“Music and Clowns”

This documentary by Alex Widdowson is about Alex’s brother, Jamie. Alex Widdowson describes the film this way:

“We rarely see portrayals of the diverse, ordinary lives of people who have Down syndrome (unless we are connected to someone who has it). Much of what we hear instead is based off a medical narrative. As prenatal screening tests improve, the birth rate of people with Downs has fallen. I believe people should be able to base life-changing decisions on accurate information. But I also feel that a diagnosis does not reflect my brother’s human worth. This film attempts to complement the medical narrative with first-hand stories of what it is like to have someone with Down syndrome in your family. Jamie has enriched our lives and I believe a society can be measured by its capacity to nurture those who are most vulnerable.”

Mud Puddle 2020

Photo by Roman.

If it’s not glass bricks, it’s mud puddles. Love ’em! It’s not a little boy nostalgia that draws me to puddles but their visual ambiguity: layers of depth and reflection. Add to that a paucity of context and things can appear really strange. So I post puddles now and then. (My favorite remains Puddle Wonderful from March of 2019.)

If I call this the 2020 mud puddle, it is not because puddles have been rare this year in Rogers Park. If this is the first and maybe the only puddle for 2020, it is only because I don’t often go out these days, what with the plague, and the bathtub puddles are nowhere near as photogenic.

“It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it!”

a face looms…

Photo by Roman.

An old toy re-discovered! While shredding old financials, I ran across an item I had forgotten, an optical filter of some kind. I think it was intended for stage lighting, but you can take photos through it as well. This photo is of another old favorite of mine, sunlight through glass bricks.

Here’s another photo of the same view with the same filter:

dsc03765
Photo by Roman. I’m still thinking of a title for this one.

The title is, of course, another of the more over-worked lines from the original Star Trek, notable for its lack of expressed hierarchy (“Jim” instead of “Captain” or “Sir”) though one wonders if anyone wearing a red shirt would have been allowed such liberty by the script-writers, even back then. Democracy, apparently, only for the ruling class of officers?

And why that line for the title? Well, its prominence depending on the resolution used to view it, there is a face-like feature in the photo. Would life unlike anything we know have a face? Any road, I imagined “Bones” (another howler of a cliché) whipping out his tricorder to make sense of what he was seeing and whispering, with appropriate awe, these immortal words…