In John Cheever's 1964 story "The Swimmer," a man swims through surreal suburbia, splashing across his neighbors' pools one after another. Dennis Sopczynski found this inspiring (the story, not the Burt Lancaster movie). Last year he took a lengthy swim up the coast of California, pool-hopping from Pasadena to Burlingame for eight days.He took some 200 photographs along the way and called them performance art. Several of the photos are now hanging upstairs at the Books Inc. cafe in Mountain View, through Nov. 1.
Even though a swimming pool is a swimming pool to me, I salute the artistic enterprise. If everyone who recorded their travels made the same effort to find beauty and coherence in the experience, there'd be a lot less babble on YouTube.
Pictured: My photo of one of Dennis Sopczynski's pictures, with the windows of the Books Inc. cafe in the background.
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