crossing over

this afternoon i have a meeting with Dia Penning over at Center for Art & Public Life in Oakland. i slip into my wallet an IKEA card with $99 credit on it that my sister gave me when i was back in NY a few weeks ago. something for the studio perhaps.

after my meeting with Dia, i wander on campus. i drop by the media center & find they have all the same equipment as SF. at the photo dept, a sad little meeting wherein i am informed that i CANNOT check out a 4x5 camera because i am not in the photo department. that is the policy. uhh, i am second year grad student working on my masters thesis & i have an BFA in photography. no. uhh, my department social practice is interdisciplinary & i am paying 40K a year here. no.

that is a huge load of crap.

i leave shaking my head and find solace in the stacks. find a Francis Alÿs book i haven't ever seen of his MOMA procession (which includes a dvd), and a heavy load of brilliant Beuys books to check out.

i think i really needed to end up at IKEA so i could sit in the silly restaurant and watch all the traffic out the window. the convergence of all these concrete byways is exacly what i want to be immersed in. i shoot some video and take a bunch of stills.

i make a list of locations that interest me :

1. Scotland. Argyl & Bute (Cove Park)
2. Cambodia. Reyum Institute; Maddox Jolie Project.
3. Caumsett State Park. Long Island, NY.
4. stables, dairy
5. Brisbane CA
6. SFO International terminal
7. Oakland: Temescal
8. IKEA restaurant window: traffic convergergence at 5PM DST
9. Salt Flats. brackish waters of Bay Area wetlands
10. site of former Potrero Gardens [land now gone to weed in fenced plot]
    

headed out of the IKEA parking lot for home, the light is so beautiful that i change my mind in a last minute flash and turn up and over an overpass to take a different way than usual to the bridge. this is the way i have gotten lost before. on a few occasions. almost every time.

the light is truly magnificent. a building for sorting recycling material catches my eye. i come back around. that's what drew me in but when i come at it from another angle, i see i'm here for something else.






for maybe 30-40 minutes as sun sets and dusk passes into twilight, i circle and explore an old familiar, unchanged industrial area within a few blocks of Grand Ave and the Bay Bridge on-ramp.

on towards the bridge, i keep the camera out and continue to shoot throughout the crossing.









i still keep shooting all the way back to the studio. i pull over & stop at a multiple construction site around the corner. the new one at the tracks is ghostly. i have been watching it go up, and to me it exemplfies a certain absurdity of development. its massive shape curves along the railroad tracks. tonight, i capture this. i shoot until the batteries empty.


'


the Baker Hamilton sign announces itself from high above, atop the regal building which has recently been gutted inside. a shell of the past towers over the changes around it.