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How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade
   
How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade


September 19th, 2004

Neat Equipment
Saturday. One of those days, my bucko's: a day to stay inside, charge the batteries (my batteries, the camera batteries, the batteries that run the midnight sun batteries) and watch a movie in bed if I want to be ambitious. I watched Four Rooms on DVD, four “movies” within a movie: Antonio Banderas, Madonna et alia, Quentin Tarantino and others writing and directing. Nice. The Tarantino segment (written, directed and staring Tarantino and Bruce Willis) was reasonably tasty Tarantino. I'd never heard of it, of course, but what the hell, that's par on my course. Again, a long day this day ended with an evening of Japanese subtitled soaps (Sakura's going to nail that dim bulb Mr. What's His Face, even if it takes another thirty episodes!) and a good night's sleep.

Sunday. It rained last night, the first rain in some time. (The wineries can't be too happy. I wonder how the current harvest is going?) Evidently the highways were inundated in places turning those parts of the road into skating rinks. What to do about the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade was my thought as I awakened. The head is clear, the energy is good - Saturday's hibernation and taking of naps evidently having an effect - and there appears to be a break in the clouds, don't you think? Let us drive over to Berkeley and see, dee-del-dee-dee. Perhaps it will work out.

Later.. I've driven over to this particular parade for a number of years. I haven't gotten many good photographs, there's no more than a page full on Art and Life, but it's a parade I know well and I've always parked some ten blocks up near Shattuck in a large municipal parking lot and then walked down to the area where the parade assembles. “Why not park on a street near the parade itself rather than walking all that distance down to California on University just to haul your ass back after two hours of humping around your cameras shooting pictures?”

So, thinking this a novel thought, I drove to the parade site itself and parked ten feet off the street where people were forming. Just like that. Why has it taken me five years to figure this out? Or is this a hint, a sign the real me is someone quite different from the exemplary me of my fantasies? That or buying an Element makes for clearer thinking in their owners.

You tend to go on like this after you've had a first drink, you know.

Life has been a blur of work, photography and writing for these last six years. I unfortunately don't have time to sit down and do them - work, write or pictures - in any but a half assed fashion.

The dial on the bullshit indicator just pegged.

OK, OK. Let's just say it's been six long years in the work - write - picture ring, but, by god, I'm still standing. The half assed journal and the half assed pictures are my contribution to the greater landscape of Western Culture: a style in and of itself. One might grouse this is a lazy man's rationalization, but one might say a number of things.

The bullshit meter just jumped off its shelf and fell down on the floor.

High, ho. Nice equipment, though. Especially the cameras. For a new art and and a new style you certainly do get to play with neat equipment.

 
The photographs were taken today at the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade with a Nikon D2h mounted with a 17-55mm f 2.8 Nikkor lens at ISO 200.

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