TWO NOTCH ROAD - Columbia SC


I’m not sure what entirely it is, but I feel uneasy in Columbia SC. My camera struggles to make sense of it all and find good images. The city has gems here and there, the art museum, the capital building, a pleasant downtown, the university with it’s iconic stadium, the history museum and repurposed buildings. Still the place has a rough un-sewed feeling about it.


Maybe it’s the free ways running north and south and slice and dice it. Not straight lines ones, instead sharp curved ones designed it seems by politicians, certainly not an engineer. Fast cars setting the pace for all the streets and byways that spring off it.


You always want to bring home a trophy, a great photo, worthy of the outing. Fate does not always say yes. My full frame Canon RP was not focusing well. When good, this camera takes detail colorful shots. I had to pull off to the side of the road and reset the camera. A lesson for sure. You have to use fine equipment regularly or it will let you know.


You could not resist the road name, Two Notch Road. I took the exit. Perhaps Two Notch Road a metaphor. Along it you can see the shinning city in the distance. Only scraps along it sides though. A closed ghost mall greets you first, then strips of struggling businesses on either side. Some trapped in strip malls with colors faded with time. Even fast food has left or is leaving the roadside. Along the road you never stop hearing the slices of nearby freeways in your ears. There is no calm here. Still once in a while you spot some industrial patina or parked art. Your now functioning camera comes out. It keeps you hope alive and a desire to try again to understand the place. One you never will…
















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A TIME FOR ART

Image
  Art can be a powerful influence on our lives. Doing any form of it, takes us away from the chaos around us to a place we can call our own. To a world we create and learn in, a place we can give voice to our own lives. If you're like me, when you are doing art, any art from photography to painting, it absorbs your efforts and thought. While the rest of the world in going from A to B on often someone else’s mission, you feel like you are really accomplishing something. You are creating. It gives you a real sense of power and has almost a medication aspect to it.  What you create is of little importance. It is the doing that gives you found power and resources to take on the rest of life. You see things differently and more completely than others.  Along the way finding new ways to enjoy all of life around you. It’s ironic that in a time when Art might be more important than ever, schools and various art venues are finding their funds cut and programs eliminated. Maybe it’...
Read more

BEN BECK

Image
  Few people took much note of Ben Beck, as older man who walked the North Lake Union area, always in a beige zip up jacket and jeans. Ben owned a small shipwright business. He had a gift for crafting the just right part for the aging fleet of pleasure craft on the lake and recognizing a good investment. He considered both art more than craft. The area near the lake was full of small frame apartments and homes where the cities workers lived. He concentrated on buying the apartments over time acquiring 15 of them closely located in a 5 block area. The city grew rapidly and new tech business wanted all of the area. They only saw steal and glass buildings where the apartments stood. Ben saw different things, places where a working man or artist could still live in the city, if the rent was reasonable. He kept it that way. Beck lived in Apartment 1 of the original property he bought, called the Brownwood. The building sat on the corner of Blue Street, the lighting wonderful for a p...
Read more

KING BIRD

Image
  Years passed since events sealed Carls fate. He sat smoking a cigarette looking out from the window in a two story tenement on Morven St in Wadesboro. A blank lot adjoined the building, plenty of time to think about what could have been.  He was old now, but his size and strength once predominate still showed shadows of itself. He has acquired the nick name King Bird during a stint in jail for robbery. Carl duked it out with a security guard that was roughing up inmates for no reason. It bought him more time, but respect. Carl thought how ironic the Morven street name was. He had grown up in a town on the Pee Dee River named the same. The south was deep there. He’d heard all the stories local whites like to tell. How slave barges were brought all the way up the river from the coast. How the best slaves were always taken in the towns south of Morven. Prejudice leaves stains. Like a frame where you can change the picture but the frame is still there. A bitterness still burned ...
Read more