Does it get any better than first-snow photos of your neighborhood taken with a bad phone camera late on the Saturday night before Christmas? (Sure it does, but not this year and not this night: this year, this night, this is as good as it gets.)
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Beauty
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Friday, October 02, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Unknowability
An apartment building in the Village, 8:46 this evening:
Have a look at the window in the center of the photo. What's going on in there, do you think? Who lives there? Are they at home right now? It's Saturday night; maybe they're out. Or maybe they had some people over tonight to watch the Yankees on TV; they played Oakland tonight. Or maybe someone lives there by himself, or herself. Maybe that person was hung over all day and only got up at 7:36. Maybe they're having a crack binge up there.
Or maybe a family of four lives there, and the parents are out but the children are in, with a babysitter. Or maybe the children are old enough not to need a babysitter. Maybe the parents are in the country and the kids are staying in the city for the weekend -- getting ready to go out, or maybe having a party or something? Maybe a mother-in-law lives there. I wonder if she's in the country or if she stayed behind. Maybe she has the place to herself; maybe the kids are at summer camp. Or maybe there aren't any kids; maybe a woman and a man live there together (married?) and are having a dinner party. Or making it a Blockbuster night.
Or maybe they're fighting, or having a threesome with someone they met on Craigslist, or getting ready for bed because they have to be up early for an 8:05 flight from JFK to Chicago -- someone's wedding, maybe, although maybe not since tomorrow is a Sunday. A funeral, maybe. Or maybe they're not flying, because the guy has panic disorder; maybe they're taking Amtrak to Chicago, or driving.
Or maybe the guy just stepped out to run to the grocery for some Ben & Jerry's and the woman is talking to her sister on the phone while she waits. Or maybe the woman is a man. Or maybe everyone's out but the lights are on because someone is supposed to think they're home.
9:06 tonight: a small playground on the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue, bordered on its other two sides by apartment buildings:
Were there a lot of kids here today? It's empty now, obviously, because it's nighttime, but it was nice out today -- hot but nice, and, of course, a Saturday. Who were the kids who were playing here today? How many of them go to private schools, parochial schools, public schools? How many of them will die of a drug overdose before they're eighteen? How many of them will go to college? Will any of them get their own news-and-opinion show on cable TV when they're in their 30s? Will there be cable TV when they're in their 30s?
How many of them will go to an Ivy League school on an academic scholarship? How many of them will still live in New York five years from now? If their families move out of the city, why will they do that? How many of them will become surgeons? How many will live their entire lives as functioning alcoholics, their noses turning redder and redder as they grow older? Did one of them help another of them up today who'd fallen down and hurt himself? Will one of them save someone else's life some day? Will another of them be arrested for going more than three times the speed limit while having a blood-alcohol level which is twice the allowed level? Are these two kids the same kid?
How many of these children will at some point in their lives hit someone in the face whom they love? How many of them will be hit in the face by someone they love? How many of them will, at the end of their lives, look back over their lives and feel that they led a fulfilling life? How many of them will, at the end of their lives, look back on their lives and wish that they'd been less greedy, or more greedy? How many of them will, at the end of their lives, be able to remember their own name? How many of them will, at some point in their lives, visit Phoenix, Arizona?
9:12: two guys having dinner outside of 12 Chairs in SoHo:
What's their deal, these two guys? Are they friends? Are they gay? Are they gay and just friends, or are they on a date, or are they a couple, or are they going to see their girlfriends later? Are they from out of town? Did one of them grow up in Topeka? Do either of them work in the field of journalism? Do they hate their lives or love their lives or does one of them hate his life while the other loves his? Would the guy who loves his life be friends with the guy who hates his life if he loved his life instead of hating it? Does the guy who loves his life really only think he loves his life, or does he really love it?
Are these men going to have sex with each other later? Are they going to find women to have sex with later? Is one of them going to find a woman to have sex with later while the other goes home, secretly pissed off at his friend because his friend found someone to have sex with? Did these guys go to college? Did they go to college together? Why are they friends? How did they meet?
Does one of them secretly hate himself because he couldn't make it in investment banking? Does the other secretly hate his friend because he was a sub-par investment banker, which is why he isn't one any longer, which is why he now teaches high school and has not had to declare personal bankruptcy? Do either of these guys, this being New York, own cars? Do either of these guys, this being New York, know how to drive? Do either of these guys, this being New York, have any Republican friends?
Did one of these guys order an appetizer while the other didn't? If so, did the appetizer-ordering friend offer part of his appetizer to the non-appetizer-ordering friend? Will one of these guys be hit and killed by a yellow cab later tonight? Will one of these guys win a Nobel Prize in something forty years from now?
9:22: a deli at the edge of a little park on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thompson:
M.H. Fruit Corp. is a typical name for a New York deli or grocery; it's also classic New York that the essentially meaningless name is actually on the awning, that someone paid someone else good and presumably scarce money to put this meaningless name on the awning. Delis and groceries in New York all seem to have names like this: obscure names which very peripherally, if at all, describe what's for sale.
So who chose this name? When? Someone, at some point, had to decide to call this deli M.H. Fruit Corp. as opposed to something else, such as Sixth Avenue Fruit Inc. How was the decision made? Did the Koreans (I'm almost certain that Koreans own this particular deli) have a lawyer who was helping them when they were setting up their store (incorporating, getting the proper permits, etc.) ask them, "you need a name for your store; what do you want to call it?" Did the Koreans say "I don't know," and did the lawyer say, "well, what are some of the things you're going to sell? Are you going to sell fruit?", and did the Koreans say, "yes," and did the lawyer say, "well, how about M.H. Fruit Corporation?"
And who was this lawyer? How did they find him? Had he helped the cousin of one of them set up a magazine shop in Chelsea or a grocery in Harlem? Why are these Koreans here in the U.S. instead of in Korea? Were they from the north or from the south? What did they do back in Korea -- was one of them an engineer and the other a clerk in the health ministry, or did they both work in the sewer, or was one of them a foreman in a factory while the other cared for an invalid sibling who died, or were they even of working age when they came here?
Are they brothers, the two oldish men one of whom is usually behind the counter, or cousins, or brothers-in-law? Did they meet in Korea, or here in New York at a church function? Do they have wives and children? Is one of their children at Cornell while the other is studying biochemistry at City College? Do they hate black people? Has one of them been having a twenty-three-year-long affair with the other's wife? Do they cry together sometimes because of something that happened a long time ago?
I do not know the answer to any of these questions. I know nothing about the people who live in the apartment with the lights on or the children who play in the little playground or the 12 Chairs guys or the Koreans. I love the fact that I couldn't begin to answer even one of the above questions; I am in love with this fact, actually. Of all of the things there are to know in the world, one can't know more than a tiny, tiny fraction of them, and there's something comforting and maybe even thrilling about that. That not matter how curious we are, we remain ignorant of almost everything that there is to know about the world. I do not mean to celebrate ignorance; I mean to say that there are things large and small which we do not know and cannot know and will never know, and that I'm glad that they're there. There is a sense in which they make life worth living, these things which we don't know, these mysteries.
What would it be like, after all, to live in a world in which you knew everything there was to know? Every fact about every person and every place and every thing, past, present, and future? That sounds to me like a world not worth continuing to live in. This world we live in, on the other hand -- well, I like it, because there's so very much about it which we don't understand.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Toon In
I took this photo the other day. I'm not sure what the ugly three-story building is; it may be the above-ground part of a ventilation shaft for the subway tunnels below it. The building in the foreground is what looks to be a disused warehouse. These buildings are on the docklands below Brooklyn Heights; Manhattan is in the background.
From the photo, I drew this:
Except that I didn't really draw it; I traced it from the photo. (I don't draw, really. I wish I did.)
So, why do I have very little interest at all in knowing anything about what goes on in the photo, while I sort of feel like I want to jump down into my cartoon and see what's going on down there? Why does it look so much more interesting than the photo? Why do I feel as if there's more going on in it than there is in the photo?
It's possible that it's not more interesting; just that it's more visually appealing. This worries me a little: am I more drawn to the cartoon version of this dockland reality than to the (relatively more "real" photographic) reality because it's more sanitized? No dirt; no ugly, light-brick wall on the ventilation building because I didn't depict or imply a specific type of wall; slightly brighter colors (I stuck to the "real" colors for the most part, but will cop to replacing a grayish sky with a blue one, and made the water downright Caribbean-colored)? Do I prefer Disney World-type "reality" to the real thing? Am I one of those people who secretly prefers the cleaned-up-by-Giuliani Times Square to the old "grittier" one? (The truth about that is, like most people who live in New York, I used to avoid Times Square because it was a dump and because it wasn't particularly safe; now, like most people who live in New York, I avoid it because new office buildings aside, there's no real reason to go there. And I really do wonder how many people who miss the old, scummy Times Square actually spent much time there in, say, the 1980s or early '90s. I'm sure some of them did. I'm sure, too, that many of them didn't.)
I don't know. What I do know is that I've developed, over the past few weeks, what could become an unhealthy interest in cartoonifying things. Remember the television ads for the Label Maker, the ones where they guy who's just purchased one goes a little nuts and starts making labels for everything? Labeling his pets and wife and stuff like that? I feel something like that coming on. Especially unhealthy, perhaps, because while there's a certain amount of craft, maybe, involved in creating a cartoonish image like the one above (I used an animation program which can also be used for drawing, a program which I've used for many years but which isn't difficult to learn how to use), there's very little creativity involved. To the extent that any is required, it's in deciding what to leave out rather than what to put in -- creating a cartoon from a photograph absolutely necessitates taking stuff out (not only the aforementioned dirt and other "objectionable" grittiness, but also most or all textures, unnecessary lines which could place a confusing emphasis on unimportant elements, etc.) and simplifying things like rows of windows on office buildings. (I suppose that deciding what to leave out is as important as deciding what to put in where most forms of creativity are concerned; it's just that in the case of making a traced drawing from a photo, it's almost all about what to leave out -- after, of course, you've decided what photograph you're going to bother taking and then tracing in the first place.)
So it concerns me that I've become mildly obsessed with making these drawings (which aren't even really drawings, since I... you know, can't draw) because I feel that I should be spending my time on creative pursuits. What I can say, though, is that I feel as if I've discovered a power which I didn't realize I had, i.e. the ability to change a cityscape which I don't find appealing -- because it isn't visually appealing but also because I don't find it interesting, which of course aren't the same thing -- into something which does appeal to me.
I'm not sure why a sanitized, cartooned, abstracted version of reality should be more interesting or appealing to me than reality. The opposite should be true, right? A world in which there's more detail ought to be more interesting, because there's more to be interested in, more detail to work out, more going on, more implied history (for example, if a street is dirty, then someone put the dirt there, or else someone made a conscious or unconscious decision not to clean it up, to let it accumulate), shouldn't it?
Maybe, but I think there's also this: that to simplify reality in the way that I have above, by removing detail, results in something that is more real than reality, in the sense that my drawing, lacking detail, allows the viewer to supply his or her own. If your bullshit-detector is going off on reading this "more real than reality" stuff, perhaps it should be, but please bear with me. Look at the photo above. It leaves something to the imagination, but the cartoon version leaves more. And to the extent that a visual representation of something leaves more to the imagination rather than less, doesn't it also represent -- or, anyway, allow for -- more versions of reality? Sort of like: consider the millions and millions of people who've read The Catcher in the Rye. It seems to me that a new reality is born into the world every time someone reads that book (or any book). Everyone has their own take on what, say, Holden Caulfield looks like, sounds like, etc. Everyone has their own idea of what, say, his dorm room at school looks like, and it'd be dumb luck if my Holden's-dorm-room and your Holden's-dorm-room looked the same: in other words, different realities. (Of course, we project our own ideas onto all art forms, but more onto some than others, it seems to me: movies, for example, in most ways leave less to the imagination than paintings or books do.)
I don't know. I watched Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis on DVD recently, after reading the comic book (or graphic novel, or whatever we're supposed to call certain types of comic books). Persepolis depicts the life of a young Iranian girl named Marjane (the book and film are highly autobiographical) whose life changes dramatically as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Satrapi created the book and was deeply involved in the making of the film (a mostly faithful, animated version of the book); she does the audio commentary on the DVD. In the commentary, she talks about why she made Persepolis a comic book and why it was important to her for the film to be an animated version of it, rather than a live-action feature. She says she feels that the level of abstraction which the comic-book and animated forms provide was important to her because she didn't want for people to experience Persepolis as the story of an Iranian girl, but of a girl, to whom her almost entirely non-Iranian audience could relate, whose trials would seem more universal than if actors of a specific skin color played her.
(This, I think, is in some way related to the "more real than reality" thing that may still be pegging your BS meter, which is okay; I'm not sure where I'm going here. What I'm saying is that generally speaking, comic-book-like drawings such as the one above allow their viewers to project more onto them than photographs do. I don't know, perhaps they're less real than reality, in the sense that the viewer must supply the missing reality bits. Your BS meter is broken now. Sorry. Send me email and I'll replace it for you if you send me the original receipt. I should mention, too, not by way of excuse but by way of explanation, that I have the feeling there's a whole vocabulary which would make it easier for me to discuss all of this stuff. Unfortunately, I don't have this vocabulary.)
Maybe this is a good place to mention my ongoing affinity for the Tintin comic books. Tintin was/is a comic-book character created by Hergé. Hergé, who was Belgian, drew his first Tintin strips in 1929 and his last in the late 1970s. Here's a frame from a Tintin strip (this is from The Crab With the Golden Claws). Tintin is the one wearing the pith helmet:
I'm not sure where to start with Hergé and Tintin. Maybe the first thing to note is that there's very little to Tintin's personality: he doesn't have much of one. We know that he doesn't like bad guys; we know that on occasion, he can be annoyingly high-minded and didactic. That's about it. His age and occupation are both puzzles: he is "Tintin the boy reporter," but we only see him file one story over the course of five decades -- in his first adventure, Hergé sends him to the Soviet Union to report on the evils of Bolshevism -- and for that matter, while he dresses like a boy, he doesn't talk or act like one, nor do people react to him as if he were one; also, he knows how to drive motorcycles, cars, and tanks and to fly airplanes and helicopters; he can operate a handgun; he lives on his own; he doesn't seem to have parents; etc. Finally, he doesn't seem to belong to any particular socioeconomic class. Is he a working-class kid? A child of privilege? Son of a dentist? (Son of anyone?)
He is, by the way, surrounded by "characters": the sometimes alcohol-abusive, hot-tempered, creative-insult-hurling Captain Haddock; the absent-minded, hard-of-hearing Professor Calculus; the idiot detectives Thomson and Thompson; his sharp-tongued dog Snowy. But as protagonists go, he's a relatively blank slate. In this way, he's like the cityscapes (and other settings) in which Hergé has him go about his sleuthing, and like the cartoonified version of my photo above as well: viewers/readers are allowed or encouraged or forced to fill in the details of his personality, just as they're forced to fill in the details of the physical world in which he exists. Perhaps this is why the Tintin books have remained in print for so many decades, and translated into something like thirty languages: because Tintin himself is a universal everychild, his lack of a personality, rather than boring young readers, instead encourages or even requires them to project themselves onto him. (I'm not the first person to make this observation.)
(And perhaps Tintin's lack of depth has something to do with the more-real-than-reality/less-real-than-reality stuff I discussed before: he is less-real-than-reality, yes, in the sense that there's so little to him, but more-real-than-reality in the sense that a Welsh dumptruck-driver's son an upper-class Japanese kid (he's big in Japan, btw) and millions of other readers of all backgrounds can project their own "Tintin reality" onto this cipher of a person.)
Anyway, I like the physical worlds created by Hergé. I'm curious about them in the same way I'm curious about the cartoon version of my photo, and not curious about the photo itself. That's maybe what led me to pluck Tintin out of this panel, from King Ottokar's Sceptre...
...and drop him into another traced-photo thing I made recently, of a street in my neighborhood:
It seems to me that Tintin's presence in New York, a place Hergé never sent him, is a sign that I need to move away from this tracing-stuff business until I figure out a way to incorporate this newfound cartoonifying power into some sort of creative endeavor.
And/but, I must say, this version of Pierrepont Place in Brooklyn Heights is much more interesting than the real thing.
Kink Ottokar's Sceptre by Hergé, artwork copyright 1947 by Casterman. The Crab with the Golden Claws by Hergé, artwork copyright 1953 by Casterman.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Sunday, March 08, 2009
D.S.T.
Here is a mundane photo I took earlier this evening (I specialize in them); more on this photo in a bit.
So tonight, PH is holding another giggly-girl convention at our house. All of this convention's attendees went to Wellesley College though, so actually, there may be less giggling than last time and more discussion of Betty Friedan, white male hegemony, issues/notions of gender identity in pre-post-racial America, etc. Or not; I may be being unfair; I may be generalizing; I'm not there; I don't know; maybe they're all sitting around giggling about how boys are silly.
(PH went to Wellesley for her freshman year; she dug up all of these former classmates for tonight's convention on Facebook. "In like fifteen minutes!!!", actually. Until about a week ago, Facebook was, as far as PH was concerned, the work of the Devil, a place where people whom she didn't want to deal with could "Google her shit." She was particularly concerned about someone she went to middle school with, I believe. Also, it was "for singles," wasn't it, so why was I on it, anyway? Was I single? No, and anyway, didn't I mind people Googling my shit? I don't need to tell you what's happened, do I: my lovely girlfriend has become addicted to Facebook in a rather hardcore way. "Every junkie's like a setting sun," Neil Young tells us. You know? Whatever. Sad. Whatever.)
But so, right: I'm hiding again. I left the convention site around 6:30 and went and sat on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, because tonight is a special night: tonight is the first night of Daylight Savings Time, 2009 Edition. Whatever time it is right now here on the east coast of North America, it's that time, EDT, not EST. Pardon my language, but I fucking love Daylight Savings Time. I think that we should have it all year round; in fact, we have had it all year round; it was Daylight Savings Time for the duration of World War Two.
For us not-having-it-get-dark-prematurely enthusiasts, things have -- at least during my lifetime -- improved. When I was in high school, "spring forward" happened towards the end of April (in the U.S., anyway). Somewhere along the line, the cutover was moved to the beginning of April and then (I believe) to the end of March. And then, a few years ago, to the beginning of March (again, in the U.S. and, I'll go out on a limb and assume, Canada; I believe DST doesn't arrive in Europe for another few weeks: hang in there, Europe).
Anyway, how perfectly perfect to sit on the promenade tonight and snap the above photo of Manhattan at 6:54 P.M. and not have to use my camera's "night mode" because it wasn't night yet. The Dow may be in the toilet and your job and mine may not be as secure as they could be and fantasy-boyfriend-related giggles may be wafting from the windows of my apartment at this very moment, but it's sort of not really winter anymore, sort of! How about that???
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Sorry, Rush.
I don't think of politicians as having particularly good senses of humor -- or, at least, good senses of humor which they're willing or able to share publicly. And I certainly don't think of party-apparatus-type organizations (the DNC, the RNC, the state political committees, the "Hill committees," etc.) as having any sense of humor at all. Humor-by-committee doesn't work, and these groups are... well, they're committees, aren't they. That's why I saw the Michigan Democratic Party's October petition to bring Tina Fey to their state (in response to the Michigan Republicans' petition to get Sarah Palin to campaign in Michigan) as delightful, but also as a fluke.
But now -- as part of a coordinated Democratic effort to paint Rush Limbaugh as the de facto leader of the GOP, something they decided made sense after a recent poll showed that only eleven percent of respondents under the age of forty, of any party affiliation, held a positive view of Limbaugh -- the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the DCCC, responsible for getting Democrats elected to the House) has launched a new web site, www.imsorryrush.com.
The ostensible purpose of this site is to give Republicans who have insulted Rush a convenient way to apologize to him for their errors in judgment: the DCCC has noticed that several Republicans have recently felt pressure to retract comments made about Limbaugh (by calling into Limbaugh's show in the case of Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, for God's sake). Use of the site is not restricted to Republican politicians, though: you, for example, are welcome to use the site too, if there's something you'd like to apologize to Rush about.
Brilliant.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Sorry I Painted The Word 'Twat' On Your Garage Door.
When PH and I first had her parents over to what was then my apartment, we took an inventory of the stuff on my walls to make sure there wasn't anything that might offend. We missed this:
...a David Shrigley postcard I'd stuck in a frame. (PH's parents either didn't notice it or didn't care; there was no "P, your father and I couldn't help noticing an interesting note hanging on the wall, something about someone having painted something on someone's garage; did your little friend Steve write that?" conversation between PH and Mrs. H, for example.)
I love David Shrigley (click each of these for a larger view):
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I think the sword one is my current favorite. The utterly demented look on the child's face; the fact that the exasperated "narrator" has profoundly misjudged which effects will follow from which causes...
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
What You'll Find If You Go In Search Of Spring At The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens In February
What you'll find are, e.g., furry bud-things which definitely look sort of springy:
Also, you will see fish swimming around in water as opposed to not swimming around because they're encased in a large brick of ice and because they're dead:
As encouraging as the out-of-doors spring-style signs are the BBG, though, the real excitement, you're likely to find, is inside, in the greenhouses. I've been going to these gardens for almost two decades, but I don't think I'd ever gone inside before this past weekend. These here (in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse) are some Orange Flowers:
These guys, also in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse, are some Other Type Of Nice Flowerz:
Also in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse (although doesn't it look like it belongs in the "tropical" greenhouse? That's not where it was, though; it was in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse, so go figure, or, if you prefer, don't) is this flower, which looks like a bird:
I don't remember which greenhouse this plant was in, nor am I positive, actually, that it's plant and not animal of some sort:
This disturbingly phallic nature item depends menacingly from a bunch of unripe bananas in the "tropical" greenhouse -- if you were a child, wouldn't you go home and sleep with the lights on for like at least two weeks or perhaps months?
No? Here's what its shaft looks like up close...
...at least two weeks, right?
Thought so.
Now, here's what a cactus (found in the "desert" greenhouse) looks like after it's died. Disturbing, isn't it? These things are supposed to live for a long, long time on the water an nutrients that they store up, aren't they? But here's this skeletal, former cactus (and this really is sort of a skeleton, isn't it? And/but since when do plants have skeletons?). Or, I should say, here is what I believe to be a skeletal, former cactus, because if you go to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens with your girlfriend looking for signs of spring, you may be told that this dead cactus is "driftwood." When you ask what driftwood would be doing in the desert instead of by the seashore, you will be treated like a child who doesn't understand the ways of the real, grown-up world:
