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Seen on the Street – Political Posters
As seen on the street. Political art.
I saw a wall of these posters earlier, plastered on the side of an abandoned building. May you live in interesting times.
Black-Necked Stilt, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Stuttgart, Germany During the Heat Wave
Our little family was in Germany the summer of 2015, during a brutal heat wave. When I looked back at the Stuttgart pictures, which is where we were for the brunt of it, it feels like you can see the heat radiating off the images. The sky was flat and cloudless. The pavement burned. Everyone was covered in sweat.
We had a good time anyway. The town was charming, and the people friendly, and there was some tasty ice cream to be had at the center where this photo was taken. Some twenty-somethings from France staked out a corner on most afternoons and blew huge bubbles for tips. When you are traveling with a kid, you can’t ask for much more than that.
I don’t take a lot of black and white pictures, which is to say, I don’t take any black and white pictures. After the fact, though, I will sometimes convert a photograph to black and white, if I feel like it might salvage a picture I liked in concept but not result. Usually, the black and white conversions I like the best are the ones that add depth to an image that I think otherwise uninteresting, or ones that bring out structural elements that were maybe obscured in the color shot. This picture of Holyrood Abbey is, I think, my best example of the latter. It’s sure a lot better as a black and white image than a color one.
The picture below shows people hanging out in and around one of the fountains to stay cool. The photo was uninspiring in color, but, I think, more interesting in monochrome. I’m not much for photo-editing – it’s on my list of things to learn – but I notice that I failed to remove the sensor smudges from this photograph. Sorry, internet. I hope it doesn’t irritate you as much as it irritates me.
Stuttgart, Germany, During the Heat Wave
The Zen of Big Dog and Little Dog In a Terrible World
Little Dog: You look worried. Are you worried?
Me: Yeah, I guess.
Little Dog: Me too. What worries you?
Me: I guess it’s a toss up between global warming and the possibility of nuclear holocaust. I don’t know.
Little Dog: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, amirite?
Me: You’re pretty well read for a dog.
Little Dog: Robert Frost’s the man.
Me: I’m also not thrilled about the guy down the street with the arsenal. Kind of scared to walk by his house, you know?
Little Dog: His neighbors have that terrifying Jack Russell, so I totally feel your pain.
Me: You are so much bigger than that Jack Russell.
Little Dog: You’d think that would make me less scared, wouldn’t you?
Me: So what’s worrying you, Little Dog? Besides the Jack Russell, I mean.
Little Dog: People. People worry me.
Me: That’s pretty broad.
Little Dog: I can’t decide whether I’m more worried about your stupid president, or the stupid people who elected your stupid president, or the stupid people surrounding your stupid president.
Me: Yeah.
Little Dog: I guess, now that I say that out loud, I’m mostly just worried about the stupid people.
Me: Stupid people are the worst.
Little Dog: If only I had opposable thumbs.
Me: I have opposable thumbs, and I’m still at the mercy of the stupid president, and the stupid people who elected the stupid president.
Little Dog: So thumbs are overrated then?
Me: So ineffectual.
Big Dog: I am also worried.
Me: You’re in the right place, Big Dog. Let’s hear it.
Big Dog: I am worried about dinner.
Little Dog: Dinner isn’t until six. It’s only three.
Me: What’s the worry?
Big Dog: I am worried it won’t happen.
Me: But dinner always happens.
Big Dog: I am worried today it won’t happen.
Little Dog: Dinner literally happens every single day. It happened yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and everyday for the two years we have been here. All existing evidence suggests that dinner will also happen today.
Big Dog: There is no guarantee. Because there is no guarantee, I worry dinner won’t happen today.
Me: There are no guarantees in life, Big Dog.
Big Dog: This is why I worry.
Me: You know what? This is something I can actually do something about. Do you want dinner right now, Big Dog?
Big Dog: I do. I do want dinner. If I have dinner now, I won’t have to worry about dinner for the rest of today. Please, oh please, may I have dinner now?
Little Dog: You realize that if you feed her dinner at three today, she will expect dinner at three tomorrow?
Me: It’s a small price to pay for Big Dog’s peace of mind and my own feeling of agency in an otherwise ineffectual existence.
Big Dog: I like you, nice lady.
Little Dog: You could do something for me, you know. Something special.
Me: More special than dinner at three in the afternoon?
Little Dog: You could give me Morris.
Me: Z’s new stuffed moose?
Little Dog: Disemboweling it would temporarily alleviate my ennui.
Me: By transferring it to Z.
Little Dog: I prefer to think of it as a redistribution of wealth.
Me: You had your own stuffed animal.
Little Dog: Big Dog ate it.
Big Dog: I ate it.
Me: The best I can offer you today is an early dinner.
Little Dog: I guess that’ll have to do.
I took two dogs and a child to the dog park, and made it home with the same two dogs and child. That’s a success right there.
Bunch of Baby Birds in Hyde Park
Sleepy Baby Birds in Hyde Park
Monterey Bay Aquarium Viva Baja Exhibit – Desert Tortoise
Monterey Bay Aquarium Viva Baja Exhibit
Ginkgo Leaves in the Fall
Gingko in November
Perseid Over Half Dome
Perseid over Half Dome
When is Enough Enough?
I have this wonderful little hobby in which I recreate vintage dances with a number of like-minded individuals. Here I am:
Mid-nineteenth Century. Photo @RJ Muna
Also here:
1950s.
And here:
1900s. Photo @ F. Chen
As you can see, my hobby affords me many lovely dresses. It’s part of its charm.
There’s a part of me that is uncomfortable putting pictures of myself up on this blog, which is otherwise relatively anonymous. However, I’m also confident, dear reader, that if we were to encounter each other on the street tomorrow, you would likely not recognize me from these photographs. One time (I love telling this story, by the way) I was attending a dance week in Rhode Island. The way these dance weeks work is that you take classes during the day, and then attend costumed events in the evenings, each evening focussing on a different era. The first night of this particular event, if memory serves, had an old Hollywood theme – I think we were watching a silent movie about dance. As it turns out, this era is kind of my jam. I did up my hair, put on some bright red lipstick, the whole shebang. The next morning, I showed up to class in my sweats. One of the ladies walked up to me, gave me a pointed up-and-down, and said, “I guess it really was all smoke and mirrors, wasn’t it?” I’m not sure where she was going with the statement – I’m inclined to think nowhere kind – but honest to God, it’s the truth. It really is all smoke and mirrors. That’s why I do it.
All this is to say, I view this blog as somewhat separate from my everyday life. This dancing business is a big part of my everyday life. And let’s face it – what’s the point of having a blog about my everyday life when, literally, I live it every day? I guess I gaze at my navel as much as the next person, but, I flatter myself, I’m not over-zealous about it.
Still, if I’m being honest, this blog is also growing from a feeling that things are changing, that maybe my everyday life can’t continue to be as it once was. Maybe I need to find a new hobby, I wonder, a wordy hobby, a cerebral one, rather than a physical one. So in that way, my blogging is inextricably bound to the other me, the more public me, whether I want it to be or not.
Because my body is aging, as all bodies age, and as it does so, my place in my world alters, and perhaps diminishes. Women, I notice, disappear as they get older. Invisibility is an undesirable attribute for a performer. Sill, I am not in the business of trying to freeze my face or my waistline at the place that would have looked familiar to the me of twenty years ago. What’s the point? Time moves, and so do I, a deep and irrevocable ebbing towards the setting sun. It’s its own dance, in its fashion. I know my part in it.
The aging of the externals, however, has nothing on the aging internal structures of my body, which are easily the crueler slight. Joints and connective tissues have a lifespan all their own, seemingly disconnected from the rest of the organism, certainly disconnected from the workings of the brain, which hums and thumps callously from its distant throne. It takes awhile for the message to reach it, I suppose. My brain still believes, deep inside its many neural pathways, that if it orders the body to jump, the body will jump, and if it orders it to fly, the body will thrillingly soar, and when it crashes down, as it must, the body will absorb the fall, and reassemble, and say no more about it. The body, of course, has a very different story to tell, of tears and sprains and imperfect recuperations, ankles that are weaker the second time, tendons that stiffen and rip, knee cartilage that breaks down irreparably, a back that hardens and aches. Things creak and groan beneath my skin, talking to me with every movement of the irrevocable passage of time.
I find all this change makes me sad. Somedays, I feel like I can see the end of the road for my little passion, and it is a lot closer than I would like it to be. There’s a foot injury, then a knee injury, then a hip injury. The deterioration of the leg feels like a metaphor, and maybe a sign. There’s my age, my increasing invisibility, the waning of my worth weighing against me. The scales hover and wobble, the enjoyment sitting in the balance of the chronic pain and diminishment. Is it enough to carry me forward? I don’t know. My dancing is a labor of love and a lifelong affair. Perhaps it is ending. Many love affairs do. Because I have to wonder: will I still love it if I can’t leap, and lift, and fly, if I can’t, as a performer, see and be seen, if I reach the point where I only ever have the memory of the thing but not the experience of it, if, on the balance, I can accept becoming a shadow of my younger self?
I guess the question remains, when is enough enough? If I figure it out, dear reader, you’ll be the first to know.
Photo @ L. Garron