My Book Some Kind of Garden - A Journey into Zen is up - Get Your Copy and Enter Zen Now !

It is a gorgeous Zen Book with Very Large Photographs and Very Small Poems.

I call these Zen Gardens the Geometry of Calm.

For me going to Kyoto was getting into the Zen space of the Mind. Japanese Zen Gardens have very little to do with Horticulture and a lot to do with sophisticated culture refined by the teachings and reflections of Zen Masters, whose sole focus had been to contemplate and distill reality to simple, vanishing abstractions.

Why some kind of? Some kind of is a larger body of work that started long time ago and contains Photographs, Video and Text. Some kind of is a thread that runs through all of my work and hops on various obsessions like one of those Stepping Stone Bridges in my book.

Enough said, Get Your Zen fix Now!

Featuring small poems by Shiko, Hanshan, Ryokan, Huang Po, Basho and myself.  With my poems being the smallest poems.

Bay to Breakers Portraits

This series for me is a collective reflection on the human condition. Behind the funny hats and painted faces are the anxieties we face in the 21 century - terrorism, global disaster threats like the Swine flu, freedom to choose partners, freedom to accept other people's choices, the environmental Health of our Spaceship Earth, globalization, multiculturalism and the extinction of identity.

Waiting for the astronomical twilight on my hands and knees under the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts

I returned to the palace of Fine Arts to reshoot photographs I took a month earlier - back then I had wondered into the space by chance and didn't carry a tripod... which resulted in grain and noise. I looked up the time stamps on the files and then googled for the sunset time for that day. Turned out besides sunset there are all these interesting terms associated with sunset data like Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight and Astronomical twilight. According to the charts I had taken the picture (below) 20 minutes after sunset and 10 before civil twilight when wild things come out, obviously, beasts are partial to beautiful light.

Today sunset was around 7:30 pm so I waited 2o minutes for the twilight to set in and some amazing things happened during that time - a guy stood under the belly of the dome and sung with the most beautiful voice a song called "Salve Regina" ... after that I lied to a couple of Tourists that the Palace was a part of a pre-earthquake bathhouse, absolutely not on purpose and out of sheer ignorance.

So Here it is San Francisco palace of Fine Arts - round Two: