Sunday, March 8, 2009

New Blue Tang

Some of you Apollo-era folks might remember downing delicious Orange Tang for breakfast as you watched astronauts roam around the moon on TV. Orange Tang is nothing compared to blue tang, which inhabit the coral reefs around Culebra. Here's some video of a school of blue tang, shot with a waterproof-housed Flip video camera.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Viva Culebra!

If you took all the money spent on anti-depressants, doctors' visits, trips to the hospital for complications arising from depression and siphoned all that money toward a yearly one week visit to the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico for every depressed writer you know, it would save millions, promote the economy, and put an end to suffering as we know it. Especially if you spent some time in Old San Juan at the end. Check out the photos.

Signs of Life

I'm not sure what first attracted me to the idea of photographing old signage; I've been doing it for years now. The more I think about what draws me to it, the more I realize it's the idea of the people behind the signs, those who created them, those who used them to promote whatever they wanted to promote, those who used them for direction. In a time when most all of the signs we see are no more than logos inflated, I look at old neon and hand-painted signs as evidence of a lost America, one in which people had more opportunity to exercise creativity and more options in the world of commerce. Drive through most any town now, and you still see some homegrown signs. But our landscape is dominated by Wal Mart and Rite Aid, Outback Steakhouse and Home Depot. It's a bland, redundant way to live, a great leveling that does nothing for the idea of community. So here's a Beehive shout out to some of the oldies, and an invitation to check out some of them here.