Thursday, February 19, 2009
ugh
sorry, blog, my mind is very tabula rasa these days. will try to put something in it to then vomit onto the page for you. feed the maw of satanblog! that's what you're saying to me, gently, i know.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
sunday story
i've decided that i'm going to start imposing structural exercises to make myself write. i'll pose a challenge and then break rules and then re-impose the rules, break them again, etc. this kind of thing could be repeated forever.
also, i realized something: it's not a good thing to be never bored and never lonely. not that i'm that way, but i used to think that never to be bored or lonely was the perfect life. it's one of those situations in which the characteristic brings unanticipated results, so that it's hard to assess the benefits or drawbacks of any one state of mind or body. for example, when i was a child my skin would get itchy and dry in the winter, and my mother used to say to me that this was a good thing. at the time i didn't agree, but what she meant was that my skin wouldn't be oily and acne-prone. or something like that. the point being that the state of my existence had consequences as yet unforeseen by me. same thing, in reverse, for never being bored or lonely. if you're never lonely, then you'll push away people who try to keep you company; if you're never bored, then you never know what you like or don't like. or something like that. homespun aphorisms only carry us so far, i know.
on another topic, today i was going to look for a gift for a friend - i ducked into an antique store known for its low prices and weird furnishings. i had bought my ugly but functional bookcase there, for instance. the men who owned the store were grousing and sniping about all the businesses in the neighborhood closing - apparently the thrift store across the street had just closed because of the recession, and then a bakery had shut its doors due to a feud between the owner and his boyfriend, who apparently ran off with the money. one of the men insisted that these people were delinquents, trying to to reassure his partner that all of these closings had been the result of individual irresponsibility or unlucky circumstances, but the other noted that the economy was causing distress, which would surely creep into their storefront and engulf them at some point or another.
while taking in this slow murmur of neighborhood chatter, i had become immersed in looking through photographs thrown together in a giant pile. somehow, although they were in disarray, there was a certain order to the images (after all, they had come unified estates), and it was an interesting game to match photographs together and craft a sort of narrative. as mentioned above, i've decided to think about these sorts of structured exercises, the simple building-block stuff of creative writing courses. because elemental preparatory stuff is often very effective and has its place, sometimes leading to unexpected outpourings. anyhow, but there was a very interesting and rich estate in there, the pieces of this guy named fred cohen, who was an amateur (or professional) photographer, had many friends, and documented his family history fairly well. we saw scattered and displaced images of him as a child, a shirtless teenager, and an adult - and also pictures that he had taken of women in the park, children on leashes at the zoo, children playing with hula-hoops on lush grass, construction work, abstract patterns made by the industrial city, a very high aerial photo, and rollerbladers, among other things. there was a sense that he loved women with long, golden hair, as well as people in motion - but the whole point of it seemed to be to test the workings of his camera, his technical prowess. anyhow, there was something fascinating about seeing him work through his process as a photographer, and one could almost divine his influences (diane arbus, certainly - and every photographic manual published between 78 and 86) from his strivings at certain angles and perspectives. there were also autograph books belonging to him and dark pictures of his square-faced relatives, over from the old world and writing postcards in yiddish with hebrew script. there is one striking portrait which i assume is connected to him; it describes an older woman seated on a chair, with such a soft focus that she almost appears as in a diego rivera mural, her features large and rough-hewn, as if carved out of soapstone. she has a very simple and straightforward expression, meeting the gaze of the photographer with an 'open' face, as it were, and calm, nothing to hide. there's another one featuring the same woman and two younger women, clustered together in filial formation. the older woman is seated, and this time the focus is sharp. her two female relatives - daughters, i would imagine, as they share a heavy brow, very dark and thick hair, and a masculine jawline - are clasping her hands and looking strangely beguiling, with their drooping velvet rose-studded headbands. i'm not sure why this photograph is darker than the rest, but the blackness of its background evoked a velvety luxuriousness of the sort that doesn't exist these days, not to my knowledge.
jumbled in between these images, which i had to excavate through copious riffling, were other snapshots of a senior citizens' group trip to some exotic tropical land, with all the trappings of modern-day tourism. there were large and comical photos of old white women wearing leis and other brightly-colored spangly neck-adornments, perched uncomfortably in canoes, being sold rugs by thin and dark-eyed vendors. Also playing tall wooden drums, squatting inside of a straw hut, wearing bathing suits astride a beachhead - that sort of thing. there was also a series of older photographs of black people doing exactly this, with more emphasis on fully costuming themselves in 'native' dress. then there was a set of oddly-shaped square photos of a new and happy family moving into their rowhouse in the late 50s, celebrating christmas, spraying each other with the garden hose while tending to small seedlings, and smiling or looking slightly harassed. the boy seemed a bit microcephalic, but perhaps it was the haircut. looking at all of these pictures together was like revisiting a riotous parade of decades immersed in life experience, saturated with histories of posing and gathering and showing rows of teeth. there was a predominance of women wearing tiny tiaras pinned to the crowns of their heads - a very small bride, a matriarch seated in hotel banquet hall chairs surrounded by her offspring. the different colors of the images, and their degree of wear, also enthralled me, because some of the colors were like the hazy way that memories occasionally resurface.
well, now i've bought some of these photographs to give as a gift, but i feel a very strong attachment to them because they're so viscerally evocative...and i don't really want to part with them. it strikes me that i don't often care about giving things away, but in this case the images and people in them feel like they're mine, or perhaps i'm just sort of mesmerized by their contents and the spontaneous lyricism in which they've captured these parts of life that i've never known or really understood. so maybe i'll have to exercise some curatorial selfishness, because what if others don't see what i do in them? the idea that they'd become just some silly trash (which they basically were before the city of chicago stepped in and donated them to this antique shop, which sells them for a quarter apiece) is extremely sad to me. i don't know. sentimentality rules the day! maybe i'm not yet out of the 18th century-in-my-mind.
also, i realized something: it's not a good thing to be never bored and never lonely. not that i'm that way, but i used to think that never to be bored or lonely was the perfect life. it's one of those situations in which the characteristic brings unanticipated results, so that it's hard to assess the benefits or drawbacks of any one state of mind or body. for example, when i was a child my skin would get itchy and dry in the winter, and my mother used to say to me that this was a good thing. at the time i didn't agree, but what she meant was that my skin wouldn't be oily and acne-prone. or something like that. the point being that the state of my existence had consequences as yet unforeseen by me. same thing, in reverse, for never being bored or lonely. if you're never lonely, then you'll push away people who try to keep you company; if you're never bored, then you never know what you like or don't like. or something like that. homespun aphorisms only carry us so far, i know.
on another topic, today i was going to look for a gift for a friend - i ducked into an antique store known for its low prices and weird furnishings. i had bought my ugly but functional bookcase there, for instance. the men who owned the store were grousing and sniping about all the businesses in the neighborhood closing - apparently the thrift store across the street had just closed because of the recession, and then a bakery had shut its doors due to a feud between the owner and his boyfriend, who apparently ran off with the money. one of the men insisted that these people were delinquents, trying to to reassure his partner that all of these closings had been the result of individual irresponsibility or unlucky circumstances, but the other noted that the economy was causing distress, which would surely creep into their storefront and engulf them at some point or another.
while taking in this slow murmur of neighborhood chatter, i had become immersed in looking through photographs thrown together in a giant pile. somehow, although they were in disarray, there was a certain order to the images (after all, they had come unified estates), and it was an interesting game to match photographs together and craft a sort of narrative. as mentioned above, i've decided to think about these sorts of structured exercises, the simple building-block stuff of creative writing courses. because elemental preparatory stuff is often very effective and has its place, sometimes leading to unexpected outpourings. anyhow, but there was a very interesting and rich estate in there, the pieces of this guy named fred cohen, who was an amateur (or professional) photographer, had many friends, and documented his family history fairly well. we saw scattered and displaced images of him as a child, a shirtless teenager, and an adult - and also pictures that he had taken of women in the park, children on leashes at the zoo, children playing with hula-hoops on lush grass, construction work, abstract patterns made by the industrial city, a very high aerial photo, and rollerbladers, among other things. there was a sense that he loved women with long, golden hair, as well as people in motion - but the whole point of it seemed to be to test the workings of his camera, his technical prowess. anyhow, there was something fascinating about seeing him work through his process as a photographer, and one could almost divine his influences (diane arbus, certainly - and every photographic manual published between 78 and 86) from his strivings at certain angles and perspectives. there were also autograph books belonging to him and dark pictures of his square-faced relatives, over from the old world and writing postcards in yiddish with hebrew script. there is one striking portrait which i assume is connected to him; it describes an older woman seated on a chair, with such a soft focus that she almost appears as in a diego rivera mural, her features large and rough-hewn, as if carved out of soapstone. she has a very simple and straightforward expression, meeting the gaze of the photographer with an 'open' face, as it were, and calm, nothing to hide. there's another one featuring the same woman and two younger women, clustered together in filial formation. the older woman is seated, and this time the focus is sharp. her two female relatives - daughters, i would imagine, as they share a heavy brow, very dark and thick hair, and a masculine jawline - are clasping her hands and looking strangely beguiling, with their drooping velvet rose-studded headbands. i'm not sure why this photograph is darker than the rest, but the blackness of its background evoked a velvety luxuriousness of the sort that doesn't exist these days, not to my knowledge.
jumbled in between these images, which i had to excavate through copious riffling, were other snapshots of a senior citizens' group trip to some exotic tropical land, with all the trappings of modern-day tourism. there were large and comical photos of old white women wearing leis and other brightly-colored spangly neck-adornments, perched uncomfortably in canoes, being sold rugs by thin and dark-eyed vendors. Also playing tall wooden drums, squatting inside of a straw hut, wearing bathing suits astride a beachhead - that sort of thing. there was also a series of older photographs of black people doing exactly this, with more emphasis on fully costuming themselves in 'native' dress. then there was a set of oddly-shaped square photos of a new and happy family moving into their rowhouse in the late 50s, celebrating christmas, spraying each other with the garden hose while tending to small seedlings, and smiling or looking slightly harassed. the boy seemed a bit microcephalic, but perhaps it was the haircut. looking at all of these pictures together was like revisiting a riotous parade of decades immersed in life experience, saturated with histories of posing and gathering and showing rows of teeth. there was a predominance of women wearing tiny tiaras pinned to the crowns of their heads - a very small bride, a matriarch seated in hotel banquet hall chairs surrounded by her offspring. the different colors of the images, and their degree of wear, also enthralled me, because some of the colors were like the hazy way that memories occasionally resurface.
well, now i've bought some of these photographs to give as a gift, but i feel a very strong attachment to them because they're so viscerally evocative...and i don't really want to part with them. it strikes me that i don't often care about giving things away, but in this case the images and people in them feel like they're mine, or perhaps i'm just sort of mesmerized by their contents and the spontaneous lyricism in which they've captured these parts of life that i've never known or really understood. so maybe i'll have to exercise some curatorial selfishness, because what if others don't see what i do in them? the idea that they'd become just some silly trash (which they basically were before the city of chicago stepped in and donated them to this antique shop, which sells them for a quarter apiece) is extremely sad to me. i don't know. sentimentality rules the day! maybe i'm not yet out of the 18th century-in-my-mind.
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