Ice

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:55:59 -0500

We went for a walk this afternoon - frozen. I shot some video and a couple of panoramas too. I suppose I’ll get around to them sometime. But I just love these. Not much to say, except that once again they’re shot with the iPhone...

Own back yard

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:24:53 -0500

Duston always talks about wanting – in her work – to see something she’s never seen before. To see something new. It gets harder as one gets older, and I’m in awe of people who’re able to change their point of view and find the unfamiliar in the familiar. I guess this is one of the reasons that I love traveling – when you travel, you’re literally seeing new things all the time. In this sense I suppose it can be seen as a substitute for imagination...

The picture above, and those in the accompanying gallery, are examples of how a technological intervention has given me the ability to see something new in the familiar. I’ll take help wherever I can get it. In this case, it’s my iPhone - yes, all these pictures were taken with the iPhone. I’m blown away. I’m using an app called Autostitch; it’s phenomenally easy to use - too easy! So the picture above is actually a composite of about 60 individual snaps that I took a couple of days ago during a beautiful little snowstorm, a few steps from the front door.

I thought I knew this view. I see it every day from the deck of my office. I’ve walked that little path a thousand times, usually hauling stuff in the wheelbarrow down to the vegetable garden. Familiar. But here I’ve had to take it apart, to photograph little patches of it and then let the app put it all back together. And when it does, there’s a great serendipity to some of the decisions it makes. It makes - not me. The app looks for common elements - bit of tree trunk, the edge of the path - and decides how to patch to together, where to stretch and distort, where to darken and lighten. To smooth it out. Math at work. And as I learn it, I shoot to fit into its proclivities. That’s what I love about really simple, limited tools. The choices are basic and finite, but the possibilities are infinite. Hey - look at the lowly pencil!

My favorite bits are we deviate from “reality”. Look at that bright area to the left - I know and understand why it’s bright, but I don’t care! That’s not what it says to me. Rather, I can’t help seeing it as some sort of door, the entry to...to what exactly? I’m not sure. But I want to walk through it. It leads somewhere else, of that I’m convinced.

The same things with the other pictures in the gallery. The ghosting trees distending and extruding at their crowns, the bulging houses.

And my entire toolkit, doubling as my music, my video camera, my compass, my telephone - all easily slipped into my shirt pocket.

Playdate

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 09:04:02 -0500

Remember what it was like to have a playdate when you were a kid? The anticipation and excitement, perhaps mixed with a little dread? The warmup period when you were getting all the toys out, and maybe if it was at Marc Lurie’s house Mrs Lurie would bring out the junk food that was forbidden at home. But most of all, the play itself. Immersion, involvement, the suspension of time and that other reality called “real life”. Ah.

I’m fortunate to enjoy that kind of play at pretty regular interludes. For one thing, Duston is a true playmate – there are many episodes of play in our live together, and sometimes it feels like there’s altogether too much of it! And early last year, when Carsten Peter came to visit from Germany for 4 days en route to a shoot in Kamchatka or some such (why on earth come via New York?) We both had new cameras, and ran around like maniacs testing them out (I was on the way to Peru a few weeks later). On the third night we sat in the living room turning the lights progressively lower until we were down to one candle, testing the low light capabilities (insane!) of the cameras. We were literally screaming with amazement and delight - I think that that’s when Dus turned to me and said “this has to be one of the longest playdates in history”.

Well, it was. Until now. This past weekend saw me, Peter Cunningham and Tim Trompeter holed up in Peter’s house on the island of Grand Manan, out in the Bay of Fundy off the coast where Canada and Maine rub edges. Tim and Peter have been close friends for over thirty years; I’m a recent interloper, having only been party to the festivities (numerous) for twenty years. But I’m getting to know them...

Peter’s been living on the island for a few months (it’s a family house that now belongs to him); Tim and I, who’ve both been up there before, thought it would be good to take a break and also to check up on Peter, who seemed to be living monastic enough an existence that we were frankly a little worried about him. Friends don’t let friends live in monasteries!

From the get go, our fears were allayed. Peter is in a deeply creative and productive space, and doing some of the best work I’ve ever seen from him. To me, he’s made the transition from being a successful commercial photographer to being an artist, certainly in the sense that he charts his own course and follows it come what may. Many torpedos have been damned in the process.

I guess that as adults who know one another very well, we had tons of anticipation for the trip, but certainly so far as Tim and I were concerned, not much in the way of dread. For Peter, maybe a little different. He, after all, was the visitee, and in some way we were potentially a disruptive force – at any event, he went to some pains to let us know that we weren’t deflecting him from any of his normal activities. His normal activities up there, it happens, are absorbing and fun.

So we spent a tremendous amount of time running around taking pictures. Peter is, after all, a photographer, and Tim was a wonderful fashion photographer and is now an artist and father of two children who vibrate with the life force. My checkered past in photography included a stint in the professional world; my first paying photo job was assisting Tim on a fashion shoot (I almost plugged a Hasselblad directly into the wall, and had Tim not intervened with a look of profound incredulity on his face there’d have been no Hasselblad and, most likely, no me. I also tried to pick up the client on that shoot – about as “no” a no-no as there could POSSIBLY be for a lowly assistant in the world of fashion photography). And I assisted Peter for about 18 months, doing mainly celebrity portraiture and covering Broadway shows and such.

Grand Manan is a fishing island. Working class, a hard life. Men go on lobster boats and scallop boats out into the freezing waters of the north Atlantic, and when they’re not literally dodging death (usually successfully, but not always) they’re dealing with evaporating fisheries and bureaucratic wildernesses, and cauterizing themselves with booze or religion. Oh - they’re also pretty equal opportunity when it comes to slaughter: while professionally sea beasties are the quarry, recreationally (and for the pot) deer are in the sights. As a nor’easter set in on Saturday night we found ourselves dining on venison and moose at the camp of some of Peter’s friends, as they regaled us with stories of the hunt, and described an arsenal of available weaponry that would make even the most hardened Guantanamero drool with envy. How was the moose, you ask? Absolutely delicious. One of the tastiest meats I’ve ever eaten, and beautifully prepared with onions and mushrooms. Considering that most of the accompanying veggies came from the garden, it might have been the most “locavore” meal I’ve ever eaten (at least including meat) - and from such an un-Michael-Pollanesque source!

Photographically Grand Manan is...well, it’s paradise. The weather cooperated as well – from a balmy first day, where we tromped around the island avoiding the high tides (the highest in the world) to the epic nor’easter sluicing in from the ocean, high winds, snow and an atmosphere of altogether wretched desolation. Wheee!! Of particular note was an area known as the lobster pound, an enormous “cage” made of logs, to which lobsters are brought post-harvest. Think of it as a sort of lobster Riker’s Island. “Enormous”, in this case, means multiple football fields. When we were there the tide was at its lowest; we wandered around a surreal terrain which, twice a day, is totally submerged. Ducking under and around dripping seaweed limpeted to the huge wooden frame, and crunching seashells underfoot. Meanwhile, the tide was turning and the entire thing began to fill like a gigantic bathtub - and at about that speed.

Returning to the house, we’d all download our pictures and play on our computers. Play - that’s the only word to use. Editing, doing some post-production, looking and comparing and talking, talking, talking. Peter’s editing a couple of books right now, one he’s done on China, and another he’s doing with Peter Matthiessen, so a lot of time was spent looking and critiquing and suggesting. Peter’s work has been hugely boosted by his switch to digital; many of the technical challenges, which are dull to him, are now effectively solved by the equipment, releasing him to focus on the more creative expression of his distinct vision. It’s been a long time since he decided to walk away from the entirely commercial practice, and he’s been through a lot of experimentation in order to get to where he now is. That, as we all know, is a key to success. Perseverance and “deep practice”, the ongoing engagement on a regular basis leading to mastery. Some say it takes 10 years, others say it takes 10,000 hours. Whatever. You can’t pick it up from the Complete Idiots Guide.

Tim, erudite and brilliant as always, was slightly hampered in his photographic output by antiquated equipment (a 5megapixel point and shoot - gasp). I think his major takeaway was that it really IS time to upgrade, and also (I hope) to start taking pictures more seriously again. Tim was an absolutely fantastic fashion photographer, and some of his “street” work from Ladakh and Morocco stands with the best of them.

And then there’s me. What about me? Well, for one thing, I just love the engagement in terms of being out there shooting, and coming back and sweating some of the images. I also love looking at others’ work, and commenting on it, and I think I’m pretty spot on a lot of the time. What I’m really NOT so good at is receiving comments and criticism, and I think that in some ways I create a subtle exclusion zone around what I’m doing - Tim and Peter have to go out on a little limb that I’ve created. I think I project that I’m not taking myself entirely seriously,and as such am giving THEM permission to not take me entirely seriously either. I come across as a hobbyist, which is what I am, but is that enough? Clearly not, but that’s the subject for another blog posting (which hopefully will follow very soon).

All told, though, I emerged from the weekend exhilarated, feeling like THIS is real life, THIS is what it should all be about. And more than anything, the fragility and preciousness of deep friendship... It gets harder as one ages.

PS: The food was just incredible. Lobsters, scallops, mussels, fresh-baked focaccia, a bottle of wine (possibly more than one...)

Playdate pictures (a collaborative album with Peter and Tim)
Grand Manan gallery

Puppy love

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:11:56 -0500

A lot of twaddle has been uttered, over the millenia, about the joys of a new puppy. Terms like “puppy love”, schmoopy sentiments in re: of “happiness” being a “warm puppy”. Etcetera etcetera. Being a sophisticated man of the world, I have naturally always dismissed these idiotisms as belonging to the realm of little girls and gay men (sorry chaps).

Of course, they also happen to be 100% true.

As I have recently discovered. Short version: Duston emails me a month ago with a picture of her and this, this...thing. Nameless, practically naked. She and Kate were on a trip to visit her mother in Florida. The email intimated that this was now OUR thing. Unilateral. Fait accompli. No say in it for the toiling breadwinner. Who, it should be noted, went into the most towering rage in recent memory. I wrote a poisonous email in response, but was shaking too much to send it (a good thing). And after the idea sunk in – it took a few hours - I realized that there really was no choice but to play along. Let’s face it – who doesn’t like a puppy? And think how many points I’d earn by being the magnanimous guy. Sheesh!

I had no idea what was about to hit me. From the first moment, at La Guardia, as my face was bathed in warm puppy tongue, my ear lobes nibbled with an expertise that would shame the courtesans of Byzantium, I felt a veritable fountain of endorphins and dopamine rising, flooding, suffusing my entire being. Oh joy! Oh rapture!

And now, that ridiculous, punched-in face (soft soft soft), those bugging eyes (imploring, knowing, wise). The exquisite humanesque yelps, the whimpering as she perches on that ledge-of-the-Eiger known as the second step down on the staircase... She mastered “up” in hours, but “down” is still replete with terrors. The stinky little farts, the adorable little vomits...

What has happened to me? First I’m taking pictures of vegetables in my garden, and now I’m reduced to this? Am I gay? Or have I perhaps become a little girl?

PS: Nameless thing is now known as ~ . That’s the official spelling, although the IRS insists that we spell it out. Tilda (the feminine form of “tilde”, which is the punctuation mark in question).

Direct Current

Mon, 7 Sep 2009 16:54:11 -0400

Washington hasn’t exactly enthralled me over the years. The first time I went was for a nuclear freeze demonstration in the aftermath of Three Mile Island, in 1979. Crowds, buses, agendas galore. Hair, lots of hair. Since then I’ve been a few times, not that many. A weekend for Amnesty International, a visit with a girl I met in Vermont, two nutty roadtrips in one week with Robin and Marina, and a gentle excursion with Duston’s dad and stepmom a few years ago.

This weekend was different. Way different. Maybe it has to do with the feeling that it’s no longer occupied territory? In any event, it was fascinating, provocative and stimulating.We went down on Duston’s ticket - she’s newly appointed to the board of the Safe Streets Art Foundation, which focuses on art in the prisons.

More than anything, and forgive the banality of the observation, it really IS about power. Somehow everything that we saw and did related back to central questions of authority, domination, and the control of their associated narratives. Exemplary were two exhibits at the Sackler, one a show called Tsars and the East, featuring gifts from Iran and Turkey (mainly) to the Tsars over the ages. The implications were unmistakable - here are the priceless artifacts of other, vanquished civilizations, here, in OUR seat of power. At least that’s how it felt to me. The other notable show was a video installation by Sun Xun, simple ink animations directly on yellowed Chinese newspapers, clearly throwing the “news” catalogued therein into question. Shaky ground, the ironic recontextualization of history.

The Newseum, across the Mall, provided a much more explicit look at our sources of information, with an emphasis on the “official” independent media, that is the big corporate media machines which sometimes do a stunning job of bringing us “the story” but then again sometimes miss it entirely or – worse – tell the wrong one. Hello Judith Miller. Plenty of shrift is given to smaller media outlets as well. Not to quibble: a mighty museum dedicated to the first amendment, and filled with fascinating exhibits asserting the vital importance of independent media - priceless.

The most interesting part of the visit, though, revolved around the reason we were down in DC to begin with, namely the Safe Streets Art Foundation. They had a concert at the Kennedy Center on Saturday night, in one of the antechamber theaters skirting the main hall. The show consisted of a series of short plays, readings and musical numbers, and what struck me forcefully about almost everything was how it was almost all “prisoner” and almost no “art”. I was reminded of a great little novel by Manuel Puig that I read twenty years ago, Heartbreak Tango. In it, an impossibly good looking young man arrives in, and then moves on from, a small rural town in Argentina, leaving a trail of broken hearts. Most of the book takes the form of letters written by the smitten, and what’s fantastic and poignant and sad is that the their yearnings are expressed in lines from tango songs, from radio plays, magazines, and Hollywood films.

The message, I think, has to do with our somehow needing to validate our own experiences of the world by calibrating them against “official” narratives of similar experiences. We all do this - I, most famously, in Bombay in 1984. Semi-dying of amoebic dysentery (30 pounds dropped in eleven days), I was sadly depleted and actually starting to get worried about major implications (22 year olds can be massive idiots about their own well-being). But as miserable and ill as I was, I still had the presence of mind to recognize the “romance” of being sick in a spartan room in a distant land, the balmy zephrys (high tide) and semi-sewer stench (low tide) blowing in off the Arabian Sea outside my window, and - validation of validations - the fact that I was somehow living through something similar to Sebastian, dying in Morocco, in Brideshead Revisited. This last thought cheered me up immeasurably, actually. I soon recovered my appetite, and haven’t lost it once since!

Let’s get back to “prison art” for a moment, though. What reverberated through almost every utterance on that stage was the fact that as prisoners, the “art” becomes almost entirely reflexive. Unlike the Argentinian woman, who could only look to the outside for validity, the prisoners seem to be able only to look to the inside, into the idea of being a prisoner, and the mouthing of the very platitudes and cliches that one would expect in such a show. To me, the tragedy of it is that prisoners, deprived of liberty in the most blatant and obvious ways, nevertheless buy in to the imagery, iconography and overall set of cultural expectations that we on the outside carry. Somehow, to be a prisoner is to become a living stereotype, and nothing I saw on Saturday budged me one iota from that set of preconceptions. In fairness, this was all performing art, and certainly curated for the event, so there was probably a slant towards “prisony” work. The most successful piece was a funny, syncopated song and dance number about hair, and it worked because it talked about the microcosmic obsession of dealing with your hair in prison with limited resources - but in ways that I bet every woman can relate to.

After the show, we went to an “after-party”, at a largely African-American (or maybe entirely African-American) old-age home. We walked from the magnificence of the Kennedy Center, directly past the front entrance of the Watergate, and into the home. Downstairs to a sort of rec room, where four older men were playing a slap’em-down game of cards. The young man who played the “senator” in the play about the just-released prisoner coming home to explain to his family that he’s converted to Islam came over to chat. Friendly, engaging and welcoming. We made some small talk, and he mentioned Van Jones, the Obama appointee who during the course of this single day had apparently gone through a dismal Republican crucifixion - in any event, he wasn’t in the news when we left the hotel at 10 in the morning; he was tried, convicted and had resigned by 10:30pm. Such is the contemporary news cycle. Try THAT one on, Newseum.

The young man, Jahid (anagram of Jihad by any chance?) then said something sort of fascinating - something about Jones having signed a petition which called the causes of the 911 attacks into question. Because as we know, only the CIA could have pulled them off. Say what? I felt the conversation suddenly going pear-shaped. Jahid started down the track of the 911 denier - it couldn’t have been “two Arab guys”, they couldn’t have done it with boxcutters (“my sister could have stopped them”), only CIA-trained operatives could have accomplished this mission, etc etc etc. To his credit, he sensed my profound unease with his chosen direction, and began to back off a little when I started to challenge him. “Just go to YouTube and watch ‘Zeitgeist’ and (I can’t remember the name of the other one); they’ll tell you everything you need to know to make an informed decision.” Hmm... Jahid then went on to talk about the fabrications associated with Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the sinking of the Lusitania...all events that were iron-clad in terms of the veracity of their telling at the time, but which seem to have been legitimately questioned and eroded in recent years. And would I put it past the CIA to have had some sort of involvement in the 911 attacks? Well, yes, actually. I DON’T think they had anything to do with the attacks, other than perhaps being one facet of the sheer incompetence of our government in the days preceeding the event.

Jahid didn’t help his case much by trying to bolster it with quotes from the Kung Fu Panda movie, and from the various Star Wars films. Still, this was an obviously intelligent guy who wasn’t just swallowing some yarn hook, line and sinker, but had thought about it and sought more information and reached certain conclusions. Perhaps because of the freshness of the events and my own proximity to them I was shocked, but not completely. And I’m surprising myself in harboring a desire to continue the conversation with Jahid, to talk this thing out with an open mind. Maybe we’ll both learn something.

The lasting image from this quick trip is a simple one: sunrise at the Lincoln Memorial. The steely repose of Lincoln, the massive solidity of the Memorial itself, and below, the city, the capital of the twentieth century, waking gently as the sun quickly climbed, like the endless line of planes taking off from National across the Potomac. The vastness of the vistas, the formality of the monuments and buildings. It conjures Rome, Mexico City, Buenos Aires... also though, it brings to mind Teotihuacan in Mexico, Fatehpur Sikri in India, and Pagan, on the banks of the Irrawaddy in Burma, all mighty in their day, all deserted now, but for the tourists.

Down

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:01:53 -0400

I was walking down the Bowery on Tuesday and was accosted by these fellows. A moment early they had been all sitting on the ground and were frankly looking a little menacing but for the fact that it was mid-afternoon and glorious. Had it been a nastier day, perhaps, but anything unworthy of a lamb seemed pretty out of the question on this particular afternoon. They seemed to be lining up for some sort of a handout, although the Bowery these days feels like the last place you’d actually go for one.

As soon as they saw the camera, they hopped to attention. Lots of banter - I guess my camera looks expensive enough and my Domke bag tattered enough that they took me to be a serious photojournalist or something. I was fascinated by what they said to me: “Do something with this”. Okay, they also wanted a couple of bucks. But their main concern was that their image end UP somewhere. “Make a billboard,” said the man in the middle, and he was eagerly supported by the man in the houndstooth jacket.

Make a billboard. Make me famous. Make me look as good as the youths I see everyday giant in the ads, who’re all posturing to look like tough guys on the street. Like me.

They cheered me up. It’s not that I was down, exactly, but it’s just so hard sometimes to photograph the familiar, and even though the Bowery and Chinatown and Little Italy (what’s left of it) are intense, visually rich places that are constantly changing, after 25 years of walking these streets and poking my camera at people and things it’s difficult to take a picture that you feel like you haven’t already taken. And it’s difficult to take a picture that you feel like you haven’t already seen - if not yours, then someone else’s.

Like this picture - I took essentially the same snap in Soweto, in 1986. A bunch of guys, younger than these ones, posturing and hamming and wanting me, through my camera, to make them “famous”.

Same attitudes, same stares, same yearning.

Growing

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:42:53 -0400

I got laid off 5 weeks ago. It wasn’t a huge surprise, and I’m not going to talk about it here. It is what it is. The upshot is that I’ve suddenly had an ocean of time on my hands, and given the recent expansion of the garden, that’s not such a bad thing.

I’ve never done much with my hands. Certainly, my entire professional life has been an exercise in abstraction. First, during the photography days, working with light – at least I worked in the darkroom then, so there was a tactile element, but given that it involved dredging my hands through chemicals for days on end, I can’t say I miss it. And then, of course, as an information architect on the web - I haven’t been able to actually touch any of my final products in years. They’re merely myriad configurations of magnetic charges in a multitude of servers in dark anonymous locations. I don’t know where my work lives, and this is the first time it’s even occurred to me to care. I’m not sure that I do. It’s all so disconnected.

I love making decisions in the garden. Should I take a chance and plant before the official last frost day (May 15 in these climes)? I did take the chance, which worked out okay - except that this year we got down within a couple of degrees of a frost 5 days AFTER the last day! So we had to go out and cover the tomato plants. And what the hell are we really supposed to do with the potato plants? Cover them with more soil - great. That’s what it says in the books, but cover what? Just the stalks? The leaves too?

The big challenge this season, so far at least, is the rain. It’s been a deluge - I think there have only been two rain free days in the whole of June so far, and it’s already the 19th. I’m learning just how important full sun is - the tomato plants are very small, and the sweet peas are delicious - but not sweet!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A little shout out: My garden is a direct result of having read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a fantastic expose of the morally bankrupt industrial food system. What I love about it is that he points to realistic solutions, though. It’s about as inspiring a book as I’ve ever read, a life changer.

New Fence

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:26:14 -0400

Crisp Sunday morning this past week. I drove down to Mount Kisco train station to pick up a day laborer for some major work on the expanding vegetable garden. This is how it works: you pull up slowly to a knot of men, and they all rush the car like starving wolves who’ve just spotted a juicy rack of lamb. Much jostling and shoving (pretty good-hearted), and it seems the one who gets a firm grasp on the passenger-side doorhandle first is the winner. Most of the people who do the picking-up are contractors in trucks. I was the guy in the Mini Cooper, and I think I compounded the general effect (that of being a bit of a ponce) by sticking my hand through the sunroof as I approached, with my index finger extended. “Hello chaps,” I think it said, “anyone care for a spot of work on my sprawling estate?”

In hops Jose Esteban (no last names please) from Honduras. He speaks little English, I speak pidgin Spanish. El Español de Paloma - the Spanish of a Dove. My own translation - very literal, but I like it. Jose is immediately friendly, and when it’s clear that I’m easygoing and happy to chat, he opens right up. It’s almost always like that with these guys - usually strong peasants who’ve made the horrific trip up from Latin America so they can prune some northern roses. I’ve had a few who’ve had university educations, which is a bit depressing, but mainly these are men of the land.

Jose was – well, he was just outstanding. I showed him the land, the fencing materials, the evil post-hole digging tool (have YOU ever dug a fence post hole? Pretty lethal work). He waved me off with a smile, indicated that he’d done this sort of thing before, and in a day-long voila, it was done. Finished and klaar, as they used to say in the old country. I took him back to the station, to disappear into the migrant mists once again with a world-class tip for his efforts. What a pleasure.

It’s incredible what a fence does for an otherwise familiar patch of earth. As we worked through the afternoon, laid down wooden growing frames and filled them with dirt, and the fence started to take shape, I found myself looking at the land behind the barn with new eyes. Two weeks ago it was a scrubby patch, unmown for years – maybe Duston’s wink at an imagined Appalachian childhood – unkempt and a little woolly. Then we mowed it, and now the veggie frames and the fence. Kate and Louai spreading humus, manure and topsoil, raking it out, instant black-earth Iowa. The sun began to really beat down, a mid-spring hammering to remind us what it’s capable of come July.

The new configuration of the place began to fire all sorts of evocative neurons in me - at one moment it was all about farms-I-have-known-in-my-life (precious few), and the emotions I associate with them. An African afternoon on the edge of someone’s scrabbly patch in Zululand. Even without any vegetables, and even as a space which had been delineated for the first time just 8 hours earlier, somehow this ancient scrap of land was beginning to ease itself into the idea of cultivation. I’m just romantic (and pretentious) enough to suddenly find myself connecting this with the potato terraces I visited with Anton and Chris Small in Peru 5 years ago (the highest recorded patch of cultivated land on earth, as it turns out). With innumerable campesinos and fellahin. With the Nepali women threshing grain next to a stone wall in the Himalayas on a similarly sunny afternoon some time back in my eternity.

This is just my second season in the garden - already the rituals are setting in. Rising early, checking the seedlings that I’ve had growing for a couple of months under lights in the basement, taking a cup of coffee outside and checking the sweetpeas, mesclun , spinach and carrots - the earliest crops planted. As the weeks progress more goes into the ground - potatoes, onions, cabbages and lettuces, chard, beets... on it goes. Mom even gave me some seeds from a South African pumpkin variety (“Boer van Niekerk”) - they grow big and creamy white on the outside - “harvest when 12kg”. That’s 26 pounds!

The attractions of doing this are too obvious to enumerate. If I were to distill it down to a single thought, though, it is that for this brief time I get to be the custodian and mediator of an infinitesmal piece of the relationship between the earth and the sky.

Deep breath

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:03:59 -0400

Damn, I know this picture so well. It’s probably my biggest “ooh, aah” picture. For obvious reasons. FIrst, it’s: Were you there? Were you scared? What did it sound like? How far away were you? And then: It’s so...phallic. Look at the blue sky. The light is amazing.

Sorry - was I just having your reactions for you?

It’s now almost six years since I “dropped everything”, following Anton’s instructions, and hopped on a plane for Boulder. He promised a great day of storm-chasing - and he should know, having driven about 50,000 miles the previous three summers in pursuit of tornados on the plains with our friend Carsten. For once in my life I listened to my brother and flew out. He and his girlfriend (now wife) Tracie picked me up in their battered white van, bristling with the latest high-tech radar systems...not. Actually, just an old MacBook and a cell phone, and a lot of balls.

So we drove, and looked at the sky a lot, and I had the ineffable pleasure of watching Anton firing on all cylinders. Sure enough, we steered in a direction that all the other chasers that day neglected, and hit pay dirt (they all did, eventually - for about a thousand miles down into the Texas panhandle, that day had incredible tornados. This just happened to be the first).

Standing next to the van on a dirt farm road, clumps of tumbleweed the size of VWs hurtling by from left to right, and then a few minutes later, the same clumps hurtling in the opposite direction. We were by that clump of trees directly on the lower edge of the funnel. Anton suggested that we hop back in the van because “something is going to happen”. So we raced to where the picture was taken, and stood out there watching as the cloud began to bulge down, and the earth began to spin up, and then then suddenly they were connected, and for 18 minutes we stood and watched and filmed, and I cursed a lot because I was pretty much pissing in my pants petrified. I am not brave.

Eventually the funnel disappeared stage right, into that nasty blackish-purple blodge. At which point Anton said “let’s go”; we piled back into the van - and drove straight into the murk. It started to hail, really, really hard. We debated the size of the hailstones. Golf ball sized? Tennis ball? Softball? Anton reached back, and grabbed a metal helmet and a stuff sack filled with balls! Like I said. He raced off and returned seconds later with a few prize specimens. We were a shade off baseball.

Why am I writing this anyway? It’s a pretty good story, I guess, and some sort of artifact of my having witnessed something, having existed in that place and that realm for even a moment. Exactly half my life ago, about a year before she died, a very dear friend of mine, Jenny Rubin, gave me a little card in the Japonais style, in which she’d written a favorite quote in her exquisite hand, in blue ink. It was from Absalom Absalom:

And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something--a scrap of paper--something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday
What does this have to do with a tornado in Minotare?

Somehow, just about everything.

60 hours

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:12:25 -0400

Last time I was in Mexico City was 13 years ago, with Duston. It was our first big trip together; you learn a lot about someone when you travel with them. We learned enough to know that we should keep at it for the rest of our lives.

When my birthday rolled around last week, we decided to head back to down there for the weekend.

I’m trying to think of something profound to say about it, but really it was all visceral, sensational. So why don’t you take a look at some snaps, and I’ll just shut up. And hey - consider going there. It’s not that far (depending where you are), but it’s a long, long way from home. What a place!