From a Motel 6

In the lot kitty-corner behind where I live (easily accessible through my driveway), there was recently a great excavation. Two garages full of two decades worth of STUFF was gone through and, for the most part, sent off to the landfill. I managed to get over there on two or three different occasions while things were strewn hither & yon, and I collected quite a few images.

This is a beautiful old Grundig shortwave radio receiver. It appeared to be in great shape. I hope it went to a good home.

Who is that glamour girl with the big eyes and the bold lips?

It's not Edie Sedgwick.

It's not Ingrid Bergman.

No, it's Exene, one of my all-time heroines.

Exene has long been my idol of the hair, my idol of the poetry, my idol of the vintage dress, and my idol of the punk rock girl world. It's been twenty years since I fell in love with her and I love her still today.

This picture was shot from the TV screen; it's a freeze frame from the film The Decline of Western Civilization. I don't usually manipulate my photos unless it's for a specific project - I try to do as much editing and composing in camera as I possibly can, not because I'm a purist in any way but because that's just the way I take photos. But sometimes I like to play around with effects and this one struck me as being Warholesque in a pleasant way.

Being a big fan of both Andy and Exene, I decided that it was a manipulation I'd share.

This is one of a series of photographs I used in an artist's book I made, a book entitled "Yours to Keep." The nine photographs in the book were of things in my home: some of them unusual, some of them quite ordinary, one of them mistaken for a piece of meat by more than one person. The broken clock in this photograph normally resides in the lavatory but I brought it out to the living room for its close up, Mr. DeMille, because the light was better. When it was a functional clock, the chicken would bob up and down to indicate the passing of the seconds.

This clock used to belong to my friend Ellen. It was slated for the landfill, but I was in the right place at the right time to rescue it. I had gone out to Ellen's property to deal with some belongings that my ex-husband, who had lived there in a ramshackle trailer for a while after we separated, had been storing on the property while he was out of the country. Ellen herself was no longer living on the property. She and her husband had also separated and they had sold their land and the home that was on it.

The clock, like our marriages, had stopped working some time ago. When I found it, it was face-down in a box of stuff that the new owner of the property told me was going to the dump. I immediately picked it up, dusted it off, and put it in my car. I've kept it on display ever since.

Some broken things are worth saving even if they can't be fixed.

As promised, I've completed my first connect 8 project. I'm pleased with the results. I didn't actively plot the progression of the photographs, but rather tried to let them suggest themselves to me along the way. Only one of these photographs was staged specifically for this project, and only one of these photographs was taken more than a month ago. They are essentially funky-fresh and minty-clean, and they want to be your friends.

Let's begin, shall we?

My starting point was "animals." Animals think...they're pretty smart.



What I love about this one are the expressions on their little cardboard faces and the way the masking tape stands out almost as if it were a three-dimensional image.

It's the tape (albeit with a twist) that leads us to our next image.



People will just throw any old thing away these days. Tape may be old-school as far as recording devices go, but it's not obsolete yet - not by a long shot.

I myself have a hard time throwing things away, which is probably why I have things like jars of buttons just hanging around my house.



You can push the buttons on a tape deck, and you can also sew buttons on a shirt. I used to do it on a regular basis when I worked in a shirt laundry. But I digress.

Green glass is a lovely thing, don't you think?



It's not every day that you find goblets sitting on fences, staring up at the sky. It seemed like the kind of thing that needed to be recorded. You know, for posterity.

What can you say about fences? Give me land, lots of land under starry skies...don't fence me in? This little red fence borders my driveway but never tries to hold me down. I thought it looked appealing in the light of a rainy day, so I snapped a lazy shot.



Yes, I know it's blurry. Sometimes life is blurry.

Red is the key to our next image. It's the color of my fence, it's the color of my hair, it's the color of Mars, it's the color of hearts on fire.

And what could be sweeter than the ace of hearts, seen here lounging in an alleyway with a couple of his pals?



The heart is a potent symbol as well as a powerful organ. We can't exactly function without one, although some people appear to do just that.

They can be problematic things, these hearts.



Sometimes they just want to be free to fly.

Love, wings, freedom, escape into a clear blue sky - what does your heart desire?

"If you put your hand in my heart, I won't let it go - until there's nothing left in the world to make me."



Tiny birds sit patiently, side by side on a wire.

Our hollow-boned friends bring us to the conclusion of this little project.

I hope you enjoyed viewing it as much as I enjoyed creating it. Y'all come back now, y'hear?