burnt embers

Out testing the Olympus XA2 I spotted from a stair case (the one shown in first of this series) this strange sight of a truck plastered with papers in the parking lot below. The closer I got, the stranger it was – the papers are photos of a man, at least two different views, with graffiti written in speech bubbles. These bubbles of thought include: “You’ve been shelled” which was on the larger white paper on the windshield, and on the photos “you’re beautiful”, “shel sells shel sells by the shel shore” “Your beard is majestic” “…and I was like ‘Baby baby baby cool'”, “why you gotta be so mean”, “to the window to the wall” “Aaron King of the scrappers” “Don’t stop believing” . “you are a gentleman and a scholar” “so is your son Maximilian”. There is more but the film is a bit too grainy to read them. Could this be an exhibit gone AWOL from the Ministry of Casual Living?

Like most of you guys, or even all of you (I write hopefully, not wanting to feel backwards), my pop culture knowledge is far too shallow to make sense of any of this. I am not completely without resources, and so my research department after diligent digging and with help from Head Librarian Google’s image search feature (which gets better every few months), did figure out that the photos are of Shel Silverstein. He was, until he died in 1999, “an American poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter, and author of children’s books” at least according according to Wikipedia. I am enough of a cultural backwater to have never heard of him, though I have heard of some of the songs he wrote like “A Boy Named Sue”.

I admire a man that can title an album Hairy Jazz (in 1959 no less) or Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball. Not to mention to write a song called Someone Ate the Baby (Dreadful) with highly esteemed lyrics that go like this (this video has the lyrics recited as poetry, by someone that might be one of the fabulous furry freak brothers grown old, so you might want to check it out as well):

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