Photographs: April 2008 Archives

I am in something of a state. Work has gone to some next level of stressful that I didn't know existed, which is funny (strange, not ha-ha) because this very same client sent me to what I had thought was my maximum level of stress a few months ago. And here we are again, except that we are farther onto the plane of insanity.

If I had any hair, I'd tear it out.

Yesterday was so bad that after my horrible meeting there was nothing that could possibly save my life except to get on my bike and go have dinner with friends. Which I did. Of course, the fact that my rare and precious cranks could break at any moment because they are not properly equipped with pedal washers* does not make for the completely carefree biking that I would like to have.

But I had no choice. I hope the bicycle gods will be merciful.

Anyway...that's a whole other story. All of that. I mean, not just the bike stuff, but the whole horrible shebang of shit. Pardon my french, this is not a G-rated blog. Don't like it? On your bike, as the British so charmingly say.

Anyway...again.

One thing the gods seem to be suddenly providing me with is men to go on dates with, all of whom have Biblical names. We started with the old testament last week, and now we are moving on to the new.

If I end up getting a date with the Bodhisattva, though, I am gonna really laugh.

So what do I do with all this bounty? Why, I go and acquire an instant liking for one of my friend's roommates, of course. Yeah, uh-huh. What is it with me and the men in unexpected places? Last time it was a bicycle mechanic. Didn't work. He likes 20-year-olds.

This time, well, who the hell knows, but he is awfully cute, and (based on the impression of 10 minutes) just my type of boy. Anyway....

I know, I know, this post seems to be ratcheting around like a ball bearing set loose in a rubber room, but, well, that's what the inside of my head probably looks like right now. Okay, the inside of my head looks like a soft pink glob of neurons, but you know what I mean.

"Don't want no pork chops and greens. Just give me gin instead!" - Nina Simone, and I agree wholeheartedly.

*Worry not; I have ordered the washers and they will be here tomorrow, and either I or my bike mechanic (not the one I had the crush on) will install them, and all will hopefully be well, at least in that area of life.

I've had several conversations in the past few days having to do with art - whether it should stand on its own two feet or whether one ought to need context - historical background or a curatorial explanation - to understand it. I am of the former camp, but much of the art world (I am told by those in a position to know) is in the latter. And those who are in the business of art call my camp formalism and say it's something to rebel against, which is puzzling to me, given how restrictive the idea of needing a translator in order to approach a piece of creative work seems.

I have the urge to expand this dichotomy to life. I suppose because it sticks in my craw in some way, but also, maybe, because it seems to express two different larger viewpoints: the one that wants help making sense of something and the one that wants to figure it out for itself.

I suppose it is clear which one of these hypothetical views I fall into. I would like to think that I can respect either viewpoint, but I am not sure I am that magnanimous. Or am I? I truly do respect the beliefs of highly religious folk, not because I share them in any way (I don't) but because I can see and acknowledge and even admire how much strength and peace their faith gives them.

Okay, so there is one example. But on the other hand, I have been feeling contemptuous lately, and I won't go into the details, except to say that when someone else's lack of courage or spine directly affects me, I am not so forgiving about it.

And on the third hand, it is precisely those kinds of situations (ones that call for courage) that show us who we are, and if I am lucky enough to be a strong, brave person, perhaps I can just be proud of that and walk on, standing a little taller in my boots with that knowledge.

Well, I'm workin' and I'm crazy, and yet somehow I keep having these moments where I just love everybody and everything. There are several potential explanations for this (yes, I feel a list coming on!):

1. The Bike Is Back. It (he, actually, and he has a name, which I am keeping secret because he is my lover) is on the wall now, but when I first brought him in, I had to roll him into the living room so I could just stare at him lovingly, and gloat over his beauteous and rare vintage French cranks, which match his bad-ass French self. Oh he is so hot.

2. The Boys Are Out. It is spring, and in spring, this city has a habit of rewarding its long-suffering overwintered single girls by unveiling lovely sleek little geek boys for them, in little fits and starts. One here, a few more there, one at the cafe where you'd least expect him to be, flirting as he hands you a menu and ponders whether or not he has any Guinness available, and then screws up your check and promises you a free dinner if the credit card turns out to have been charged twice. Uh-huh, sure cutie. Lemme see those tattoos on your arms again. As he walked away, I turned to my friend B. and said, "Do you suppose he'd fit on my bike?"

3. I am perhaps just a trifle overcaffeinated.

4. I got to sneak in a tiny little bit of girltime tonight, right smack in the middle of my horrid deadlines, and that cheered me up. We were very silly, and we laughed, and that is healthy for me. I like laughing. It feels so damned good.

5. I am going to have a picnic on my birthday, in Brooklyn. It will be fab. I will toss a frisbee with my good shoulder and eat angel food cake. Yay, picnic!

6. If my knees hold up (please hold up, guys!) I can stop riding the subway. Yay!

7. My exotic French cranks have exotic French threading, which means I couldn't use my spanking new (and very nice) English-threaded pedals. A minor bump in the road which ended, entertainingly, with my bike builder taking a very fine antique pair of pedals off one of his own personal bikes and selling them to me, at about half what they're worth. I love him and he loves me (platonically, in both directions).

8. When I got home, I realized that my bike had given me a hickey (from the messenger bag strap). The funny thing is, so did the Nikon when I first got it. See? I love everyone, and everyone loves me.

9. Okay, okay, I will cut back on the caffeine.

10. But you do see why I love the Nikon so much, don't you? Claudia, these are again taken on auto exposure, sans flash.

Bon soir, mes amis. Voici! Le printemps est arrive!

Well, sort of. Today dawned cool and cloudy again, but it's the fits and starts of spring, not the dregs of winter. Or that is how I am choosing to view it.

I took the Nikon out for a little gambol yesterday when the sun was more outish than it was today, and look. I found flowers.

And their fallen petals.

And - well, construction sites and graffiti and old cans and spray painted lines on the sidewalk and cars parked with reflections in the windows and people eating Chinese food in the front seats and so on and so forth.

And some little dachshunds in little coats promenading on tiny legs. Cute, n'est-ce pas?

PS. Forgot to add this for Claudia: All shots taken with my Nikon D40 (the D is for darling), on auto exposure, flash turned off.

Then I happened upon this jewel of a series. And I remembered the crucial thing: that I am an artist, that I have always been an artist, and that when that part of me is walled off from my daily life, I suffocate and die. It happens bit by bit, so that it is hard to notice it happening.

Oh, it's not that I never do anything creative. But the work I get paid to do is not creative, and it's been a long time now, that I've been pecking away at it, trying not to notice how much I hate it.

I am usually able to ignore it by the pure expedient of not throwing too much time at it. I work in spurts, so that I have weeks where I don't do much of that sort of work, and then weeks where I work round the clock to make some money so I can ignore it for a few more weeks.

But that plan is not really working for me, and I've known that for a while. I just haven't known why or what to do about it. I am still not sure of the next step, exactly, but the larger answer is clear. I need to make art, and to make it for a living. Somehow.

Somehow I have to do that, even though everyone has told me, my entire life, that it is impossible.

So the thing that made my cry while watching this beautiful series was here was the lie. The people who have said that have been lying. Because here are tons of people making things, and making a living at it. And god, they all sound happy. They sound just like I sound when I am playing, only they are working. Why? Because my play is their work, and their play is their work. And that is all there is to that.

From where I am sitting now, it could take any one of a number of forms. There are the photographs, there is a novel, there are plenty of other things I like to make and play with, and some of them are quite saleable, I think. I just need to hop tracks. Maybe I will go take some pictures of trains, as Boywich suggested the other day - just to get in the mood.

I keep trying to post, really I do. I get one half-written, and then it's the middle of the morning (as in, 4 am), and I am too tired to go on, and I leave it for the next day.

And the next day comes, and I am too much like a hummingbird, only less joyous than that sounds, and I have no time to breathe, much less fix or finish a half-posted post, and then it's the next night, and I no longer feel like what I said, or no longer want to share it.

And then four days go by, and it is spring, in the sense that the birds are singing and the sun is shining, and I can go out without anything more than a jean jacket.

But not in the sense that I can enjoy it in any fashion.

My arm hurts. My shoulder hurts. My ass hurts. My knees hurt. My head hurts. I am tired. I am busy in a way that cannot be measured or even effectively described with current technology.

My cat is insane because it is spring and she wants to kill all those singing birds. And she, too, is cooped up and unhappy about it. I love her for that.

I hate every single person who glides by me on a bicycle. Hate them.

I hate the people who talk about riding their bikes. "Oh, I had the nicest bike ride today," said one of my friends. "I hate you," said I.

I like the Nikon. I like the legwarmer (#2) I am knitting. I liked the doctor I saw yesterday. He told me I wasn't old enough to be needing a doctor like him. I told him how old I am. He said, "Okay, you are old enough. But you look younger."

Well, doc, today I do not. I look every minute of my age, believe me. If this whole mess keeps up much longer, I am gonna look every minute of my age, plus every minute of the doctor's age. Plus my cat's, for good measure.

See, I meant to write you a nicer post. A happy post, or a contemplative post. Something to make you go "ahhhh," after you read it. One of those. A post with life and color in it.

The trouble is, I am depleted of life and color at the moment. I am angry, and I am frustrated, and I am petulant.

And there you have it. Spring seems like a slap in the face to me, administered on the wheels of so many bicycles. Fuck it all.

Here, look at these nice roses.

That title applies in more ways than one. Normally, I don't title a post until after I've written it, sometimes well after. But this time, I had the title first, perhaps because I just went swimming for the first time in a week.

Oh, the shoulder/arm situation is nowhere close to all better, but I wanted to try it and see how things were. And honestly, I am so much happier for having gone in the water at all, even though I could only do a few little floppy laps of crawl, and some boring-ass breaststroke, and a little sidestroke, and some kick-kick-kick with the board.

It was still nice. Like being in my element. Also frustrating, because I was in my element but not able to do my Thing. Much like getting on a bike and realizing you can't ride it. Hmmmn. That all sounds far too familiar. Let's get off the subject, shall we? Right off.

These pics are from several weeks ago, on a day when I got on the (stinkin') subway (because I can't bike yet) and wondered what the heck all these teenagers were doing carrying pillows with them. Giant mega citywide slumber party?

Almost.

It was a pillowfight. A pillowfight protest, for peace, in Union Square. And the damn thing was hilarious, and a little unnerving, and a magnet for photographers of all sorts.

Unfortunately I had only brought my pocketcam, but I did the best I could to capture the scene for your amusement. There were cops. There were many teenagers and some adults. There were pillows flying through the air, people climbing on lampposts and statues, and an inch-thick layer of feathers and assorted stuffing materials lining the pavement.

There were some signs painted on quilts and pillows, but for the most part, if you didn't already know what it was, you wouldn't know what you were looking at. A freak snowstorm? A mob?

It was weird, and not quite entirely nonviolent (some people got hurt), and also disarming (as in charming).

When I came out of the crowd to meet my friends (who hadn't wanted to venture so far into the fray), I was covered with feathers. I'd worn a black coat that day, and it still has white flotsam on it. Click for bigger, as always.

"Send me in, Coach! Send me the fuck IN!" - Me.
"You know, there's a reason pro athletes retire before they're 40." - Physical therapist.
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for." - Roy Batty.

It's a well-known adage among historians that civil wars tend to be the bloodiest. Well, it's official. I and my body are at war with one another. And I have no doubt that whoever can be said to be the ultimate victor, we'll both die in the end.

Yesterday I injured my rotator cuff. While swimming. Yep, that's right, swimming - the last refuge of the wounded athlete. God fracking damnit.

To say I am in a fury about it doesn't do justice to the emotion. I am pissed, sulking, simmering, infuriated, enraged, frustrated beyond belief, and losing my freaking mind.

I call to mind, in fact, a wonderful cartoon from the '80s, "The Angriest Dog in the World." It was, it turns out, created by film director David Lynch, but I didn't know that until four seconds ago. I did, however, remember, verbatim, the caption: "So angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl."

When Annabelle called me to say hi earlier in the evening (I was just as angry then as I am now, and had not yet whacked things in my apartment to the minimal extent that I felt I might do without tearing my other rotator cuff), I mentioned this comic strip to her as an illustration of how I was feeling, and at the end of our brief chat, I told her I was glad she'd called, even though I was still angry. "You've cheered me up by one-eighth of a percent, which I would not have thought possible."

"So you're able to growl now?"

"Yes, I can growl now. Thank you."

I then spent the rest of the evening working (what else is new, and believe you me, that is helping nothing: not my tailbone, not my knees, not my shoulder, and not my mood), while half-watching "Deadliest Catch," which is soothing in its extremis - its raw danger, ice-laden ships, crab claws, men dying in pursuit of quick cash, and so on.

At one point I realized the kitty was hiding under the coffee table, convinced that it was she with whom I was furious.

I coaxed her out, reassuring her that she was the one creature in the world whom I do not hate at this moment. We had a little feline-human snuggling time, and I think she believes me now. Such a sweet girl.

I was hanging out with a friend and her cat (or rather, her boyfriend's cat) the other day, and the cat revealed a disturbing tendency to suddenly begin hissing and spitting and attacking while my friend was petting its head. One moment, all sweetness-and-light kitty, the next moment, wild fanged creature.

It made me realize how very nice my cat is. Sure, she likes to get into trouble, and chew my shoelaces, and sneak into places she's not allowed - just to see how much she can get away with. But really, she almost always does what she's told (eventually), and she has never bitten me, and she hardly ever hisses at anything or anyone. She is just a nice, nice creature, and I am lucky to have her.

Which is good, because if I were to go kitten-shopping at a shelter right now, in my Big Angry Human self, I doubt I'd be able to reassure a frightened little stray into coming home with me, as I did to her lo those many years ago. I guess she knows what's under the towering inferno.

Though if I can't get at least one of my sports back, I cannot answer for what will be under there in future. Look Out, Manhattan. You've been warned.