My New Glass Eye

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.” -- Walker Evans

I have never owned a proper camera. I've had the occasional disposable camera and have taken photos with various cell phones once in a while. I hate having my picture taken because it always turns out horrible, and I've always felt that having a camera would keep me from paying attention to where I was and what I was doing because I'd be spending all of my time looking for things to take pictures of intead of actually being present where I was instead.

I always chose to enjoy other people's photos and to appreciate the artistry of their eye and observation. And to pride myself on my memory so I wouldn't need a bunch of photos to remember things (the memory part which is now very obviously going by the wayside).

I thought all of these things before I moved to San Francisco. And then all of a sudden I wanted a camera.

Even though day-to-day life in San Francisco can be dirty and grubby (but what city isn't?), this city is a magical place to live. From day one, my eye would catch a something that screamed out to me to take its picture. A doorway or detail in a beautifully painted Victorian home (they're all over the place). A flowering garden. The usual tourist sights. A person who attracted my interest (San Francisco is full of them, too). I kept feeling like I was missing out on capturing something interesting or beautiful, that I was missing a wonderful opportunity to play show-and-tell with myself and others.

It was like my eyes woke up finally, in a different way.

This added perception has been simmering inside me all the while, but when it came time to shell out several hundred dollars for a camera, the money always seemed to find other things to spend itself on.

And then last year I went to Venice. The Boy very kindly let me borrow his steadfast little Olympus, a point-and-shoot that took some decent photos but could not come near to capturing the overwhelmingly beautiful decadent, decaying glory of that city. So I did the best I could and took some snapshots, and when I came home and sorted through them all, felt the frustration of seeing that a lot of the photos I thought I had taken existed only in my mind and that I hadn't actually taken those photos at all.

So my New Year's goal was to get what I called a Big Girl camera. And bless those friends and bloggers who I pumped for information about what to kind of camera to buy. But in the end, the money I kept trying to save for my camera was getting eaten up by bills.

***

The Boy has come to the rescue again. Last week he bought a beautiful camera on a whim while walking down Chestnut Street (apparently guys indulge in/fall victim to Retail Therapy, too). For some reason he did not know about my camera yearnings and has generously given me this perfect Canon PowerShot S5 IS, which is even better than the Nikon I was considering. It's mostly mine to use as I wish, except for baseball days when he will take it to the Giants' stadium and use the super-duper zoom function to take photos of the pitchers on the mound.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

So I've been taking my camera with me everywhere. I cradle it to my chest on the train to and from work like it is a baby. I haven't taken as many photos yet as I thought I would because I am learning that serendipity doesn't just arise when you want it to. But those moments and places will come, and when they do, hopefully I will have the lens cap off in time to catch a little magic.

I know I have a lot to learn about this new desire, but I'm looking forward to the process and seeing what happens.

“Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.” -- Author Unknown

The first Big Girl photos are here on my flickr account. See what you think.

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

Julochka has promised to send a cargo ship to pick me up to bring me to see her in Denmark. I guess we'll bum around Copenhagen first, and then head out to the Galápagos Islands (this all makes sense if you read her post).

Without going into a lot of detail, julochka has the inside track with sailors, so I feel confident that I can get a lift soon.


I stopped by the Pirate Supply Shop at 826 Valencia to get some supplies, in case we run into pirates on the way back. People don't believe me when I say that there's a Pirate Supply Shop in San Francisco, but there is. (Even David Byrne has said that this is "one of the top five pirate stores" he's been to lately.)


Sorry for the blurry photos. You'd have thought I took these photos looking through the viewfinder with my glass eye or that I was holding the camera with my hook instead of my sword hand.

Yes, this is a silly post. I admit it.

But it's Free Friday Eve, so I'm allowed. Har!

***

ps.: If you ever want to read some cool books about what life at sea was really like, try Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail by Stephen Brown, or Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age by Marcus Rediker. You can read about Anne Bonny or Mary Read: women pirates, yeah! No joke... pirates were equal opportunity employers. And these ladies were not the Keira Knightley fake pirate types either. Read the book and you'll see.

pss.: The "Have You Got Scurvy?" sign is just one of the many informative, absurd and hilarious signs you'll see at 826 Valencia. In addition to being a kick ass pirate supply store, 826 Valencia is a well-known writing workshop, dedicated to helping kids aged 6-18 develop their skills as writers. They're also the publisher of the awesome new book of kids' letters to President Obama called Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country.

psss.: Photo of Anne Bonny from wikipedia.

Seedling

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. ~ Welsh Proverb

***

I just read the most wonderful post by someone I absolutely adore, the multi-talented and passionately expressive Gypsy Girl.

Her beautiful photo of sunflowers (she is one of my photography-inspirational cheerleading angels), the lovely poem and her personal fairy tale are something I think you'll enjoy. And make you think about what kind of seed you might be.

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Babies and seeds and renewal and creating...all things on my mind lately.

Give the Gypsy Girl a visit here.

***

Gypsy Girl's post reminded me of some photos I took last week at the Chihuly exhibit that is currently on display at the deYoung Museum. These magnificent works of glass, vibrant exotic gardens of shapes and color, all lovingly and painstakingly grown from grains of sand birthed in fire...if you can make it to see these works, you will be astonished by their incredible beauty.

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More eye candy is here.

This is a video profiling the artist and his work:

The Beauty of Impermanance

Or is it the other way around? Do we think things are more beautiful when they are bound to come to an end?


Is there a way not to mourn the passing of one thing while transitioning into the next?

***

A few years ago, I went to see a group of Tibetan monks who were traveling through the US to raise money for their expatriated monastery in India. They spent days creating a sand mandala in the back of a local bookstore near my home.

The Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala is an exercise in creating a beautiful work of art that will be intentionally destroyed at its completion. It expresses the transitory nature of all life.

These monks spent hours and days on their knees bending over a large platform, chanting and filling intricate patterns on the giant wooden surface with tiny amounts of neon-colored sand. Because the process was so intensive, and the mandala so large, you could come by at almost any time and sit and watch them work.

The sound of their deep voices chanting, the intermittent clanging of bells and chimes, and the smell of incense created an otherwordly, yet very comforting, environment.

And then one night, the monks decided to teach a sand painting class for us. Each of us had our own little wooden board, a brass tool shaped like a long thin ice cream cone, and bowls of the finest sand imaginable, in the colors of a new box of Crayola crayons.

One older monk spoke enough English to instruct us in our task. We were supposed to draw a picture in pencil on our board as a guideline of where to put the sand. I cannot draw so one of the younger monks, Jamba, sat beside me to help me. Jamba was the size of a linebacker on a college football team. He wore his yellow and red robes like a lumbering boy in sweat pants and tee shirt. He had a fun, easy crooked smile and he smiled a lot. He spoke almost no English and of course I do not speak Tibetan.

I was just so excited to be there and learn to paint with sand that I could not even think of what to draw. So Jamba suggested a lotus and I agreed.

He quickly sketched a blooming lotus on my wooden board.

Then the monks demonstrated how to fill our brass cones with sand and to tip them ever so slightly and gently so that a thin trickle of bright flowing sand would come from the end of the cone like a continuous thread and that is how we would color in our drawings. Eagerly, I chose a color and filled my cone.

I tipped my cone at a fraction of an angle and a giant blob of colored sand fell onto my board. This was going to be harder than it looked. But somehow everyone else was able to do it. What was wrong with me?

I tried it again. Another blob. My lotus was not getting off to a very good start.

Finally Jamba could see that I was not doing very well. He would draw a little bit, and then hand the cone to me and watch me make a mess. And then he would take the cone back and draw a little more, or change the color of the sand.

After a while it became evident that I was not going to be able to paint my own lotus and that he would make one for me. That is when the artist took over and I just watched him work in silent amazement. He painted a full pink lotus blooming from a cluster of green leaves, floating in a sea of blue sky. With the most intricate precision he highlighted the tips of my lotus petals with almost imperceptible white veins and deepened the base of the flower with a red heart. He painted wispy puffs of clouds in my blue sand sky and as a final touch, he added a bee to my beautiful flower. The bee made me laugh out loud with delight. It was like a writer with a feathered pen adding a flourish to his manuscript.

At the end of the class, I had the prettiest lotus. The thought of sweeping it away crushed me. How could I destroy something that was made just for me? Jamba took us out to the back of the shop and each of us gingerly followed, carrying our sand paintings as if they were made of the finest blown glass.

Instead of destroying our work, he had a can of aerosol fixative. He was going to spray our sand paintings so we could take them home.

I asked Jamba if that didn't go against the whole idea of a sand mandala in the first place. They are created in order to be destroyed.

Jamba smiled and laughed and said that they only use the spray for the Americans. Because we never want things to come to an end.

He was right.

I put my sand painting in a place of honor in my home where I could see it all the time. The bee was my favorite part. Just looking at the bee and remembering how the bee came to be (!) in seconds with such festivity made me smile. But little by little the painting started to get dusty, and what could I do? I could not clean it. It was so fragile. Bits of sand started to flake off of it and I worried about the further decay of my painting. Pretty soon it was falling apart and after a while I had no choice but to throw it away.

I realized I had held onto it too long. My memory of the painting was as it was in its final stage of decay, not in its colorful glory as Jamba had laughingly painted it for me, and that made me wistful.

Now in my mind's eye, I try to see the painting as it was when it was new, and more and more I realize that is how I should try to remember lots of things, in their full beauty and in the moment of creation.

***
This is how a mandala is painted, if you are interested.

***

And because this relates to the lotus, the bee and something else I've been thinking about, a quote from a book I have not read in many years, but should read again:

"When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet, this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now. For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency." ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, A Gift from the Sea

***

Beautiful photo by readerwalker.

My Dad Is SO Not Joe the Plumber

Some of you guys have really been so kind and complimentary lately about my writing. Thank you! And I did write some comments back about writing about what you know and writing from the heart and writing often because the more you write, the better you get...

And all that's true and I totally believe it. But the real deal about the history of my writing efforts became clearer to me tonight when I called my parents to say a quick hello. They were both hysterical on the phone and had a hard time talking to me.

They were laughing.

They had found a box of old papers, cartoons and photographs of my sister and me. Apparently, the old papers and cartoons were works that I had created, basically skewering one family member or another. So the truth about my love of writing really stems from me making fun of my family, and I must have done it so well that some pieces are pretty damn timeless, at least as far as my mom and dad are concerned.

What I learned from re-reading the story below explains why: 1. I truly appreciate a guy who knows his way around a toolbox, 2. where I learned to swear like a sailor, and 3. that my parents are totally cool--especially my dad-- in that they will let me go all David Sedaris on them publicly and tell humiliating stories about our family when I feel like it. (Tonight I told my dad that this family tale would make him famous and he was all for it.)

I wrote this little story when I was either a freshman or sophomore in college. I have only edited it a tiny bit to protect one innocent (my sister, and also because you won't be able to pronounce her name). I probably shouldn't call this a story because it's all true, every last word of it. You can even call my mom or dad to check... if they've stopped laughing.

ps.: Neither one of these guys are my dad.

***

Water Music

I believe that everyone has an area of expertise, a subject or hobby in which they excel above the average Joe. And then there are the instances where it’s just better to call in a professional. Take plumbing, for example. If our suburban ranch-style house could talk, I’m sure it would have pleaded mercy with my father on many occasions. My mother tried to intercede on the house’s behalf, but my father was always steadfast in his assessment of the home repair job to be done. “We don’t need to hire anyone. I can fix it myself.”

I grew up in a house where you had to explain the variety of toilet handle positions to newly arrived guests, lest they become embroiled in an embarrassing bathroom predicament by trying to flush the toilet by pressing the handle down (a situation normal to most homes) instead of the more exotic upward flush movement common only to toilets in our house. Our interest in our guests’ bathroom habits probably seemed strange and out of place at first, but I’m sure they were grateful for the advance information once they were on their own in the lavatory.

Although we didn’t live anywhere near a bayou, our house’s windows steamed every winter from the small lake that accumulated under the floors with each rain. My sister and I whiled away the evening hours drawing amusing faces, alphabets, and tic-tac-toe games in the condensation on the bay window in the living room. We didn’t need to draw the drapes in the winter at our house; our family was cleverly concealed by the inner fog that bloomed from beneath our floorboards.

A slight downside to the underground lake was that the moisture warped our front doors, making them very hard to close, and each year was a little worse than the previous one. It got to the point where it was easier to let guests in through the garage rather than slam the door with the force required to propel a cannonball, and that the slam made almost the same noise as that aforementioned cannonball. The booming crashes (it always took several tries before the door stayed shut) became so horribly embarassing one year that my father ended up tying the door handles together (from the inside, of course) with a strong piece of rope. At first, I had delusions of knife-wielding attackers sawing their way into our domicile through the one-inch gap between the doors, but as the weeks passed, I realized the attackers probably felt sorry for us and I slept much more soundly.

One morning I awakened to the sound of a very long, very loud shower being taken in the bathroom next to my room. Which was kind of strange in that no one ever took a shower in that particular bathroom (it had nothing to do with plumbing anomalies in this instance). The water was absolutely pelting whoever it was hitting, and after a moment, I heard other noises besides the water: someone running, and muffled voices with an hysterical edge. Someone was crying. I should have stayed in bed, but then I would have missed the only geyser I know of in our neighborhood.

I stood in the doorway of the bathroom, and watched in gap-jawed amazement as an eruption of hot, steamy water from one of the sinks was smacking the ceiling with surprising intensity. My sister was perched on top of the counter, trying to stem the geyser with a pile of sodden towels. Her hair was plastered around her face in clumps and her eye makeup looked like Tammy Faye Baker’s Great Lash mascara on a particularly tearful day. My sister’s school outfit clung to her teenage body like Saran Wrap. She was crying. “Dad, I’m going to be late. They [the school administrators] are going to send me to Broadway.” (An explanation: My sister suffers from C.T.S., otherwise known as Chronic Tardiness Syndrome. Because of her condition, she was always on the verge of being sent to our high school’s version of a correctional facility. The mere mention of Broadway struck terror into the hearts and minds of kids and parents alike; therefore, my sister got a ride to school from my father every morning. This morning, however, she was definitely going to miss first period.)

Before I could comprehend exactly what was happening, an ominous thud crashed behind me. I whirled around to see my father, having just run in from the garage, wearing soggy flannel pajama pants so heavy with water that he was in grave danger of exposing his private parts to his children. His sopping rust-colored suede booties had left bright footprints on the beige carpet in the hallway, and his glasses were fogged up like pieces of Lalique glass. His expression was tragically frantic. He was holding a hammer.

I got out of his way.

My father dashed under the sink with the hammer, striking the frozen knobs under the porcelain bowl in an attempt to shut off the source of our newest attraction. The knobs didn’t budge. (We now know that you’re supposed to turn those knobs once in a while to keep them from freezing up.) My mother stood in the door to her bedroom, mirroring my expression on her face. She knew how to handle certain people (namely my father) in crisis situations. In the most restrained voice she could muster, Mom asked, “Don’t you think we should call a plumber? I bet Frank knows what to do.”

The fury from under the sink was palpable. “We don’t need a plumber!” Dad raged. (If this wasn’t an instance for a professional, then I am at a loss to ever think when a more appropriate time would be.) “These goddamn knobs are frozen! Son of a bitch!” With lightning speed, my father dashed back down the hall to the garage. My mother made a run for the phone, and called Frank the plumber anyway. My sister, frightened that she would never be allowed to leave her scalding perch, looked at me with enormous eyes. I went back to my room and shut the door, where I immediately burst into silent convulsive laughter (any giggle from me at that moment might have been my last). When I felt I could return to the scene, I put on my straightest face and reopened the door.

Dad had run back from the garage and into the fray. “Where’s my fucking hammer?!” he demanded of the gods. “Where is it?! Goddamn it!” My mother replied evenly, but with a tinge of iciness, “Sid, the hammer is in your hand.” Wild-eyed, my father looked confusedly at the hand tool he was clutching so tightly. His crazed glare softened and he seemed to understand English once again. My mother quietly repeated the instructions she had received over the phone, and like a somnambulist, my father glided into the garage, turning off the hot water heater as he was told. The geyser quickly stopped. The house was very silent, except for the sound of water dripping from the lip of the sink onto the three inches of standing water on the floor. My mother opened one of the bathroom drawers. My father’s watch, wallet, and other odds and ends were suspended in the miniature pool like vegetables in aspic. She closed the drawer again without comment.

My father reappeared from the kitchen holding a turkey baster. With that same sleepwalking gait, he moved silently into the bathroom and sat on the floor-cum-wading pool, mindfully sucking water into the turkey baster and squirting it into the bathtub. This was the scariest thing we had yet seen this morning; it appeared that his mind had completely snapped. My sister, my mother, and I looked at each other with furtive glances. My mother spoke again, with compassion, but also as if she was approaching a mad dog. “Sid, why don’t you get dressed for work? Your youngest daughter has to get to school. Don’t worry about the water; Julie and I will take care of it.”

He looked up at her like a three-year old who had been given a cookie. “Okay,” he said placidly. He dressed, and took my damp-haired, re-outfitted sister to school. After a few minutes, the shock wore off, and doubled over in laughter, my mother and I got down to the business of disaster recovery, minus the turkey baster.

***

I think this story might also explain where I got my sense of humor.

Now don't forget to turn those knobs under the sink! It's very important! Otherwise your children might write embarrassing stories about you someday and then put them on the internet for their own amusement.