Delivery

UPS just delivered a sheet of miniature "grass," browned from not receiving enough water during the hot summer months, or perhaps the "grass" died during the winter?

Since it is very tiny, and it's plastic, I don't have to mow it.  I hated mowing grass when I was a kid.

Fumbling around in the past / words rambling

I was poking through my film-based photographs today, searching for bridges and water -- I found this photo from one of my first visits to NYC. I took it in the '60s, my college [girl]friend Paula and I, riding the Staten Island Ferry. Paula looking all "Jackie."



I remember clearly the Nikon F camera I used, its weight, even the smell of metal and leatherette. The camera made me feel, even as a student, I could make real art.

Cameras always subtly excite me. I studied painting, but I never found harmony with the materials, the way I did with those little photography machines. Paula's father Frank loaned us a Miranda camera, the first precision Japanese camera I had ever seen -- started photography for me (I think I might have broken the camera!).



Paula had a friend in the architecture school, at Washington U, who sold me my first Nikon F [first serious camera]. While taking that photo I realized we both wanted to live in NYC. Eventually Paula and I moved to NYC, she first, to study and eventually become an illustrator. I stayed in St. Louis 4 more years. We were so sure, that day in NYC, we would be artists.

Today my working camera is digital, not such a visceral instrument, but still, the act of recording moments in time...

addendum: Finding that photo forced me to drift around in the past, reminded me how easily beauty escapes our grasp. The last time I saw Paula she rollerbladed into De Robertis Pasticceria on 1st Ave., beautiful as ever. She talked happily about her husband, her life in NYC. I never saw her again, she died in 1988, from breast cancer.

Just one of those days, when I can smell spring, when art and life are on my mind. Back to work now. Enough.

"Dot-Com Throne"

Tomorrow I get my Aeron chair back from Sam Flax. The seat needed repairing and the arms were worn out. Herman Miller offers a 12 year warranty so all I had to do was pay for pickup and delivery. Sam Flax has been great, personal emails, and a three personal phone calls!


Target's Kool Kolors Task Chair

Sometimes the Aeron seems a bit pretentious now that the dot-com era is "over." Like I am harboring a fugitive that escaped the Nasdaq debacle. In the interem I bought a couple of inexpensive green desk chairs from Target, gave one to a friend, smaller, nice colors, less showy, they fit into my smaller Brooklyn studio nicely.

I miss my Aeron, not just because it is comfortable, dare I say cozy? The NY Times called it the "dot-com throne," when the Aeron's designer, Bill Stumpf, died in September of 2006. My favorite quote from that article, "Aerons piled up in a corner as a kind of corporate graveyard after they laid off 95 percent of the staff in about two months."

I survived -- and so did my Aeron, both the Nasdaq and 9/11. I brought mine from Manhattan to Brooklyn in 2003, I will be glad to have it back home.  

(It just came via messenger, and they rebuilt it like new, new seat, arms, and pneumatic cylinder!  www.samflax.com)  

After a few days, I am not sure I will keep it, maybe I have finally outgrown it, now that I have been with the little green cutie from Target.

Spend the day...

Look at these links when you are reminded, by a visit to eBay or CNN, how really awful most of the web is designed. There are enough designers to keep you busy for days, especially if you follow their links too.

Both print and web design, linked from a brilliantly simple homepage. www.forestyoung.com

"equivalent reproduction"

Lately I have been wanting to put something online about how [and maybe why] some of my photographs exist.

I had model trains when I was a kid. My mother built my first "train board" for me, and my younger brother, when I was about 6. My mother painted with great economy, I knew at the time she had created something unusual, no other kids I knew had. I wish I had better, color, photos.


my mother's highway around the lake

When I was 15, building a models, in my parents' basement, no one seemed to grasp I was building an alternative reality to inhabit. The "real" world was excruciatingly boring, just endless hours at school, watching the hands tick off the minutes until lunch, nothing to do but figure out ways to cheat on the the next exam. No video games or the internet to escape to.

Jean Baudrillard was still in school, but there I was, right in the midst of his future words,

"The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation."

Well maybe more in the world of the Matrix? Baudrillard is, after all, more political in his arguements, and I am more interested in the paradoxes of reality and illusion. But his name does come up.



Reality has never been as satisfying as I had hoped, but still, I am not really commenting on Baudrillard's lament on the disappearance of the real, "the most important event of modern history."

I meant this post to be less convoluted [abstract] than it actually is, I was thinking, originally, to just show a photo of a model during construction. It is hard to be Charlie Brown.