see the boy's raised brow in the second photo. That my friends is pure Gutierrez.

I'm not much on poetry, but I found this one cut out from the New York Times Book Review dated 2/16/91. I had used it as a bookmark in a dictionary (it was in the W's) and I kinda like it.

Crayola

My favorite in the box of 64
Was Prussian Blue, rich with its hint
Of green, blue enough to suggest
An exotic 19th-century
Militaristic world.

I'd have colored everything Prussian Blue-
Except tree trunks, hands and faces -
But it had to be carefully rationed
Lest, its paper cover stripped away,
It would wear down to nothing.

Without it: prosaic Umber and Sienna,
Yellow-Green, the all-but useless White.
Adult life, I assumed, is when you own
All the Prussian Blue you'll ever need
To color anything you want.

LEWIS GARDNER

People complain that I always have my camera out, but I never get the best images I see. This post was inspired by the website unphotographable.

These are but a few photographs I did not take over the last two weeks:

A man with his back to the road standing out in the desert looking at the empty sky, hands aloft. Nobody around for miles. I am the only person in the car who notices him.

5 boys, 1 with a gold tooth, beggars, faces pressed tight to the glass of the window. All startled into silence by the site of a Korean, a gringo, a baby, and a set of identical twins.

A small Mexican cemetery amongst the joshua trees at twilight.

Several young girls in their white confirmation dresses, one with blood on her knee seeping through the dress.

My Tio Rodolfo sitting in a chair at twighlight looking a bit like his father and smiling to himself at the scene of his grandchildren running around him.

Jennifer asleep with her hair all over the pillow. The light just right. Naked baby nuzzled by her side.

A Bush Cheney piñata broken in half in a courtyard.

Four old men holding a wooden coffin aloft on a hot day in Monterrey.

Graffiti on an abandoned building near Highway 59 that said "2 boys got shot here" with flowers strewn around the junky lot.

Mr. Maldonado telling a whopper of a tale, involving his wife, a thief and a submarine, his eyes crinkling when he got to the good parts.

My old treehouse, or what's left of it, covered in vines. Blackberry bushes growing below, bugs in the hot air. Forest light.

A girl from my high school, unrecognizable with age standing in the middle of an empty supermarket late at night.

All the abandoned sno-cone shacks in Lufkin.

The crowd of ladies in their colorful hats outside the gospel Church on Sunday morning waving their fans in the heat.

Some secret places I know.

The sight of the city from the BQE over that big graveyard at dusk.

Muslim ladies with their kids flying kites on the promenade.

Our baby on his grandfather's stomach, both laughing.

Too many other things...

I've become a big fan of del.icio.us the online social bookmarks manager. While explaining it to people is difficult (even my wife who sort of glazed over by the time I had said "online social"), if you just start using it, you'll soon wonder what you did without it.

Anyway I find del.icio.us provides a pretty good snapshot of what's on my mind at least in the realm of my computer. You can see my tag cloud yourself by clicking here. I'm a relatively new user, so my list isn't very robust yet, but it will fill out soon enough. I'm at http://del.icio.us/themexican/.

And while I'm leaving webdroppings, I should include my audioscrobbler homepage and my last.fm homepage as well. Want to discover new music you like. Build up a playlist in audioscrobbler and then start listening to last.fm's personal radio stations of your 'musical neighbors'. Again a bit hard to explain sometimes, but brilliant once you get the hang of it.

Oddly (or perhaps not oddly), of the thousands and thousands of users, I personally know 2 of my musical neighbors.
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Hmmmm.... what else...

Jenn has started Spanish classes so we've been conjugating verbs around the house.
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We've noticed that my dad inserts the phrase "and the baby is cute" somewhat randomly into paragraphs when talking to people on the phone.
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After only 10 days out of the city, I return damaged. I keep looking for a horizon. Must defeat this urge.
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Crash Review:

Jenn and I snuck out and watched Crash two nights ago. I knew absolutely nothing about the movie going into it and was impressed by the good acting, but was annoyed by the too neat and tidy story line. And why does a movie about racism manage to treat each character as a racist stereotype? You can almost hear the screenwriter's wheels turning, "I'll take a racist cop and have him do something utterly abominable to a woman and then, get this, I'll have him save THE SAME WOMAN. And the Persian guy, I'll have him so beaten down by racism that he becomes a racist himself." The basic idea is everyone is driven mad by racism, and each character has a twist (or in screenwriterese "an arc"). The "bad" characters are all warm and fuzzy underneath, the "good" characters are all capable of horrible acts. While there is an ethnic stew of characters, as usual Asians get short shrift. Ultimately I looked at the film as manipulative and cynical in it's attempt to portray acts of grace. My prediciton this film and it's cartoon racism will be wildly overpraised. The discussion of real race issues is almost completely absent in popular American culture, so if a film seems to be saying the right thing the kneejerk reaction is to deem it a masterpiece.
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Do you ever feel like there just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done? Right now I'm running underwater.

The NY Times announced today they will start charging for online content. Most of the daily paper will still be free (available for a few days before being pay per view) but op eds and special features will available only for paid subscribers. They will charge $79/year, $39/year for people who already buy a $250/year subscription .

I believe the Times is making a mistake and is going about this backwards. Right now the Times articles are not indexed by google because they expire after a few days. This will continue. Premium content will make op-eds even less accessible and limit their audience. The upside, I believe, will not compensate for the loss in audience. Unlike the Wall Street Journal which thrives on a subscription model, the type of content the Times will be charging for is available elsewhere on the net and the subscriptions will generally not be covered by corporate expense accounts.

What is the right model? I believe the Times should open up it's entire archive for free to the public. Make it searchable and indexable. Then The Times should sell micro-ads on keywords, specific stories, or on themes. Given the depth and breadth of content available (ie it's not just news) I believe the profit potential is staggering (cough, cough, google, adsense, record profits). As a side benefit the Times would become relevant on the web (right now as far as it's google and the other search engines are concerned it's completely invisible) and will gain readership not just by pushing news daily, but as a historical and cultural archive.

But the Times (and other major papers) do not think this way and we are all the poorer for it.

we miss you already...

in the Garden of Memories near Lufkin: 'Jackie Lee Asque, April 10, 1919. March 4, 1983. See, I told you I was sick. P.S. I knew this would happen, I just didn't know it would happen so soon.'

...but one day you find yourself sitting at the adult table in your uncle's backyard on a hot night with a cool breeze watching the kids playing freeze tag and darting through the legs of chairs and remembering what it was like to be one of those kids in that same backyard not so many years ago.

I visited my grandmother's grave and left some flowers.

more (and photos) when I've had more than 5 minutes sleep.

I'm too swamped at the moment to write anything, so in the meantime why not do your eyes a favor and explore some of my favorite phtooblog links...

Our baby sprouted his first tooth today. Jenn refers to it as his platypus tooth. This freaks me out. (baby platypuses have a single tooth that they use to escape their eggs.)