Pink skies at night: Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light

One of the classic books on the Cape Cod shelf of my over-stuffed bookshelf is a gorgeous collection by Joel MeyerowitzCape Light

“…an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He was born in New York in 1938. He began photographing in 1962. He is a “street photographer” in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, although he now works exclusively in color. As an early advocate of color photography (mid-60’s), Meyerowitz was instrumental in changing the attitude toward the use of color photography from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. His first book, Cape Light, is considered a classic work of color photography and has sold more than 150,000 copies during its 30-year life.”

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Cape Light is still in print and can be found on Amazon. If you are into gorgeous photography, I recommend it.

The photographs were shot with a large-format camera – using 8″x10″ film — and I recall from the preface that the camera was a gorgeous work of art in and of itself.

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Dairyland, Provincetown, Cape Cod, 1976 by Joel Meyerowitz

What is special about the book, especially while writing this on a grey day in mid-March when snow flurries are scudding across a bleak yard littered with broken sticks and honey locust pods, is that Meyerowitz managed to catch one of the most ineffable things about life on Cape Cod, that rosy, pink glow that tinges summer clouds in the evening with a lambent poetry I have never seen anywhere else in my travels. Cape Cod is an east-facing land — the Wampanoags were known to their fellow Algonquin tribes as the “People of the Dawn” and the peninsula is, as one of the easternmost promontories in America, a place to celebrate sunrises, not sunsets.

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But Provincetown and Truro, the upraised “fist” of the Cape where Meyerowitz set up his camera in the early 70s, is one of the few and only places where a decent sunset can be observed over a watery horizon in all of the eastern United States.

The pink that permeates so many of his shots — who knows why it occurs here especially. The reflection of the sea around the land? Some cloud chemistry having to do with summer humidity and the polluted air that washes over the Cape from New York City and New Jersey on the summer’s southwesterly prevailing winds?

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Whatever the cause, it comes in the spring and ends in the fall — the sunsets of November turning ominous like the eye of Sauron over Mordor as if to warn the Pilgrims to start gathering their corn and make ready for the harsh winter that follows. I haven’t seen that tell-tale glow yet this year, March continues to come in as a lion and I need to plant my St. Patrick’s Day peas today in the barren garden for my 4th of July salmon and peas supper, but it’s coming. The boats are ready. The crocuses and hyacinths are blooming and any day now the peep-peep cries of the ospreys will begin and the tinklepinks will sing in the bogs.

I have a strange affinity for photographs that show the horizon between sky and water. Andreas Gursky’s Rhien II was on display at Christie’s in New York City a few years ago, prior to its setting the auction record for a photograph, and I remember being captured by it and lusting for it for reasons I couldn’t explain. Enough so that it’s been the desktop background of my PC ever since.

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Another amazing artist of sky and horizons and the sea is Australian photographer Murray Fredericks. His video essay of his expedition to the salt lake of Australia’s Lake Eyre is hauntingly evocative of something vast and empty that gets me right here.

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I don’t know if it comes from sailing offshore out of the sight of land that makes seascapes and horizons such a big thing for me. My inept attempts at celestial navigation during my yacht delivery days gave me a technical appreciation of the horizon, of how it changes depending on the eye’s height from the water, how the sextant brings down the celestial body to kiss it in a swing of the split mirror, rocking it from side to side to find a good angle then calling out “mark!” to note the precise time. But it’s also the point of interface for the eye, the not knowing what lies over it in the distance, the inability to see the curve of the earth, the way a rising or setting sun or moon can be seen to move so subtly when they are close to the line.

 

 

Jumping the gun

The last two weekends of February were surprisingly warm on Cape Cod so what’s a person to but go clamming and paint boats? It was 60 and sunny when I decided to squeeze into a pair of uninsulated waders and scratch around for some quahogs off of Lowell Point. My lower extremities turned into popsicles but I wanted some chowder and would not be denied. A pair of beach walkers cocooned in their down coats took a seat on the stairs leading up to the old Lowell estate and watched me pull one clam after another out of the hard bottom.

A clam warden appeared out of nowhere. The relay off of the point is next to the town dock so it’s not hard for the department of natural resources staff to swing down in their truck and see if anyone is out there. A few years ago there was a lot of pissed off clammers after some local Wampanoags cleared out the beds under the cover of their native riparian rights so that stretch of beach tends to get a lot of scrutiny. The town with the help of the volunteers of the Barnstable Association of Recreational Shellfishers “relays” clams from high up in the bays where the water is a little more stagnant and polluted down to the lower harbor and so-called relay bed where they can flush out in cleaner water until they’re safe to eat.

The warden called out to me, asked how I was doing, asked me to show him my basket and to give him my license number. I was too far out to feel sociable and it was too cold to wade back ashore and then out again, so we conversed through shouts for five minutes before he was satisfied I was legit and only grabbing three dozen quahogs for my dinner.

It was quite nice to stretch out on the back deck with a knife and open said clams and then turn them into a winter chowder. Something about the smell and taste of plain clam chowder makes me realize the “terroir” of Cotuit is the particular smell of its antidiluvian black mud which comes through its clams and chowder.

The following weekend was just as warm, and with temperatures in the mid-60s I turned on the outside faucets, dragged out the house, and set to work on the motorboat and the sloop. Nothing like the lung searing fumes of hull cleaner to get one awake, but in eight hours of non-stop work I was able to paint a total of 51-feet of bottom with antifouling paint, right down to a fresh boot-top of red on the motorboat.

I left the motorboat in the middle of the lawn, daring to think for a moment I might launch and be on the water in February when the usual first launch is in April. But no. Hubris is a bitch and now the boat still rests in the middle of the lawn covered with a half-foot of cold, cold now and another foot is predicted tonight and tomorrow. At least they’re painted and I can cross that off the list — the first time in my memory I’ve checked off antifouling paint day in February.

With the crocuses buried and the tulips and daffodils utterly confused at this point, next up in the harbinger list are the arrival of the ospreys and the planting of my peas on St. Patrick’s day. With tomorrow’s yet-to-be named blizzard on its way, I doubt either will happen this week.

 

 

Testing the Google Docs to WordPress Plug-in

Testing the Google Docs to WordPress.com plugin

I used to enjoy the convenience of writing inside of Microsoft Word and then publishing from that wordprocessor to my blog. But the plug-in was picky, the blog was self-hosted, and eventually it broke and I stopped working on the blog outside of WordPress’ CMS interface.

Now I am straddling the old world of Microsoft Office and that of Google Docs. I work at a Google Docs company and spend most of my work day inside of Google Sheets, Slides or Docs.

Now I can evidently post notes to my blog on WordPress.com thanks to this plug in.

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And maybe can even add images to it. Apparently it isn’t a direct publish, but parks a draft in there for me.

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