The people that you meet

Just a few photos from last Sunday. Each the result of a chance meeting a with cool person on the street.

Washington Square Park, NY

Piggy, help me pay for tuition!

Except for the one involving a piggy bank and my dear friend Mariana: A cool person, but a planned meeting, in attempt to illustrate student frustration over tuition hikes.

And in attempt to play with a piggy bank.

Get me a Yoplait, stat. I have something we should talk about.

Jezebel often clues me in to good things. Such as:

Sarah Haskins

On my continuing preoccupation with people-besides-me-who-realize-that-there-is-something-horribly-wrong-with-how-the-media-portrays-women, I have been given a new mark for my arrows of approval. (They’re like Cupid’s arrows, but without the prestige and nasty unwilled side effects.) It comes in the form of certain series of videos, available on current.com, entitled “Target Women.”

The star is a woman named Sarah Haskins, who, by all appearances — despite the fact that her only “appearances” to me have been made via computer screen — is a real woman. And by “real,” I mean unafraid to admit a profound enjoyment of the occasional burrito. (Er, I think she did that, but I can’t find which video it was in right now. Maybe I just imagined that. She does say she likes take-out pad thai…)

There are a lot of things for which we, as women, are supposed to blindly develop a fondness. And, I mean, sometimes we do. (Flowers? Okay. Bronzing products? Er…) Sarah Haskins admits that she gets sucked into romantic comedies with the rest of us, even while realizing that it’s sort of, basically, really, a load of tripe. With these running commentaries, she singles out some trends in TV marketing, and asks why, why, we could ever fall for such blatantly ethereal falsehoods.

As she puts it, dryly (and slowly), ”I am just a lady! With a simple lady mind.”

Incidentally, my best friend and I have been wondering what’s up with all these women sitting around on our TV screens and eating yogurt in groups while talking candidly about their periods for years now. I have to say it. Sarah, you can join our yogurt circles any day.

Then we’ll chuck it and order a round of pad thai from the place that thinks my name is Daila. (Seriously, why is that? At this point, it’s all I can do to help the delivery service understand that, yes, I am calling from the same cell phone number, but no, I’m in a different building than I used to be, and if you could please deliver to that one instead…)

a smidgen

So I said this was going to be a photography blog. And… it is! Just not this post.

I’m not proud. It’s true, I’ve gotten further from my photography lately than I intended to– partially due to a lot of crises in my immediate surroundings, which we’ll relegate to description only in the abstract– but lately I’ve been getting closer to figuring out where I want to end up in the world. I have got a plan, even if the details are fuzzy.

A fuzzy detail.

In the meantime… Let’s go for the wide-angle. (Bad pun, bad! Go to your room, pun.)
Photography is still about sharing a perspective, however compact and intrinsically incomplete of a perspective it may actually be. So I want to share a few compact and incomplete observations with you all.

Intriguing Things:

• Blackbook Magazine
  You’d think I was new to this, the way I keep discovering new publications that really aren’t new to most people. But let’s face it, during the school year I’ve historically spent more time studying (or planning to study) than trolling the magazine racks.
  So there it was, on the shelf in Whole Foods. A genderless magazine, albeit with a woman on the cover, sedately titled “Blackbook.” As if it had seen the urge to be red, but moved on… to someplace perhaps a bit cooler, perhaps (speaking predominantly as a matter of temperature).
  I’ve been considering, lately, how the designation of a magazine as a “women’s magazine” managed by women can, in itself, say a lot about the nature of its outlook on gender relations. I’m not positive, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s something vaguely akin to being the little girl who puts up the “NO BOYS ALLOWED” sign on the treehouse door.  (And I should know, because I’m pretty sure I was that little girl.) There are a lot of very legitimate reasons she might do it, but let’s face it, divisive bipartisanship with a moat down the center never solved anything.

(Castlefight: An artist's rendition)

• The Thing Itself, by Richard Todd
  I haven’t made it this far through a non-fiction book since I was assigned to read the narrative of Frederick Douglass in high school. (Actually, that’s a complete fabrication. I’ll be telling you all about another one I’m enjoying within the next few weeks. But good grief, I remember disliking that book, and now I can’t even recall why. Oh, how the years fly in my old age…) Anyway, this one threatens wonderfully to blur the very lines of fiction and non-fiction, wielding subjective opinion as alternately the only truth we have, and the source of all falsehood. Todd fearlessly takes on the most challenging questions of reality and a lack thereof, and he does so without resorting to the infamous Matrix Route (although, as with any good meditation on the lack of spoons, it’s in there). Todd reminds us that there’s a very tangible history to the questioning of reality– I can’t do his book justice here, so I’m not going to try to summarize. But I’m glad someone is now on the bookshelves to remind that our own world, and not just those of alternate sci-fi universes or the alternate thinkspace of incorrigible Derrida worshippers, contains more than adequate reason to remain skeptical.

So this has been fun, but right now I have to go rescue my chair from what, without having yet looked out the window, sounds like a sudden onset of the rain-based end of the world.

Lemon Found

My Chair.

It’s only in the past year that I’ve finally begun to understand my dad’s love of onions; even now my appreciation is fairly limited to “the red ones.” We’ve always had other things in common, though: A love of languages, for example, and the inclination to make things by hand. But oh, did it ever embarrass me when he’d pick me up from elementary school and, on the five minute ride home, repeatedly toe the brakes to get a better look at… the furniture someone else was throwing out on the curb.

I always thought he could read my chagrin through the way I slumped down in my seat, ideally finding myself beneath the windowsill and thus neatly out of sight. I had a (perhaps irrational) fear that another family, or worse, the neighbor who had decided where the furniture belonged, might see him get out of his car and pick it up. (With his love of fixing things, I’ve suggested that my mom and I might do better to buy him broken things for his birthday than anything new.) Recently, I mentioned those childhood days to him. It turned out he had been oblivious to my abashment all along, and while he wasn’t sorry, he seemed to understand why a little girl might think it less than enjoyable to watch her father go through trash.

So he had some right to mock me yesterday when I told him how on my way home, I’d happened to pass the site of a garage sale I had missed attending the previous day, found it miraculously turned into a “FREE STUFF” pile by the passage of a night, stopped my car, got out, and forced into the backseat a simply beautiful wrought-iron chair, painted white.

Another view of the chair, this time as depicted by my lovely cell phone.

(And he did.)

But I love this chair! I think it’s pretty. (Pretty what, you might say? Pretty rusty! Ba-doom chik.) And with my dad’s help, I’ve hooked up a drill with a wire brush attachment, and begun the process of power-sanding (I guess that’s what you’d call it) until the rust and loose paint began to flake off, revealing a solid deep gray color beneath.

I should also mention the sign: “SHABBY CHIC CHAIR $12 / JUST ADD A CUSHION!”

Add a cushion indeed. The seat, as you may be able to see (by the way I wedged the sign into the part I wanted to emphasize), includes a rather pointy slit down the middle. Also notice the disconnect between framework and latticework around the top right edge. Not sure how that happens to wrought iron except with some considerable force, but I’m not above using considerable force to repair it! This may involve enlisting the help of my friend Britt’s father, who’s got welding tools.

So, y’know. I’m working on it. It appeals to all my modern-day Rococo, Francesca Lia Block-like dreams. (The first link is to a post from the blog of Penelope Bat, whose wordiness and otherworldliness both quite enjoyable. The second is to the bio of author Francesca Lia Block, a writer of California-flavored fairy tales, alternately angsty and magical, of which every 13-year-old girl should be aware.)

So far, the poor chair may end up in one of the following states:

• lime green (my original idea, and the simplest to boot, from which all the following ideas later sprang)
• partially plushified with floral fabrics (oh yes, this is going to be an indoor chair if it kills me, complete with little felt pads under its feet)
• wrapped in multicolored yarn (my friend Melissa suggested something like this yarn by Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Potluck, when I expressed my anxieties over the anticipated difficulties of using fabric)
• re-painted white, and then detailed with painted vines, leaves, and flowers (kudos to Brittany for this one)

It may be off the beaten path of photography, and erring instead towards the long road of home repair (note my disinclination to carry my camera within ten feet of the power sander), but I’m excited, aren’t you?