Not-quite-busted

One thing I love about being a place-blogger in an urban area like Boston or Cambridge is the way no one seems to care if you stop, snoop, and snap photos: there’s nothing you’re doing, after all, that’s any weirder than anything anyone else is doing.

Although I know folks who have been asked not to take photos in particular public places, I’ve never been confronted for my shutter-buggery. Either I look boring enough that I don’t arouse suspicion, or I look weird enough that folks aren’t surprise when I do something quirky with a camera.

Usually when I snap photos in public places, I try to be discreet: not only do I not want people to think I’m taking photos of them, I don’t want to call attention to myself. One of the benefits of using a purse-sized digicam is the fact I can pull out my camera quickly, snap a few surreptitious shots, and then sneak it back into my pocket or purse before anyone’s noticed what I’m doing. If there are people milling around something I want to photograph, I’ll typically wait until they disperse, or I’ll refrain entirely from taking pictures. The last thing I want to do is make myself an object of attention while focusing my attention on some interesting object.

As I was composing the above photo of the graffiti along Modica Way, for instance, I heard the crack and static of a police officer’s two-way radio as a faceless person passed behind me. “Holy crap,” I thought as I froze mid-shot. “All I need is for Mr. Cop to ask me what I’m doing in a graffiti-covered alley taking pictures.” After I’d snapped my shot, I looked down Modica Way to see Mr. Cop walking away unconcerned, a McDonald’s bag in one hand. I don’t know how Cambridge cops feel about street artists, but apparently hungry officers won’t interrupt their takeout breakfasts to harass place-bloggers who like to snoop and snap.

Click here for a photo-set of images from today’s and yesterday’s posts. Enjoy!

 

Easter eggs

On Sunday mornings when I’m scheduled to give consulting interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center, I make a point to arrive in Central Square early so I can take a quick walk, camera in hand, to see what’s new in my old neighborhood.

Taking a quick stroll around the Square helps clear my head before I meditate…and it’s one way I heed Cambridge’s official command that I “Be curious!” What better way, I think, to put the Buddha’s mantra of “What is this?” into practice than by taking a quick spin around the block to see what’s changed since the last time I strolled the streets?

Central Square, like any urban neighborhood, is always full of surprises. I already knew from blog reports that a new crop of street art had sprouted like spring wildflowers along Modica Way since the last time I’d taken pictures there. Every time I walk around Central Square, I see something I hadn’t noticed before–something new, perhaps, or something I’d previously ignored. Even though I lived in Central Square for two and a half years more than a decade ago, the streets there still surprise me. Even if I were Kwan Seum Bosal with her thousand hands and eyes, I still wouldn’t be able to take it all in.

The surprises you encounter in urban neighborhoods like Central Square shouldn’t be surprises: in urban areas, nothing should surprise you. Are you surprised to find a cracked but otherwise whole Easter egg lying in the middle of a parking lot more than a month after the holiday? When you remember that the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Easter later than we Westerners do, and when you remember that there’s a Greek Orthodox Church in Central Square, a late April Easter egg makes sense.

When I was a child, I always loved looking for Easter eggs because it gave me once-a-year permission to snoop around looking for surprises. In retrospect, I guess keeping a photo-blog gives me a similar excuse to scour my surroundings for things that are interesting or odd.

Once you start looking for Easter eggs, you start finding them everywhere: it’s as if you hone your senses to notice All Things Egg. On Sunday, for instance, I wanted to snap a photo of the Goldenstash decal I’d previously seen on an electrical box at the heart of Central Square…

…only to find the mustachioed man nearly everywhere I looked.

The enigmatic character known as Goldenstash is something of a legend in the greater Boston area, appearing as street art on signs, electrical boxes, and walls.

Goldenstash’s street-mystique has garnered press attention and a slew of Flickr photos.

Going ’stash-spotting, I’ve learned, is a bit like looking for Easter eggs: you’ll find him in the usual spots you’d expect, and then you’ll find him in spots (and in poses, and with people) you’d never have expected.

But just like an Easter egg, you’ll never spot the ’stash until you start looking, even if that means seeming a bit silly as you snoop around.

A street artist’s Everyman, Goldenstash is the ultimate Easter egg. Simultaneously elusive and everywhere, ’stash is a stealthy secret until you learn he’s ubiquitous, sticking around with the sole purpose of being spotted by someone, sometime.

After having snapped these shots in Cambridge on Sunday morning, later in the day I spotted Goldenstash on the back of a sign somewhere in Jamaica Plain while a friend drove down unfamiliar-to-me streets on our way to dinner. I wasn’t quick enough with my camera, unfortunately, to achieve a drive-by ’stash-shot, so you’ll have to believe me when I say the mustachioed one is everywhere.

 

The wheres and whys

This morning I walked Reggie first thing upon awaking, recognizing we both feel better when we begin our day on foot. Reggie rests more quietly–he’s less antsy–after he’s been walked, and I feel more alert and alive after our strolls. Taking a walk makes it easier for me to come back home, have breakfast, and then write in my journal, even if I haven’t seen anything on my walk worth writing about. The simple act of getting out and getting moving pulls me away from my laptop’s virtual world and pushes me into my neighborhood’s actual one, and that’s a good thing.

Mark posted from India today about blogging and diary-keeping, and I posted a lengthy comment in response. I think it’s natural for bloggers to occasionally ask themselves why they started (and continue to keep) a blog: why keep a blog when it doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything? Yes, some bloggers become famous or at least popular via their online writing; some bloggers get book deals or make money from their sites. Most of us, though, do not. Blogging is something we do primarily for our own satisfaction; if we were looking for something else from our online writing, we’d give up, discouraged, the moment we discover New York literary agents aren’t pounding down our doors with book deals and expensive pens in hand.

The only reason I continue to keep both a journal and a blog is I see each kind of writing as being a spiritual–not a commercial, professional, or even practical–practice. I write journal pages and blog posts the same way I sit in meditation: the act of writing or sitting is its own reward. Any positive consequence of sitting, writing, or blogging is an accidental side-effect: a result (good or bad) that’s beside the point. Long ago, I gave up any hope or expectation of achieving “enlightenment,” figuring that sitting quietly, breathing, and lightly gazing at the floor in front of me isn’t a bad way to spend an occasional half-hour. I’ve given up, in other words, any hope or expectation that meditation will give or get me anything remotely practical; instead, I figure if I’m here in a human, breathing body, I might occasionally spend some time simply experiencing what it’s like to be breathly and embodied.

Writing is the same kind of practice for me. After eating breakfast in the morning, on most days (when I’m not in a frantic hurry) I don’t have much better to do than sit a spell while I finish my morning juice or tea. Given I’m typically in no hurry to attack my to-do list right after breakfast, I might as well do something rather than nothing with that time…and scribbling into a notebook is the “something” I’ve chosen. You might reach for the newspaper while you finish your morning coffee, or someone else might flip on the television before showering and getting dressed. I reach for notebook and pen: nothing special.

Were I a perfectly faithful journal-keeper, I’d have no need for a blog…but an online audience keeps me honest. If I skip a day or two, a week or two, or a month or two in my journal, no one but me will notice. But if I disappear without a post or picture for several days or more, presumably someone in cyberspace (I tell myself) will notice. On many days when I just don’t feel like I have anything to show or tell here, the expectation of an awaiting audience (whether they’re actual or merely imagined) makes me show up rather than slacking off.

Ultimately it is that fidelity and discipline–that entirely quotidian commitment to show up more days than not–that keeps me blogging. Practicing anything (meditation, writing, or other) by oneself is no less fruitful than practicing with a community, but many of us are more likely to show up consistently if we know other folks–including folks whose names and stories we know–will be showing up as well.

So these days, I blog about Keene to remind Mark what it’s like here while he spends his academic sabbatical there. The rest of the time, I blog about my environs to remind myself time and again what it’s like to be “here” even as I remain close to home, steeped in the here and now.

This is a more-or-less exact transcript of this morning’s journal pages, written after I’d walked Reggie, made a quick check online, and ate breakfast. If you’re interested in this topic of blogging and journal-keeping, I’d highly recommend Mark’s post as the push that set my mental wheel in motion.

 

Fresh paint

The first time I walked up Beech Hill here in Keene, the municipal water tower was unfenced and covered with graffiti. One year later, the tower had been surrounded by a tall fence…and it was still covered with graffiti.

Last week, I walked with Reggie up Beech Hill to see if the wood frogs were calling, but the woods were still partly snow-covered. (In the meantime, I’ve heard wood frogs quacking elsewhere.) In the process of looking for wood frogs, though, I discovered that the City of Keene has finally gotten around to painting over the graffiti that’s covered the Beech Hill water tower since before it was fenced. And in due fashion, some intrepid street-artist has scaled the fence to leave the first of presumably many tags, the blank canvas of a freshly painted water tower apparently begging to be so claimed.

It took the City of Keene nearly four years–from the first time I walked up Beech Hill in May, 2004 until now–to paint over the same old graffiti…and it took some intrepid street-artist a matter of months (if that!) to make the first claim on this territory. As a writer, I can understand the impulse: there’s something about a blank page that beckons. In a season of fresh leaves, isn’t it tempting to turn over a new one by making one’s mark on a fresh slate, intoxicated by the promise of fresh paint?

 

Watch out for children…and graffiti

When I imagine ways of defacing a “Children” sign, I picture possibilities more playful than political. This sign near Newton’s Richardson Field (shown in all its spring-muddy, pre-Little-League glory at the top of this post) still shows the freeze-dried residue of a Halloween encounter with some anonymous child(ren) armed with Silly String. No matter what the season, kids will be kids.

I’m not quite as clear about the meaning of this stencil-adorned “Children” sign, also spotted in Newton.

Perhaps in Newton, you need to be on the lookout for children who play guitar and have SARS? Or is it children (not drivers) who’d better be wary of guitarists with respiratory diseases?

I’m not sure, but this much I know: I’m back in Keene now that my spring break in Newton is over, and tomorrow I’ll be headed back to teach at Keene State. Do you think any of my students will be armed with SARS, guitars, or Silly String?

 

Isn’t it ironic?

Something tells me that the person responsible for this child-unfriendly sign is her- or himself a child, at least if we include mischievous teenagers in the category of “children.” Apparently nobody’s taught the Unknown Scrawler that a corollary to “keep your laws off my body” is “keep your markers off our signs.”

 

Art

I’ve already posed the philosophical question of whether graffiti qualifies as art, so I won’t go there again. But given today’s Photo Friday theme of Art–and given the fact that it’s snowing again here in New England, so I didn’t take any photos on this morning’s dog-walk–I’m taking this opportunity to re-visit several more images I snapped on my way to the Cambridge Zen Center this past Sunday.

Annette recently shared a humorous video that tackles the vexing question of What Is Art? It’s a question I ask in a slightly modified form in a Literary Theory class I occasionally teach online: before we address the subject of literary theory, can we first determine exactly what literature is?

It helps, of course, that one of the books we read in this same class–Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction–begins with a chapter titled “What is literature?” It either does or doesn’t help that Eagleton duly refuses to answer his own question. “What is literature,” Eagleton asks; “What do you think it is,” Eagleton responds, as do I. One coy way of answering Eagleton’s question is to note that literature is a field of inquiry focused on questions that have more than one answer. Whenever students press me for “the answer” to Eagleton’s question, I note that my copy of the book doesn’t come with an Answer Key, the question “What is literature?” being a question I ask because I’m genuinely interested in discovering some decent answers, not because I’m looking for students to read my mind.

After we spend about a week grappling with the most basic of literary questions–how, after all, can you move on to the sticky task of interpreting literature if you don’t even know what literature is?–I’ll eventually observe that I personally think the very discussion and debate we’re engaged in is in large part what defines “literature.” Given a blank brick wall, most folks won’t find much to argue or analyze; given a brick wall with some sort of image painted therein, we can begin to pose (and debate) questions such as why is the image there, what does it mean, and what value or significance does it have in our lives?

And yet, even this answer is incomplete and unsatisfactory, for it ignores issues of intent. If audiences define art, then an accidentally spilled bucket of paint can qualify if onlookers subsequently wonder why or to what purpose said paint was spilled. Right now in New England, many winter-weary folks are shaking their fists at the sky and wondering “Why”: does that mean Yet Another Snowfall could qualify as Art if enough of us got together and started debating its meaning?

Things are complicated even further when I realize I have contradictory views about my own blog, which may or may not qualify as “art” or “literature” depending on whom and how you ask. If you were to ask me if my written posts qualify as literature, I’d probably say yes…but if you were to ask me if my posted pictures qualify as art, I’d probably say no. As a writer, I see my words as being consciously crafted to communicate an artful intent: yes, it does my writerly heart proud to think that someone might read my words and ponder issues of meaning or significance in response. But as shutter-snapper, I don’t see the pictures I post as having the same intentional import: the fact that I shot this rather than that is almost always accidental, and art (in my mind at least) is about authorial intention. If I snapped an interesting image by accident, would that image be art, or simply fortuitous? In my mind at least, the pictures I post are illustrations, but they aren’t art, for they don’t rise to the same level of conscious craft that my carefully chosen words do.

And yet, as a literary critic, I also know that authors themselves are often the least credible source when it comes to interpreting their own art, which again suggests a certain element of accident (or at least surprise) when it comes to creative matters. If an author or artist was thinking Idea A when she or he crafted a given work, does that preclude the possibility that Ideas B, C, and/or D might be appropriate interpretations as well? It seems the very questions “What is art” and “What is literature” are themselves rather artful and literary, inspiring as they do a complex internal debate that appears to be ongoing. My copy of Terry Eagleton’s book definitely does not come with an answer key, and I ask these questions because the more I think about them, the further it seems I am from actually answering them.

 

Random

Yesterday morning on my way to Zen practice, I stopped to photograph Modica Way, the alley in Central Square, Cambridge, that has been taken over by street artists.

The most democratic of genres, graffiti is an extremely random art form: anyone with a spray can, paint brush, or inedible marker can add their scrawl. Not only is Modica a collaborative work incorporating the efforts of several different artists, the wall reflects various media of street art, with stencil work, free-hand tags, and all sorts of stickers covering the bricks, exposed ductwork, and other building surfaces.

Even at its most random, the Modica mural shows some semblance of order, with different sections being dominated by different artists, including Bren Bataclan, the Boston artist who painted my Christmas present. When I first visited (and photographed) Modica Way over a month ago, I wasn’t sure where the “real art” of the wall’s sanctioned artists ended and the popular editorializing of random punks began. On a wiki-like wall where everyone can write and revise, which version is the truest? After staring a while, I realized the point of pastiche is the ultimate randomness of it all. When your parchment is a palimpsest, every painting is pentimento: every iteration is a literal do-over, today’s version writing over yesterday’s.

I’ve had randomness on my mind all weekend as I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time staring at the gift I gave J for Valentine’s day: a digital frame for him to display his photographs. I figured a digital photo frame was a perfect gift for a photographer who has everything; what I didn’t foresee was the way I’d enjoy revisiting a couple hundred of J’s favorite images from the last year. Now that there’s a frame on J’s kitchen counter cycling in random rotation his various photos of me, our pets, and the places the two of us have explored together over the past year, I find myself stopping to watch these scenes from our shared life, marveling at how many memories two people can cobble together without really trying.

At Zen practice yesterday, I gave consulting interviews, and one practitioner asked about the difference between good thoughts and bad. How can you encourage the former and get rid of the latter?

“There is no difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts,” I explained. “The mind is a sense organ that perceives an endless series of thoughts, just as the eyes perceive an endless supply of visual stimuli, the nose perceives an endless series of olfactory signals, and the ears perceive an endless stream of sound.” Just as we don’t blame our nose for bad smells or gouge out our eyes when they see something ugly, we can’t blame or give credit to our minds for their thoughts. Thinking is what minds do, so it makes no sense to judge our thoughts or to cling to presumably good thoughts while pushing presumably bad ones away. Instead, thoughts will be thoughts, and our minds will be minds: like a digital frame set to “random,” our minds endlessly loop the thoughts and images they’ve taken and stored whether we like them or not.

And so the answer I’d give in response to Annette’s request that I describe my life in six words or less would be the following Zen-inspired definition of consciousness: an endless series of random stimuli. Some folks wait until their dying breath to see their life flash before their eyes, but I say watching your life is as easy as walking down a graffiti-covered alley or flipping through the virtual pages of an electronic photo album, the accident of your life appearing in all its random glory.

Click here for a photo-set of images from Modica Way, taken yesterday and in January. Enjoy!

 

Watch your step

Soon on the heels of arriving back in New England after visiting my family in Ohio, I’m leaving again, this time for a weekend wedding in Los Angeles. Although I’ll be taking my laptop to keep in touch with my online classes, I’ll once again be out of the loop when it comes to blogging. I’ll see you when I return from the Left Coast; in the meantime, watch your step and beware of falling ice.

 

Gray

Here is another view of the little listener standing with her tin-can phone outside Turn It Up! used CD shop in downtown Keene: a splash of color to enliven an otherwise gray stairwell.

This is my submission for today’s Photo Friday theme, Gray.