Category Archives: Photographs

The Abduction

Photographs, Short stories

A tragedy.

She remembered the chill running down her spine.

The man was tall. Tall and wide in that Mediterranean way. He blocked the light. The hair a touch too perfect, maybe on the verge of receding, the muscles well defined, the loose fitting black suit jacket sporting a bulge on one side.

But most of all she recalled the man’s smell. It was a strange mix of machismo and Old Spice, both sickening and alluring at the same time. She recalled the scent from her father and remembered how she had sworn to get away from that tedious middle class world of movies and dinner out once a week with her mum. So controlled, so cloying. She wanted so much more.

“Is Roger in?” he asked.

Instantly she knew he had asked that a thousand times. It was not a question he expected to be taken lightly or one to be denied. There was a mix of command, expectation and threat in the voice, lower pitched than she expected.

The eyes ran down her body, starting at her full, rouged lips, pausing at the single strand of pearls, resting that moment too long on her cleavage and then down past her slightly too tall body to her waist and legs, perfectly defined by the black Chanel evening dress. Too tall for Vogue, she had found her niche in the interior decorating line. The clients were men as often as not, frequently accompanying their trophy wives to that little place on Jackson Square that kept her amused during the week. Strictly high end furnishings, neatly extricated from China and England thanks to understanding customs officers, and commanding healthy mark-ups. Instant credibility for the hedge fund manager du jour who had hit it big before the SEC came calling. At least the male clients appreciated her for what she was, unlike the interior decorators who were the order of the day, and seemed to have eyes for one another only.

“Who shall I say is calling?” she asked, surprising herself at the slight quiver in her voice.

“Guido. He knows me.”

Roger visibly started when she announced their visitor. She recalled how his face turned the color of the Aubusson she had so lovingly secreted away on her last visit to Chartres. It was posited as a buying trip to her partner Nigel, but the reality was that she and Roger had devoted much of it to the first throes of new love, lost in one another’s arms most of the time. She recalled his long late night cell calls, all whispers and hidden glances, but made nothing of them. Roger was in money management of some sort, so she supposed that secrecy was part of the game. And that new 911 he had picked up in Zuffenhausen at the factory, a gorgeous antique silver Turbo which made a rude noise, testified to his success. A glance at the speedometer on the Autobahn had told her that this was as fast as she ever wanted to travel on the ground and she had closed her eyes and enjoyed the fragrance of the seven Schwabian bulls it had taken to line the interior.

The meeting took maybe twenty minutes. Even though the library doors were thick oak – she had personally seen to their import from that old castle in Berkshire – she could clearly hear the raised voices through them. When Roger finally came out his color had changed from Aubusson green to something more reminiscent of China white. He had rushed to the living room and poured himself a generous tumblerfull of Aberfeldy 21 – he had it specially shipped from the distillery in the Highlands – downing it in two great gulps. As the color came back to his cheeks, she gently inquired.

“Roger, darling” she knew that he loved the ‘darling’ part, “is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing honey. Nothing for you to worry about”.

She knew better than to ask, but she recalled how Roger had shouted out in his sleep that night “No, no, not that!”

She had always smoked too much, and during periods of stress she only smoked more, castigating herself for the habit. How her mother had upbraided her for that. What was Raleigh thinking of when he brought those early tobacco leaves back to the West? The only calming influence on such occasions was her first love, from her days immersed in English Lit at Vassar. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. So it was ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ that she had taken with her to work that fateful day.

It all happened so quickly. She has been waiting too long outside the store, had smoked too many cigarettes. Nigel had asked if she needed a ride, and she had brushed him off. And when it happened, where she was expecting Roger there was a hulking Guido emerging from the long, black limousine. His scent had a new taint. She recalled it from her chemistry lessons at school. Suddenly, one of her Blahniks had fallen off as she struggled hopelessly against Guido’s powerful biceps, the red Dior wrap ripped off, her Prada eyeglasses hurting her then falling with a sickening crunch to the sidewalk, and as the handkerchief came up to her mouth, all she could recall was a mix of man odor, Old Spice and chloroform. Her book dropped to the ground and she felt herself falling, falling, falling ….

Osgood Place, Jackson Square, SF. Yesterday.

UX in Paris

Photographs

Urban exploration at its finest.

I have been lucky to feature some outstanding urban exploration photography here, both from England’s SilentUK and from the American master Jonathan Haeber and his team.

But it will come as no surprise that when it comes to Urbex, or UX, at its finest, that Paris should be the source, as profiled in a simply gripping article in Wired magazine. Along with London, Paris is the location of the finest subterranean Victorian-era civil engineering and UX does for Paris what SilentUK does for London.

Click the picture for the story.

UX is appealing in so many ways. The sheer spontaneity of the movement, the act of finding something beautiful and bringing it back to life, the process of exploring recent and neglected industrial history, the rebellion against ‘The Man’ and the opportunity to make fools of inept administrations, while showing those of us above ground some of the magic that went into the making of great cities, UX is all of that and more.

The article from Wired is long, it’s filled with mystery, excitement and romance, and who can resist the appeal of gazing at stolen Legers, Picassos and Cezannes located but feet from their original location, unknown to the ferrets charged with their custody?

If you hew to the romantic appeal of restoring a 1790 clock with a team lead by a master horologist from one of the world’s great mechanical watch makers, all done clandestinely and underground, then sharing the peal of that restored masterpiece with all and sundry to the amazement of the buffoons in government, then you will thrill to this magnificent piece of journalism and the courageous people who make Parisian UX amongst the world’s greatest. And in case you believe that the US Government has an exclusive on stupidity, just check this out:

Marlowe lives

Architecture

Film Noir at its best.

I have been watching Howard Hawks’s ‘The Big Sleep’ (1939 – but check the Comments) for decades now and have long ago given up trying to figure out whodunit. The plot is so many layered, so vastly complex, that I prefer to luxuriate in Humphrey Bogart’s and Lauren Bacall’s acting while enjoying my favorite city in America, Los Angeles. The movie is one of the rare cases where monochrome trumps color.

San Francisco has done a far better job of preserving its inter-war buildings than either LA or New York. The atmospheric Bunker Hill of Philip Marlowe’s day has long been torn down, replaced by soulless glass and steel buildings and Frank Gehry’s execrable Disney Concert Hall, an eye sore of rare foulness. New York also gives short shrift to historical preservation as the world’s center of greed abhors space that cannot be developed and rented for top dollar. Whether it’s the lighter touch of commerce in San Francisco or the fact that the big bucks reside thirty miles south in Silicon Valley, I do not know, but the city is brimming with gorgeous buildings from the ’30s and ’40s.

This one was spotted on Howard Street and the threatening shadow suggested nothing so much as the office space that a gumshoe of Marlowe’s persuasion would have occupied. Marlowe, for ever down on his luck, would have been in one of the smaller offices on a low floor. Not for him the high rent suggested by the magnificent double height windowed floor. As is often the case, the backdrop is a modern building presumably designed by a structural engineer, because architecture is nowhere to be seen. Here it only serves to heighten the beauty of the older masterpiece, caught in a shaft of late afternoon light on a freezing winter’s day.

G3, 45-200mm @ 103mm.

Here’s one of the many posters for that cinematic masterpiece:

A more recent version of the LA ’40s crime mystery, no less well made or acted, gains from a simpler plot compared to The Big Sleep what it loses to color – L.A. Confidential.

For those preferring San Franciscan detectives, Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade is as good a stand-in for Marlowe as any.

One of my commitments for 2012 is to publish more architectural photography and, checking this blog, I see it’s a subject I have addressed on many occasions, so I have added an Architecture category. You can access this by clicking here or by diving into the drop down menu under ‘Categories – Photographs’ at the bottom of this screen.