Pictures on My Phone, 8/19/2013 - 8/29/2013

Here's how it is: sometimes, you move to a mid-tier city of a nation very far from your own for school, walk around and see the sights and make some friends and go bowling, but then it's time to dig and prepare for the semester because you came here to go to school, after all, not just bowl and take pictures of intersections, and once school starts you don't have that much time to gad about.

This is how it was for our hero for in this 10-day period.

8/19: A single image. It's sort of an odd one. I think it's of a building housing a religious organization of some kind, but I'm not sure why I think that. The shot is from the street, of an unremarkable tan concrete-block building that is clearly a "facility" of some kind. We are also clearly no longer in the city proper -- a street winds up to the right to a stand-alone house, and the facility is on a spacious lot with no buildings around. It looks suburban. There are doors into a glass-halled walkway leading off to the left, and a turret that is kind of hard to describe reaches up from the center of the structure -- this turret is why I think "religious"; this plus the fact that our hero bothered to photograph it at all. The turret has rounded lines, and echoes itself 3 times: a largest turret with a similar smaller one etched within it, then a similar smaller one etched within that. It has a sculpture that I can't identify and google isn't helping me with on top: a golden orb, with either a flame or a leaf of greenery lifting off from its northern pole. It is a bright, sunny day in Cleveland or this suburb of Cleveland on 8/19/2013. It was a Monday.

8/25: This is the nadir point of our hero's photographic exploits so far. A disgusting picture of food. The food might have been good; I'm pretty sure it is sevai kheer, which is really tasty I could go for some right now. But the picture is geee-ross. Our hero manages to accentuate everything that is yucky about food, while missing all the good points of food. The noodles look wormlike and gelatinous. The pudding around them looks even more gelatinous, and possibly infected: everything white has a greenish sickish glow from bad lighting. The bits of deliciousness in the kheer -- cashews, dried fruit -- look like growths or the accidental droppings an animal that got into this grotesquery when it was left out too long. The whole thing is presented from a bird's-eye view in a black cooking pot on a stovetop: the bird's-eye view of a sick, sad bird trapped in some bird hellhole with only this vista to look down on. 

However, I am being negative. It is great that our hero, or someone, made homemade sevai kheer because sevai kheer is delicious and I hope all of its eaters enjoyed it. And it is a nice impulse to want to snap a shot of that home cooking -- I imagine him sending this to his parents back home, showing that he's doing fine and living well and making familiar yummy things. Though it is a shame, for our purposes (which admittedly are rather far from our hero's intended purposes (whatever they were (seriously, this picture is gross))), that the execution of that impulse is so revolting.

8/26: I hope I'm nice enough about the loveliness of the cool things our hero does that my negativity about some of these pics is not too relentless or mean. Because this photo -- maybe the lesson here, actually definitely the lesson here, is that we all take a lot of dumb dumb pictures on our phones -- this photo is also not good. It is a shot of the cover of Introduction to Data Mining by Pang-Nin Tan et al. It is sideways in native orientation, so you can crane your neck or flip it and get a narrow, small photo. The book is set on a tabletop, and a pair of black-trousered legs and the white loop of shoelaces are visible at the bottom of the frame. It was taken during another one of the earthquakes that ravaged Cleveland occasionally while our hero took pictures; having taken pictures with this exact same (exact same, remember) camera, I feel on firm ground giving him a hard time about this. It's not that hard to get this phone to take well-focused shots of stationary objects in good lighting. Like, for example, a book on a table.

That aside, again, it's easy and kind of nice to imagine the circumstances of this shot. He needed to know what book to buy, and his friend had it. His friend needed to know what book to buy, and he had it, etc. Semester starting -- good times. Onward, friend.

8/28: This one is cool. A white tile column on a platform in the Tower City Rapid Transit Station in Cleveland. A linear map is on the column: white text on industrial blue. Tower City is blocked in white, indicating where we are. An old white man in a blue shirt and chinos is walking down the platform, disappearing behind the column. A young guy with short-cropped hair is seated on a public-facility metal wire "bench," back to us, reading. Our hero went somewhere on August 8th, 2013. Good for him. I'll pretend this is just like me, standing on the platform in Chicago or Boston or London or any other city where I've been new, and know exactly how he feels unless I've got the circumstances all wrong, which hey I probably do.

8/29: This one is lovely too, because it's that same building that our hero and his friends took pictures in front of on August 18th, before bowling. A different angle, but again the picture gives a lot of its real estate over to a big intersection in front of the building, which is now lit red white and blue. It's night - the sky is black and city lights are on. The photo is out of focus. Interestingly, the shot is taken through the windshield of a car: the dashboard is visible at the bottom, and the streetlamps are all splayed diffractionary through the glass. There's a white sedan in front, its rear over-illuminated by the headlights of our hero's car.

I like the idea that he liked this building so much that he took shots of it kind of whenever the opportunity presented itself. Maybe he thought it looked particularly nice at that moment, being driven back (he's not in the driver's seat, you can tell from the angles) from something, seeing it there illuminated -- perhaps for Labor Day, which was coming up that weekend.

To figure out the Labor Day thing, I just looked at my own calendar. On this same day, I was pretty stressed and unhappy. It's nice to think that our hero was doing better, and somehow it draws a straight unifying line from me not-happy then, through him hopefully-happy then, to me much happier now.

What's that, reader? You want a road trip? Well brace yourself, because next up in "Pictures on My Phone": motherf***ing ROAD TRIP.

Pictures on My Phone 8/17/2013 and 8/18/2013

In which ALL IS REVEALED and also there is bowling.

8/17/2013 was not a dramatic day in our hero's photograph-taking, but it was a catastrophic one in the event that he, for instance, decided to sell his used phone and neglected to wipe all the data and was concerned about identity theft. Because it includes 3 photos:

- a weird out-of-focus one of an upper corner of a room with white paint and functional plaster-work, with a door open and a blue-ish coat hung behind it. The shot is as though you lay down on the floor and pointed the camera up into the corner of the room by the door (or were laying on the mattress in your newly-moved-into flat???). Anyway, this photo looks like an accident or a test.

- a photo of the front of his driver's license. Things I think it's okay to share: our hero is from Andhra Pradesh, along with about 85 million other people, gosh-knows-how-many thousands of whom probably come to the US to study and work. Andhra Pradesh driver's licenses are functional and not too exciting, like US licenses circa 1982.

- a photo of the back of his driver's license. One other thing I think it's okay to share: our hero is 25 years old.

It's interesting for a second to think about why he took shots of his driver's license, then it's not interesting at all. He was newly enrolling in things, and in a new place, and there were probably all kinds of things with school and maybe his lease and who knows what else asking for identification. He doesn't have US identification yet, or maybe he needs this to get it (although in that case I feel like he'd have to show up physically with the actual ID).

Anyway, our-hero-about-whom-I-know-a-lot, wipe your phone better next time, dude. People can crack your s**t from your behavior on, like, Tinder. Lobbing pics of your driver's license front and back about the used electronics marketplace is not best practices.

Now some good stuff.

Because on 8/18/2013 our hero had a Night Out with Bros. And he took 43 pictures. No way am I describing each one  of them -- already, this whole enterprise has me questioning my use of my spare time. But we can relive the night through them -- if you scroll through really fast you can actually sort of see it in fast-motion, which is neat.

First, they took to the streets and -- either drunk, walking-and-clicking, or careless -- took extremely blurry street-scene shots of Cleveland's hustle and bustle. This is 3 photographs, and particular attention is paid either to a white SUV, the building behind it, or -- again -- the intersection at which it is parked; it's impossible to say.

Then, the dudes posed in front of what must be some kind of landmark building in Cleveland I have no idea. It looks mid-20th century; it tapers up to a cupola then a pointed spire with maybe some columns up there, and it's lit a la Empire State Building: on this night, red light then above it white than above that -- the cupola and spire -- green. It took a little figuring to get these photos correct: there are a couple in which our hero is small, you can barely see his face as he disappears in the intersection before the building. Then they sort it out and he's closer to the camera, looming nearly as tall as the building itself, smiling easily with one thumb hooked into a jeans pocket, wearing a grey "Varsity Fame 08" t-shirt (must have been a warm night). This is 7 photos, all together.

The process then repeats with one of our hero's friends, and honestly both photographer and subject take a turn for the worse. The friend stands, wearing a polo shirt (light blue stripe, black base) that looks to me like it reps either a football or a cricket club, his hands in both pockets and arms bowed out in an awkward/uncomfortable looking way. The shot is from far away! He's not smiling! Also the photographer (perhaps our hero) is drunk/crazy. Whatever best practices were learnt photographing the previous subject have been lost: the first photo is from a bizarrely high vantage point and tilted sideways, as though the photographer has hopped up on a park bench and bent himself at an angle. The next is blurry.

But all that's okay, because now we get to it: 30 photographs of BOWLING MAGIC. Here is the cast of characters of these photos:

-- our hero is not in them. probably he was taking them.

-- shorts and red/blue striped polo shirt guy. A buffoon, sadly. Heavyset. You can see in the shots of him selecting a ball that he is timorous about relating to and manipulating this physical object. And then you can see in the shots of his bowling that this timorousness is well-founded: he looks awkward and stuff and uncommitted in his motions.

-- jeans and red/blue striped polo shirt guy. What a stud. If we made a movie of this night, here's our alpha male. He has a nice face -- we only see it in incomplete profile in a couple of shots of his getting a ball, but it's a nice face with a strong nose but not too strong and you know has a keen gaze. And he bowls with the easy grace of a man for whom it comes easily: there's a shot of him with his foot tucked behind himself in that way bowlers do. There's a shot of him approaching the lane with quiet, certain authority, ball raised ready to go. He doesn't say a lot, this guy. He doesn't have to.

-- white button down-shirt. The aesthete. We don't see his face at all, we just get a few shots of him at the lanes. Whereas our alpha male had the unassuming grace of the... alpha male, this guy's got pizzaz. His leg kicks up almost to his butt as he releases the ball, a nearly dancerly motion. His stride up to the lane is long, as if he's devouring the shellacked wood floor between himself and release.

-- a hot pink bowling ball. They all use it some, and it's always quite prominent when they do.

-- jokesy chinstrap-beard guy. There are 2 shots of him; one of him sitting with yet another dude as they wait and he looks a little smiling, a little unfriendly, with his chinstrap and his pooched lips and his phone in his hands. But then! In the second shot in which this jokester appears, he is facing the camera bent over, his butt facing the lane, having just released the ball between his legs backwards for his shot.

Ach, bowling is fun. I'm not being ironic. There is no sarcasm on this blog. That's one of the rules. The other rules is I'm not allowed to write about anything that it's actually a good use of one's time to write about, apparently.

Now obviously, we're judging these guys purely on form, on honestly also on how I like the cut of their various jibs. For all I know, shorts/polo-shirt guy bowls a 280. But I bet he does not. There's a shot of him, face turned to someone sitting behind the ball dispenser, and the look on his face is full of questions: that guy didn't know what he was doing. The other guys seemed to.

All of the dudes are South Asian, and all dressed sort of similarly. One gets the sense that they are all in Cleveland in a similar position, although it's hard to tell if they know each other before or have simply come together as fellow students with things in common.

The lane is one of those very bright, neon-y ones with images projected over all the lanes of a full moon and clouds, white and blue and sidewalk art-ish. What's that? You want more sleuthing, more detail? Okay, hotcakes. If you blow up any of the images of the guys bowling, beneath the moon-and-clouds graphic you can make it out: Yorktown Lanes, "your bowling headquarters." Damn straight.

Now, those amongst with OCD or who are savants may be asking: yo, 3 blurry SUV shots + 7 hero-in-front-of-building-of-mixed-quality shots + 2 non-hero-in-front-of-building + 30 bowling shots = 42 shots. Slim buttons, you said 43.

I did. And that's because the dudes ate some donuts. The final shot of this dynamic series, the capstone to a night of wandering around and posing and bowling, is a shot (blurry! again! what's up with this?) of a delicious looking box of donuts. It's hard to tell, but from the lighting, the floor, and the corner of the table the box is on they are certainly no longer in the lanes area of Yorktown Lanes, and I suspect they have decamped to some late-night donut establishment by this point, because that floor looks pretty dirty. There is a jean-ed leg with a hand resting on it in the lower right-hand corner of the shot. And then, centered, the donuts: white box. 4 plain honey-glazed. 2 cinnamon bun. 2 cups of donut holes. 2 cream-filled donuts of some kind, with nuts on the frosting in that bit of frosting that cream donuts often have where a donut's hole should be. 

The donuts look delicious.

Pictures on My Phone 8/16/2013

As promised, intersections. 5 pictures of intersections, plus 1 bonus.

Except I was wrong. I think they aren't pictures of intersections. They're pictures that include intersections, and in which the intersections are centered as if they are the subject of the photo for who-knows-why. But I'm pretty sure, in each case, that these pictures are "of" specific buildings that in any one of them look like background objects, but that in fact seem to be the defining feature that ties the photos together to tell the story of this day in... Pictures on My Phone. Here we go.

The first photo is of an intersection. There's a state road sign for "East 20", some green trees across the street, and what I assume is East 20 running diagonally away from us into the upper right of the photo. There's a bus and a gazebo with a down escalator that has a public transportation look to it. And, in the background as if incidental, there is a kind of handsome white tower with the letters "CSU" in signage relief on each of the 2 visible sides, looking out over the city and the scene. Our hero has moved to Cleveland to attend CSU, remember.

Far right on the photo, there is a sign for "Marino's Hair Cutting," with a little arrow pointing you there.

In the next photo it comes together. It's a photo of an intersection; our hero is not (yet) awesome at framing, maybe. BUT along the periphery of this photo we have several things. Foreground and 58% of the photo or so is a big spacious intersection in a big spacious American city: wide streets, street lights, scattered people crossing. Background, though: green and trees, and peaking up beyond them a handsome glass building that we recognize from earlier photos -- the handsome low-slung glass building that adjoined the courtyard our hero had photographed the day previous. Also off to the right, and it really looks incidental but subsequent photos knit it in as important, is another labeled CSU building, this one short and squat and tan, with signage along the top reading "Monte Ahuja College of Business," which is apparently currently undergoing a conversion from a 4-credit to 3-credit course system, with which I wish them godspeed it sounds like a nightmare. I couldn't find anything on its site for an abbrevation by which this long-named school prefers to be known, so we'll call it MACoB from here on out.

Centered in this photo -- perhaps this is the subject -- is a tall streetlamp pole with a banner on it, green background white letters running sideways: "Cleveland State University"; small font horizontal: "Engaged Learning".

Next is really just an adjustment of the previous. Our hero has repositioned to get a different angle on the intersection of what we can now see is Euclid Street. Incidentally, from the formal perspective of framing but probably not from the perspective of why this photo was taken, this also gives a straight-on (background) view of the MACoB building, foregrounded by street, intersection, ersatz red cable car tourist bus thing, park/courtyard from previous photo series, and trees. But it's there.

To give our hero credit, and put snark aside, these photos do a great job of conveying the physical context in which these buildings are placed. They'd be great illustrative photos to share with, for example, friends back home, or perhaps with parents whose pictures one carries in one's wallet.

The next two photos are even more of a duo, and they're what confirmed me in this "the background buildings are really the point" thing. You may disagree, reader, but you haven't seen the photos and you probably never will because once I post this I'm deleting them. (Not for reasons of narrative elegance. Because I'm compulsive and it's satisfying. Also to free them, or something. Whatever.) Anyway these two photos: guess what two intersections. A broad avenue, it looks maybe like a residential neighborhood with some city-ish multifamily houses on the left, and a kind of neat old fashioned neon "GREYHOUND" sign on a building across the street, a building with Art Deco curves and long Art Deco window channels inset. But the subject of these photos, now that we've learned to read our hero's work, is clear. It is the brown, rather unhandsome 1960s/'70s looking mid-rise residential building with one long flat side of smallish windows and one narrow side of concrete balconies facing us. It looms over the scene like an implication, which I wrote and I'm sticking with but I'm unsure an implication of what. The second photo just comes closer to this same building, with the remarkable achievement of still keeping it like a background fixture and taking the intersection one block closer as its centered subject. But there is the building again, emerging.

This is not the Statler Arms, which we'd earlier conjectured might be where our hero took up residence when he came to Cleveland. The Statler Arms looks, frankly, a lot nicer. So what is this other building? It's residential. Is it where he lives? Was he crashing at the Statler Arms? Has he not decided yet, so he is sharing the options with his parents/whomever back home was getting these photos?

Dunno. Dunno dunno dunno. Maybe subsequent photos will clarify.

The final photo of this day is different. It's a photo of a computer monitor, specifically of a web browser on a CSU Staff page: the photo features 5.5 thumbnail portraits of people with @csuohio.edu addresses and job titles. Centered -- and in this case I'm going to say I think the centered thing is the thing -- is a woman who works at the College of Business in a capacity I'd be curious about if I came to the U.S. to pursue an MBA and was looking to stay afterwards. Why take a photo of a screen with her information? My guess is just that people record important info all kinds of ways -- maybe that was easiest at the moment.

  

Pictures on My Phone 8/15/2013: Part 2

On this day, August 15th, our hero took a lot of pictures. It seems like he was newly arrived in Cleveland and at his school, and taking it in.

The first photos on this day are of a nice public square -- if I knew Cleveland I suspect I'd recognize it, but I sort of like keeping this whole thing in semi-fictive abstraction. It's paved, but has large islands of colorful flowers planted amongst the paved walkways: they pop with dark red, pink, purple, white, and green grasses. Overlooking the whole thing is a spire of what is almost certainly a landmark building, tapering to a sharp point, stone and early 20th-Century looking, with an American posted atop that is surprisingly visible (you can see some of the stripes) even at a distance. There is a wide shot of the square that captures all this, then some alternate angles that get in closer to the flower beds, revealing an arcing fountain at one end of the piazza. It's a different fountain than the previous series; we're in a new place -- this one (it's hard to tell from the pictures) seems to feature a male form leaping out of the water, or an orb, the form wrought in green metal, muscular torso and arms upstretched, lower half obscured either by swirling waters from which he's bursting or a merman-tail type situation.

What looks like a recently built residential high-rise overlooking the square gets photographic attention. Is this where our hero's rented a flat?

The next photos are of streets in Cleveland. We begin on E. 4th St, which has signs for a "CLE+ Visitors Center" and something called Corner Alley, the latter advertised on an ersatz old-fashioned neon-style sign. One side of the street is brightly lit, the other (with both the signs) is cast in deep shadow. I wonder if our hero is not perhaps experimenting with the phone's ability to shutter for different light exposures. There are cars parked on the street, which looks like the street of any well-kept district of a well-tended midsized American city. An odd piece of art/signage dominates the middle of the shot: I think it's supposed to be/evoke a giant torch, conical and metal with flames depicted on panels running up its side. It looks like the sort of thing that a city might put up to denote that you're now in the "Downtown District" or the "Wharf Markets," when a city is trying to encourage the use and reality of that kind of neighborhooding concept.

This looks like a commercial district. It looks like the sort of place business school students would come to have lunch; it reminds me of having lunches on sunny American streets in Chicago during business school.

There are 3 pictures of this commercial street, with signs and restaurants and odd art-poles on the sidewalk, then a strange final picture in this set. It's of a street that's mostly empty: just a couple of cars parked, a couple people walking in a way that just makes the absence of people more clear. All in shadow. It has a side street look; it's narrow, with the traffic lane in one direction actually too tight to even allow for parking. There's a building on it with a nice detailed grey-granite first couple of stories, followed by red brick above, with one of those thick art deco structural awnings. If you zoom in you can see the lettering: Statler Arms. Contra what I said above, I searched and found this. Our hero's residence, in his new city, to which he has come almost certainly to study and is probably studying still, living with doubtless hundreds of others in this building I'm betting near campus in a "gracious apartment home," perhaps with a view of Lake Erie. I had no idea that was possible, the Lake Erie views, even though I've seen Cleveland on the map of course. That's nice.

Next: a lot of pictures of intersections.

Pictures on My Phone 8/15/2013

I bought a refurbished HTC One X (good phone) in the fall of 2013. I tend to buy used phones of 1 generation back, reliving the iterative improvements 6-8 months after the fact.

Whoever had my phone before me -- or whomever they sold it to -- didn't know how to wipe it.

It was full of music -- mostly Bhangra, or what sounded to me like Bhangra. Before I erased it to save space, my car would sometimes just play this music unbidden when it connected to my phone's bluetooth. Which I liked.

It is also full of pictures. Pictures with enough detail to tell me a lot about the phone's previous owner, including a picture of his driver's license. I'm not going to write any of that stuff -- any of the clear markers of who this individual is.

I'm also not going to post the pictures. They aren't my pictures, and it's an accident that they came to me.

But I think I can write about them, in a non-identifying way, with a clear conscience. They are neat, and tell a story, and I'm going to delete them day-by-day as I do.

The first set (the phone's gallery dates the pics) is from 8/15/2013. The last is from 9/9/2013. This already begs a question. Did my former-phone-friend only own this phone for about 3 weeks? If so, why'd he get rid of it so quickly? It's a good phone!

The very first picture is of pictures: a hand holding a wallet with 2 people's photographs, who seem to almost certainly be his parents you can somehow tell even before you've looked at all the others. Two South Asian adults. The man's photograph is on top: a blue background, an unsmiling man with a red dot on his forehead wearing a white collared shirt. He has a slightly jowly face. The woman on the bottom looks perhaps a decade younger than the man, in her 40s. Her photo has a red background and is smaller. She also has a red dot, also unsmiling; she's in a sari with a gold necklace. She has a round face. In the lower left hand corner, just barely, you can see our protagonist's thumb as he holds the wallet open to the oval frame into which these passport photos have been placed. His fingernail is a little bit dirty: there's a crescent of dirt between the pinkness of his flesh and the whiteness where the nail has grown out.

I like imagining that he took this picture to show his parents his phone and its capabilities, although that is also a foolish thing to imagine on my part as there is no reason to suspect that a phone with a pretty good camera would be novel to someone from India, particularly someone from India with the resources to come to the U.S. to study, as we're about to learn our hero almost certainly has.

In the next picture, we meet our hero. He's in a classroom. The shot is a few feet away; the wall behind him is industrial concrete squares, a pattern with gaps between the small blocks of concrete. In the background are other students, sitting in lecture hall seating; a dark bookbag is slung against the tan concrete wall behind a white student in a green shirt. Our hero is South Asian (Indian, we'll later learn). He has on a yellow shirt with vertical grey stripes. He's staring at the camera and at first he looks unsmiling, but that's not right. His mouth is pulled back in what looks like a calm, reasonably content, you're taking a picture of me expression. His hair is short and tidy, parted on the left and combed to the right. He's got a little heft, our guy, though you wouldn't characterize him as chubby or overweight. He's a little meaty.

The next couple pictures are of the campus: a terraced affair with patches of green grass amidst concrete and clean sharp buildings with a lot of glass. There is a centerpiece of some kind, between a couple of buildings, made of black stone. Perhaps a marble fountain or something. Everything is edges and straight lines.

A couple pictures later we get specific: it is a black marble fountain, with water flowing down its several terraces, and atop the insignia of Cleveland State University. Our hero stands in front of this fountain now, in his yellow button-down and blue jeans, posing contrapposto with left hand stuck in left pocked and left leg slightly bent.

This shot is repeated, in various permutations, 8 times. The sun goes behind the clouds and comes out while the pictures are being taken. Who is taking these pictures?

The final pictures of this set are of a performance of some kind in a courtyard outside one of the buildings: glass and edges behind it, marble spheres for sitting on planted on a concrete walkway cutting through the grass -- or rather, because there is so much more concrete than grass, a concrete-ed over (this is nice concrete; when I say "concrete" it has kind of rough connotations but I mean that good slick smooth-looking concrete; the color is reddish or tan or light grey). I don't think I'm profiling just because of who our protagonist is -- I'm pretty sure it's some students doing a Bollywood style dance routine. There are three, a man flanked by women either side. All three are South Asian. The man has coiffed bouffant hair, and is wearing a white suite, red shirt with the collar flapping out over it, and light brown (red?) dress shoes. The women are in loose black shirts and slacks, with magenta scarves tied around their waists. They are clapping their hands as the man seems to sing or shout in the first photo, all three of them lifting up their left foot with the dancing. People around are watching, and a man in the background is taking a photograph with a big camera. The next photo they're doing one of those moves where you lean out all the way to the right and point and step that way with your right foot but throw your hip in the other direction. The next photo: the man is jumping, feet off the ground, still singing or shouting! Then he's jumping again, now to the side, as the women throw their right hands up and their hips to the left, smiling widely.

That's it.