He Knew All The Words

New Yorkers have a lot of things we say — you know, all the clichés and catch-phrases, fughettaboudit, grab-a-slice, bagel-and-a-schmeah, etc. I love and embrace them all, except one, which seems to me to be a little self-satisfied and smug and therefore should be far beneath us, and more appropriate for a prissy little town like San Francisco. The saying is: “Only in New York!” But you know, we do see a few things that the rest of America doesn’t see. And the picture above really wouldn’t be seen very often anywhere outside of Los Angeles or New York. And it’s the kind of thing we see on a daily basis, which is why I love that Evan sent me this picture (he sent it with a one-sentence note: “And I got the part, too!” Heh.)

Viagra is aggressively marketed. Television, radio, and the internet beam the spots to every corner of our land. Which, when you think about it, is really strange. I mean, only a very small percentage of the population needs this product. So with all the focus that ad agencies put on targeted marketing, why are we all inundated with this product’s sales pitch? Because fear of aging is one of the biggest motivating factors in American culture. And of course lying right under that layer of this onion’s skin is fear of death. Anything that can help us put that off — or just help us pretend to — is welcomed into our homes with a kind of panicked glee.

Try this wrinkle cream, use this hair dye, take this pill and watch youth flow back through the arteries that lead to your dick. Fear of aging has been a motivating factor for men and women since Adam and Eve first retired from The Garden, so why stop now. With that in mind here is a pair of short poems by Jack Gilbert, the first from 1962 and the second from 20 years later. We see the simple girding for a distant future death change into a present tense realization of age:

Between Poems

A lady asked me
what poets do
between poems.
Between passions
and visions. I said
that between poems
I provided for death.
She meant as to jobs
and commonly.
Commonly, I provide
against my death,
which comes on.
And give thanks
for the women I have
been privileged to
in extreme.

More Than Friends

I was walking through the harvest fields
tonight and got thinking about age.
Began wondering if my balance was gone.
So there I was out in the starlight
on one foot, swaying, and cheating.

–Jack Gilbert, Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982

This is the fourth in the Favorite Picture Project series. The entire series can be seen here.

At the beginning of 2009 London received a two-foot covering of snow. In the middle of Summer 2009 Jennifer Whitehead sent me this picture. And she saved me the task of writing about this one. In her email she writes:

I keep thinking about Snow Day. Even though it’s the middle of summer and sometimes it’s actually quite hot and sunny, I suddenly remember the brilliance of Snow Day.

England is supposedly a cold country, but it really hardly ever snows — especially here in London. Whenever it does, it’s always pretty exciting, waking up and seeing your street suddenly unrecognisable with its overnight whitewashing. Then the snow quickly melts away, life carries on.

But not this year. We had a proper day of snow. Heavy, blanketing, lovely snow. The buses stopped, so did most of the Tubes. Work and school were off for most people, and it was the most exciting day of the year.

I’d started walking to work when I got a phone call saying I didn’t have to come in. But already in town and with my camera, I decided to keep walking. I saw so many places I’d seen thousands of times but
they were all new and amazing.

The last time it snowed like this in London was 18 years ago. Not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime event (I hope!) but a lovely and memorable day that is one of my favourite EVER.

There is something so London about this streetscape, even though it’s Chinatown, even though it’s snowy, and even though it’s almost completely devoid of people. We see the curved street and those little storefronts and know exactly where we are. I wanted to pair all of these Favorite Picture images with a poem — but no poet ever wrote about snow more poetically than James Joyce did at the end of his story “The Dead.” Here’s the final paragraph of that marvelous story:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This is the third in the Favorite Picture Project series. The entire series can be seen here.

Nicole Cadoret told me nothing about the picture she sent — except that it was taken with her iPhone. The camera on these phones is notoriously bad, which Nicole apologized for, but which makes this image, to me, absolutely beguiling.

Are we looking at an amazing natural encounter? Nicole off hiking in the woods, talking to the animals? The deer eyeing her with a mix of curiosity and skepticism, giving her the once over before trotting quickly off with her shy fawn trailing closely behind?

Or are we looking through glass? Are those slight scratches just below the picture’s midpoint on Nicole’s lens? Or are they scratched into plate-glass panels separating a curiously still diorama from a nature museum‘s visitors?

Either way, Nicole’s channeling Robert Frost circa 1923:

Two Look at Two

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. ‘This is all,’ they sighed,
Good-night to woods.’ But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.
Then, as if they were something that, though strange,
She could not trouble her mind with too long,
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
‘This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?’
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall as near the wall as they.
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,
Not the same doe come back into her place.
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,
As if to ask, ‘Why don’t you make some motion?
Or give some sign of life? Because you can’t.
I doubt if you’re as living as you look.”
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared
To stretch a proffering hand — and a spell-breaking.
Then he too passed unscared along the wall.
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
‘This must be all.’ It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

–Robert Frost, New Hampshire

This is the second in the Favorite Picture Project series. The entire series can be seen here.

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Christopher Santos actually sent me four pictures for this project. Three of them featured fog, the fourth a brown hat. I picked the one that he himself indicated he would have picked if forced to choose just one, in his words, “the tattered flag above the boat’s wake.”

The flag of the United States of America. Old Glory. The object of our Pledge. Or in some brave cases, the object of the pledge we will not take. The Stars and Stripes.

I love the old-fashioned feel of this picture. The perspective (or the wind) makes the triangular corner of stars that is showing look warped and out-of-proportion, as if there’s too much space between that last star and the three before it, as if the empty spaces there are waiting to be filled with the fresh stars of Hawaii and Alaska (or Puerto Rico and DC?). And the tatteredness? Oh the tatteredness.

I assume from Christopher’s home-base of San Francisco that this is that Bay, though given his ability to slip into and out of locales all over the world (London calling, Los Angeles falling, the Cape eternalling) this may have been shot somewhere else. I also love the emptiness — the wake, as he calls it — of most of the composition. A self-portrait in the voice of early Mark Strand:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

– Mark Strand, Selected Poems by Mark Strand

I see Christopher next in Brooklyn in December. While he’s here, he’ll be what’s missing.

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What is Favorite Picture Project? See here.

Well, I haven’t had much to say these last few weeks. That’s not true, actually. I’ve had plenty to say, but all of it filled with bile and venom and then shrouded in an ugly veil labeled “I don’t care.” Which itself is a lie. I do care. I care that Maine voters are 53% bigots. I care that Democrats feel it’s necessary to abandon core values in order to pass a shitty health care reform bill. I care that the economy is recovering for bankers but not for anyone else. And I care that many good things — movies, music, internet stuff, successful work and personal experiences — have come and gone without me passing any of it on to you here on these pages. But sometimes I need a break from paying attention. And I’ll tell you what — it’s felt great to not worry about this blog for a few weeks. If you missed me, sorry. If you didn’t, well, I didn’t miss you either. I honestly didn’t. (See what I mean about the bile?)

Anyway, one way to rejuvenate my interest in updating this thing would be to follow-up on a long-standing initiative that’s been languishing on the road to ruin since mid summer. With Thanksgiving coming, it seems a good time to pick it up again and make something of it. It’s called the Favorite Picture Project.

Back in early August I sent an email to family and friends that read:

Dear Friend,
If you’ve taken a picture within the last year that you love, and feel like sharing it, please email it to me. Anything at all. I want to compile such favorite pictures from a whole slew of different people and put them together in a blog post. You’ll receive credit and I’ll let you know when it goes up.
Love, David

The intention was to collect these pictures and make one massive blog entry that presented the pictures in a collage of the world as viewed through my loved-ones’ eyes. Well, they say that when God doesn’t answer your prayers he actually is answering, with a big ol’ “No.” And my friends and family responded in fewer numbers than I really needed in order to present the massive world-through-my-loved-ones’-eyes collage. I don’t blame anyone, of course — I mean, we’re all busy and frankly, most of us don’t really take any single picture that’s worthy of sending to anyone as a favorite. But let me tell you, the baker’s dozen of people who did send me pictures really came through with flying colors.

So the modified version of this project will be to present each picture individually, with a bit of writing about it or about the person; each as it’s own entry. The first edition of this project is coming up next. I hope you love these pictures as much as I do… Stay tuned….