February 6, 2010
I escape back to Rio– a picture I took in Sta. Teresa last month, reminding me that color and produce continue on in other parts of the world. Today is my friend & pianist Luiz’ birthday, and he is playing tonight at a club in NYC. But tomorrow he will arrive here, and Monday we will perform together, songs from my new CD, Brazilian music full of color, rhythm, and joy. I just bought my ticket back to Rio in mid-March yesterday, so my heart is full of memories and saudades for that beloved city. Cidade Maravilhosa, its nickname says it all. Rio has held such a magic place in my life for the past few years, truly the key that opened the lock on the door to my new life. I can almost taste those tomatoes.
February 5, 2010
Beauty is a matter of creative perception. I look for it in every crevasse these days, and sometimes it appears. Not a traditional loveliness, but a re-conception of what actually exists, an alternation, sometimes for only a moment. Yeah, maybe it’s a metaphor for life– unintended but, the optimist in me insists, possibly true.
February 4. 2010
Light is one of the only transformative powers at this time of year, light and snow, but we have none of the latter. The landscape is drab, covered with grit, matted leaves. The days are getting longer, so we have light and… hope? But no color to speak of, only contrast, and only on the sunny days.
week 68 ~ she was 13 eating potato chips
she was 13 eating potato chips
at a party in Juárez Mexico
when they opened fire how can we know
such evil exists and sail past like ships
in the night pretending our lives matter
with soda cans and snack bags scattered in
pools of blood handprints on the wall to win
in this hellhole of life gone wrong what were
her chances the radio spews forth these
grim details I never asked to hear on
my way home 16 are dead young lives gone
while mine goes on to do with as I please
privileged by what capricious whim of fate
to live free from this violence this hate
February 2, 2010
I am artistically obsessed with the demolition of this bit of highway. I go down with my camera again after work to find the metal scaffolding down on both sides, revealing the beat-up murals and columns open to the sky for the first time ever. It’s a bright and interesting photo spot in the dreary February landscape, and I now have dozens of shots to save images of these cartoons long after they have been leveled, reportedly by next week.
February 1, 2010
A forgotten grant app gets pounded out just in time to meet the deadline. A great save by my unconscious mind, because I don’t even remember reading the date in that reminder email received while I was in Rio. As I speed by the underpass on my way to hand it in, I notice the scaffolding is down on one side but the art is still up. So tempted to stop, but deadlines call. Perhaps it will still be up tomorrow, but the work continues every night and soon there will only be rubble left.
January 31, 2010
So long, oh January of contradictions. From 113 to 0, from lazing on the beach to working my tail off on this ball of confusion called my life. I send out missives for events to come, obligations imposed or willingly created, and organize my teaching for next week. And the question occurs to me– how do we each arrive at the track called our present life? However do we manage to to get involved in so much, to want so much, to roll out unending paths to so much that matters to so many. Sometimes it’s fulfilling, other times disappointing, but it’s nearly always exhausting. I’m not sure why there was no possibility I would end up w/ a boring life. Usually I’m grateful, but other times the restfulness of boredom beckons beguilingly. I guess the grass always seems greener where one can never live.
January 30, 2010
You have to know how far you are willing to go before you have gone too far. It’s a hard call to make, requiring perspective and thinking on the spot. But after you have failed to get it right a few times, you learn to appreciate how much pain can be saved by cultivating forethought.
“It looks like a war zone,” someone yells out his car window as I return to photograph the underpass, now mostly open to the sky. “A war zone with cartoons,” I shout back as he whizzes by rolling up his window. This will probably all be gone next week, so I skirt the edges of frostbite just to take pictures for 15 minutes. It reminds me of some streets in inner-city Rio, but that decay is more permanent, and longer in the making. Amazing how much more sinister the portraits appear framed by rusted metal and concrete rubble.
