the visual perception of slants

Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia, taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone.

The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.

The New York Times synopsis of the research recounted in Social support and the perception of the geographical slant (PDF) by researchers Schnall, Harber, Stefanucci and Proffit of the University of Virginia.

So if Sisyphus had friends, he wouldn't have been so screwed. (Or at least he wouldn't have thought he was.)

besos

besos
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Have decided I'm officially a fan of the Hotel Lucia in Portland, Oregon, where they have 1) a pillow menu in each room (soft, medium, firm, extra firm, U-neck, body), along with 2) a spiritual menu (call down to the front desk for a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, the Bible, the Koran, the Tao de Ching, the Torah/first five books of Moses, or the Book of Scientology).

Where they also have a lovely little Thai place called Typhoon where a couple of slow moving old broads (that would be me -- pooped from a long week on the road -- and the spectacular Anniemcq -- wiped from a nasty nasty bug) can settle in for a long meal complete with floor show, provided by the inimitable Joe-Henry.

Also: Fish on Fire. For real. (Halibut.)

Plus Joe-Henry brought me not only a Valentine, but maybe the coolest one ever: punch out the paper bits and fold it just right and you have paper goal posts and football guaranteed to provide hours of amusement. Or at least half an hour on the swanky chaise lounge in the lobby.

Above photo of a nascently evil Dick Cheney in a bumpercar at the Ohio State Fair courtesy of David Hume Kennerly, whose images are sprinkled all over this place.

One more reason to love human retreats in the middle of grueling business weeks, and be reminded that it's this kind of road time -- the kind that brings far away friends close enough to touch -- that makes me not mind all this traveling so much.

Posting by cameraphone from the Hotel Lucia in Portland, OR.

of course.

This is the problem with cell phones
of course

They’re incompatible with passion.

Tortured whispers from the hallway
fail to transmit

The ear meant to receive
the hurried promise
of a kiss
remains cold

And this wail
My friend
Your wail

All distortion your cries funnel
through the phone
details scatter like beads broken
are lost in floorboards, beneath furniture

If I am to hear you I must tell you
Drop your voice
Go slow
Map out for me the betrayal
The discovery
Tell me again how you wonder
About your marriage
And if it is destroyed.

But I don’t.

I let the distortion drown me like a torrent
I try to catch the words
But like salt water they swallow me

(Lean your body against mine. I will try to sponge the grief that soaks through your skin but I know, I have been here, I know that the chemistry of grief will not permit osmosis. This is your child and I am here to catch her in my arms and bring her back to you. I am here to ask you, when the pain has ebbed after some time, many years maybe, and we stare at this strange creature, her weight heavy on your chest, I am here to ask you: How will you go on from here?)

have a seat, friend, andI'll put on the kettle

Yi-xing, my kitchen table.

Earlier today.

asking the ghost to dance

This is my M’bira. It was a Valentine’s Day gift a long long time ago, a collaboration between my ex-, who knew I wanted one, and our buddy TD4, who played and taught and shared African music (much in Boulder, CO, frequently elsewhere) and knew how to get one.

This one was made by T.W. Chigamba of Zimbabwe, which makes it a big deal.

Tom taught me to play. As a teacher he was as kind and as gentle and as quietly, wisely prodding as he was a friend. Like sunshine coaxes a bud to bloom, that’s how his friendship worked.



The day after his memorial service I ran into his partner over breakfast at Lucile’s. We hugged some, we cried. I had only met her the day before: the time that they had been together I’d been too busy and far away to visit their home. Recovering from my divorce; too broken up with memories.

She told me of a voicemail that I had left for Tom and of course her questions: “Who’s this D--?” And Tom, she told me, trying to tell her who I was, and maybe answering a question that she didn’t tell me she asked, summed it up as: “We loved the music together.”

My M’bira has sat quiet for some time now. I’ve tried, several times, since losing my teacher, to play, and every time it brings me to tears.

I know I need to take lessons again. The ghost needs to dance.



Today I took it down from the shelf where it sits mostly now, dusty and quiet. The light was nice in the kitchen (although cold. winter light.) and I was shooting odd things -- a seed pod that I’ll post soon; a teapot. I started to shoot the instrument. The light on the keys and the wood and the Fanta bottle caps that buzz when it sings.

And yeah, of course, I started to cry.

Because it seems it'll have its music from me, somehow.



p.s. Tom brought the instrument by shortly before the day we got the pu-erh.

good. morning.

good. morning.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Bookending a business meeting in San Francisco with a couple of good meals and conversations with dear friends; woke this morning steeping in an abundance of sizeable graces and huge gratitudes.

And the memory of some of the best Chinese food *ever* (Hunan Homes? Maybe House.) in Los Altos.

Posting by cameraphone from just outside San Francisco on HWY 101, heading South.

Update: Hunan Home's
4880 El Camino Real
Los Altos, CA 94022
(650) 965-8888

bacon brittle

That's right: Brittle. With bacon. And a pecan or two.

Courtesy of Ms. AnnieMcQ, who rhymes with "I love you."

You shouldn't have, doll. But I'm so glad you did.

view from the guest room

Spent the weekend with two of my favorite people in the world at their beautiful new digs in Richmond, Virginia, where we paid our respects to a few of the movers of the American revolution, and where I was reminded once again why it is that friends matter so much; how they remind of us of what's possible; how just by showing up and sharing their stories they give us the courage to reach farther and do it better.

Posting by cameraphone on the road to Chesapeake, VA.

Welcome to Monday.
Time to get back to work.

the breakfast king

the breakfast king
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Biscuits & gravy at Midnight.

Posting by cameraphone from The Breakfast King all night diner, Mississippi & Santa Fe, Denver, CO

grateful for...

Friends. Like sweet anniemcq, at whose sun-soaked table I took this shot way back in May when she put me up for a night and something about being in that laughter-filled, music-filled, love-filled house made me spill out all my troubles in a big blubbering mass (and yes I mean mass) which she oh so decorously mopped up while administering good solid advice to steer by that's held me all this good long while.

I'm grateful for *so* many friends who have provided moorings while I've been passing through some rough waters. Offering so much wisdom. So much compassion. So many brilliant insights. Thank you, dear friends. How did you all get to be so *smart*?

Family. Whom I never get to see enough and when I do see I want to see more. (A friend asked me about my trip in late August and I said: "Oh you know how it is when you see family -- it's always the best." And she laughed, saying: "No, D. It's not. Most people wouldn't say that.") My family are my favorite people in the world. They're my core. They keep me honest. I want to be like them when I grow up.

Work. I'm lucky to do what I love and in this last year it's taken me thousands of miles and placed me in close proximity to so many of the people I adore. It doesn't get much better than that.

The Margins. Which mean so much. Blogging. Flickring. Twittering. The people that you meet when you're walking down those streets. It's the Internet, I guess, that I'm expressing gratitude for, but it's more than that: it's people reaching out to people. Telling stories. Sharing their lives. Offering wisdom, encouragement, *recipes*, for the love of god. And creating -- making something new -- "See? I made a hat. Where there never was a hat before." [1] -- and throwing it out here to see what sticks.

I've made some dear friends online in this last couple of years, and I never would have guessed something like that would have been possible. It's like the story debaird told me, when he recounted to friends how he met up with p2wy and me for dinner when he passed through Chicago some time back: "Was it weird?" they wanted to know (debaird had only ever met us online); "Only in that it wasn't weird," he told them (although I'm paraphrasing, so db you set me right if I got that wrong).

Sure there are some odd birds online, but I haven't met them yet. Instead I've met you guys, for which this world is a richer and more miraculous place.

So thanks, y'all. I'm grateful for you.
And Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

[1] And thank you Kari, for placing that Sondheim quote (which I'm sure I've mangled) so prominently when you were blogging over at litwit, and reminding me to Make Something New every time I checked in.

(links to follow soon -- posting by cameraphone -- late -- good lord why am I not *asleep*?!)

Update: Linked.

playing hooky

Played hooky on my virus last night, which is a strange insidious thing, wearing me down a little, making me spacey and peppering my calves with hives (?!) but otherwise leaving me be. So yeah, I pretended to be fine and crossed town to have dinner with a friend who's in town delivering a paper at Northwestern over the weekend at what appears to be a fascinating conference on Visual Democracy. If I'm able to ignore my virus a little more today I'll head over that way again and try to catch a plenary or two.

But to my point: I was looking up a book title that came up with A.M. over dinner, and found this waiting for me at Amazon, in that helpful way Amazon has of recommending books just for you based on your past purchases (see: the recommendation I received when I was getting reamed by life) and although I'm not yet convinced that I'll buy their recommendation I was glad to browse through to the first poem of the book which summed up so well so many of the things that came up over that good bowl of cassoulet and the late night stroll that followed through Chicago's public art -- starting with the Dubuffet (which rhymes with cassoulet -- don't pretend you didn't notice), past the Picasso and Miro, the scattering of street people, the shared the cigarettes, Chagall's Mosaic across from the Inland Steel building, on to Calder's Flamingo stabile at Mies' Federal Plaza and then to Millennium Park for a taste of Today -- but back to my point. Which belonged to the evening, which is resident in this fragment from Mary Oliver's Messenger:

let me keep my mind on what matters
which is my work
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished

Or something very much like that.

say cheese.

I took this shot during an intensely lonely moment as I clambered around the tiny island of Agathonissi in the Dodecanese many years ago. (God that sounds rich and privileged, doesn't it? For what it's worth I was sailing on the cheap, in a trade for work.)

I was reminded of it recently while exchanging notes on goats and their cheese with a Flickr friend, but here's why I'm posting it: When I took it, with this grandmother's kind permission, the plastic bag bothered me; broke the pastoral perfection that I was hoping for. Now it's my favorite part of the image. Nearly a punctum. Not quite, but gives me hope that I'll get there some day.

And just down the hill on that tiny little island in the very moment this image was taken were two strangers who, within hours, I would share glances of recognition, and then over a week we would decide that yes, we'll know each other for a while, and now going on years I gratefully count them as friends I would never want to live with out.

Life's funny like that: Matters of great importance waiting for you just a little way down the hill.

karma come and getcha

Moving is one of those things, like showing up, that you do for friends. I’ve run out of fingers to count the times I’ve moved my own life from one point to another, and I’m nearly through the toes, which means I’ve learned from experience that moving is always better with a crowd.



Which is why when friends ask, I’m there. (Although I hesitate a little to broadcast this fact to the blogosphere. ;)

Moving karma always comes back around, and sometimes it comes back in curious ways. One of the curious objects that I love in my life is a coffeepot that came to me in a move.



It’s old school, from Ethiopia[1], with a rounded bottom so it can’t stand on its own – I set it in a little dish designed for mixing soy sauce with wasabi for sushi, and it sits, balanced just so, on the top of my Bompa’s bookshelves.



It was given to me by a dear friend whom I helped move once upon a time, who dug it out of a box that we were just about to seal up and said: “Here – you like these kinds of things – would you like to have it?” M is from Ethiopia, and she explained to me that she used it to make coffee – first they’d roast the beans, over the fire, and then they’d grind and boil them, by setting the pot in the coals.

“But won’t you need it?” I asked her, and she laughed. She’d been in the U.S. for several years at this point and she shook her head. “Not at all,” she said, “we use Mr. Coffee!”

So of course I said yes, please.
And thank you.


[1] Lest we forget, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by, legend tells it, a goat herder named Kaldi – which makes a coffeepot from Ethiopia just about as old school as you can get.

showing up

My maternal grandmother has one skill that I admire above all the others – even more than her knack for trading stocks online (profitably), canning produce and jams and jellies like nobody’s business, and raising a brood of seven kids in the 60s.

She knows how to show up.

Whenever there’s a crisis, whenever somebody goes down or someone they love goes down, she just shows up.

And does all the things that one should do when showing up: Chores, errands, all the little things that get thrown into suspended animation when life stops to accommodate something new. Something traumatic.

She did it when my Dad went down, and my parents have been divorced for nearly 35 years. Just showed up and stayed at the hotel, watching the grandkids, while we camped out at the hospital.

My dear friend Bonita is blogging at long last, and just after she saddled up her father was diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer. She’s documenting the progression and its impact in lucid, present prose.

Showing up. Getting it done.

This is how we love each other.

Mom, Dad and me »

starry night

Spending the weekend in Tahoe, here to see an old friend get married, in another one of those strange intersections where my past life collides with my present.

I lived here once before, just married, to a man I'm no longer married to, and who was, inadvertently, the reason I fell out of touch with (for a time) the friend whose vows I had the privilege to witness here last night.

But that's another story for another time.

The story for right now is how I met R while I was wrapping up high school and running drive-thru at McDonald's. He worked there too, in a kind of in-between state between H.S. and the next big thing. We got to know each other better the following year -- I wasn't working Mickey D's anymore, but I was still working, saving to somehow try to get my butt through college (pulled it off in the end), and he was playing Ultimate Frisbee with my boyfriend, J -- my first real I-think-this-is-it sweetie (it wasn't).

Our friendship was solidified the night the three of us were hanging out at his place and he put on an album (CD's were *just* coming out) with a "you're never going to get this" look in his eye and said "guess what this is." I listened close and took a swing: The soundtrack to Godzilla?

It was.

He looked at me differently after that (and pestered me a hundred times: "how did you know that? how did you KNOW that?!") and I looked at him differently too -- as odd as it might be for a 17 year old hippie chick to know something about Godzilla soundtracks, it's even odder to run into someone else who cares about those things.

Time passed, I headed up the hills to school in Boulder, and R continued to work at his in-between place, working a marriage into the mix to see if that might do the trick.

It didn't, and we both wound up getting our hearts broken around the same time. J did mine in, R's wife did his, and one night during all that R drove up to Boulder to do some hanging out.

We probably hit the Last American Diner for dinner and some bread pudding -- I don't remember that part of the night the way I remember the last part of the night, but I was pretty keen on their bread pudding so I expect I talked him into something like that.

It's the last part of the night that I remember best, like it was one of the best nights of my life, because it was.

I remember that we drove up Flagstaff Mountain, but we drove past the usual turning off spot, way way up and over the ridge. And into the darkness.

Finally we pulled off the road onto a little sidespur and got out. It was chilly, the way the mountains get at night in the Fall, and I was wearing my old jean jacket (before it was all that old) so I wasn't nearly warm enough.

R had the idea that we should lay down on the hood of the car, which was still hot from the ride up, and turned out to be just the thing to chase away the chill.

And, of course, it put us directly in line to see all those stars.

There was a Rocky Mountain ridge between us and the city, so the seeing in that night sky was tremendous. A big thick carpet of stars -- stars that aren't ever like anything else you try to describe them to be -- diamonds, points of light -- no, goddammit, they're STARS. With unknown worlds swirling around them. And there's nothing like lying on your back with something warm beneath you looking up at something that intimate and magnificent and vast.

The conversation was vast, too. We talked for much longer than the heat of the hood lasted, about all the things you talk about when you've just had your heart broken and you're still young enough to believe that the next time you love you'll love just as wildly, just as free, just as full of everything you have to give. You won't. But it's something to believe you might.

Still is.

I don't remember how we said goodnight that night. I suspect my shivering got to be too much and we had to pack it in.

I'm sure as we headed down the mountain I thought "what a wonderful night", but I suspect it didn't occur to me, for even just a moment, that I wouldn't have hundreds, even thousands, of rare and remarkable nights like this one.

Of course I haven't. There have been a few since then, but not nearly enough.

So R and I lost touch for awhile -- my fault entirely, and it would take a whole other post to explain how I so easily evaporate from the lives of the people who matter to me the most. It took the death of a friend to bring me back to him and to the brothers b1-, who I met through R, and who I lost touch with at the same time.

Not a trade I would have asked for, but the kind of thing that has to happen only once for you to realize how sparsely populated this planet is with rare and remarkable people. How hard it is to cling to that vastness, and how important it is to try.

good vibrations

Turns out the hippies were right about this one too:

A widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WIFI, mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed.

This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

…

Reviewing decades of such data, Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa G. Aspinwall, psychologists at the University of Utah, offer the infelicitous term “a mutually regulating psychobiological unit” to describe the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected unit.

To the degree that this occurs, [the doctors] argue, emotional closeness allows the biology of one person to influence that of the other.

From «Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing» in Tuesday’s New York Times.