Vacancy.
I flew home via Reno last Sunday and had a bit of a layover. Landing midday, I was shocked how deathly quiet the airport was; SeaTac had been bustling in the morning and I would have thought weekenders would have been coming and going from Reno as well. As I no longer suffer PTSD from The Biggest Little City, I headed downtown to walk around a bit. If I had thought the airport quiet I was certainly unprepared for the eerie emptiness and silence I found downtown.
And then I went to Chicago [Hot Child in the City Version]
It turns out I really like cities. I’ve sort of always known this, I mean, I was the kid who liked Athens when everyone was like, “No way! Go to Corfu!” Hmm… the birthplace of Western Civ… or getting plates smashed on my head while consuming copious amounts of ouzo. Let’s see. Athens FTW. But this was not a new phenomenon. San Francisco always fascinated my little Sonoma County self. I loved the sprawling craziness of Mexican municipalities. Then there was New York… Vancouver… London… Beijing… Sydney, and of course the amazing 852. Cities. And my love of what is urban brought me back to San Francisco when given the choice of where to alight from my trans-Pacific relocation.
Scholars have long claimed that the primary characteristics of a “civilized” people – of civilization as it were – include advanced cities, specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping and advanced technology. Declaring what is and is not civilized is a bit touchy. I find focusing on the etymology safer, even though the five characteristics have expanded a bit, it is still dicey territory. Regardless, cities are always listed as the first sign of a settled people with potential. And it is true – what do we always look back upon with awe and wonder: Cities. Atlantis, the Cretan cities of the Minoans, ancient Sumer, Alexandria, Athens, Pompeii (yes, and Rome…)
The word ‘city’ comes from the Latin civitatem (nominative is civitas) meaning citizenship or community of citizens.” We use cities as our primary judgement of people, places, and entire nations; a default marker for better or worse. Is something cleaner than Stockholm, safer than Saigon, dirtier than Delhi, more diverse than New York, bigger than Beijing, more misleading than Mandalay… on and on. Cities are collections of patterns that would make M.C. Escher envious. I could wax on forever about the unique ways cities have developed and the crystalline-like patterns of growth and the controversial genius of all the models used to explain the phenomenon of cities: Christaller, Burgess, Hoyt, Harris and Ullman… But I might lose all but three of my faithful readers, so I will not. [Though I will comment that Old Walter's model, by design, could work only on a featureless landscape - and no offense to the Midwest, but you all lack some major features out there. I never realized how much I depend on the ocean and mountains for my orientation...]
And I have to admit, a lot of my knowledge of Chicago outside of sports teams and stockyards really comes from the OPI Chicago collection. It is how I learned about Mrs. O’Leary and her oops-”barbeque”, Lincoln Park (“After Dark” – and now “After Midnight”), the Magnificent Mile (being “Marooned” or otherwise), how I always remember which of the Great Lakes Chi Town sits on (“Skinny dippin’ in Lake Michigan”), and all that “Razz”y jazz, the “El” (of a color) and “Blues” (for red). So, it is with this all of this urban fascination and personal national naiveté that I headed to Chicago last week to meet up with the leader of the A-Team and D for Lollapalooza and some quality city time. Being a tourist in your own country is great fun and something I’ve not done for ages. And there was the added bonus of being totally generously hosted by The Shazams for the first half of the trip. Win, win, win.
And so Chicago. Gimme what you got one time.
I finally finished the book: 365 photos, 366 days later.
One (long and very interesting) year after I completed this photo project, I have completed the book of the photos. It is for sale via the Blurb website for the cost of the book – a total non-profit enterprise, as I imagine all feats of the ego should be.
I hope you take a moment to look, and thank you for following the blog, the photos, the process.
xoxo
a
ps: If you don’t want the book, you can still visit the blog…
Small things.
11:00 a.m.
18th Street, The Mission, San Francisco, California
When I walked back by an hour later, all the I love you, toos were gone.
The rest of my walk home I imagined what people might be doing with the little slips of paper.
- Bookmark? (I had just bought a book.)
- Writing down a phone number? Address? (A potential mixed message.)
- Putting it in a scrapbook? (Someone’s SF memento?)
- Burning it in angry effigy? (I hear people do this.)
- Practicing saying the words? (Sometimes this can be hard. I practice on my cat.)
- Holding it up to a window to see who noticed? (Very art school.)
- Putting it in an old-fashioned letter? (But, email…)
- Dropping it on the ground one block later? (The moment passed.)
- Forgetting it on the table with the shopping? (It is small.)
- Inadvertently placing it in someone else’s bag. (Then they would wonder.)
I don’t suppose it matters really. The harder part is saying it first.
And that was still there.
I thought of Bukowski again today.
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes.
~ Bukowski, ‘Dinosauria, We’
I thought of Bukowski again today.
I am very disappointed about the forced resignation of Representative Anthony Weiner, (D-NY). In a world with far more significant problems than Weiner’s sexting habits and history, America chose to focus wholy on one man’s odd choice to send someone a picture of himself in his underpants. The key issue was the user error which caused the photo to post rather than be sent as a private message between consenting adults, though mental midgets like Andrew Breitbart, Reince Preibus insist that the issue was the photo itself.
If a majority of his constituents were okay with it, why do members of the opposite party care so much? If they really think Weiner’s behavior is so categorically reprehensible and the cause of untold moral outrage in our country, they should have put their thinking caps on and let him stick around so he could have been the Democratic Party’s Palin. I mean, damn, that woman is a godsend to every opposition party.
Of course, that they did not clearly underscores that they know it is not that big of a deal and so they had to make it a big one while they could.
Total focus on one man’s penis. That Weiner’s own party freaked is an eve bigger mysterty. Maybe they thought they were missing out on some quality collective outrage, or something. We apparently have the collective intellect of a 15-year-old boy. In a world rife with war, degenerating domestic industry, social isolation and sadness, violence, an absence of health care, regular miscarriages of justice, government sanctioned fraud in big business, and rampant political corruption of all sorts of real consequence…
We are
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Bukowski knew. We know. We can do something about it.
Will we?
Kitty in the City.
Toto, I don't think we're on Lamma anymore. Just sayin'.
Through the eyes of another…
Lately I have been immersed in discussions about how the views of others help to inform us of our own perspectives and understandings of people, places and things. My freshman are reading Catcher in the Rye and my seniors, Heart of Darkness, and in both the images and understandings we glean or create about the characters come from the reflections of said characters in the eyes of others.
What an interesting vantage point: through the eyes of others.
Frenchie spent last week with me in San Francisco and it is certainly no secret that while we have far less in common than we share, we still manage to get along quite well. I think this is because we appreciate seeing things through the others eyes. [Admitedly sometimes when I do this I feel like I am wearing the drunk goggles from Driver's Ed simply because her view seems so distorted - but it is not. It is just different and has always been interesting.] I am not sure she is always aware of my appreciation, but it is there none the less.
Looking through Frenchie’s photos and seeing how she saw the City I call home was fascinating. It looked so same-same-but-different. It was fabulous. Illuminating. And a terrific reminder of how it is through these myriad perspectives that true vision can be achieved.
A morning in the Mission
If I had billions of dollars I would buy all of the old theaters in the Mission and refurbish them. I think about this every time I walk down Mission Street.
Far West Flower Fest…
Walking at Point Reyes National Seashore near Inverness with Ron on a grey Monday.
Some things I know I’m going to miss about Hong Kong
Cheap utilities including phone service – remember that year we all got our electricity subsidized? That was cool. [Seems fair anyhow since our little island provides HK with ALL its power.]
Everywhere you might want to travel seems to be 2.5 hours away by air.
Anna introducing me as “Amanda, my friend from Hong Kong”.
In-town Check-in/Airport Express/Cathay Pacific.
Tirumala Septentrionis Butterflies.
Getting your drink on in the street.
The Inland Revenue Department.
Public transportation.
The Rugby Sevens.
My yoga teacher.
My amigas.
My view.
Norman.
Tang Lung Street: Causeway Bay
There is a little alley that leads to Tang Lung Street near Times Square in Causeway Bay. Tang Lung Street is very visually interesting. Among some other contributors, a local Hong Kong company Start From Zero has a fairly distinct presence there.
“Where do you stay?” A small question on semantics & photography
I am not a linguist, though I confess to an unusual interest in lexis and etymology. In my line of work I have often had to consult independent sources (read = UrbanDictionary.com) or even directly ask people what exactly they mean when dealt phrases like, “That’s sick!” or “I’m f’na go.” [The first, a total gimme for you, yes, sick = sooooo cool. The second, slightly more advanced, and I only actually worked it out after getting a lesson from Nakisha "Pepsi" Green back at the Double Rock projects where she 'stayed' in 1994, "I am fixing to go," or "I am leaving."]
Working with adolescents is a constant reminder of how totally lame you really are once you pass the age of probably 25. There is simply no way to keep up with the morphing vernacular. That aside, I have noted some strange consistencies from working in San Francisco’s Excelsior district back in the day, to the wilds of Reno-Tahoe-Sparks and the mania of Asia. Not many mind you, but a few. The first is a prevailing interest in footwear. The second is the way that ESL and “non-standard” English (though I hate that term, since technically, as a Californian I am way non-standard…) speakers ask me where I live: they consistently ask where I stay.
“Where do you stay in Hong Kong?”
I am clear what is meant by this question, and I even know how to respond, which guarantees the following rejoinder: “You stay on Lamma?!” I have no idea how the initial question becomes translated this way, nor do I really care. In fact, what I have been contemplating with regard to this semantic distinction is the nature of the difference between “stay” and “live”. Let’s compare:
stay:
–verb (used without object)
1. to spend some time in a place, in a situation, with a person or group, etc.
2. to pause or wait, as for a moment, before proceeding or continuing;live:
–verb (used without object)
1. to pass life in a specified manner;
2. to escape destruction or remain afloat;
That sort of sums up my take on the semantic situation. I had been contemplating the impermanence or flexibility inherent in ‘stay’ in comparison to the need-based feeling I get from ‘live’ – as in I need that to live. [Leave it to Dictionary.com to allow me the variety in definitions to prove just the point I wanted.]
Live. Stay. Live. Stay. Live. Stay. (a)Live.
When my favorite yogi was astonished to learn that I stayed on Lamma, all the time, I got to thinking about just that. Do I ‘stay’ on Lamma or do I ‘live’ on Lamma? I have to say, it is sometimes hard to tell. I am not sure it matters, really. A combination is surely the best. At that moment I totally wanted to take a picture of him, not just for his amusing and incredulous smile, but because I wanted to share this part of my life with my family and friends who don’t get to see it. [Of course, that would have been super awkward, so I exercised a little restraint.] But then that got me thinking about the way I see the places I find myself vis a vis my camera.
When I travel, I take heaps of photos. Absolutely. Heaps. But when I went home [that tricky conundrum - "home," an entirely separate semantics lesson for another time] this summer… I took hardly any. Okay, well, that is a slight understatement, but it is true that in five days in Japan I took more than twice as many photos as I did in five weeks at home. [And rest assured that has nothing to do with some corollary re: aesthetics.] The thing was, I was living – not staying – while I was at home. For real, living like, to have life; to continue in existence, operation, or memory; to maintain or support one’s existence. No documentation was required. Right now, I am staying in Hong Kong… like I stayed in Japan and will soon stay in Vietnam and Bali and Burma: I will pause or wait, as for a moment, before proceeding or continuing.
Everyday when I take out my camera to continue on the adventure that is my Project 365 blog, I look around and try to see things that represent my life here… things I see that, just maybe, someone else missed. I am documenting my life here in a certain way, but I am not living in a specified manner (yeah, escaping destruction for the most part…) I am pausing before I continue.
I stay in Hong Kong, on Lamma, and I know I will stay many other places as I work my way back to the States.
And this, quite clearly, is living.
It’s all in a day in the 852.
A turtle has joined the koi community. Harmony = Cool.
Dragons watching over the Pak Kok temple and the ferry pier.
I got a new little project to satisfy my OCD, list-love and voyeurism. Nice.
Yeah, that’s right… it is a whole new thing for me to obsess focus on and you can check it out right here. The premise is simple: post a photo everyday for one calendar year. So, instead of putting a big old “X” through each day, which frankly does not seem all that interesting or enlightening, I will post a photo to surprise you everyday. Gee, it is kind of like an advent calendar for you all, except for the part about it having nothing to do with advent or religion, not opening little doors to find candy and going on for 365 days rather than 25. So, you know, sort of like that.
It is not an original idea, not a particularly new one, but I don’t care so much about that. I like the idea of it in just about every way. Somehow it seems to impart a great sense of order. Something I will do everyday. What else goes in that category? Breathing? Eating? Drinking? Okay, but aside from those basics? My list gets pretty short, and honestly, I am probably not gonna share the rest of it with you anyhow.
I have already considered some issues. Like I am not sure what to do when I fly long haul and I have two of the same day in a row… or I lose a day. I suppose I will have to cheat adapt a little bit. Hopefully these are not preemptive excuses… I do have some previously established issues with commitment.
Anyhow… this endeavor commences on the longest day of the year, June 21, 2009.
I hope you will heck it out.
Amanda
