hoops

holga.

ruby shoes, take two

Tomorrow I hang up my wings and leave the road I've been traveling for the last four years, if you count the time I've been working this gig; or ten years, if you count the time I've spent in this place.

Within a week I'll be schlepping a U-Haul to Boulder, Colorado to start something entirely new in a place that's utterly familiar, and yet wholly changed.

Or maybe that's me.

Either way: I'm going home.



Related: ruby shoes, the first »

Come on-a my house.

speaking of Kansas (before the Twister hit)

This really would have been a lovely shot if I had had color film loaded.

Austin, TX
holga.

contained.

Port of Seattle.
holga.

feels like.

Sandwich, IL
holga.

Thanks Gapers Block »

rhymes with geometric

Freshly showered in Hell's Kitchen
holga.

landline

ORD, Terminal 3 (I think).

holga.

shuttered

Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco (1506–15), Spain
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

holga.

corn.

Grinnell, IA

holga.

another day another dollar

holga.

detach(ment)

holga.

the long red road

I subscribed to the current season at the Goodman because it promised the premiere of The Long Red Road, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I’m a Hoffman fan. Missing his Iago was one of the bigger disappointments of the last theatre season. I patiently endured Synecdoche, New York for Hoffman (and for Charlie Kaufman) because he gave up such a brilliant performance in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Hoffman’s performance in Charlie Wilson’s War drew solid lines around the cartoons of Tom Hanks’ and Julia Roberts’ performances. His Capote? Was Capote.

Hoffman’s directing was why I showed up yesterday at the matinee performance, but soon I found myself curled in the same aversive cringe that overcame me when I saw him play his over-amped meteorologist in Twister.

As a simple assemblage of parts, the play was a success. The stagecraft was sublime, disparate lives scattered across Western states somehow intertwined through the shared bits and pieces of any household: The front door. A bathroom.

The disappointment? A play that never lulled long enough in its steady rage -- fueled disparately by either alcohol or resentment -- to reveal the tender underbelly of any of our players; to give us a point of empathy from which to enlist in the brutality of a ride that ends in violation and death and conflagration.

Or as Mr. Hoo stated as we made our way out of the theater: “Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to give a sh*t about any of those f*ckers.”

True: Several audience members walked out in the first act, one loudly intoning “Garbage. This is garbage.” Many more never made it back after intermission.

I held on because I wanted to believe something more would unfold to make me care about these characters; to redeem them. In the end, just as our blonde saviour Annie learns through her fruitless love for a tired and dying alcoholic, there was no change, there was no transformation, all remained as it was from the beginning, driving down to its inevitable end, as if foretold in the first few scenes.

Perhaps it was just this inevitability that Mr. Hoffman was striving for, like the sodden, shaky dullness of the hangover that certainly follows the binge. Maybe he achieved his directive after all.

el is a sound of joy

El Is A Sound Of Joy, Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra »

emptying the cup

The long tail stretch of the Chicago winter hooks deep into the days of March and April that most folks know as Spring, and empties every last reserve of hope that the world might turn green again.

These days remind me of the teacup koan; of the emptying:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

Yes, Winter: We are empty now.

Please: May we have some Spring?

the backside of hell's kitchen

Stayed at Ink48 back in January. It's snugged into the backside of Hell's Kitchen along 11th Avenue, which is just a nudge too far off 9th Avenue -- that wonderful street of shops and restaurants -- to feel like you're still in Midtown, even.

But the rooms are massive, for Manhattan, and it has a lovely view of the Hudson.

The sky starts to open up as you near the hotel, walking along 48th towards 11th. The skyscrapers of Midtown are just a memory and the sun has more opportunity to seek out surfaces and shine them up, resplendent -- which you think would be a good thing, and your evolved brain that digs beauty says *yes,* but your animal brain that has taken safety in the canyons feels tiny and nervous and exposed.

Like a creature crawling out from under a rock after a hard rain.

big yellow taxi

Upper East Side. Holga.

then & now (midtown)

Sometime last Summer. (holga)


Day before yesterday. (shot by a colleague)

long tall drink of water

Resomation (a neologism meant to suggest rebirth) was first proposed for use in Europe as a method of disposing of cows infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The corpse is placed in a pressurized chamber. The vessel is then filled with water and potassium hydroxide, creating a highly alkaline solution, and heated to 330 degrees. After about three hours, all that's left are a soft, white calcium phosphate from bone and teeth and a light brown primordial soup of amino acids and peptides. Bodies buried underground decompose in the same way, albeit over many years and aided by microorganisms.

(...)

The brown liquid, because it's sterile, can go down the drain. "There's no genetic material in it at all; it's just basic organic materials," Sullivan assures. "You might get some people who say they want the fluid as well, but at the end of the day, it's best to send it to the water treatment plant so it ends up back on the land, as nature intended it to."

Resomation in New York Times 9th Annual Year in Ideas, Dec 2009.

Like Soylent Green: only wetter.

until such a time

2009 has officially become known around the 'hoo household as the year of death and disappointment -- I'm not at all sorry to see it go.

Welcome to the party, 2010. Let's try something new.