Andrew Wyeth in San Benito County

I realize the lameness in writing a post that essentially says, “Guys, I did a neat thing on Instagram! Go look at it!” But that’s essentially what I’m doing. Instagram may be a place for people to post photos of sandwiches and dogs who think they’re people, but occasionally you see something that’s not Insta-filtered within an inch of its life and not entirely ugly and not pointless. And this may be one of those.

It’s also a different angle on a house that I photographed immediately after receiving a new camera for Christmas in 2003 — and this is a standard camera that didn’t double as a phone, if that dates this story at all. That photo also skews a little Andrew Wyeth, but more Andrew Wyeth by way of The Ring, horse and all.

In fact, to this day, the original posting of the old photo still gets hits from people trying to find Moesko Island.

Photos of places, previously:

• Maui
• My parents’ back yard
• Santa Monica Boulevard
• A rotten oasis outside Las Vegas
• The Pinnacles
• Paihia

Grandma Misery

Reading over people's writing and neatly placing it online with visual accompaniments affords me a look into the lives of others. Sure, just by virtue of these writers having documented a meeting or a conversation, I get to experience it secondhand and moments before the loyal Independent.com readership does. But every now and then, these small articles manage to escape the limits of mere reporting and offer a moment — in the writers' lives or somebody else's — that strikes me as honest, regardless of whether the way it's described comes off as objective or subjective. To paraphrase Joan Didion, it's how they remember it, and that in itself carries a certain weight.

A while back I put online a column by a writer who now covers Goleta goings-on for us. The text itself read fairly straightforwardly, but the writer included one photo that I found somehow moving. Even being an un-doctored photograph, it's still what the writer/photographer saw and what she thought important, and she composed it to reflect her experience of this moment.

What you see above is no great feat of photography. It's a snapshot, really, taken by the kind of Average Joe With a Camera that generates most of the photography we see online, my own included. However, I see something in this photo that makes me want to stare at it. Maybe I'm intrigued by the contrasting greens of the marshy brush and the woman's sweater. Maybe I like how her head rests just below the horizon line. And maybe I'm drawn to the fact that the whole image — the greens and yellow expanding out beneath the sky, the woman's age, and her facial expression — remind me just a little of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

In the wonderful way, there's something in this image I can't put my finger on and can't take my eyes off.

[ link: another time when Andrew Wyeth seemed important ]

Moesko Island Lighthouse

NOTE: Since so many people are finding this post my searching for the phrase "Moesko Island" — nearly fifty a day, by the count of Freestats.com — I thought I'd drop links to two other "Ring"-related posts that you might not find otherwise: "Spreading It Like Sickness" and "Rewind, Rewound."

So I'm writing a review for the "Ring" sequel for Brenna to run in Artsweek this week. I didn't hate it as much as I thought I might. Sequels generally disappoint, and while I think I could have lived happily without seeing this film, it didn't bastardize the original. It seems like the people behind "The Ring Two" actually understood the original, even if they did break the rule of Samara only showing up by popping out of TV sets when some unlucky fucker's seven days are up.

Most anyone who knows me knows I really liked "The Ring," even if a lot of people didn't care for it much. It genuinely scared me and I find it hard to believe it only got a PG-13, even with its lack of gore or raunch. In the neverending fight against writer's block, I re-watched the original when I got home from work. Whether or not you thought the movie worked, I think it's beautiful. The look of it — this gray-blue haze, like some low-lying rainstorm. IMDb says Gore Verbinski looked to the paintings of Andrew Wyeth for visual inspiration, and you can really see it. There's something crisp and cold and vaguely lonely about these and I get that from the movie. (See Christina's World, Wind from the Sea and Fed, all by Wyeth.)

Anyway, watching it again, I realized that aside from being a neat little horror mystery, this movie has a theme of art and creativity and creation in it. All the main characters are make things that could be considered art, in one way or another. Rachel, the Naomi Watts character, is a newspaper reporter and a writer. It's her propensity for words that drives the film's central investigation. I know a news story isn't generally considered art, but it's definitely a creative process — and one that ultimately leads to her survival. Journalism versus Evil: Round One, as bygone Artsweek editor DJ Fatkid headlined my review for the original two years ago. Rachel's ex-husband, Noah, is a photographer. Before he finally believes Rachel's story about a cursed video tape, he uses his camera to conduct his own little investigation. The creepy son is a little artist too. In his first scene, he's drawing a morbid little picture with crayons. He keeps doing this throughout the movie, and one of his doodles eventually provides a pivotal clue for Rachel.

And then we have Samara. Oh Samara, the little dickens who re-affirmed my general fear of children, dead or not. In the movie, we learn that Samara had freaky psychic powers, even before she died. She could create images on negatives just by thinking about them. She burned a perfect image of a burning tree into the wall of her bedroom. And she, after all, is the one who put the images on that damned video tape together. (You could also say that Samara is a bit of a sculptor, too — whatever the fuck she does to people sure leaves their corpses in a memorably horrifying state.)

The most interesting artist figure, I guess, would have to be the film's director himself. Not Gore Verbinski himself — though "The Ring" sure springboarded him to bigger and better things — but the idea of a director — the director as an abstract figure. "The Ring" suggests that a film is so powerful that it actually can kill a person — make them feel an emotion so profoundly that it overrides every other bodily impulse and shuts the whole system down. When Samara emerges from the TV to kill one of her viewers, it's like the person has gotten so into the movie that the lines between art and life completely disappears. They let the art in, and when Samara reconfigures their corpse into some horrible death posture, they become art themselves.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it got to me, this movie. It did before. It does now.

By the way, here's the first picture I ever took with my digital. Last Christmas, I drove out to the edge of where I lived and snapped some shots of this creepy area where people's area stops and it turns into countryside. They always reminded me of "The Ring." Just a little bit.