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I spent too many of my addled high school and college years staring at Roger Dean paintings. Staring at these, you could get lost in reveries of microscopic subway networks, elven mineshafts, fossilized toothpaste. You want to figure out what made them, and why they live in the tide pools of Malibu. They are an invitation to wonder.
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Faith is an odd, powerful force – a combination of yearning and belief in the unbelievable. Prayer cards are little faith amplifiers, allowing you (if you believe) to draw on the faith of dead saints whose faith was more powerful, and to ask for them to help. They’re tools for bootstrapping yourself to grace with more effective prayer. Here’s what you’re supposed to say to St. Francis Xavier (namesake of my Catholic high school) when you want something in the world:
Prayer of Saint Francis Xavier (attributed to Fr. Marcello Mastrilli, S.J (17th cc.)
Most amiable and most loving Saint Francis Xavier, in union with thee I reverently adore the Divine Majesty. I rejoice exceedingly on account of the marvelous gifts which God bestowed upon thee. I thank God for the special graces He gave thee during thy life on earth and for the great glory that came to thee after thy death. I implore thee to obtain for me, through thy powerful intercession, the greatest of all blessings – that of living and dying in the state of grace. I also beg of thee to secure for me the special favor I ask. In asking this favor I am fully resigned to the Divine Will. I pray and desire only to obtain that which is most conducive to the greater glory of God and the greater good of my soul.
Feast Day: December 3.
And maybe that’s one of the problems I’ve had with organized religion – people believe that God can change their lives on earth. I’m cynical enough to believe in an observant God rather than an interventionist deity. (S)He went to all the trouble to set this huge, complex organism in motion, and sat back to watch. You’re on your own in the world, blessed with the family and friends you deserve, and you have to make the best of them and everything else. A little four-color, gilt-edged card of a long-dead saint waving a cross around may be an anchor of faith for some folks, but it’s just an artifact to me.
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It’s begun. Pentax denies it but you know it’s only a matter of time before film technology vanishes. With it will go shirt-pocket axes like this Olympus XA, a little fistful of Swiss-watch precision. Designed and built in the early 1980s, it’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes, comes with a teensy little flash unit and has a quirky 35mm lens that captures crisp, bright images, then viciously vignettes their corners like a bad case of cataracts. Shooting with it reminds me of my Dad‘s old 1950s-vintage Zeiss Ikon 35mm rangefinder, which he bought in the Navy PX and let me use. Two images appear – a yellow ghost of your picture floats in the viewfinder and you shift the focus ring back and forth until the images reconcile – and you squeeze the button in a split-second flood of excitement, anticipation and hope.
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In the boom years, you’d think nothing of spending $2 million a year on billboards – in one city alone. LAinsider.com was pushing its restaurant guides and live traffic maps on hundreds of billboards around town simultaneously – big, graphic messages exhorting people to use the site’s terrifically useful tools. But with the collapse of the Internet ad economy – the foundation of our business model – the site eventually folded, leaving behind a few relics: Wall-sized blueprint posters (now faded and buckled) that adorned our studios; Huge sheets of billboard material, printed in four-color process with stochastic screen dots the size of leSeur peas; trunkfuls of logo’d t-shirts; And miniature billboards like this one – gifts to the marketing department from billboard companies hoping to retain our business. Perhaps it’s the cinematic dimensions, maybe it’s the visual syntax of a billboard frame around an image I watched for as I drove around town, just to confirm my custodianship of something with a Known Brand. But this trinket exerts a magnetic pull on my line of sight whenever I glance at that corner of my office, and commands attention among the scholarly journals, robot miniatures, Altoids empties and HTML texts.