Photos: Frisbee on the Cliffs, July 2005

I have had a few hundred of my pictures from the past three years digitalized. Here I'll put up photographs from one day in July 2005, when we played frisbee golf on the cliffs at Sutro Heights in San Francisco. From left to right, the competitors, Darren Southworth, Liam Jospeh Olaf Worland Golden, Alaine "Virtue" Ball, James Eliovich Quill, & James Henry Welsch. The American football was used, I believe, for an occasional splash of Calvinball.

As it happens, a federal district court has ordered the Treasury to redesign our paper money to make it friendlier to blind people. Why not take the opportunity to go further than changing sizes or adding texture? Franklin shows the way. Yes, he was a politician, but he was equally or more famous as a scientist, a diplomat, a newspaperman, an aphorist, a satirist, and a boulevardier. Let’s keep Washington on the single, and then let’s start printing bills with pictures of the other sorts of people that make us proud to be Americans. With rotating portraits, we can have a musicians’ fin (Foster, Gershwin, Ellington), a scribblers’ sawbuck (Twain, Melville, Dickinson), a performing-arts twenty (Caruso, Keaton, Balanchine), a secular saints’ fifty (Douglass, Jane Addams, King), and a scientists’ C-note (Franklin, Edison, Einstein). As a three-fer (President, saint, writer), Lincoln could have the two-dollar note all to himself. A three-spot could be introduced, with Whitman (“What you give me I cheerfully accept,/A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money, as I rendezvous with my poems”). As with Presidents, a decent interval would be required. The Dylan fiver will have to be deferred until another decade of the sixties rolls around.

-Hendrik Hertzberg, "Too Many Chiefs", The New Yorker, Feb. 19th & 26th, 2007

I just had to post that, because I made the same point in my Feb. 12th post, but I didn't go so far. I'm at work today, & I'm sitting here alone, & we're out of one dollar bills, & it's a bank holiday, & I just got a text message from my manager saying "dunno what's best." Where are those dollar coins?

I had the above image put on a T-shirt as a birthday present for Miss Jenny Crawford. It looks great. Anyone else who wants a copy, send me twenty dollars.

With Pantheist energy of will
The little craftsmen of the Coral Sea
Strenuous in the blue abyss,
Up-builds his marvelous gallery
And long arcade,
Erections freaked with many a fringe
Of marble garlandry,
Evincing what a worm can do.

-Herman Melville, "Venice", Timolean, &. (1891)

And it was a choice moment of irony when GOP Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri argued, "Could you picture Davy Crockett at the Alamo looking at his BlackBerry, getting a message from Congress: 'Davy Crockett, we support you. The only thing is we are not going to send any troops'?" Actually, Crockett led the "surge" at the Alamo -- it didn't end well.

-Vicki Haddock, "All talk but little action by Congress on the war", San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, February 18th, 2007

In case you're not looking close enough, there is a person in every one of these photos, somewhere camouflaged upon the rocks. Most also have a frisbee somewhere midair. Annie told me that as a sports photographer, I seem more interested in waves & foliage.

The Ancient of Days forever is young,
Forever the scheme of Nature thrives;
I know a wind in purpose strong--
It spins against the way it drives.
What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare?
So deep must the stones be hurled
Whereon the throes of ages rear
The final empire and the happier world.

-Herman Melville, "The Conflict of Convictions" (1860-61), ll.61-68, from Battle-Pieces

And Hand & Hyle rooted into Jerusalem by a fibre
Of strong revenge & Skofeld Vegetated by Reubens Gate

In every Nation of the Earth till the Twelve Sons of Albion
Enrooted into every Nation: a mighty Polypus growing
From Albion over the whole Earth: such is my awful Vision.

-William Blake, Jerusalem, Chap. I

Liam told me that he was by a polluted river in Brazil, & he mentioned that it was polluted to a fellow traveler. The man insisted that there was no way it could be polluted because there "just too much water." He argued that it was visibly & malodorously polluted, but the man had convinced himself that rivers have too much water in them to ever register any contamination. Similarly, I'm pissing into the bay in the above picture.

That night or the next, we climbed Twin Peaks to see the Independence Day fireworks. Liam & I had poison ivy rashes all over our bodies for the next six weeks. This photo is an eerie reminder.