Tunnel vision

I consider myself lucky to have a blog I can use an excuse to climb children’s playground equipment to snap curious and colorful photos. Most grown-ups, of course, need to have children to justify their spending any time at a playground…and when you’re a mom or dad, you presumably stay on the ground and observe while Junior tests out the equipment. But if you have a hungry blog to feed, you can engage in all kinds of playful and otherwise odd behavior. How could you tell, for instance, exactly what the inside of a jungle-gym tunnel looks like unless you climbed upon the thing to look for yourself?

As adults, we easily acquire a kind of tunnel vision that looks at the world from strictly an adult-level view. How difficult it is for us grown-ups to remember how even the prettiest playground pony must have looked tall and daunting when we first looked upon it as tiny tots. Walking the usual streets and sidewalks of our mundane lives, it’s easy to forget the amazement and wonder that fills folks newer to our neighborhood. To a child, even a small, otherwise ordinary playground can be a miraculous spot where make-believe characters come alive, childhood lasts forever, and a kiss from Mom or Dad makes everything instantly All Better.

If our adult lives seem less magical than now-distant childhood days, perhaps that’s because we walk the same streets and sidewalks that children do, but our grown-up perspectives prevent us from seeing the color, whimsy, and wonder that’s so apparent to those closer to the ground. Walking past a playground, we adults see ordinary swings and slides…but if we allow ourselves to experience the same at eye-level–climbing up, crouching down, or otherwise deviating from our usual upright business–we might find an entirely new world of wonder in a neighborhood we thought we knew.

 

Re-plugged

It’s beginning to look a lot like…extension cords. J tells me they keep the lights wrapped around the towering spruce tree in downtown Waban year ’round, and he’s probably right. But I don’t remember seeing these extension cords on previous dog-walks, so I’m guessing they don’t keep Festive Holiday Tree plugged in all year, just during the Festive Holiday Months of November through February-ish.

Yes, February-ish. I met J last January, and the first time he gave me directions to his house, Festive Holiday Tree was a notable (and conveniently illuminated) landmark. Newton is a largely Jewish suburb of Boston, and Waban is a largely Jewish section of Newton. This means there aren’t many Christmas trees in Waban, but Festive Holiday Trees are a different story. If you keep your Festive Holiday Tree lit until sometime in February, no one can accuse you of celebrating Christmas at the expense of other sectarian holidays. Instead, Festive Holiday Time, like Festivus, is a celebration for the rest of us.

Apparently it takes a lot of extension cords to keep a Festive Holiday Tree lit. In the past, I’ve used the metaphor of laptop power cords to refer to the way different religions tap into the same unnameable power source, and I suppose that applies to Festive Holiday Trees as well. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Buddha’s Enlightenment, or any of a number of light-focused winter festivals, you have to light your fire somewhere. It’s heartening to know a nice Jewish neighborhood like Waban makes room for both a Festive Holiday Tree and a Catholic born-again Buddhist who believes in truly eclectic holiday decor.

Every year, I think “they” (i.e. the Powers That Be who put up and plug in Festive Holiday Trees) are getting an earlier start on the season…but then I realize it’s later than I think. While I’m still getting used to the fact that it’s November already, the rest of the world is zooming into Thanksgiving. If Thanksgiving is here, can Festive Holiday Time be far behind? A quick check of my blog archive shows I posted a similar picture of the Festive Holiday trees in Keene on–you guessed it–November 18 last year. Whether “they” live in New Hampshire or Massachusetts, “they” have an impeccable sense of timing.

So whether your Festive Holiday Tree is a ginkgo with a light-lined trunk or a spruce with bulb-bedecked branches, ’tis the season for everyone.

 

Larger than life

On sunny days, I try to take extra pictures for a rainy day. On Sunday while I was photographing the mural on the backside of Microcenter in Cambridge, MA, I also snapped some shots of the mural on the side of Trader Joe’s, my actual post-practice destination. On sunny days, you need to save up for a rainy day, and on days when you drive to the Zen Center, you might as well stop on the way home for groceries.

Municipal murals are an interesting sort of propaganda; even more interesting are murals sponsored by a particular company. As far as I know, it’s sheer coincidence that a mural depicting the Cambridge freeway revolt is on the backside of Microcenter: as far as I know, Microcenter had nothing to do with this activism. But the mural on the side of Trader Joe’s, although painted by an established muralist responsible for other public artworks in the metropolitan Boston area, is pretty much a giant ad. If you look closely at the diverse cast of lounging locals enjoying a sunny Sunday along the Charles River, you’ll notice they’re all picnicking on Trader Joe’s products.

On one level, I have no problem with the product placements in this particular mural. The artist’s “canvas,” after all, is Trader Joe’s itself, and I’ve no doubt that the money for the project came from (yes) Trader Joe’s. If a grocery store or other business is going to paint an exterior wall anyway, why not hand a brush to a worthy artist who can put something pretty on an otherwise nondescript brick wall?

What I find interesting about corporate-sponsored murals, though, is the vision and ideals they depict. In a Trader Joe’s world, people of all ages and races enjoy a sun-drenched moment of leisure along the river. Mothers walk with children; children walk with dogs. Families and friends gather over food, and athletic types row by in their sculls. There’s a place for everyone at the “table” that is the Charles River, and there’s food enough for all. I find this brightly colored, utopian vision of a Trader Joe’s world just as tasty as any groceries I might buy inside.

I commented long ago on the amateur version of this idealistic Mural Mindset that can be found here in Keene, NH: “In our rainbow-happy world, we walk hand-in-hand with persons of all races and sizes, communing joyously with one another and with nature…” Here in shiny happy Keene, that old mural got tagged by graffiti hoodlums who presumably aren’t so happy. If your vision of Trader Joe’s, Keene, or whatever else doesn’t match that of actual locals, you might encounter some criticism…and apparently some critics carry spray-cans. It’s hard out here for a muralist.

The idealized mural view of either Cambridge or Keene reminds me of the viewbook perspective prospective students get of college campuses. In college viewbooks, it never rains or is cloudy, students of all races study and hang out together, and nobody gets sick, drunk, or expelled. Just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no crying in college viewbooks. No one in those pretty pictures ever gets homesick, dumped by a faraway high school sweetheart, or infected with an STD. In viewbooks, college campuses are pretty and pastoral, dorm rooms are spacious, and everyone is Best Friends with their roommate. Anyone who has actually been to college knows the real collegiate world isn’t like that, but the real collegiate world isn’t what prospective students are applying for. If a college degree is a necessary first step toward the American Dream, then a lushly illustrated Viewbook Dream is the first step toward pursuing a degree.

Blogs are more than a little like viewbooks and murals. When I showed J this picture of a larger-than-life beagle that bears more than passing resemblance to his real and life-sized one, he wondered where I’d taken it. Although J’s been to this very same Trader Joe’s, he’d never noticed either the mural on its side or the beagle included therein. Given all there is to notice during a shopping trip, on a college campus, or in a city the size of Cambridge, can we be blamed if we miss a detail here or there?

If the mere act of perception is selective–if we can’t see and notice it all, but only bite-size bits either randomly or consciously chosen–why shouldn’t we act like a master muralist, picking out, zooming in, and blowing up those details we want commemorated? I know there’s a graphic artist who Photoshops cigarettes out of the the candid campus photos that get included in the Keene State College viewbook, and I know there are details of my days I don’t mention on-blog. If you can’t squeeze everything into even a larger-than-life canvas, why wouldn’t you choose the brightest, most colorful, and rainbow-happiest images to include? Given the stocked grocery-shelf called Life, wouldn’t you add only the tastiest items to your menu?

 

Picture perfect

Today was a picture-perfect day in Boston with mild temperatures, turquoise-blue skies, and a light breeze. It’s no wonder, then, that one bride and groom thought the harbor walk alongside the JFK Library would be the picture-perfect site for their wedding portrait.

Click here for several other shots of this same picture-perfect couple. Outdoor wedding photography is something I’ve captured here and here as well: enjoy!

 

Auto-matic

Although I’m not one to wear my politics, personal philosophy, or sense of humor on my sleeve, much less my car bumper, I do believe our cars say something about our selves. With this in mind, today I spotted two separate cars in Newton, MA that suggest that optimism is alive and well, at least in one upscale Boston-area suburb.

 

Futuristic

This is what you might call a blast from the past. Something strange is going on with my “old” blog: after over three years of faithful service, the old gray blog went white yesterday afternoon: the proverbial blank page. Over three years of old posts are still there on my host server…but you can’t see them via any browser. I’ve attained, it seems, invisibility, and it isn’t nearly as fun as the super-hero fantasies we all presumably had as children.

While I’m trying to figure out what caused my ancient installation of Movable Type to suddenly go awry, I’m testing the waters here at WordPress. After more than three years of the same old blog template (and an ancient MT installation that took forever to load in IE), I’m thinking a new blog-home might be in the cards. In the meantime, though, I thought I’d resurrect the above image from last week’s trip to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) as my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Futuristic. Below, by way of a flashback, is the original post that accompanied this image: proof that my posts do still exist in cyberspace, albeit invisibly.

Ad infinitum

Sometimes an almost-daily photo-blogger needs a little help looking at the same old world in a new way. I’ve been blogging for over three years, and for most of that time I’ve posted pictures. Now that I’ve walked the streets of Keene, etc. with a camera for over three years, I sometimes wonder where, when, and how I’ll run out of images. As a Zen Buddhist, I truly believe that each moment is new and unique…and yet as a writer/photographer, I sometimes question whether there really is something new to see and say after all this time spent seeing and saying.

Whenever you’re questioning the Universe’s creative power, it can be helpful to visit a museum, if for no other reason than to play with artsy toys. On Saturday, Leslee, a mutual friend, and I went to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art to enjoy a few mind-altering hours of art. Leslee’s already posted her account of our visit along with some stunning architectural pictures of the ICA’s new waterfront building: a high-brow version of our gallery hop. My perspective on an artful afternoon is much more childlike, focusing (literally) on a series of kaleidoscopic images I shot in the ICA gift-shop with a multi-faceted looking glass–a $8.95 toy intended for children–held over my camera lens.

When you look at the world through an insect’s kaleidoscope eye, what you see is reality refracted and repeated ad infinitum. The umbrellas and handbags I saw in the ICA gift-shop were no different from ones I might browse elsewhere…but when viewed through a multi-faceted lens, these ordinary shopwares seem alien and exotic, something much more exciting than the usual stuff of rainy days and Mondays.

In my writing classes, I try to convince my students that revision is actually the art of re-seeing…so what if they took that language literally, looking at their words and worlds with an eye toward double- and triple-vision? Repeated ad infinitum, literary themes become tiresome and trite…but when even the most ordinary colors and shapes are repeated through a refracting lens, the result seems magical and even life-transforming. Having viewed the world kaleidoscopically, is it possible to view it normally ever again?

If you think of a blog as being a kind of lens, then each almost-daily post can serve as a facet. Over time and under the influence of light, each almost-daily post reflects a shard or sliver of time repeated toward infinity. In more than three years of blogging, how many times have I said roughly the same thing over and over again, varying each incantation of the Same Old Truths only slightly? A Zen Master friend, himself a rehabilitated college professor, once told me that all an academic needs to make a career is one good idea: the rest is just reiteration. Perhaps writing in a blog–like publishing in academe–is like speaking with a stutter, each moment tripping the tongue like a stammered syllable. Like a skipping record, any given writer says the same th-, th-, thing time and again until it rings true: revision ad vertitum.

This issue of peat and repeat–the manner in which time accrues like bog moss, each layer pressing the preceding into a nutrient-rich mass of fertility and decay–is ripe for me because of some literary re-visiting I’ve been doing. In response to the qarrtsiluni theme “Greatest Blog Hits,” I submitted this time-ripened post to the cause. How strange it is to open one’s blog like a time-capsule, re-visiting a particularly poignant moment and viewing it through an aesthetic, art-appreciative lens. The “me” who reads that post today is not the “me” who wrote it: even the many reflections of me, some of them refracted into kaleiscopic shards themselves, no longer look like the “me” I see in my mind’s eye. Can it be that retrospection itself is a distorting lens? Should our backwards-looking Mind’s Eye be inscribed with a warning: events viewed through his mirror may appear larger than they actually are?

As both a writer and photographer, I’m not convinced there’s anything new under the sun…but I try to convince myself that today’s lens on the Same Old Stuff is somehow different from yesterday’s (or last year’s) tired perspective. Sometimes it takes looking through a bug-eyed plastic bubble to re-define your perspective, or sometimes it simply requires looking back. Why take the time to visit and re-visit the gallery of images that is one’s Life: isn’t a single, cursory take enough for the ages? Blogging, like a bug-eyed lens, allows a writer to see the same world anew, today’s refraction being sometimes sharper, sometimes blurrier, than the images preceding it. Over time, an oft-observing eye might come to see the world more clearly and more true; over time, an oft-observing eye might come to appreciate life and its multi-facets ad infinitum.

Click here for more kaleidoscopic images from inside the ICA gift-shop. Click here for other “Greatest Blog Hits” on qarrtsiluni, an online literary magazine which itself is ripening into its second year of existence. If you’re interested in contributing your own “Greatest Blog Hit” to the qarrtsiluni queue, you can find submission guidelines here. Enjoy!

 

Crystal light

Leslee recently shared images of Parisian shop-windows, the French term for “window-shopping” (l�che-vitrine) literally translating as “window licking.” Although Keene, NH isn’t Paris, France, sometimes the best window-shopping happens when you’re inside a store looking out. Window-lickin’ good!

 

Image shopping

This morning when I went to the grocery store, I was famished for light and color. I woke to the sound of rain; even before it was light, I could tell the temperature was above freezing by the sound of water trickling off eaves and the wet hiss of rubber tires on puddled pavement.

The soil here in Keene is already saturated with snow melt, so any additional precipitation merely puddles and pools, too much for the earth to absorb. Now at midday the rain is slowly turning to sleet; later, it will turn to snow. But even the prospect of pristine snow doesn’t lighten my spirits: now that it’s March, I’ve grown tired of gray, tired of slush, tired of mud. Sprinkling a topping of snow over a veritable lasagna of freezing rain, slush, and soggy earth doesn’t make for a palatable portion: covering the mess with snow is as efficient a fix as slapping a coat of paint on a rusted wreck.

What we need here in Keene is spring–real spring–an honest-to-goodness influx of light, color, and warmth. But Mother Nature won’t serve up that promised feast until April or May, and the days in between are long, so in the interim I go shopping.

Like those pictures of abundance I blogged several weeks ago, these images from my local grocery store were snapped with my handy pencam. Like me, my pencam thrives on light and color. In dim settings, it produces images that look like this morning’s weather: watery and muted, with blurring colors and washed-out murkiness. But under the bright lights of a grocery store, my pencam zeros in on shape and shadow, capturing the bright colors and sharp contrast that make products seem to pop from their shelves.

As I’ve shared before, I often go shopping with my pencam, wandering all sorts of stores with my Hungry Eye and only occasionally buying anything. No, looking is infinitely more satisfying than buying: the products you see displayed aren’t commodities I wish to own or consume. Instead, I crave the ordered chaos of tightly tangled colors sorted into meticulous rows and columns, my local grocery store being a clean well-lighted place that is amply stocked with visual flavor.

Just as the body needs a nourishing daily allotment of vitamins and minerals, I think my soul needs a healthy dose of optical stimuli, a full panoply from all portions of the visual spectrum. The muted white and gray of a New England winter are fine and good, but my spirit’s starved for richer fare: green and yellow and red, tumbled forth in an exuberant display of nourishing goodness.