I'm watching "Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals"... So unbelievably .... enjoyable. There's probably something wrong with me.

I'm up late, and so happy that I'm not working next week. My son, who is all of 19 months, has spring break. Yes - it's been a tough semester, singing "Puff the Magic Dragon" with Mr. Adam, learning about the letter "G", playing with Oona, Maya, Freida, Zora and Anna. (Girls' names this year are all about ending in "a." Reminds me of grade school when all the girls names ended in "y". Trends are strange.) Phineas and his little friend Nicholas are the only boys in their toddler daycare. I really don't know what effect that has on the kids - where there's 8 girls and 2 boys. One day I picked him up and one of the teachers told me that he had bit one of the little girls that day - out of frustration. When I told Anthony, I had to laugh at his matter of fact reply - "won't be the last time..."

Anyway. Ahhhh - a whole week! a week to go to the tot lot, run (on my own), slide on slides (with Phineas), count airplanes and 'copters, make friends at "toddler tumble time"... or take it easy at home, with the little guy watching yo gabba gabba, his head against my arm. One of the best feelings there is.

The Celtics & the Lakers... that series has worn a well-trodden neural pathway in my brain. Part of my youth is involved in that rivalry. Part of what I think and know about sports heroes & competition is involved in that rivalry. I remember once walking through Beacon Hill with my college boyfriend. He had a Lakers ball cap on. Before we walked out, I remember saying - "uh...are you going to wear that hat?" He thought I objected to him wearing the ballcap itself. But no. I objected to walking through a Boston neighborhood with someone who had a Lakers ballcap on. That's just not smart...

And then, before you knew it - the Magic/Bird era was over. The Chicago Bulls and Jordon ruled... And then, that - of course - became something else too.

Sort of like how winter is now spring.



Prospect Park burst into colors during sunset just a few days ago. I see these trees every day and note their changes - day by day/season by season. And ... a few days ago ... I looked up around 6pm and the colors were blindingly beautiful. My iPhone camera does a nice job, but can't really compare to the actual loveliness. The shadow line - between sun and shade on the trees - is the building line in front of the park. I love that contrast.

Place Matters

A few days ago I checked out this photostream of photos of New York in the 1930's - 1940's. And they're amazing. As I went through one after the other I realized that I knew this city, and that those pictures - even though they're 60 or 70 years old - show a way of life that is at once familiar and comforting. And it's not because they're ... grainy black & white photos of New York depicting a ubiquitous "New York" that lives in this country's collective imagination through films and stories. It's because I know that building, and this street view - I know what it feels like to laze on a stoop with friends, I see little kids silhouetted against a grand skyline all the time... this view is right outside my office window today. I've hung out in a park, at night on a date, trying to create a fireside intimacy in the most public of places. And Times Square in the rain - even though you're drenched, far from where you want to be and cursing everything in sight - is romantic. (Even lovelier in a massive snow storm... I can still remember a sudden whiteout snowstorm about a decade ago, walking through a near deserted Times Square, its neon colors muted by a few inches of white overlay, wanting only to share that wondrous and lovely experience with someone who was at once so far away and so completely inside my every thought. A beautiful and melancholy Times Square is the perfect backdrop for unrequited love.)

What looking through these photos did for me, was to connect my life, in its everyday mundaneness to a history of shared experiences. I think only older cities can do that for us - show us where our patch fits in the overall quilt. Many places in this country are still forming - what they are today is nothing like what they were 60-70 years ago. I was surprisingly, unexpectedly happy to see the dominant threads of my life evident in the New York of more than a half century ago. All of a sudden, just by living my life, I was carrying on a time-honored tradition.

I just read this strange and beautiful story that I have to share.

The unexplainable, magical things that happen, sometimes, in life, stagger me and confirm my - too often tenuous - belief in the spiritual world that exists beyond the rational everyday.

The Intimacies of Strangers

The man who lives beneath us snores. Loudly. And it's not that kind of sporadic, choking snore. He snores with every in-breath - every long, heavy, loud in-breath. The first time I heard it, I jerked my head off my own pillow and thought - "no... that's too ... that can't be..." I thought it must be just one of those odd sounds old buildings make at night. But, despite my unwillingness to believe, night after night it only became more clear. Aside from it being somewhat repulsive to fall asleep listening to the snores of this maybe 60-ish man with a shaggy unkempt beard and sagging belly, it also embarrasses me for him. I cringe every time I encounter him in the lobby because of the horrible mental image that flashes through my head of him sleeping. And it seems like he's always sleeping!

Maybe that's why he and his wife argue so much. Not because he snores, she must be used to that by now, but because she is not close to him. I can't imagine she sleeps in the same room with him - not when there are two other bedrooms she could use. We hear raised voices, hers more than his, on a near nightly basis. From the general intonation of the conversations, she dominates. His voice has a low, sonorous quality that only breaks into her higher-pitched harangue from time to time. The man spends most of the time he's at home being reprimanded about something or other - it's no wonder he sleeps so much and so deeply.

You know, I don't know them and I really should know better than to wonder at what keeps couples together - but I do wonder. If they've ever had kids then maybe that sustained them for about 20 years or so. Though, if they have ever had kids, those kids never come around to visit. I think it's just been them, by themselves, all these years. Maybe it's just the force of time that keeps them together, they've been together this long and endured this much - perhaps it's a badge of honor of some kind. Or maybe it's just inertia pooling around their ankles, weighting them down. Maybe they've just never had any relationship that's been better and at this point, that voice - angry or not, defeated or not - is better than silence.

Hell, maybe they love each other.

Anyway, the contemplation of this, of them, has given me an idea for a new project. I'd love to photograph couples, portraits of couples, to see the body language that comes about naturally. How do these couples come together for a photograph? Do they have an automatic turning inward towards each other? Does one person face in and one face out? Is one person's hand or arm placed in a proprietary way on the other person? a tentative way? I'd love to do a shoot with a large white backdrop, and say - "ok, I'm going to take several shots of you - just act natural," and see how "natural" is translated. Who snores loudly day after day, and who places themselves in the center of the frame... Something in the style of Richard Avedon.

Hopefully someday soon...

Bedtime lullaby

I was finally clued into "yo gabba gabba" last month and I think I like the show as much as Phineas does. Hearing this song by Mark Kozelek sealed the deal. I love it and the animated dream interlude.


Here's another take on a dreamspace.


daytime, day-dream time

Searching for answers

Ever since the first of this year, or really since the 4th of this year when I started back to work after being off through the holidays, I have felt unsettled. Going into work that day I felt bluer than I have in a long time.

"oh - this routine again." I remember thinking as I walked from the subway to my office. "another year of this. and it's only january."

And by "this" I meant the broad pattern of my life at this point - the frenzied morning rush to get to daycare and work, the minor panic that I'm not on top of what I need to be at work, the frustration that can occasion client service jobs because essentially you're always doing someone else's bidding. the rush to finish and leave the office to get to daycare before six, before they charge for being late, before - even worse - it's your kid who's the only one left, again. the brisk walk home pushing a heavy stroller over uneven pavements, snow and slush, around people who take up too much space on the sidewalk, in between rush hour traffic blocking the crosswalks. the scramble to figure out what to make for dinner that Phineas will eat and then watching and coaxing while he doesn't eat...

It's not that I don't want to do these things, or that I'm unhappy that this is what I am doing. It's just that all of that leaves no room for personal creativity. Is it just discipline that enables someone to stick to routines? No, I guess not - it's has more to do with responsibility, sacrifice and the desire to do what's best for the people you love. I used to think that people who were more routinized really just lacked imagination and creativity.

Anyway - one way I've developed for dealing with monotony is to be impossibly obsessive over politics. Following the daily debates, reading about political ups and downs, and just tracking the news - literally minute by minute. It really works to sublimate the incredible absorption that comes from creating something. My energy is instead channeled into absorbing the details of health care reform, or political races, or how some idiocy from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh should be refuted. It's not really a good trade-off... I know.

This evening, between the fallout from the Massachusetts senate election and the Supreme Court decision in favor of corporate funding of political campaigns - I felt a complete and utter despair. It sounds ridiculous, I know. Anthony cannot at all understand why any of that would matter so much to me. And his point is valid - worry about the stuff over which you have some control. But... for me, it's complicated.

To get myself out my misery pit I did something that is instinctual - take a book down from the bookshelf, think about writing or reading or art. I picked two books - and found something in each of them that instantly soothed my passions.

The first was the Tao Te Ching - which I like opening at random to read what it has to say to me. I opened to this stanza:

Act without doing; work without effort.
Think of the small as large and the few as many.
Confront the difficult while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.

The Master never reaches for the great;
thus she achieves greatness.
When she runs into a difficulty she stops and gives herself to it.
She doesn't cling to her own comfort;
thus problems are no problem for her.

I also picked up a book by Annie Dillard that I'd read some years ago - For The Time Being. Rifling through, I found this passage -

"Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?... The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper... It is life's noise - the noise of the news - that sings 'It's a Small World After All' again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark."

After reading those, I felt light years better.




Night-time in a strange place

Wyeth's words

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -- the loneliness of it -- the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it -- the whole story doesn't show."
- Andrew Wyeth