Photographs: August 2008 Archives
Some nights I just want to eat a Frankendinner, ya know?
You know what I mean. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, and none of it adding up to a cohesive whole, but somehow that's what I want anyway.
It occurred to me, after eating the veggie hot dogs and the zucchini in garlic and olive oil and the tomato and basil salad, that we're always expecting life to be like a story is. To have a beginning, a middle, and an end - and more than that - a thrust, a meaning, a punchline - something to pull it all together.
We expect it to be like spaghetti and meatballs, not like a Frankenmeal.
But it feels a lot more like my little plates. A little of this, and a little of that, things that taste different, songs that don't go together. Milkshakes before the meal, pancakes for dinner, chocolate in the morning, and fruit with vinegar. It's weird. And it makes very little sense, except in snippets, flashes of insight that peek through at us like the stars winking here and there in the heavy backlit blanket of a NYC night.
Okay, it's pop quiz time. What is wrong with this picture?
a) The hot boy in the foreground is not offering Lizbon candy.
b) The fracking road is in the sky.
c) Lizbon is not at the front of the line (for either boy-candy or road returning to earth).
d) All of the above.
Yes, it's time for everyone's favorite annoying/amusing game - waiting for the drawbridge to come down at rush hour. As usual when I am waiting for a drawbridge (which is admittedly not often), I was torn between being frustrated at having to wait so long and tickled by the fact that my bicycle journey was being delayed by the need for the road to come back down from the sky.
I watched the little tug push the big flat barge through, and thought about how I forget that NY is a working harbor.
Then I rode on my merry way, slightly too oblivious to traffic craziness for my taste (I had a mild migraine and was not at my best). Later, I dined with several young boys, as is my wont, met Miz Fury and her beau for a couple of Campari and tonics, and spent the rest of the evening trading increasingly flirtatious and X-rated texts with the boy formerly known as the blonde.
'Cause that's how I roll, baby.
The world is a mess, and I just need to...rule it. - Dr. Horrible
Sitting here in the construction site (aka. my apartment), with the cat determinedly stalking some manner of flying thing (I am afraid to look; I dearly hope it's a bird), and waiting for the damn tea to steep so I can wake the hell up, I wonder where god went wrong.
Note that I do not capitalize, because a) I hate that word, and b) I am uncertain as to the nature of this creature's existence.
It's not that I'm an atheist, exactly, but, in the words of the immortal Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." Not that there is a specific "you" intended here.
And then at this exact moment, Nina Simone sings, "Sinnerman, you ought to be prayin'."
Yeah yeah.
I wasn't intending to talk about this at all, mind you. I was just going to put up some photos.
I guess what I think, though, is that we are here for various reasons known only (and occasionally, at that) to ourselves, and it's up to us to glean meaning out of our lives. I have a clue as to my reasons for being here, as I imagine most people do. But the terrifying and sad things that happen to people while they're here are as mysterious as they ever were.
I like movies that tackle this question, even (sometimes) the ones that do it ham-handedly. I've had disagreements over the movie Contact, for example. Boywich thinks it's rather silly (though he'll watch it with me), and I like it and can't especially articulate why. Sure, some of the characters are too black and white; it departs from Carl Sagan's book in some significant ways, and yet I like it.
And I don't think it's solely to do with the fact that I can watch almost anything Jodie Foster does because I like that gleam of intelligence in her sharp blue eyes.
I think it's actually the earnestness of the thing. It's so like Carl, for one, and like me, for another.
One thing I admire about Carl (yes, i know the verb ought to be past-tense, but I still admire him in the present tense, even though he is not himself in the present tense) is his lack of pussyfooting. He loves science, he loves the big questions, and he wants to share these things with Everyone.
I've been known to pussyfoot on occasion, to stick my toe in the sand and pretend lukewarmness when actually I am standing in a furnace like Liz. I guess I am working away from that.
But I don't see why caring about something should be cause for embarrassment. A friend of mine recently proclaimed that it's now cool to be obsessed with something. I don't know that he's right. Maybe it's cool to be obsessed with something material. But the very word "cool" gives the lie to the idea that being impassioned is ever going to be cool. Just look at how men react when they see you actually feeling something about them.
Everyone says they are looking for a passionate person, and one who will be passionate about them, but in the moment of seeing it, they realize they don't want it. It makes them nervous - even when it's purely physical passion. Honestly. I've seen it time and time again.
Real feeling makes people edgy. Does it remind them that we are actually here, that these are really our lives, that we might actually connect with one another? And does that, in turn, remind them that this is it, and it means something, because we are all going to die, and that very much sooner than we realize?
I was wondering where I was going with this, because I hadn't thought of anything in particular when I sat down, just that I had some photos to put up, and I just went with the stream to see where it led. Wondering, perhaps, if it had anything to do with death. Thought so.
Again I tried to take pictures from the bike for you, and again I saw beautiful images - a graffiti-covered plaque on the bridge, all blues and blacks; the Domino Sugar factory on the Brooklyn side, bathed in golden light - and yet I didn't want to stop. I told myself I'd take some, walking, on my way to the bar with the friend I was going to meet, but then she wasn't feeling up to going out (she's recovering from surgery), so I didn't take any.
The light would've been gone by then anyway, and I knew that, and I still couldn't stop.
I'm a little heartbroken today, and maybe for the last few days, and I'm not sure how much of it is for me, and how much of it is for the various people in my life who are going through rough times. When I say rough times, I am talking more serious than breakups or job losses. I am talking cancer.
I won't go into detail here, because these stories are not mine to tell, but suffice it to say that several of my friends - two of them very close friends and one a more recent friend whom I'm nevertheless very worried about - are having to deal with some heavy shit. And I as their friend am having to deal with being afraid for them, and knowing how much they mean to me, and how intolerable it would be to lose them.
And then I check my email and see yet another message from yet another guy I'd emailed who is telling me that he is not interested because I am older than his chosen age range (in this case only a couple of years older). If he'd just said that and not included a bunch of chatty banter as well, I wouldn't have minded. But the combination was, somehow, like a slap in the face.
I don't know why that particular email mattered - it's not that I was super-interested in the guy; it just hurt, even coming from a stranger. I suspect it is to do with something larger, something that I can't examine just now, because I can't even examine the things that I'm aware are going on. 
It's a big tangle - like that giant ball of string that's either an actual or apocryphal tourist attraction in the midwest.
Another friend of mine mentioned to me, just offhand, that he's hung up on somebody, "hung up bad," and I was dumbfounded for a minute trying to figure out how I'd describe my own state. I was going to say that I'm not hung up on anybody, and that that is unusual for me, and somewhat uncomfortable in its own right. Which seems weird - why should I prefer to be suffering unrequited passion, instead of just feeling nothing very much? I guess because it isn't that the alternative is to feel nothing very much. The alternative is to feel much blanker and more empty than one does when suffering the unrequited.
How are these things related? "Even the wisest cannot tell." (Galadriel)
PS. Obviously, these pictures were taken on a different bike ride, on a different day - but at much the same time of day, for there is that slanting evening light. Pocketcam, auto exposure, flash off.
I'm watching Bladerunner tonight, and it occurs to me that melancholia is a lot more attractive when one has an art director, good lighting, and an interested audience.
In a solitary room, with no noise but that of the fans, there isn't much that's romantic about being in that mood, other than that it gives a little extra frisson to having selected a movie that's so perfectly in keeping with it.
After a pause to wash the cat fur off me (she doesn't seem to realize that it's a billion degrees and muggy in here), I pulled out the Nikon to see if I could make myself some similarly good mood lighting.
I have always loved the light (or lack of it) in Deckard's apartment. So tawny and dusty-seeming.
It's all just about the color and feel of that amber whiskey he drinks out of the perfectly square handmade glass.
I'm surprised Crate and Barrel never copied those glasses outright. They are beautiful, and in synch with the angles and weird square relief designs carved into the balcony.
Anyway. 
Lacking an audience, not to mention Ridley Scott to paint up my face and make me look like an eerie nine-foot-tall ragdoll (Pris), the photos don't do much to make me feel dramatic and vive la melacholie.
But they looked rather nice in black and white, I thought.
