I haven’t really been able to shoot much at all over the past few weeks. Life has been hectic lately. In any case, here’s a new old picture. I took it about five years ago, on one of my first visits to San Francisco.

Now, I’ve always said that if there ever was a personal Hell for me, Christian-style, it would pretty much have to be set in a never-ending shopping mall. There’s very few things in this world that unnerve me quite as much as malls, mall culture, and everything associated with them. I do a pretty good job avoiding them in my day-to-day life and when I absolutely must go to one of them, I pretty much treat it as a ninja mission. Go on, chop some heads off, and get out as quickly as possible.

Now I don’t remember the precise reason that led me to that mall 5 years ago. It’s been too long. I do remember taking this picture though, leaning my trusty old (3 1/2-megapixel) Olympus E-10 on the railing and hoping for the best. I had just met Marina and we were spending one of our first weekends together, wandering around the city lost in a never-ending conversation about anything and everything.

I was going through my old photos and found this one. Last Thanksgiving we went on a road trip to Portland and drove by this beautiful town on the border of California and Oregon. We stopped there to get breakfast and I’ve noticed this abandoned café.
Anyway, here is another Amichai’s poem, hmm it looks like I’m really obsessed with his poetry.
 

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

A street-protestor in Berkeley, Ca. A common sight. Incidentally, this is also the first picture I ever took with a medium format camera. This was before I learned how to develop my film – I handed this one in to Adolph Gasser in downtown San Francisco. Brings back memories.