Mr. Khaitan

a found poem

colored slippers
car parts, and
bloodied flesh

his brother
his son

Mr. Khaitan paused

unlike many
he looked young
with only a few strands
of gray

he held up the cover
of the local paper

his son
and the other children

smiled from within small circles
that would fit in a locket


Found poem rules remain the same: edits only; nothing re-sequenced. Found in a piece that Damien Cave wrote for the New York Times on a bomb blast that recently went off in Iraq.

what’s that in girl-years?

Long before the dawn of calculators and inexpensive desktop computers, the grinding work of large problems had to be broken up into discrete, simple parts and done by hand. Where scads of numbers needed computing—for astronomical purposes at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, or to establish the metric system at the Bureau du Cadastre in Paris—such work was accomplished factory-style.

In his book When Computers Were Human, a history of the pre-machine era in computing, David Alan Grier quotes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times to capture the atmosphere of such workplaces: “a stern room with a deadly statistical clock in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid.” The most famous modern example of such work is probably Los Alamos, where scientists’ wives were recruited in the early stages to compute long math problems for the Manhattan Project.

***

In the history of computing, the humbler levels of scientific work were open, even welcoming, to women. Indeed, by the early twentieth century computing was thought of as women’s work and computers were assumed to be female. Respected mathematicians would blithely approximate the problem-solving horsepower of computing machines in “girl-years” and describe a unit of machine labor as equal to one “kilo-girl.”

David Skinner writing about David Alan Grier's book «When Computers Were Human» in The New Atlantis

beware of dog

It's Gaper's Block appreciation day. Beware of Dog was featured in Rearview on 15 August.

Thanks, guys.

veggin' out

Tonight’s Green Earth haul inspired a some balsamic braised fennel with halibut, and a tasty batch of beets and beet green salad which the darlin’ companion immediately pegged as “yuck”. (Important to note that the judgement was made without ever tasting the salad. Our man of the meat and potatoes also opted for fish & chips while I downed my halibut. Oh well: It’s quick, it’s cheap, and it keeps the peace.)

Big batch of kale to dispose of too – which means I'll be pulling out the Kale and White Bean soup recipe that got us through the last batch. (No yuck on that one -- the kielbasa eased the way.)

Beet and Beet Greens Salad adopted from Viana La Place’s Verdura

1 bunch of small beets of equal size, with fresh, leafy green tops
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped
Extra-virgin olive oil
Fresh lemon juice

Viana La Place wrote up a beautiful recipe with telling details and instructions on how to serve this salad in a lovely way – complete with lemon slices on a large platter. But I’m tired from all that beet boiling, so here’s a quick recap:

Boil a big pot of water. Salt it.

Drop in the beet greens for a quick parboil – before you do that be sure to strip out the stems. And wash them, of course. The beets too, while you’re at it.

Pull the beet greens out with tongs just as soon as they go limp. Drain in a colander.

Drop the unpeeled beets in the boiling water and simmer until tender – about 15 to 25 minutes, depending on their size. (This is when your husband walks into the kitchen and says: “Smells like dirt.” ‘Cause they do, a little bit, while they’re cooking, if they’re fresh. Or maybe I didn’t wash them well enough. But that’s cool: it’s boiling water anyway.)

When they’re tender (test them with a fork) drain, rinse under cold water, and peel. (At this point you can slip the peels off with your fingers -- they're slippery and ready to give. Of course, that'll leave your fingertips pink for a little while.)

Slice them the way you like them (I like wedges) and chop the greens a bit. Toss with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper and garlic to taste.

If you’re like me (ravenous omnivore) eat it right out the bowl. Otherwise serve it up nice, just like La Place would like, garnished with lemon slices.

neglect

I stumbled on a brilliant little half block of decay and decrepitude just off North Green Street over the weekend. All of these shots are from that little patch of the city (will be uploading a few more over the next few days) »

only in chicago

only in chicago
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

I love the way the Chicago Sun Times writes their headlines.

My favorite Sun Times headline ever was when Pope John Paul was still alive and he announced -- just in case folks had lost track -- that Catholicism was the one true faith. The Sun Times ran a headline in the upper left hand corner of the page -- alongside the masthead -- accompanied by a picture of the pope with his staff raised and his other arm lifted in blessing. Basically: both arms raised, and a single finger pointing straight up.

The headline read: "We're Number 1!"

the tip of the iceberg

Any work the caliber of a masterpiece carries a load of meaning of which its author is quite unaware.

James Bridie, the Scottish dramatist, used often to ask my opinion about his new plays. They usually seemed to me fascinating, witty, original and hard to understand. I would ask 'What d'you mean? What is it about?'

His invariable reply was 'How should I know? I only wrote the thing.'

At first I thought this was just an ironic joke. But gradually I came to see that it was profoundly true. Of course he knew in a limited sense what he had tried to say; but he knew also that, if the work were any good, his conscious intention was comparatively insignificant.

The important part of the work would have, without his conscious intention, often in spite of it, have slipped in 'between the lines.'

A masterpiece, he used also to say, is like an iceberg; ninety per cent of its meaning lies below the surface of the author's consciousness.

Tyrone Guthrie writing in his autobiography «A Life in the Theatre», published by McGraw-Hill in 1959.

you’ll never get away from me

When I was a kid, being a child of divorce had one advantage that set me apart from many of my peers: I had three sets of grandparents.

And as any kid knows, grandparents are for goodies.

Because of the particular mash-up of my family's breeding tendencies I can trace my heritage – and its peculiar influences on me -- to three inimitable communities: Sonoma County Catholics, Pacific Northwest Lutherans (with a sprinkling of lapsed Scots-Irish), and New York City Jewish.

My Grandpa Schufmann worked in the garment industry in New York, and I’m pretty sure my passion for textiles took root in the elaborate silk Parisian scarves that my stepmother received from him and wore, Rhoda style, through the 70s.

He also gave me Broadway.

Grandpa was a collector, and an avid Broadway attendee (who wasn’t in NYC in 40s and 50s?) and he saved every Playbill he ever received. After my grandmother died, he started the slow purge – he missed her terribly (“You have no better friend,” he told me when he was grieving, “than your spouse. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. No better friend.”) -- and I suspect at that point he knew he would be checking out soon.

During the purge he sent me some of those playbills. The covers read like a history of the American theatre: Anne Bancroft in the Miracle Worker, Ingrid Bergman as St. Joan, Dorothy Sarnoff and Yul Brynner in the King and I, Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind, and an ancient cover for Kizmet that I’m confident must have been drawn by Al Hirschfeld, but even the folks at Playbill.com can’t source its provenance (“our records don’t go back that far,” was their email reply).

There's also Ethel Merman in the premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy.

I think Grandpa S. would have dug Patti LaPone last night, turning it on in Gypsy at Ravinia. There was something raw and real about her performance. Some folks were grousing that her voice was weak in spots, but I didn’t hear any of that, probably because I don’t know her at full strength well enough to know when she’s tipping in the other direction.

I just know that she struck some kind of chord with her performance that ruined me. The way The World According to Garp ruined me to John Irving novels – the story, the tragic arc, the revelation were all too perfect, and all too horribly painful. It’s one of my favorite books ever, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to read Irving since. I can’t bear to go back there.

It’ll take me a while before I want to see musical theatre again. Already my diet was limited to Sondheim shows, and now he's like Irving to me. What I saw last night filled me up – it’s all I need for now.

Besides -- I don’t know how to process it or understand why it left me so deeply unsettled and so entirely satisfied.

So I’ll just give it time. I’m sure it’ll make more sense with time.

Because right now I'm a wreck.

(Here are some more write ups on the show from litwit and
little voice.)

surreal cross-selling

Things have gotten a little surreal for me over at Amazon since I checked in on the Tuscan Whole Milk reviews. (Which are now clocking in at 670, btw.)

Current recommendations include Prada shoes. Used textbooks. Men's watches. Project Runway miscellany.

Iceberg lettuce.

Not my usual fare.

balance + disorder

I was packing up to leave Los Angeles (after living there for about nine months) when the riots following the trial of the police offers who beat Rodney King broke out in 1992. The memories of that week are stuck in my head like one of those traumas that play out in slow motion while you’re living it. The whole week was like that. Smoke, fire, army tanks driving by under my window announcing: “stay in your homes; if you are on the street you will be shot”.

Strange days.

On the morning of day three of the riots a disturbing scene played itself out on TV. One of the local news shows was showing a helicopter aerial of the local highways and commenting – incessantly -- about how free they were of traffic congestion.

It was a beautiful shot, actually – almost meditative, like watching a fish tank.

They patched in an audio signal of another broadcaster who was roaming through the Crenshaw district – the neighborhood in South Central LA where most of the damage had been done (in equal parts by folks driving *into* the city from the outskirts, I should add. I saw many of them on their way out, loaded down with television sets and other big box booty).

While the Zen-like aerial shot of the highways continued to run on screen, cutting back periodically to the anchors in the studio, the fellow in the Crenshaw district talked about the difficult conditions in that neighborhood – how it was without water and electricity, how telephone service was cut off, and how many of the businesses were still smoldering.

He sounded terribly earnest and concerned about what was going on. And the folks in the studio sounded terribly earnest and concerned about what was going on.

And then our man on the ground said: “Excuse me a minute.”

There was an animated conversation off-mic – also very earnest, but hard to hear – and then he returned to the microphone, sounding exasperated now, and saying: “Sorry about that. A man just stopped me – his wife is having a baby – they can’t get her to the hospital and they can’t call for an ambulance – I don’t know what he thought I could do for him.”

My jaw dropped. Something strange surged up in my belly. It was bile.

The anchors back at the studio shrugged it off with a sort of “geez – how strange – like you could do anything for him” – one gal actually said, in one of those faux-joke voices: “what – did he think you were a doctor?!?!” – and then got back to being earnest and compassionate about the good people of the Crenshaw.

I started screaming incoherently at the TV. I don’t remember what I said – but what I was thinking was: Well, let’s see f*cker – you’re a newsman in LA – do you have a CELLPHONE on you? Let alone A BROADCAST SIGNAL?!?!?! Think MAYBE you could broadcast a location and get an ambulance dispatched to help this guy out?

Holy f*cking crap.

And all the while the free-flowing, almost poetic highways and byways of the LA highway system filled my screen.

That same strange feeling surged up in my belly when Katrina blew threw the Southern US last year, and the images and the stories started coming through on the wires.

So many people stranded, so many people in desperate straits, so many people needing help – and so many people DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT. (That would include me, safe in my home way up North.)

Seafood truck near Buras, LA • Copyright © 2006 Aric Mayer

So why am I dredging this up now? Well, there’s the anniversary of the event of course. And there’s also an extraordinary exhibition of photography that just opened in New Orleans, that captures the feeling I had that day in LA, watching the Zen-like stream of images on my set, while something so disturbing played itself out just off camera.

I’ve written about Aric Mayer’s images before – I’m a big fan, not only because Aric is a dear friend who’s company and far ranging conversations I never grow tired of – but also because his images of Katrina’s aftermath – which are breathtakingly beautiful – awaken that deep, disturbing feeling that something is not right here.

Aric tells the story true. And we need some more of that. Especially during days like these.

You can see many of the works that are hanging in New Orleans at Aric’s site, aricmayerstudios.com.

And if you’re going to be in New Orleans, you might want to stop by to the see the show.

Balance + Disorder:
A Response to Hurricane Katrina and the Photographic Landscape
Photographs by Aric Mayer
Gallery Bienvenu
518 Julia St
New Orleans, LA
August 5th-September 30th, 2006

rhymes with bitch

Sometime back, when Elaine Stritch appeared in an interview session at Steppenwolf's Traffic Series, a fawning fan in the audience stood up to remind her that they had met, that he was a big fan, that he had interviewed her in Detroit, yadda yadda yadda -- taking forever to get to his question -- and of course the thing that made it so funny was he kept getting her name wrong. She corrected him several times (which he failed to hear through his yammering) and then finally said: "It's STRITCH -- rhymes with BITCH."

Brought the house down.

Now I adore Ms Stritch (rhymes with bitch), so I feel a little uncharitable posting this video clip, shot the other week when litwit and I hit her dry run for the Carlyle -- but it's precious and it's true and it's just that she was tired after putting on long show, and her insulin dose was ebbing low.

And seeing her cranky as all get out just makes me love her more.

(Warning: It's dark and hard to see -- and there's another fawning fan in the wings -- and yeah, I was goof enough to think I could turn my camera sideways to shoot video and everything would come out all right in the end. It won't happen again.)

skills

Creativity is cheap. All you need do is concoct a stupid idea - that Venusians invented marshmallows, for instance - and you'll be creative. As for self-expression, you express yourself every time you break wind.

For this reason, no decent artist worries about originality. Shakespeare cribbed his plays from everyone from Plutarch to Marlowe; we remember Shakespeare, not for his originality, but for his craft. Raphael produced the most lovely paintings of 15th-century Florence, but not one of them was original - Raphael merely did what his teacher, Perugino, did, except that Raphael did it better.

Edward Ingram getting cranky and platonic in «Pop Idol Judges Understand Plato» in the Telegraph. (Many thanks to MGL @ (...) for the link.)

Discuss.

situational awareness

P1000952-departures
Originally uploaded by Tomasz Nowak.

Travelers should go about their plans confidently, while maintaining vigilance in their surroundings and exercising patience with screening and security officials.

From a 10 Aug 2006 Press Release from the Press Office of the US Department of Homeland Security


"Don't panic." ~Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A timeline of the day's events from the Telegraph »

water as commodity

"Whenever you flush a toilet, take a shower, drink a glass of water, someone is making money," he said, noting that the water stocks he tracks went up 10.65 percent in 2005, compared with a rise of about 3 percent in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.

Timothy M. Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, «There's Money in Thirst: Global Demand for Clean Water Attracts Companies Big and Small» in this morning's New York Times

affectionate regard

Yorktown, VA

tuscan whole milk: the reviews are in.

I was in Tuscany recently, and despite my sincerest efforts was unable to sight any Tuscan Wholes. Given the rarity of this creature, I find it hard to believe that anyone one has managed to domesticate them, let alone convince them to give milk.

Alexander Strommen "The Z" -- one of over 575 (at this writing) reviewers on Tuscan Whole Milk, in Amazon's new grocery channel.

It seems the folks at ytmnd.com are responsible.

(But they ain't got nothing on the Choka.)

bikini beach

This shot cracks me up, but I may be the only one. Certainly taught me a thing or two about netting views on Flickr -- include the word "bikini" and you're golden.

Yorktown, VA

dare to be dumb

In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks.

A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate.

Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.

«Weird Science: Why Editors Must Dare to be Dumb» by K.C. Cole writing in the «Columbia Journalism Review»

manderley

A found poem

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,’

Joan Fontaine says in a strange,
sing-songy tone.

‘For awhile I could not enter,
for the way was barred to me.

Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed
with supernatural powers
and passed like a spirit
through the barrier before me.’

But of course we see
what she is talking about
and it isn’t a dream at all

It’s a shifting picture of a dark and tangled wood

And we peer through the trees
at a black and jagged ruin
a Gothic scramble of turrets
and mullioned windows.

Michael Wood writing about David O. Selznick’s «Rebecca» in «The London Review of Books»

ex libris

home sweet home
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Okay, b1 – I’ll bite. Because I’m just a little bit of a book whore anyway.

A book that changed your life:
I don’t think that any one book has -- but knowing books and spending time with writers through their books -- has definitely shaped my life.

There is one book that was especially important -- not because of what it said but because of what I decided while I was reading it -- before I read this book I thought that to "like" a book I had to swallow it whole and agree with everything in it -- this particular book (some obscure title of feminist deconstructive criticism) -- made me realize that I didn't have to agree with everything a book said to take some good away from it. As with people, there's good and bad in a single book -- light and shadow -- and you can love a book without agreeing with everything in it.

Before that revelation hit me I worshipped books too much. I wanted them to be more than what they were, instead of just accepting them for what they are. (It took me another ten years to realize the same thing about people. Once that clicked life changed for the better.)

And books are like people, aren't they? We encounter them for odd random reasons, but sometimes that encounter -- either then or later -- seems strangely fated, entirely significant, and very important.

A passage from a book that was particularly important to me was lobbed my way by my father, just at the time that I -- as a stormy, gripe-y adolescent who didn't have enough cash to put herself through the private college she'd been accepted to -- needed to read it:

All education must be self-education.

Let him realize the truth of this, and no school will be a danger to him. … The man who goes into a school to educate himself and not to be educated will get somewhere. He should start out a master, master of such that he has, however little that may be. By being master of such as he has in the beginning it is likely he may later be master, after years of study, of much.

He should not enter the school with any preconceived ideas about his destiny. In fact he should be open and free. His aim should be to search deeply and work hard and let the outcome be what it may.

The best art the world has ever had is but the impress left by men who have thought less of making great art than of living full and completely with all their faculties in the enjoyment of full play. From these the result is inevitable.

From The Art Spirit by Robert Henri

That one passage has shaped my life from then until now. (The rest of the book is pretty dang good too, but that one passage was just what I needed right then. Thank you, Mr. Henri. And thanks, Dad.)

A book you’ve read more than once:
Does it count if I’ve never finished it? Ulysses. I’ve tried and tried again to get through the battered copy that I inherited from my grandfather with the inscription in his handwriting that reads: “Received on the Island of Guadalcanal, July 13, 1943”.

Recently I had a frightening experience when I opened it again, fresh home from Dublin, read the first chapter and understood the whole thing.

I shut it again, quickly, in a state that felt a little like terror.

Strangely, the only other book I’ve read more than once – outside a bunch of pulp when I was a kid that I couldn’t get enough of – is the Odyssey. I could read that book over and over again for the way it's told, alone. It's so rich and humane. I only just now realized the connection between these two books that haunt me – they’re the same story. (Sort of.) A journey and a homecoming.

A book that made you laugh:
I read David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day on the Channel Tunnel between Paris and London on a very quiet train car and had to squelch my laughter repeatedly for fear of coming across as a gauche American. Still it got away from me, in big obnoxious bursts.

Later, on the flight home, the woman who sat next to me (Swiss, trés chic and trés feminine -- at first glance I made up my mind that she was a blonde airhead) looked longingly at the book I was reading (Minotaur, about Sir Arthur Evans) and said “That looks good. I wish I brought a book.” I handed her Me Talk Pretty and she was off. The whole flight home she was squelching herself too. (It also led to a conversation in which I learned that she was a physicist on her way to an annual conference. Very interesting person with a whole lot of interesting things to say. That’ll teach me.)

She hadn’t yet finished when we touched down so of course I told her to keep the book. Her gratitude was genuine – she so didn’t want to let go of that book until she had finished it.

A book that made you cry:
Tracks. Big blubbering gasping sobs – that came out of nowhere. If you’ve read the book you know when and why I cried. If you haven’t read the book, and are in the mood for a good cry – and an adventure story about a gal crossing the Australian Outback alone on camelback -- I highly recommend it.

A book that you wish had been written and a book you wish had never been written:
I can’t summon the passion needed to answer these two questions. I’m pretty content with what’s out there, and pretty confident that if it comes to mind, someone will have written something about it.

Books you’re currently reading:
Several stacked on the bedside table right now:
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time by Edward Hall
Time and the Highland Maya by Barbara Tedlock

A book you’ve been meaning to read:
Ulysses. And Captive and Cousins – because I suspect it might lend some interesting insights in to the whole Maya captive thing, even though it’s about the Native Americans of North America. I’ve also been meaning to reading Gödel, Escher, Bach for something like 14 years. (It scares me a little.)

I tag litwit and anali (and opiliones [aka heatherlorin] and enyasi if they can squeeze it in). Lolabola, you game?

the golden touch

I'm not sure when it dawned on me that the Yorktown Motor Lodge -- the only available room within spitting distance of Gloucester, VA where Kathryn's burial took place -- referred to THE historic Yorktown -- of Schoolhouse Rock fame. (Sure the story's been recounted elsewhere -- but anywhere more impactful than Schoolhouse Rock? I think not.)

So we did the circuit -- a walk along the Riverfront, a trek through the battlegrounds, a short stint with revolutionary artillary under the command of a WWII vet. (A story in itself. I got video.)

And then coming back into DC (because I was brilliant enough to think flying into DC was a *good* idea. yikes.) we stopped by Mt Vernon -- mostly because Monticello was out of reach, and because neither one of us (me or my darlin' companion) had ever been.

George Washington has always struck me as an aloof guy -- I don't buy the cherry tree story, and there isn't a lot to go on outside of that and the wooden teeth. There's nothing more in his mythology to build a serious crush on, like there is for Jefferson and Lincoln. (You really don't want to get me started about those two brilliant hunks.) But tooling around his grounds lent a little more insight into the character of the father of our country.

It turns out that Wasington was a bit of a convservationist, which I didn't know, and insisted that when wood was required fallen trees should be harvested first -- because he felt the forests, by and large, had been over harvested. (In the 1700s already he had figured this out.)(Of course it was the slaves who did the harvesting, which introduces some distasteful issues. But this is meant to be a short post so we won't go there. For now.)

He also said something (or rather wrote something, to a friend of his) that was exactly what I needed to hear on what was yet another difficult series of days in which events outside my control were raining chaos and uncertainty all around me:

When I speak of a knowing farmer, I mean one who understands the best course of crops; how to plough, to sow, to mow, to hedge, to Ditch and above all, Midas like, one can convert everything he touches to manure.

There was evidence of that everywhere we looked at Mt Vernon -- even the "Necessary", or three seater outhouse, where human waste was collected in drawers that could be loaded into the compost pile along with all the other goodies from the stableyards.

I decided (because I had very little else to lean on just then) that I would take this message to heart, and consider that maybe the way to cultivate the scary things that visit us, uninvited, in the night (or via email, as the case may be) is to convert them to manure. Midas like.

Because shit makes things grow.

And the whole point of any of this is to grow, baby -- grow. (Because your turn to compost will come soon enough.)

there is a difference

But we may never understand what it is.

The Yorktown Motorlodge
Yorktown, Virginia

Not to be confused, under any circumstances, with the Duke of York Motor Inn.

the things you learn on flickr

Don't read enough?
Originally uploaded by hyfen.

An ad campaign that's made a recent appearance in Canada, according to hyfen.

Suzannelong and BLA1NE spotted it too.

your world is not my world

Cameraphone Shot
The Duke of York Motor Inn
Yorktown, Virginia

happenstance

two random events
(sandwiching resolute will)
being born, dying

the long goodbye

Roadtripping to Gloucester, VA to say goodbye to Kathryn. See you on Monday.

p.s. Merle Greene Robertson, the Grand Dame of Mayan studies, posted a very dear note about Kathryn on Mesoweb. The link is not a permalink, so I’ve pasted it in below too to keep it handy. As my sweetie said when I shared it with him: “Nice remembrance. And she was just like that, too.”

* * *

The sad and shocking news is that Kathryn Josserand passed away at Palenque on the evening of July 19th of what is reported to have been a massive brain hemorrhage while taking a shower before dinner. She was 64 years old, at the height of her illustrious career, way too young to have been taken away. As soon as the Mexican papers are finalized, Nick will take her to Gloucestor, Virginia, where she will be buried in the Hopkins family plot at Ware Episcopal Church.

Kathryn and Nick had been in Mexico for a month taking three students around for orientation and writing up some of the Chol material with the long-time friend and co-worker Ausencio "Chencho" Cruz, who is also a friend of everyone who has ever been to a Palenque Mesa Redonda, and my constant assistant during all of my work at Palenque.

Kathryn's part in the Mesas Redondas de Palenque was significant—from presenting papers, to the Spanish sessions given by Kathryn and Nick every afternoon in the town for the citizens of Palenque. How they loved this. It just shows one of the many ways that she gave of herself on her own time, just because she wanted to help others.

Kathryn had a Fulbright Fellowship to do six months of research in Guatemala. She and Nick were to leave for Antigua at the beginning of January where they would have a large house to be be headquarters for this study.

Kathryn will forever be remembered for her selfless giving of herself to others. The way she took over when I had two broken elbows and my husband Bob died at the same time, is friendship way beyond what could be expected of friendship. Nick told me that just a couple of weeks ago they went to Bob's grave in the Palenque cemetary to see if it was cared for. It was not, so they had more dirt filled in the plot, everything cleaned up and flowers planted. Just another example.

Then just a week ago on the way home from Uxmal, they stopped to see Willie Folan in Campeche, where he was in the final throes of writing a paper for the ICA conference in Seville, Spain. Instead of proceeding directly home to Palenque as was the plan, Kathryn spent several hours making Folan's text intelligible to the ordinary human. I could go on and on about her "giving to others."

The last time I saw Kathryn was at the Annual Texas meetings in Austin in March. My memories of her, however, will be of so many wonderful times we had together at Palenque, cooking Thanksgiving dinner for what must have been half of Palenque, getting together with Chencho putting Chol names on all of the trees and plants, and just sitting on the back patio of Na Chan-Bahlum with good friends having rum and coke and discussing everything about Palenque.

Merle's Corner, Mesoweb

forgotten america

When Spike interviews a forgotten American whose kid floated away in the water, he lets them raise up their poetry.

They’re able to express to him what they’re not able to express to anyone else.

Sheila Nevins, Executive Producer on Spike Lee’s new film «When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts» as quoted in this morning’s New York Times.

Four hours. Airs on HBO August 21st (the first two hours) and then wraps up August 22nd. No voiceover narration; just interviews with Orleanos who received these instructions while shooting:

On the set Mr. Lee asked all the questions from a typed list. (“You have to say the question in the answer,” he said to those he interviewed. “Don’t look at me, keep looking at the lenses.”)

There's also a free screening in New Orleans on August 16th.

everyone loves a parade

This is the kind of image that I usually throw out -- the light was low and I was shooting at the wrong speed without a flash -- so the results are a blur-o-rama.

But I was digging through some old pics last night, looking for images of Kathryn, and this one struck me as maybe, maybe worth dusting off.

Shot in small town in the Yucatan while visiting friends. We were pretty much the only Norteamericanos there.

whoa.

It was like, "Whoa, where did that come from?"

An anonymous source who was present in the Oval Office in March 2001 when George W. Bush told Sharon that he would "use force to protect Israel" (quoted in today's NYT).

I'm hoping against hope that it didn't come from a little island called Patmos.

nothing like a dame

Lots of things in life are beautiful, but brother,
There is one particular thing that is nothin' whatsoever
In any way, shape or form like any other.

There is nothin' like a dame.

Good medicine – and very much needed -- a night at Ravinia with Elaine Stritch as she ran through her new Carlyle show. It was rough, ragged, all rehearsal-like, and worth every dime. (And worth every suffering minute in that unmerciful heat.)

Hats f*ckin’ off. (As Elaine would – and did -- say.)

Although there were plenty of grumpypants in the house who wanted it to be more “polished” (as heard and reported in the ladies room by litwit, and observed in the disapproving couple sitting in front of us), maybe it was having the advantage of having seen her last Carlyle show, in one of the most perfect NYC evenings ever, and being able to project myself back to that cozy corner booth when she was close enough that I could see every character line on her beautifully weathered face.

I wouldn’t trade last night for all the spit and polish in the world – although I will be sorely tempted to go another round at the Carlyle when she finally settles in – if only so I can hear Elaine f*cking Stritch sing Woke Up This Morning from the Sopranos -- again.

And so I can wonder, and maybe even have a chance to ask her: What’s the alchemy? How do you do it? How does a girl become a dame?

Because it’s the one thing I really want to be when I grow up.

grief

they call it heartache
because it does; soft tissue
tender to the touch

una res

a found poem

the one thing
by which
the world was created

and with which one could
"perform miracles"

no ordinary alchemist
interested
in making gold

Newton aspired
to a theory of alchemy

more comprehensive

than even his laws
of gravity


Found in this morning's New York Times

email inbox

a found haiku

I have some bad news
[the one you loved][story here]
s/he did not survive

right now.

right now
would be a good time
for the bombs to stop

for the shells to let up
for the children to sleep

in peace.

right now
would be a good time
for the lacerations

(those still fed
by the warm drone
of a beating heart)

to slowly knit
themselves

together.

na balam

My husband and I were married by two anthropologists, a Mayan shaman, and Lisa Presley.

More about the Shaman and Lisa Presley some other time. Tonight I got the news that my dear anthropologist, and the godmother of my wedding, has died.

Kathryn Josserand was a Mayanist, linguist and epigrapher who taught at Florida State University. She was one of the chief authors of the authoritative Chol dictionary, an indigenous language of the Maya of Central America. She authored countless papers on the subject, and initiated dozens of students in the careful deconstruction – and construction – of Mayan glyphs.

She was brilliant, fiery, highly organized, and the biggest softie this side of the Foster's Freeze. She was Na Balam: The Jaguar. And a real dame.

My husband and I traveled with her and her husband to Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico countless times. We planned to travel with her again this Christmas, to see some remote Olmec and Zapotec sites.

Today I received an email from her husband Nick with the news that she suffered a massive brain hemorrhage while in the field at Palenque. As unexpected as her death was (she was in her mid-60s) it sounds as though it was a good death – sudden, painless, and well-timed. He wrote, in part:

She went out quickly and painlessly after a good day, feeling great. I thank God we were not in the US, because I was able to be with her from the moment I found her until we wrapped her in her shroud.

In the US I would have been kept in a waiting room, wondering what was going on. In Palenque they don't have the technology to keep the body alive after death; in the US she would have been put on "life" support even though there was no chance of recovery. And in Palenque everybody knew us and I got tremendous support.

The morning after, while I was in town sending out notices, friends came in and set up an altar on Kathryn's work desk, with flowers and candles to call in her soul.
***
On Tuesday we had a good day's work, and Kathryn was really happy with what she was getting done. In the late afternoon we went off to look up Moises Morales, whom we hadn't yet visited with. We had a nice long visit, and Kathryn related to him (again) her first trip to Palenque, on a break from her first fieldwork in Yucatan in 1965, with a girlfriend.

The night they were to leave, they were in the Cañada restaurant, and were talking about having to go catch the midnight train for Mérida. A local tour guide heard them and came over to tell them they didn't have to be there at midnight, since the train never came before 2 AM. They went out anyway, and he went to keep them company, and sat with them in the dark telling them about the stars and the Maya.

Years later, when we went back to work in Palenque, she realized this had been Moises Morales, who by then was a central figure in the Palenque Mesa Redonda circle, and who became a good friend of ours. Anyway, Moises was the first Palencano she ever had a long conversation with, and he was the last one.

Kathryn makes an appearance in New Yorker editor Peter Canby’s book The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya; but it’s late, and I can’t find my copy, and I’d much rather spill some tears into my pillow than look for it any longer.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get lucky. If I do, I’ll share a few lines here.

people get ready

My paternal grandfather took 10 years to die, and my grandmother nursed him all that while. At the end it was backbreaking work – in addition to a broken ankle that never properly healed, his love of martinis left him with liver disease which would periodically put him in the hospital for long periods of recovery after awful bouts when his system would flood with toxins.

In all those 10 years I never heard my grandmother complain about the work, even though the strain and pain the physical labor caused her (she has severe arthritis in her hands and shoulders) was substantial, and the exhaustion was profound.

I suspect that she thought her husband would live forever that way – and that she would be forever nursing him – and so on one occasion when he was checked into a nursing home for what the doctors prescribed as a prolonged convalescence, my grandmother got a wild hair and decided she would go to Norway.

Within the next few days.

It caused the family some consternation, of course, but I thought it was wonderful -- in large part because I think the impulse to travel is an important one and, when it crops up, must be obeyed – but also because I’d never seen her act out like that, and thought it should be encouraged.

But that’s not to say that I didn’t have some doubts about a 75 year old woman -- who had only traveled once internationally, and then to Japan (as part of a Shriner entourage in the 60s – but that’s a whole different story for a different time) – traveling all alone to a far away place. Fortunately she spoke the language: she was raised by a Norwegian born grandmother and by a mother who, although Chicago-born, preferred Norwegian even when I knew her in her final years.

Grama was leaving in a hurry, so I suggested that I could meet up with her one week into her trip, which would give me time to wrap up some work commitments. That, she said, would be just fine.

So I met her in Stavanger.

It was an extraordinary trip for many reasons, the most remarkable of which was the way that the foreign and yet familiar place triggered stories and songs and memories that she shared with me over the two weeks we looped the country by boat, plane, hydrofoil, car, and train – stories that I had never heard before and haven’t heard since. Stories that were born of her grandmother’s Norway and, surprisingly, stayed behind us when we left it.

There were two moments during the trip that stand in especially high relief. One is of a meal we shared in Oslo. We were early birders, sitting down to dinner at 7 in a city that doesn’t sit down to dinner until 10 during the summer months when the sun carves a huge elliptic out of the sky. It had been a great day and it continued to spill into stories over dinner, and we laughed and lingered long over coffee. (Coffee in Norway is one of those things I could never get enough of. The body of the brew is remarkable – I quizzed dozens of people about the coffee beans they were using – they all looked at me like I was nuts – until a new friend explained to me no, it wasn’t the coffee, it was the water. He had tried with Norwegian coffee and failed to recreate it anywhere else. It was “farské”. Fresh.) (And I'm pretty sure I spelled that wrong.)

She told me stories about her boyfriends (Grama was a beauty: she had many stories to tell.), about meeting my bompa, about the “change” that happened to him when he went away to work one summer in Alaska, with his father, and saw things he shouldn’t have seen. About growing up so poor that when the hot iron scorched her only dress in grade school -- with a big iron mark in the middle -- early in the school year, she was forced to wear it the rest of the school year just like that.

We spent a lot of our time in graveyards over the course of the trip, looking for family plots. She had a few clues to go on, but not much: the only cousin she knew of had passed away some time before. The week she spent in Stavanger without me she used to canvas the phone book – calling all the Ragës within a 50 mile radius, and asking if they were related to so-and-so who passed away who-knew-when.

One afternoon we stopped at an especially beautiful cemetery that was built into a steep hillside. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and the gravestones were decorated, as so many were in Norway, with fresh plantings of blooming flowers. (Frequently we would meet people in these graveyards, who were tending the flowers and shrubbery planted around the stones, the way they would their garden plot at home.)

We had packed a picnic lunch, so we sited a spot on the hilltop as our lunch spot, and headed that way.

Hiking up that hillside, walking through the headstones, scanning for Ragës, I was overcome with the feeling that this dear woman, who raised me in more ways than my own mother did, would die.

At first I tried to escape the feeling. It seemed inappropriate: it was a beautiful day and my grandmother, for all her infirmities, was remarkably strong and hale. It was my grandfather who was dying and, really, I should be thinking of him.

But I couldn’t do any of those things; the knowledge of my grandmother’s mortality was too overwhelming. And I suppose it was accompanied by the knowledge of all that is impermanent, and knowing that I would die too.

So I did what any good Norwegian would do: I said nothing. My grandmother – a tremendously garrulous woman – also said nothing. We hiked the hill in silence, and said only our “pleases” and “thank yous” when it came time to break out the picnic.

We sat largely in silence, eating our lunch, looking out over the sublime Norwegian countryside, and I did my best to hide the fact that I wanted to cry, listening to the refrain that circled through my head: “Remember this. Remember every detail.” It was so apparent, right then, that before too long she would be gone.

It turned out my grandmother was doing the very same thing.

We spoke of it later, in the hotel room, when the emotions had ebbed a bit and we could look back in detachment. She too had been overwhelmed by the very same thoughts at that very moment.

And then a couple years after that picnic lunch a friend of mine asked if my grandmother was available to appear in a regional commercial that she was shooting for a senior care facility; she asked me to appear along with her. (Of course we said yes: Grama was born for the silver screen and had missed her shot when she was younger - the closest she ever came was to work as an usherette in Seattle’s Musicbox Theatre, where she met my grandfather – who yes, was on a date with another woman).

It was a great little ad – I’ve only captured a small clip of it here – but it was edited by a fellow who produces for the Daily Show now, and he cut together a great story. The filming was interview style: The director asked her subjects about getting older. I watched from off-camera as my grama, when asked to share her experience, told the story of the hike up the hill in Norway, and wondering then: where had the time gone? It seemed like just yesterday she was 40, and now -- it’s almost all run out. Unfortunately (for me) my grandmother only appears briefly a few times in the ad. But it’s enough, knowing the story, to bring it all back.

My grandmother turns 87 on Monday. Time is having its way with her. She’s still stunningly beautiful and well preserved, but her memory is slipping, and she frequently finds herself in the kind of mental loops that the elderly slide into: her anxiety is more pronounced, the grievances she holds against those who have wronged her are amplified; the world is a smaller place.

Knowing that I would miss her last few years was the hardest part about deciding to leave Seattle for Chicago; our phone calls, in which I shout and she pretends to hear and then she tells me what she can about what she understands is happening in her life – are small comfort across great distance.

I miss her fiercely, and as more and more of her memory slips away, it becomes more and more difficult to connect with her. And although I know this is the way we die, the way age takes us by increments, it doesn’t make it any easier.

Here’s that clip. And yeah: I have no business posting it, but I stripped out all the brand elements, so let’s see how long it takes YouTube to crack down on me. Grama’s the gal with the silver hair talking about being 75.

During the interview, right after she said “I’m 75” she said “that’s OLD” -- but they cut out that part.




Video: Grama's Debut »

happy accident

This is my most "faved" shot on Flickr -- the Fave rate is 10%, with 39 faves to 409 views (at this writing). I shot it in low light on a moving train with no flash -- it was a total throwaway at the time. I was riding in an old Burlington Northern Santa Fe train car and was taken with the way the interior was designed and the colors that were used -- I wanted to capture it and take it away with me.

I almost didn't upload it, because of the blur.

This shot is a steady reminder to me that I don't know what I think I know -- I don't know what people will respond to, what they really care about, what really appeals to them -- not precisely.

It's always a crap shoot. Which makes it all the more magical when you throw something out there and it finds a home.

no quarter

I could go on at length about the hours and the quarters I poured into video arcades when I was a kid. That would probably get really boring really fast.

All I will say is: This shot makes me very, very happy.

krick? krack!

The Musical Door
Originally uploaded by doctorbob.

In Haiti, when someone has a story to tell, they shout out to the crowd: “Krick?” – and if the crowd wants to hear what the storyteller has to say they call back: “Krack!”

I’m a glutton for a good story. My favorite kind of story is the one that just appears – inline – walking with a friend from one place to the next; waiting for something, anything; sharing a drink; hanging out on the back patio.

When you tell me a story you tell me not just what happened, but what mattered to you when it all came about. And knowing what matters to you helps me understand the way you see the world you live in. And when it’s a good story, it makes me realize that you and I are not so different, friend. Which makes the world a little bit easier to live in.

This is one of those inline stories: doctorbob@flickr posted a shot of a lyrical green door in Dublin – he called it “The Musical Door” (which is just as good as calling out “Krick?”) I bit – others did too – my comment: “why so musical? does it squeak?” (Krack!). And he replied to the lot of us:

@david - thanks for your support :)
@jinmo - love your individuality in your images.
@suttonhoo, are you sitting comfortably?
@jennifer - then, let us begin:

This is the door to an old musical instrument shop in Dublin on one of my favourite streets, Capel Street.

Capel Street is a long Georgian street dating from the last years of the 17th century, the buildings of which have mostly 18th century facades, punctuated here and there by a Victorian pub or a modern office. Nothing is particularly out of place and nothing particularly changed from 250 years ago with the one exception that the street has taken a decidely downmarket air.

In the 18th century it was a fashionable parade with Dukes and Baronesses strolling along and purchasing lottery tickets - wealth was a given and the people inhabiting the street led lives unimaginable to the 'mere Irish' as they were known.

Along this street gentlemen in tailcoats pranced, ladies in plumed hats nodded and servants dashed at their masters whims. Meanwhile 5 miles in any direction from this spot people lived in apalling poverty and suffered some 8 famines in the lead up to the great one of 1845 when one million people died of starvation.

During the passage of the centuries this brilliant avenue began to drift from the raffishness of the lotteries, to gambling clubs and side street inns, gradually a middling crowd took over and the great pubs such as Slatterys appeared and provided a convivial pleasure for real working class Dubliners.

In between grocers, tailors and other merchants plied their wears only really losing ground as the suburbs spread outwards dragging with them the better class of customer in the early 20th century. The revolution, the resultant destruction of the city by British gunships and the catastrophe of the Civil War all played out within an asses roar of the street and pushed the wealth of the area further downwards.

In the 1930s the street was famous for habberdasheries and builders providers as well as furniture. The Emergency as the Second World War is known in Ireland killed off another layer of the small businesses and the street saw the beginnings of some new out of character buildings as planning and design were luxuries that Ireland could ill afford as emmigration sapped the life blood of the nation.

By the 70s the street was reduced to a busy stream of cheap furniture shops, one famous garden shop, an equally famous tailor and some less than salubrious pubs all snarled up in the beginnings of the angry love affair between Hibernia and the car.

Come the 80s stripped pine showrooms with myriad bunkbeds designed to house the baby boom of the early 70s became a common sight and then in the 80s and 90s something mad happened. Sex came to Ireland! Sex shops appeared, protests began, the church ranted, little old ladies railed, rosaries were proffered and yet the sex shops survived - albeit dyslexically - Uthopia (and perhaps they are).

But through it all from the 1920s onwards this little shop sold musical instruments. Fiddles to be loved and played and the soul of the street resided in that brass handle as musicians decades by decade came to view and buy lutes, guitars and all manner of melody makers.

The shop is closed now. That’s why I took the picture.

Photo credit, story credit, and full points to doctorbob.

push me pull you

It's a peculiar habit of merchants in the Chicagoland area to leave one of their double doors locked. Always. Almost predictably. Regardless of the season.

I'm sure it has something to do with keeping cold winter winds out, and cold Air Conditioned air in.

I'm also sure it violates some kind of fire code.

You would think this information would be enough to slow me down when exiting or entering a restaurant, a store -- the moment when I grab the door, expecting to swing it hard and wide, or barrel into it, using all my weight to move through.

It isn't. And I'm frequently disappointed to find that I've picked the locked door.

And have bruised myself again.

p.s. here's some happy news: this pic made the home page of the Chicagoist yesterday. woo hoo!

an eye for color

a found poem

in visual perception
it is necessary to recognize

that color deceives continually

one and the same color
evokes innumerable readings

the aim is to develop
(by trial and error)

an eye for color

seeing color action
feeling color relatedness

just as the knowledge
of acoustics

does not make one musical

what counts here
first and last
is vision

Seeing.

this way of searching
will lead to an awareness
of interdependence
with form and placement

of quantity
quality
and pronouncement

Cobbled together from the Introduction of the Josef Albers classic: Interaction of Color (with liberal editing)

cream me

peter's-ice-cream
Originally uploaded by lyrical.

I have tried them all as they came down the pike: dairy-free, fat-free, sugar-free; with tofu, yogurt, rice, whatever.

They always make me sad.

Teacher Linda Calhoun talking about foreign substances pretending to be ice cream.

I’m a fan of butterfat going way back. I swore off margarine early on because I just didn’t trust it. (And it turns out my instincts were spot on.)

It probably had something to do with growing up with an Irish grandfather who buttered the bread of every sandwich he ever ate and poured half and half over his breakfast cereal; a Norwegian grandmother whose own grandmother nursed her when she was ill with draughts of heavy cream (For the nutrients! Only she said that in Norwegian.); and a stepmother from Queens who got the whole food religion in the 70s, and tossed the latkes and matzoh brie of her childhood out the window in favor of tofu and sprouts and homemade granola. (Not entirely true: she still made the occasional potato pancake and cooked up a periodic mess of matzoh brie – and thank god she did, because the granola wasn’t so good.)

I became convinced that I had chosen well when I traveled in Norway and feasted on everything and anything swathed in butterfat -- fish chowders in heavy cream with dots of butter floating on the top, fresh salmon served in a rich cream sauce, the best melkesjokolade I’ve ever had in my life – and looked around me to see a nation full of fit, beautiful, skinny people.

It’s not the food, folks: it’s the portions.

And it’s the fat ass lifestyle that’ll make you or break you. (She says, having moved to Chicago and learned a thing or two about fat ass living her own fine self. Oy vey. Toto: we're not in Boulder anymore.)

So no more trash talk like this please:

The other new method for making super creamy ice cream was caught up last month in the global debate over genetically modified foods.

In June, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, applied to Britain’s Food Standards Agency for permission to use a new ingredient in its frozen desserts – a protein cloned form the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout.

From Creamy, Healthier Ice Cream? What’s the Catch? in today's New York Times

I’m sure it’s fine, I’m sure it’s not fishy, and I’m sure it’s all brilliantly scientific.

But, like Ms. Calhoun, it makes me sad.

TD4.6

it's the music, friend
(wishing you could hear these notes)
that conjures your ghost

lepidoptera dreams

I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.

Vladimir Nabokov in an interview in 1964, referring to his scientific passion for butterflies, and quoted today in a story about «The Nabokov Code», an exhibition in St. Petersburg that looks at Nabakov's work in the context of his entymological pursuits.

Should I take comfort -- or despair -- in the thought that even Nabokov wanted to be something else when he grew up?

For what's its worth -- according to the article -- Nabokov worked in his desired capacity at Harvard for awhile, reclassifying the Lycaeides genus, which earned him a mention in the 1951 «Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America».

(Here's a link to the St. Petersburg show -- but heaven knows I wasn't able to get it to load.)

bau-house

Messing around with a new flickr set of random typography shots, and stumbled across this accidental juxtaposition.

"Bau-" was shot at a poster show in Chicago; "House" was shot along Parnell Street in Dublin. (Yeah, I know it's misspelled. But come on -- that's kinda cool.)

shifting sands

Two cool unrelated stories about sand dunes in the paper this morning:

The dunes at Sand Mountain in Nevada sing a note of low C, two octaves below middle C. In the desert of Mar de Dunas in Chile, the dunes sing slightly higher, an F, while the sands of Ghord Lahmar in Morocco are higher yet, a G sharp.

Since at least the time of Marco Polo, desert travelers have heard the songs of the dunes, a loud — up to 115 decibels — deep hum that can last several minutes. ... While the songs are steady in frequency, the dunes do not have perfect pitch. At Sand Mountain, for example, dunes can sing slightly different notes at different times, from B to C sharp.

Secrets of the Singing Sand Dunes. Clickthrough to the article to hear the audio and find out what they figured out -- but hurry -- the link structure on both of these is thwarting the extended RSS link format -- this link will time out in a few days and only subscribers will be able to access it.

Had the scientists listened a little while longer, they may have discovered that the dunes were talking about the weather:

If that dune has been fixed in place since ancient times, you can know which way the wind blew back then, and by extension what the climate was like.

By analyzing the region of dunes known as the Nebraska Sand Hills, scientists at the University of Nebraska have determined that a major wind shift occurred on the Great Plains from 800 to 1,000 years ago. That shift, which brought dry air from the southwest, led to a prolonged drought that was much more severe than the Dust Bowl.

Shifting Sands and an Ancient Drought

Both bits were in today's New York Times (gotta love that Tuesday Science Times section).

two wheels good

Unlike the horse-drawn carriage, the bicycle was almost silent. It did not crush people to death, nor did it foul the streets with excrement. There were exaggerated complaints about irresponsible velocipedists, but there was also official support for the ‘feedless horse’. Special roads for cyclists were built in France and the United States.

Herlihy mentions the bike path that ran from Prospect Park to Coney Island (‘about 10,000 cyclists participated in the inaugural parade’ in 1885), but not the more spectacular aerial cycle path, opened in 1900, that ran at roof-height for more than nine miles between Los Angeles and Pasadena. Cyclists could ride four abreast on a surface of oregon hardwood, lit by arc lamps every 200 feet. At the halfway point, a bicycle elevator joined the track to the a café, a restaurant and a cascino. Mechanics with pumps and spare parts were positioned all along the track.

From Graham Robb's review of David Herlihy's «Bicycle: The History» in the London Review of Books

Herlihy wasn't the only one who missed that one -- I lived in South Pas and worked in Pasadena for awhile and never heard a word or spotted a remnant of the path Robb writes about. Reminds me of when they outlawed bicycles in Beijing. Where have all the bicycles gone? They were asked to leave.

remodel

delayed in detroit
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Traveling today. Lots of time to think about the little things I would do to make the world a more pleasant place if I had any pull. (I'm feeling cranky too, so watch out.)

Seat people in theatres the way Southwest seats planes – by zone. Middle folks in first. No more of this climbing over my knees 5 min before curtain sh*t.

Take a cue from Japan and activate the indicator light on the elevator as soon as the poor schlep wanting the lift pushes the button. (How courteous and kind is that?) I’m tired of wondering and guessing and then dashing for the door when it finally dings.

If you’re gonna ask me to take my shoes off at airport security, for god’s sake lay down one of those funky paper runners – and change it every day. Nothing icks me out like walking on that airport floor in my socks. And then climbing back into my shoes for a long stinky ride. Ew.

Redesign airplane armrests from the ground up -- replace them with something double-wide and soft and cushy and maybe with a bumper down the middle so I can share it with the big guy in the middle seat without all that unnecessary stranger on stranger arm touching. (More ick.)

Replace all the PA systems remotely associated with public transportation with modern audio components – start with the ones in the terminals and on those old MacDonald-Douglas aircraft – because WE CAN’T UNDERSTAND A WORD YOU’RE SAYING.

When you offer folks an option between two standby flights or one available flight on those quick check-in terminals, flash a warning that you’re flying them into an entirely different airport than you flew them out of. Some of us are just tired and want to get home and WON’T NOTICE that you’re booking us to Midway after we departed from O’Hare. (goddamit.)

not quite clear on the concept

You come here to live like people did in the Middle Ages, but in a four- or five-star hotel.

Rodolfo Lazarich Gener, an economist from Cádiz, quoted in Sunday’s NYT in a piece on the paradores in Spain -- a network of convents, castles and monasteries that were converted to hotels shortly before Franco blew through.

Whadya think the monks liked better: the prix fixe feed or the day spa?

(And whadya wanna bet that Rodolfo wouldn’t have a clue what was going on if someone threatened to “get medieval on his ass”?)

the unmentionables

I happen to be a pessimist. It’s my nature. I focus on what is UN-heroic and IG-noble in myself and am naturally suspicious of optimists and those who talk about the great things that we Americans are capable of.

I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to be an optimist – it’s a luxury I can’t afford. Pessimism doesn’t mean defeatism. It just means looking realistically at what we DO, instead of what we like to SAY we do.

And the nice part is, we pessimists are rarely disappointed. Sometimes we’re even pleasantly surprised.

Bruce Norris blogging about «The Unmentionables» as excerpted in «Backstage», Steppenwolf’s house rag.

Norris is three for three with me: Purple Heart, Pain and the Itch, and now The Unmentionables -- all produced at Steppenwolf – all brought it home. (But then I like things dark.)

As they age I suspect they’ll get even better, the way Mamet productions have improved over time, as folks figure out the cadence, music and delivery that makes it juuuuuuuuust right.

(Guess I better take back all those things I said about Steppenwolf, huh?)

fire plug

Last shot after a day of shooting on the near South Side with fellow flickrite p2wy.

Here's a mash up of the day's take aways -- p2 was shooting macro (mostly); I was shooting wide »

the excellence of every art

The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose.

Another one of the beautiful old Arts & Crafts buildings that line Printers Row in Chicago. (I'm not sure I understand what it means -- or agree -- but I'm digging that tilework.)

what we have done

a found poem

my mother has started cutting necks
my grandmother kneels beside her

between them is a pile of chicken heads

wall-eyed, astonished
the stunned crop of white feathers
against the pink wavy flesh
of fading combs

my oldest sister
snar[es] chickens
with a long wire legcatcher

[she] is god today

my second-oldest sister
retriev[es] chickens
from the headless places they have flown to

vivid sprays [of] blood

rising in fountains on the white stucco walls
bucking up against the trunks of cottonwoods
soak[ing] patches in the grass

the red-iron smell
strewn across the dewy green lawn

my grandmother
holds her hand around the chicken’s neck
tilting it like a wine bottle
she means to pour down to nothing

the water is boiling in tubs
the feathers come off in clumps

the smell is complex
water meets wool meets vinegar meets dirt
like wet fur, like bad feet

“Mmm, girls, just think,” she says: “fresh chicken.”

we walk the red wheelbarrow
to the dump ground
to bury the parts
metallic tinge of blood
still in my mouth

(do I have to?)

I must.

I must learn to know the taste
of what my hands have done

on my tongue



Thanks and apologies to Debra Marquary, who wrote the original really lovely piece (chock full of blood and manure) «Chores: An endless stream of tasks to keep you from having fun», just published in the July | August 2006 edition of Orion.

egyptian revivialismsionism

This batch is for my little brother (am I allowed to call you that after you’ve cleared 30, AMB?), who lobbed me an email after the Dawes post and said that, actually, he *would* like to hear more about that Egyptian Revivalism tour.

Problem is, I wish I had more to tell. We saw a smattering of buildings and a huge outcropping of mausoleums scattered around the city and in various cemeteries, the majority of which were built during a surge in interest in all things Egyptian between 1880 and the turn of the century.

There were two disturbing trends in evidence – both of them with the same roots – the diminishment of “paganism” overtime – making Egyptian iconography safe by throwing in a Judeo-Christian angel or two – and the curious emergence of Anglo-features on the figures that had faces – Reebie’s Seti and Schoenhofen’s Sphinx were the two most obvious examples that we came across.





I wish I knew more about 1) what awakened the interest in this round of development (there were some big archaeological finds -- although Tut wouldn't be uncovered for nearly half a century -- but was it also connected to the Spiritualism that thrived during this time?) and 2) whether the presence of this stuff in the city of Chicago had any influence on the thing that AMB’s working through in his thesis – SunRa’s whole crazy trip.

But I don’t. And it’s late. So no research tonight. Just the pictures I promised, and this little tidbit: There are two Seti statues flanking the front door of Reebie Moving and Storage (their ad slogan: "If Old King Tut were alive today, he'd store his things the Reebie way"). The base that they stand on is inscribed with actual hieroglyphs that read:

Protect your furniture • I work for all your reigns in sunshine and darkness forever • Behold the cargo swiftly sent up the Nile in the time of the Pharohs

So you see, there are some advantages to traveling in the company of Egyptologists.

So here you go, little bro: Here's your Egyptian Revivalism Architecture in Chicago Slideshow »

in Tyre

a found poem

In Tyre
     the dead wait

for the bombing to end


Front page photo caption of this morning's NYT

night & day

Monday, 6 PM



same spot, 9.30 PM (with a little bit of b1-66er blur action)

visual literacy

In a new memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Roger Angell recalls trips to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the 1930’s with his father, who also liked to join pickup games when middle-age American men still did that.

Today baseball is like the arts, with grown-ups mostly preferring not to break a sweat. “We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it,” Mr. Angell writes.

So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.

***

We have given it up, at a cost that, as Franklin might have put it, is beyond words. Mr. Angell goes on in his book to say that television and sports journalism have taught us all about the skills and salaries and private lives of professional ballplayers, on whom we now focus, instead of playing the game ourselves.

As a consequence, he writes, “we don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves much, either.”

Michael Kimmelman writing about «Teaching America to Draw», an exhibition at the Grolier Club, in « An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth» in Wednesday’s New York Times.

Kimmelman has a point, but I think too that he needs to spend a little time online to see the amateurism that’s flowering around him – on places like blogger and typepad and youtube and flickr. The tools have changed, but the impulse to “preserve a cherished sight, a memory” and tell a story remains the same.

Although I’m with him on his central point: it sucks that so few of us can draw – can really illustrate – any more. We’ve lost an important form of literacy – and there’s no reason to believe that we’ll be able to, or even attempt to, restore it.

the wild parakeets of hyde park

What you would see -- if I had actually hit the “record video” slider on my little PowerShot the way I thought I had -- what you’d be looking at here is lousy video of wild parakeets.

But instead what you get is a fraction of the first frame in which a goof stood, holding a camera over her head (a camera that was recording NOTHING) while she watched three wild parakeets moving through the tree, rustling the leaves and fluttering from branch to branch – there appeared to be two nests in there too. You’d also hear some stupid chatter – laughter, oohing, ahhing, “there he is!” sorts of things, so maybe it’s a good thing that I blew it with the video.

The video-of-wild-parakeets-that-wasn't was (not) recorded in Chicago’s Hyde Park -- where the parakeets live year round.

Have you ever spent a winter in Chicago? It’s no Telegraph Hill. These are birds with some serious character.