Archive for September, 2008
22 items.
The Last Night of September 2008
September 30th, 2008 |Posted In: Feature, General, H.o.p. art, Art, The Child Experiments, Art-Photos, Uncategorized photos
The Last Night of September 2008
Sept 2008
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H.o.p. made a movie while I chatted with George. When we came out it was just as the sun was setting, movers were moving someone into an apartment on the floor above us. Marty arrived home and we talked about Paul Newman movies (mainly George enthused over Paul Newman movies as he was far more familiar with them than we were, which means I need to look up “Hombre” and “Cool Hand Luke” and watch those two again). Others came and went. Then it was quite dark and Marty went on in to start the spaghetti squash and I sat outside with H.o.p. waiting on him as he finished up another movie.
Update: I watched “Cool Hand Luke” last night on Netflix. Realized I’d never seen it before, when I thought I had. Great movie. I’m still pondering it…Paul Newman cutting off the heads of the parking meters. Remarkable opening. I was surprised at how much “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” owed to it.
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I’ve been wanting to blog about this. Seven months ago I started a yoga practice and found my way in short order to Elsie Escobar’s yoga podcasts. These many or few months later (however you look at it) I seriously credit those podcasts with giving me a solid basis and making yoga work for me. Yes, I scoured the internet and listened to just about everything I could find over the next several months and subscribed to a number of yoga blogs and read through years of archives (and I read books and listened to many lectures) and found a few other practice resources that I use, but when I go to my mat, 8 times out of 10 it’s Elsie’s podcasts I put on. Her thoroughness in description informed my postures so that much of it is pretty well second nature now, and by that I don’t mean, “Gee look what I can do now, I’m good,” no, after all I’m a late bloomer and have only been doing this seven months. No, I mean that instead of just doing a pose and hanging limply there I have imprinted in me all these checkpoints for this muscle and that muscle and stance and jaw and neck and shoulders and back and feet and hands and fingers and just plain taking care with what I’m doing, being attentive, concentrating and considering and breathing. Which all sounds mechanical but it isn’t. It’s more like walking a path and that path taking you deeper into a landscape of sorts so that at first you’re on the path next to the parking lot and you keep following the path and find yourself in a place where you can’t see the parking lot at all.
After a while I began to think about how it must be for a teacher to know that students are out there who aren’t just listening to their voice but are incorporating it so it is a part of them.
Of course we all know and experience how the voices of others become a part of one, this isn’t anything new. My youth was all the experience of teachers as negative voices and it’s been the negative voices, throughout my life, that tend to stick in my head and repeat endless furious litanies of punitive discouragement. For some reason, once negative voices are ingrained it’s difficult to adopt impartial ones or even the mildly positive. I doubt I’ll ever be ragingly or even moderately positive about myself but as I worked with Elsie’s podcasts it was interesting to note that the voice that moved in with me, in relation to yoga, didn’t berate or punish or condemn. It didn’t flog or demean. Instead the voice was invitational and reassuring. Where are the different parts of my body? Oh here and there they are. Can I work the pose deeper? Great, if I can. Am I falling out of it today? Well, that’s all right too. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe not. It is what it is and it’s going to always be changing. Accept it for what it is at that moment.
I’m used to a harsh and strident inner taskmaster. When I first saw Elsie’s website, I didn’t want to listen to her podcast and I suspect it’s because I was looking for a strident taskmaster in bamboo fiber clothing (the yoga version of the wolf in sheep’s clothing) though I didn’t know it. Still, there was something about the website that kept asking me to come back to it and have a listen, and I wasn’t connecting with anything else I was hearing so I tried her podcast.
I may not have been at ease in my postures but I felt at ease with Elsie’s voice and even laughed. It connected.
And thus did Elsie’s voice end up residing lively inside my head as the well-tempered yoga teacher. Which I’d not expected. Without thinking about it, I believe I’d assumed her words would become my words would carry the shades ultimately of my inner voice and would thus become another derogatory dialogue with which to do continual battle. Instead, there is no perfect or better picture of myself with which to compete and flog what I am in failing to meet it. There is simply the doing. That’s all. While I’m on the yoga mat with that voice I’m simply being.
By summer my mat had already seen better days and I began to think of getting a new one. I liked it because Marty had purchased it for me but my hands kept slipping in downdog and the mat kept rumpling up and was by now starting to tear. I thought well maybe I should get a new one. Then Elsie announced she would be having a drawing for a Jade Harmony yoga mat and I thought well this has come at just the right time, hasn’t it, and decided to enter.
I had really committed myself to the yoga, to making it a part of my life, determined not to let it fall to the side and nag me from the edges of my peripheral vision for several months before finally taking it out and dumping it in the trash.
I’d developed a friendly relationship with yoga. We had a kind of agreement. It would be what it was and I would commit myself to just doing what it did with me. And it demanded non-violence. Any twinge or discomfort I felt meant a re-evaluation, I had to step back and take it a little easier or change and do something a bit different for a time, knowing if I risked surpassing a boundary then I might not be able to do yoga.
A part of the agreement I came to with yoga was not to make a picture of what it would be and expect out of it what it seemed to show itself doing elsewhere. I would just do it and take it as it comes. Time would tell what would develop out of the relationship.
I waited for the drawing for the yoga mat. “You can buy yourself a mat,” I thought. But I wanted to wait for the drawing. “Maybe just maybe you’ll end up with the gift of a yoga mat,” I thought. “Yoga has been that kind of friend.”
Finally came the podcast in which Elsie was going to announce the winner of the yoga mat. A couple of days beforehand I had thought of going ahead and ordering a new mat then thought no, there was still the drawing, wait for the drawing, be patient and wait. Now I had the podcast in which the announcement was being made and I downloaded and listened and didn’t expect anything but still had the thought on my mind that it would be kind of nice if my friend yoga gave me a new mat. “It will be nice if that happens,” I told myself. “But if it doesn’t then someone else will really enjoy their gift of a yoga mat and perhaps they will enjoy it more than I might and I can just buy myself one.”
As chance would have it, I won the yoga mat.
It arrived a couple of weeks ago. I unboxed it and laid it out on the floor. It is soooooo much better than my old mat. My hands stick to it, they don’t slide in downdog. I like the feeling of it on my bare feet. I felt a little tentative and uncertain at first as it was such a completely different surface. I knew in a couple of weeks I would be well on my way to getting used to it. Which I am.
So, I am still doing yoga and yoga is doing whatever it’s doing with me, and we’re working on a new yoga mat and I like it and I like how it came to me.
That is how things stand at seven months with me and my yoga.
The Red Shoe Makes its Rounds
Sept 2008
Today we were approaching Peachtree on a walk and the red shoe passed but I was too distant to take a photo. Ah well. Then some minutes later we were ready to cross Juniper and here came the red shoe again.
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Welcome to Presidential Debate Night at Our Apartment
Sept 2008
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We, like how many other households, were turned in and I thought I’d show this because it is a mass participation event, kind of like football, only we don’t watch football.
First we settled down with coffee and with H.o.p., me telling H.o.p. it was part of his education to watch the debate with us–but it’s not exactly 1968 is it, the election that first really caught my attention as a child (I vaguely remember the one before it because I recollect my amazement at the name Goldwater). H.o.p. wasn’t thrilled but tried watching for around 20 minutes while we explained things to him. He’s well familiar with Bush Land but the names McCain and Obama are still fuzzy and remote to him. When he said, “I really don’t understand anything they’re talking about,” I said, “OK, that’s enough,” and he ran off to pursue another film project.
After H.o.p. was done watching I dug out the cherry pie we’d purchased a couple days ago in memory of the nights we would purchase cherry pie and watch Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” I had been reminded of those nights because I had been reading interviews with David Lynch and watching his earliest film shorts on Netflix, “Six Men Getting Sick”, “The Alphabet”, “The Grandmother” and “The Amputee”. And with the weather cooling off it seemed a good time for cherry pie.
Cherry pie à la David Lynch and the debates seemed to be a good fit. And the wilting sunflowers. I thought they fit in as well, considering the economy.
From his bath later on, H.o.p. called out, “Who won? Really, I want to know!” And we talked about the debate more in depth and answered a number of questions he had formulated in the meanwhile.
The Face of Delta
Sept 2008
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Marty’s back from New York. He brought a couple trinkets for H.o.p., who was delighted.
There are two Skyteam symbols on the Delta toy, each ahead of the forward doors, but they end up looking like X eyes, like in a cartoon where a character is passed out cold.
I think the toy has been given a grin as well.
Marty returned just after the landlord had left.
“What’s that board doing there?” I asked as I escorted the landlord out the back door, pointing out a long old board, something like 8 feet by six inches, that was half clinging to the top of a high fence that separates the area behind our apartment building from the area behind the next apartment building, partly supported by the slender limbs of a tree just beyond that fence, looking like it had dropped out of the sky.
Sometimes I find things weird that others don’t find weird and vice versa. So I was a little reassured that my landlord was astonished as well and marveled over the board. He eventually guessed that a tenant in the next building had perhaps opted to pitch it over their apartment’s balcony rather than lugging it down to the trash.
Earlier, the landlord and I had discussed Palin. He’s Republican yet we are able to talk politics and joke about politics and be serious about politics sometimes. My landlord has had his criticisms of Republican policies and their outcomes and so I was surprised he likes Palin. He thinks she’s a smart one. I said she was an idiot. He said she spoke well. I said she did not speak well at all, that she and McCain were McFester jello brains, that her talk was all irrelevant mumbo jumbo essence of snake oil.
I suppose I could have been more constructive in my criticism?
I told him about the incident where I surprised myself by yelling out the car window in the direction of a truck with a McCain-Palin bumper sticker. I noted how I wasn’t seeing many McCain-Palin bumper stickers, then thought to amend that.
“Of course, you may have one on your truck, I don’t know,” I said.
“No,” the landlord said.
“She’s pretty,” he said of Palin. I said, yes. He said she had sold a lot of eyeglasses, he knew that.
I said that I’d read a couple weeks ago that hair salons across the country were booked with people getting the Palin hairdo.
“I didn’t notice, what hairdo is that?” he asked.
I told him it was a 60′s bouffant french twist in the style of Claudia Cardinale. “Oh, yes,” the landlord said, reflecting dreamily on Claudia Cardinale.
Marty doesn’t know I’m writing about the Palin discussion and comes up behind me and mentions that he heard all over the airports talk about McCain suspending his campaign and nothing positive about either McCain or Palin.
Marty now mentions to me that when he got home the landlord was out joking with one of the AT&T guys about this board in the back hanging in the trees and that it must belong to them and the AT&T guy had walked back and was marveling over the strange board.
I check my email now and find the Library of Congress congratulating me on having successfully created subscriber preferences so that I may now take advantage of e-mail updates offered by them. Strange thing is I didn’t visit and create any subscriber preferences for the Library of Congress. I mean, not that it’s a bad idea, they have some cool stuff on their website. But I didn’t visit the website any time recently and I didn’t subscribe to it today.
Whatever.
Anyway, there you go, I talked about Palin with a Republican and then we wandered outside and marveled over a strange board sitting in the trees like one of those “what’s wrong with this picture” puzzles.
A Precarious Perch at Twilight
Sept 2008
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Brave man on a ladder at a Midtown intersection at twilight.
This evening on our walk H.o.p. entertained himself making movies of Yoshi, a little toy figure of his. Yoshi was tossed up and down and thrown across the sidewalk and walked fences and cavorted in trees. A number of men were working at another intersection and one of the road crew was apparently entertained with H.o.p.’s antics. The next thing I knew he had produced a camera out of his pocket (he is prepared) and here I am with my camera and H.o.p. is with his camera photographing Yoshi and now one of the road crew is grinning ear to ear and photographing us as we walk across the street.
Man, it has been beautiful out. Sun’s Power Hits New Low, May Endanger Earth! reads one headline. And there’s the Wall Street mess which is just fat and happy rich grinning big-bigger-biggest, their mouths stretched monstrous large under wide open sluices, and Palin dishing out McFester jello brain grab bag garble that has nothing to do with anything except a shoddy con that’s content to let the audience soak in the smell of snake oil essences because, well, the pretty bottle is cracked. But it’s still a pretty bottle! See? See? See the pretty bottle?
Still it has been lovely out these past few days. And H.o.p. and I take our walk and he makes up Yoshi movies and the road worker photographs us because he’s entertained and lots of times it’s best just not to think of tomorrow, like when things are feeling simply all right at the moment.
Marty’s off to New York for a couple of days and, as H.o.p. was going to be missing him, Marty prepared yesterday a big pot of red beans that would simmer and simmer and simmer and be prime eating by the time Marty was doing the sound check for his gig. So while Marty was in New York, H.o.p. would be here eating his favorite red beans and rice.
It was a gorgeous day yesterday. The weather is unbelievably perfect. The several windows that aren’t sealed shut with time and paint we have been keeping open and the slightly cooler air mingles with the smell of the red beans and andouille making something like heaven on earth these first autumn days.
Early this evening I go in to prepare H.o.p. his bowl of red beans and andouille. It’s not quite thickened enough but it’ll do and smells beautiful. I glance out the kitchen window to my left where we have an exhaust fan lodged that’s capturing the smell of the beans and broadcasting them out the back alley, and there’s George waving his arms ecstatically. He has smelled the red beans and andouille and they are calling to him.
I give George a bowl of red beans and andouille which he’ll carry back up to his apartment where he’ll prepare his rice. We’re not having rice today as Marty’s not here and H.o.p. doesn’t like rice. He likes his red beans and andouille straight.
And that’s why I love this old apartment building. I like looking out and seeing someone waving their arms enthusiastically over the aroma of red beans and andouille and having quite enough to prepare an extra bowl.
Untitled
Sept 2008
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Animals of the Arctic Puppetry Booth, Fernbank Museum of Natural History
Sept 2008
“Ends of the Earth, From Polar Bears to Penguins” program.
Spent the afternoon at the exhibit, which had a lot to it, too much for one visit. H.o.p. really enjoyed it and is asking already to go again.
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Atlanta Botanical Garden Pond
Sept 2008
I love these leaves. They’re like mosaics.
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