In A Different Timeline, Maybe

Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, I once went out with this girl -- let's call her Lisa -- whom I got to know through a show I had at the Simard & Halm Gallery on Melrose Avenue (it's long gone now).

She was the daughter of a well-to-do German lady who was supposedly of noble(!) heritage (they still have those in Europe, at least formally).  The mom had asked the curators for a meeting with the artist, possibly presuming the artist to be a mature man of Christian/European extraction I think, based on the subject matter and handling of some of the paintings in the show, not to mention the fact that my last name, Suhr, looks German.  So if that were the case, they must have been a bit surprised to see a young Asian guy show up, but maybe they were all the more intrigued by it, and anyway they were wonderfully nice to me;  and as things worked out, the daughter was about my age and single, so we ended up goint out.

We started out with a movie date.  And boy, although I can't even recall what our original selection was at the time, for some reason we ended up going to see "Eddie Murphy Delirious" instead, a performance documentary of one of Eddie's stage performances.  Well, if you know anything about Eddie Murphy's standup, you know it's gonna be full of casual use of all sorts of expletives and forbidden lines crossed and recrossed, all in good humor.  Good luck^^

The movie was fairly infamous even back then -- so well, you can fairly well imagine Lisa's reaction...  To be sure, I hadn't gone in expecting anything like it either, but still, I wasn't offended at all and anyway it was all very funny.  But afterward when we came out, all Lisa said was "That was not a movie" -- presumably meaning it was not at all in line with the beautiful classics of artistic cinema that she had probably grown up watching in her elegant home, but in contrast was vulgar and offensive and that she was not at all amused by it.  I was maybe a tiny bit annoyed by her reaction to what I'd found simply hilarious, but anyway that certainly didn't keep me from "parking" on the way back to her house.  We talked a while, then we started "necking" (do people even still use that term any more? it was old even back then) in the car -- until a policeman came by and stopped us because he thought we were suspicious (this was in a ritzy area of L.A.).

Well, soon after that first date (I was already having second thoughts about Lisa) I had an opportunity to attend a "talk and simultaneous magic performance" given by this psychiatrist in his Bell-Aire home;  it seems he was a well-known personality in the local Mensa community in Los Angeles.  Imagine my surprise when I saw Lisa and her mom there -- turned out, Lisa was a member of the local chapter of Mensa (as was I).  Long story short, I had gone there with this girl from my job who I thought I might have better luck with (not to mention more in common with);  so we sat to the front of Lisa and her mom, and all throughout the presentation I made sure the girl (I think her name was either Melani or Melody) and I were visibly on real close terms.  Well, it worked;  Lisa dropped me forthwith, and I was free.

At that time I was just proud of myself, thinking I was being pretty smart and coolly manipulative -- you might even say kind of like the plot of some K-drama (and this long before anyone had ever heard of K-dramas);  but that was then, and this is now, and now I'm feeling pretty guilty about it.

Now and then I even catch myself imagining how different my life might have turned out, if I'd successfully courted Lisa and married into German nobility!

To be honest, I'd probably be long divorced, due to "irreconcilable personal differences".  I can see that coming from a hundred miles away.  But  would I then have been able to keep whatever title I might have acquired from the marriage?  Probably not.

Winter Rain

Happy hippo catching the rain in his maw

Paper airplane that hit a tree and crashed

A sidewalk comet that looks like a cyclopean ghost

Pedestrians caught short

And just as the weather forecast predicted, later in the afternoon the rain turned into sleet.

A Few More Waking Dreams

Then Appeared In The Evening Sky

a great flaming sword (minus the angel).

Errant Wiener

 

Related posts:  errant

Contrast

Crawling through the back lanes and alleyways of Seoul in search of shots, I sometimes come across rare scenes.  The stark contrast between the despairing girl and the happy smiling model in the sign is indeed striking, even cruelly so.

She reminded me of this other girl I photograhed last year.

And no, I didn't ask that girl what was the matter, either.

Beauty

 

Day In Night / Night In Day

An impactful shot of the lowering sun.

Or the rising full moon.  I've forgotten which.

Mermaid Dream

Early this morning I had a dream about a mermaid who longed to tread land under her feet and experience the world of humans.  So she managed somehow (the details are forgotten, if indeed there were any) to acquire the means to transform her tail to legs (painlessly), went ashore, met a man she loved, and settled down.

It was all on borrowed time, however, as there was a time limit on the magic that turned the mermaid's tail to legs.  The date of her forced return to the sea was known to the man from the start -- she had not hidden anything from him -- and when the day came he threw a grand farewell party for her by the edge of the sea.  Everyone had too much to drink and fell into a stupor;  the mermaid-woman was the only one who remained alert, and at the appointed time she walked into the sea.  And here is the part I remember most vividly, as if I had been watching a movie instead of sleeping:  she waded in until she was waist-deep in the water, then she suddenly fell back, indicating that her legs had turned back into a tail;  she took one last poignant look at the sleeping man, then turned and swam away into her original home.

That "ending" was so cinematic that after I woke I actually wondered if I hadn't been remembering a movie rather than dreaming.  I remember her long wavy black hair, her round face, her serious expression, and the bitttersweet mood of the ending scene.  I actually did an online search to see if indeed there had been a movie with such a plot (despite the fact that I could not recall seeing such a movie) but came up empty.

All in all, the dream seems to have been an amalgam of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of "The Little Mermaid" and another, obscure but exceptionally haunting mermaid story I once read as a child in a collection of Korean short stories.  That book was either lost or left behind when I moved to the US, but even though I could only vaguely recall part of the actual plot I never forgot the impact the story had on me -- at one time, many years later, I went looking for it in bookstores in L.A.'s Koreatown, but I never was able to find it again.

I also could not find an image online that illustrated something similar to that last scene, but then I found this shot I'd taken earlier this year, of a bicycle that aspired to fly like a bird, and thought it was a good visual analog of the mermaid's longing to walk on land.

Another Mirror In An Absurd Place

Untitled V

Just happened to notice this guy hiding in the shadows, looking scared of his downstairs neighbor.

A Rather Ominous-Seeming Staircase

 

Another Example of Spontaneous Order

Things just have a way of aligning themselves to "go with the flow".  From February 2018.

 

A Winter Day's Iridescence

Is it just my overactive imagination, or does that little cloudlet kind of look like frost on a windowpane?

 

Well Fortified

against a forecast of "heavy snow" today.  Actually it was not as cold today as it was yesterday despite the forecast of minus eight degrees Celsius, because there was thankfully very little wind.  Yesterday it was so cold and blustery that I was literally shivering as I walked on.  Korean winters can be brutal.  So thankful for the new, big thick overcoat and the absolutely humongous new scarf.

A Half-Sun

which serves as a neat visual encapsulation of my motto for this blog, which is -- "Forever seeking the beauty and the terror in all things everywhere".

A Surprising Omission

This is a detail from a painting I did back when I was still a student at USC.  Something had reminded me of it and I wanted to look it up on this blog.  It is one of my favorite images, and naturally I had assumed I must have long ago posted it here.  Rather to my surprise, I found that I never had, so here it is (the Latin phrase for "here be dragons" is a later addition).

When I painted it I was thinking of Dr. Lao, the enigmatic Chinese circus master in the book by Charles G. Finney (previously referred to in the July 26 post).

Just A Couple of Nice Shots

But in extravagant evening colors this time.  First, another one of those "right there" shots;  then, one that makes one suspect the Korean military has finally perfected that fabled laser weapon.

Captive Moon

Some workmen were erecting a giant Christmas tree in the plaza.  They put one up every Christmas, but this time I noticed the star topper was... in the shape of a magic pentagram! -- and I was inspired to do something audacicous and daring.

Using the power of the pentagram, I would trap the Moon and hold her captive.

Unreachable Selene;  fickle, inconstant Moon that Romeo couldn't swear by;  her proud, indifferent beauty -- now mine to keep.

At least her image, if not the Moon herself.

A Twofer

I don't know how I could have missed it at the time!

Originally, this photo was slated for the "stairs" folder, but when I expanded the image I realized that it also contains that partial shot of a mirror at the top, hung in a truly absurd position and still somehow managing to escape my notice!  It's a real two-for-the-price-of-one deal -- great, except now I don't know whether to put it under "stairs" or "mirrors out of place".  For now it's staying in "downloads".

A Follow-Up

And maybe this elder could serve as Hell's gate keeper?  He certainly looks old enough, forbidding enough, and ornery enough to serve as Charon's stand-in.

Apocalyptic Skies

I seem to be on a bit of a "hellfire" jag lately.  It's probably not healthy...

Could It Be...?

While going through unused photos in old folders, I came across this image of a "ghost in the clouds" from April, 2021.

It looked decidedly odd, so I closed in and heightened contrast, and whaddayaknow, it was a giant cell in the sky!  Trying to blend in with the surrounding clouds, but it stood out with its unusually well-defined boundary (cell membrane?!) and what look for all the world like a nucleus and organelles within the "cytoplasm".

[With a wink and a nod to Trevor James Constable, author of They Live in the Sky!]

Compare to this diagram of a typical animal cell found online.

Looks like I'd come across an actual sky-amoeba.  And come to think, it reminded me of this, and this, as well as this.  The skies are indeed full of w̶e̶i̶r̶d̶ s̶c̶a̶r̶y̶ m̶o̶n̶s̶t̶e̶r̶s̶  life!

"You Can't Keep A Good Cat Down"

The pawprints of a cat who climbed up these stairs, imprinted when the cement was fresh, cat-lifetimes ago, but preserved for all time.

Brimstone Angel II

 

I'm finding this one actually frightens me, just a little.

[But at the same time, I sure like me some hellfire, it looks like]