The American crow is cawing at the far end of the property over some unseen interloper.  Often the interloper is I, but this time, the usual interloper remains hidden behind the kitchen screen door, watching how fall is gently insinuating itself into our nature preserve, while the morning coffee brews.  The real interloper must itself be close though not so dangerous, as the caw is persistent, but not raucous, and just one crow, not a murder.  Perhaps the interloper is Autumn herself.

Suddenly a chipmunk pops out from under the stockade fence and scampers to the 18-inch stone statue rescued from the old property.  The statue depicts a boy pouring water into a basin to offer sips to small mammals.  Except the statue was broken into fragments, which I have collected and saved in the basin.  So it looks instead like a boy pouring pieces of his own body, an offering for small but evil satanic reptiles.

The chipmunk takes the favorite vantage point on top of the boy’s head.  Chipmunks through the eons have enjoyed this safe lookout, which I established about 14 months ago.  The fence protects their rear flank and they achieve a 180-degree sweep of the terrain, plus, due to their elevation, an incredible quarter-mile visibility.  (Don’t worry.  The crow is not going to come sweeping down to pluck the tasty morsel offering itself.  This is a mostly happy fable.)

The chipmunk jumps down and scampers along the edge of the driveway, tail as stiffly vertical as a battle flag.  Its legs are tiny blurs of frenetic coordination that must in that one burst consume 20% of its daily caloric allotment.  One can’t help but think the flag-high tail would make the perfect handle for a swooping crow.  Ten feet down the drive, it stops and pops up on its hind legs into a classic Meerkat pose, scanning for, one assumes – carefully on the lookout for, one hopes – predators.  Seconds later, it is again a tail-high sprinter for another ten human feet, further down the drive.

How long is a rod?  I doubt they even mention it anymore in elementary school linear measurement lessons, let alone force rote memorization of the conversion values.  It is 16½ feet.  What a noble median measure!  Perhaps that is how far the chipmunk actually sprinted.  And possibly the derivation of the measure itself: one chipmunk sprint, or more properly: Rodent Overland Distance — rod, for short.

This time when it stops, the chipmunk takes a tiny soft mound configuration on the edge of the grass, the definition of compactness.  At this distance, through my bi-focs and the flyscreen, I really cannot make it out among the early brown leaves.  I hope an American crow would have as much trouble detecting the cute furry bundle.  (I told you, don’t worry.)

Then it is off again for another rod.  It is either running full speed, max output, 100 scale miles per hour, 50 calories per millisecond. . . Or it is not: Instant stop; instant Meerkat pose; not one muscle atwitch.

I simply love these little guys.  I wish so much they would be my friends.  I have made overtures, tossing shelled almonds at them, whistling friendly greetings of non-aggression, but off they took, shunning the outstretched hand of interspecies concord.  I am hurt.  I am offended.  How can these little bastards disrespect such overt Franciscanism?  Thus, I dis them back, and call them little scoundrels!  And thereby dub them Chimpunks.

The American crow has decided to join me in my observation, and derision no doubt.  Still cawing at a mere level two alarm, it flies the three or four rods to the top of the evergreen nearby.  How different its attitude from the frantic sprints of the formerly cute little punks.  The giant black crow is almost lackadaisical in its flight, pumping his wings effortlessly, moving in long sweep and utter aplomb.  It approaches a slender branch upon which to perch, one which could never possibly hold what must be ten pounds of bird, and lands as gracefully as a butterfly in a dream.  I am again amazed at their finely honed internal resources; their balance, intelligence, blackness, power.

The stupid punk several rod down the drive drops to the ground and scampers into the brush by the fence, disappearing for a snack and nap.  The crow, not the least bit interested in the tiny-brained fat-cheeked thin-limbed micromammal, continues periodic announcements, both repelling the dangerous and welcoming the friendly interlopers, while checking what’s next on his agenda for this autumn day.

I will be appearing (a little song , a little dance) in the title role (i.e. Jury member, aka chorus) of G&S’s first big Savoy Opera.  Curtain is at 8:00 PM this Friday and Saturday at the Smith Opera House in Geneva.  (Interesting note:  my first job out of college was in the very same theatre as a union carbon-arc projectionist in a previous life.)

Of Saints and Psalms

featuring choral works by
Mendelssohn and Britten

The Hobart and William Smith
Colleges Community Chorus
with Strings, Organ and Percussion
Deanna Joseph, conductor

The St. Peter’s Community
Junior Choir and Senior Choir
Wendra Trowbridge, director

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 – 7:30 PM
St. Peter’s Church
151 Genesee Street
Geneva, NY

PROGRAM

Sonata No. 5 in D Major, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)

Op. 65 I. Andante – II. Andante con moto – III. Allegro Maestoso
Jeffrey Kempskie, organ

Hear my Prayer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Words by William Bartholomew (1793–1867)
Angela Libertella Calabrese, soprano
Jeffrey Kempskie, organ

Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
I. Choral – II. Choral – III. Aria – IV. Choral
Christa Wertman, soprano

The Hobart and William Smith Colleges Community Chorus
Deanna Joseph, conductor

Saint Nicolas Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)
Op. 42 Words by Eric Crozier (1914–1994)
I. Introduction

II. The Birth of Nicolas
III. Nicolas devotes himself to God
IV. He journeys to Palestine
V. He comes to Myra and is chosen Bishop
VI. Nicolas from Prison
VII. Nicolas and the Pickled Boys
VIII. His piety and marvelous works
IX. The Death of Nicolas

The Pickled Boys Richard Lawson, Ah’Kell Whitfield, Teddy Townson
Boy Saint Nicolas Teddy Townson
Saint Nicolas Scott Perkins

St. Peter’s Community Junior and Senior Choirs
The Hobart and William Smith Colleges Community Chorus
The Hobart and William Smith Colleges Festival Orchestra
Deanna Joseph and Wendra Trowbridge, conductors

Nightlight Unretouched, originally uploaded by LlewellynL.

Remember reciprocity failure? Sometimes you just don’t need Photoshop.

This is an actual unretouched photo of some unretouched structures in my nightly meanderings (Feb 7, 2009 ~8:30 PM).  No super-saturation or false-color IR.  All I added was my name and copyright.  How fair is that?

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All the color here comes from the various monochromatic artificial light sources and of course the wonderful hues you can coax from the evening sky with a 4-second exposure.

I used to love to shoot out the apartment window in the middle of the night and let my Nikkormat EL stretch towards 60 seconds with slide film to get the ‘real’ colors from the Upper West Side tenements, topped by urban nimbus streaks. Besides the amplified subtleties the results incorporated the non-linear sensitivities of the different color layers when exposed outside the roughly 1 to 1/1000 second range they were calibrated for, hence reciprocity failure.

Another note about this image is the lens: the little Nikkor 50mm 1.8 (effective 75mm in DX). The VR zooms are pretty amazing but if I want the sharpest of the sharp, I snap on this baby (and lock my vision into medium-telephoto for better or worse). It provides that extra kick I look for in the detail and undoubtedly adds to the overall subliminal effect on the viewer. (It makes me kinda yearn for one of the Micro Nikkors, except they are all longer and slower and bigger and cost 20 times as much.)
</nerdtext>

South Bronx Portrait 1976, originally uploaded by LlewellynL.

Back when I was driving a Checker, a fare took me to the South Bronx. The only tip they gave me was: “Get the hell out of The Bronx!”
Just kidding. I never had a problem in The Bronx. Any real grief I met in Manhattan.

1976 was smack dab in the middle of the arson epidemic that devastated much of the South Bronx, destroying neighborhoods. At the time, it didn’t feel at all like the cleansing process of a forest fire that would prepare the land for fresh growth and renewal. No, it felt like the beginning of the downward spiral to hell, and the ultimate collapse of civilization for many poor families. It is still debated what conspired to bring on those dire times, which included the near bankruptcy of New York City and seemingly the entire country telling us to drop dead — not to mention, disco. Robert Moses, John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Nelson Rockefeller, and crack cocaine have all been blamed. Oh, and John Travolta.

This was taken with my trusty Nikon F2 and fuzzy Vivitar 24mm, which I’d hide under the seat like a revolver. Driving that cab I’d end up in some crazy corners of the city at truly surreal times. Over the months, I drove three different shifts: evening (4PM – 6AM), morning (6AM – 4PM) and, my favorite, graveyard (midnight to whenever). When I was starting out, an actor friend of mine who’d already been hacking for a few months took my Hagstrom map and literally redlined the neighborhoods he said I should steer clear of if I planned to remain alive. He flipped through Brooklyn and drew lines around Bed-Stuy and East New York. When he got to the Bronx, the blocks in the picture above were targeted. As it turned out, I didn’t play that game and if I ended up in a sketchy neighborhood, I still cruised out of it, On Duty, with the roof light on, never turning down a fare. (You always drove back to where the most fares were, usually Manhattan. But it was better to drive there with a paying customer in the back seat. Scaredy-cats would flip on their Off Duty sign and speed to the nearest bridge. Those were the guys with the lousy empty-to-paid miles ratios, that the meters kept careful track of.) Sure, I was nervous sometimes and kept my wits about me. You always make a judgment call as you approach a hail waving at you down the block. I just didn’t figure any of them for murderers. As it turned out, I was neither murdered nor robbed nor even had a no-pay walkout.

Back then, I processed the color-neg film with reusable chemicals made by Photocolor. I was poor, young, and foolish. (Hey, I was driving a cab to stay alive!) This neg looked like it’s been around the block and the color shifts and dust are horrific. Photoshop is fantastic but it can’t work miracles.

Here’s a tip for you: Old chemicals, expired film, cheap paper, and corner cutting all lead to heartbreak. A lot of my negatives are beyond rescuing, or worse, DOA (dead on archival). Modern corollary: Shoot raw, edit PSD copies (not JPEGs), back up your digital image files daily, off site. . .but maybe not in The Bronx.