So check out these new digs, eh! Many, many thanks to Shut Up I’m Awesome for building this spartan and watery new space. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old drunken one, but with so many things about to change at JLP headquarters I felt like a new design and name would be a fun way to restart my interest in exploring the finer points of freelance work, and so here we are… Pacific.
Magellan christened the name for our western ocean in late 1520 for the peace and stillness he found (relativity is hard to see clearly) during the Earth’s inaugural circumnavigation, and its always been my favorite body of water to get lost in as an idea. The incredible immensity, the opposite of its location to my life, the color of the water in picture and thought, the Pacific is the ocean in my dreams and represents not only the greener grass of things unknown, but also the notion that everything is a lot more complicated, ironic, and plainly rough than even old names suggest.
We hear all our lives about the “gentle, stormless Pacific,” and about the “smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands,” and about the “steady blowing trades” that never vary, never change, never ”chop around,” and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight, like any other Greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country’s banner, and named his great discovery “Pacific”–thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts.
In a word, the Pacific is “rough,” for seven or eight months in the year–not stormy, understand me–not what one could justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling and very “rough”. Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that had “Wild,” or ”Untamed,” to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it.
- Mark Twain, letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, 4/17/1866
I don’t have a mission statement for the new blog because I’m not sure how it will be especially different than the old one, or from the half-dozen blogs before that, which I also led down the path to destruction. I would, however, like this blog to be a bit more about what things are working in freelance photography, despite the terrible climate we are all working under, and maybe scratch at some of the contrast between what things seem like and how they might actually be (relatively is all I have in stock as well, unfortunately). There will likely be a few rants, that’s just me, but I’m going to try to think about the things that drive me and my passion for the craft of photography, and hopefully that and the absence of bourbon will keep things on more of an even keel.
Welcome to Pacific!
Was missing your blog man. Now I can be looking forward to John Loomis’ insights again!