Just looking

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between words and images. I share a lot of words and photos here on my blog, and I produce a lot of words and images that never get posted here. I consider myself a writer who also takes pictures, the “taking pictures” always taking second place to the “writing.” But although I consider myself more a shutterbug than a serious photographer, I have to admit how reliant upon images my writing has become. Although I certainly can describe things without an accompanying photo to illustrate, whenever I find myself at a loss for words, it’s often because I haven’t been looking at (or photographing) much.

I’m coming to realize that looking at things–particularly new or interesting things–is an important part of my composition process, even if what I’m writing has nothing to do with what I’ve been looking at. I guess you could say I’m a visual thinker: whereas some people are inspired by ideas or sounds or even smells, my personal muse seems have big, wide-open eyes. When I’m in search of inspiration, looking is more fruitful than thinking: thinking just leads me in circles, but looking at something interesting perks me up in a way that few other things can.

Last weekend while I was at Northeastern University for the BRAWN Summer Institute, I went to a session on place-based pedagogy. I’ve always described Hoarded Ordinaries as being a blog about place, and when I taught a first-year writing class called “The Art of Natural History” at Keene State College, I encouraged my students to choose research topics that similarly close-to-home: “topics they could touch” was how I described it. Now that I divide my days between two different campuses, I’ve struggled to incorporate place into my teaching: it’s hard to feel rooted when your teaching is neither here nor there.

During that session on place-based pedagogy, however, something remarkable happened: we took a field trip. Half of the participants went to examine the Student Center food court, and my half of the session went outside, walking over to a brick wall where Los Angeles-based street artist El Mac recently painted a mural representing the union of arts and sciences. Our official assignment was simply to look at the mural, and when we reunited with the other half of the group, we discussed the various uses of these two spaces: indoor and outdoor. But what fascinated me most wasn’t that ensuing discussion but the simple act of looking an an interesting image.

Having taken so many photos of the Wall at Central Square, I’ve developed a certain fondness for the look of spray paint on brick. And having once had an office inside Holmes and then Nightingale Halls–two of the academic buildings housed in the re-purposed factory where El Mac’s mural is situated–I love the look of the neighborhood these days. A brick wall can be a frustrating obstacle–something that blocks the sky and gets in the way of forward progress–or it can be a canvas of opportunity, a window into a world you can envision only with your inner eye.

Click here for more photos of El Mac’s new mural at Northeastern. “Just looking” is a title I’ve used for two other blog posts: one describing a summer walk around my neighborhood here in Newton, and the other featuring one of my favorite photos.

 

Starved for color

We’ve reached that time of year when I’m tired of photographing icicles and snow.

January’s “river of stones” challenge ended a few days before another big storm left me snowbound in Massachusetts while J was stranded on a business trip. During the days J was gone and I was home alone with a houseful of pets, I taught my face-to-face classes online and ventured no further than our backyard dog-pen, my snow-buried car parked at the end of our snow-buried driveway. For the better part of a week, my days were full of teaching tasks, household chores, shoveling, and roof-raking: not exactly the stuff of interesting blog-posts.

Despite my best efforts, J came home to ice dams, a leaky porch, and a damp basement. It’s been good to have him home, and even better to have some warm weather this past weekend that cleared much of our roof more efficiently than either J or I could have done with a snow rake (although a tenacious ice dam still took down one of our gutters). Even though we know winter isn’t over yet, a spot of spring-like temperatures is enough to give us hope.

On Sunday morning, on my way to the Zen Center for mid-morning practice, I made a point to venture behind the Harvest Co-op in Central Square to photograph David Fichter‘s summer-bright mural, “The Potluck“: a cheery scene I’ve blogged before. When you’re starved for color and sick of snow, a colorful mural on an above-freezing day beckons like a promise: someday summer will return, and eventually it will be warm and sunny enough to eat outside.

Click here for more photos of David Fichter’s “The Potluck.” Enjoy!

 

A rainy day

David Fichter’s murals look better on a sunny day…but it was raining when I arrived at the Cambridge Zen Center on Sunday morning, and I’m in the habit of taking a walk before sitting down to meditate. So despite the drizzle, I left my purse in the car and walked with just my camera and a raincoat: just me, the rain, and a neighborhood full of images.

In response to Rurality’s comment on yesterday’s post, today I’ve been sitting with a question: what is wrong with quick picture-posts? As a writer, I feel guilty when I post “just” a picture, yet I continue to stockpile more photos than I could ever blog, even if I posted “just” a picture a day. So what am I waiting for? Why am I saving images for a proverbial rainy day when I know the secret to successful blogging is simply showing up?

So here I sit on the evening of a sunny day sharing pictures from a rainy day. This is how Central Square, Cambridge looked on a wet Sunday morning, before I arrived at the Zen Center to meditate to the sound of raindrops. What better way to spend the morning of a rainy day?

If these rainy-day images of David Fichter’s “The Potluck” have left you hungry for more, you can revisit my sunny-day photos of “Sunday Afternoon on the Charles River,” another Fichter mural in Cambridge, MA. And if you still haven’t gotten your fill of photos, I’ve finally uploaded a photo-set from the May 3rd soccer match between the New England Revolution and the Houston Dynamo. Enjoy!

 

The other side

For all the times I’ve shown you the graffiti wall along Modica Way in Central Square, Cambridge, I’ve never shown you the photo-mural on the opposite wall.

For whatever reason, I tend to focus on the color and changeability of the graffiti wall more than the monochromatic sameness of the other wall. I suppose the officially sanctioned permanence of a photo-mural isn’t as interesting or illicit as an ever-changing wall painted by street artists. Some civic-minded folks organized, designed, and then erected the mural, which commemorates the faces and flavor of Central Square…but knowing the mural is going to be there with its predictable black and white photos every time I’m in the neighborhood, I tend to ignore it. The graffiti on the other wall is unpredictable and always surprising, so the same old photos on the other wall seem tame and reliable in comparison. Although I’ve occasionally snapped photos of the other side of Modica Way, I’ve never found a reason to blog them. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the dictum of the mainstream media, and “if it’s colorful, it’s bloggable” seems to have become my unofficial policy. Images of someone else’s black and white photos always seem to take a backseat.

You miss a lot, of course, if you focus only on the colorful, remarkable things. Much of life is monochromatic and predictable: in fact, you could rightfully argue that the best things in life are tame and reliable. Colorful graffiti offers the excitement of novelty: turning the corner onto Modica Way, you’ll never know what sort of colors, shapes, or images will be there to greet you. But there’s something to be said, too, for reliable predictability. Temporary exhibits might draw us back to the same old museum, but there’s a reassuring comfort in knowing the permanent exhibits are still there, inviting us to take another look.

Truth be told, the photo-mural on Modica Way isn’t as unchanging as I seem to think it is, and therein lies the true lesson of all things monochrome. Passersby have and do put stickers and Magic Marker messages on it–the most primitive form of graffiti–and someone occasionally cleans these up: the towheaded tyke pictured on the far right here is no longer labeled as a white devil, and the fellow with his thumb up here is no longer holding a flower. Impermanence does indeed surround us: yesterday’s Magic Marker commentary might be scrubbed by tomorrow. Even if the mural itself doesn’t change, the faces depicted therein certainly do: the celebrated Central Square figure of the Reverend Larry Love, a deranged but lovable fellow who wandered the streets (and occasionally directed traffic) in colorful costumes when I lived in Cambridge, died in 2001, but an image of him in his makeshift police uniform keeps his memory alive on Modica Way.

After having unofficially participated in November’s National Blog Posting Month, I feel like I’m returning to the monochrome world of posting when and how I can. The month of November showed me that I can post something every single day if I really put my mind to it, but now that December has started, life will be less colorful (and thus presumably less bloggable) as my academic workload turns from “fairly busy” to “that time of the semester when I’m buried in paper-piles.” On the one side of Modica Way, colorful graffiti points to the creative impulse that makes something out of the blank slate of bare brick…or that, at least, paints over yesterday’s ephemera with today’s novelty. On the other side of Modica Way, a collage of decade-old (and older) photos invites the commentary of marginal marker scribbles: given what someone else saw then, what can you say today?

Last month, I spent 30 days typing words on the blank slate of an empty screen, and for the next three weeks, I’ll be writing comments on papers, my marginal scribbles seeming mundane and monochromatic compared to November’s colorful conversation. I’ll post when and how I can, even if it’s only an occasional postcard, until I come out on the other side of the current semester.

Click here for the complete photo-set from the other side of Central Square’s Modica Way. Enjoy!

 

Single shot

When I first moved to the Boston area in the early 1990s, my understanding of the city and its outlying areas was completely T-dependent. I knew the individual subway and trolley stops I used on my way from Malden to Chestnut Hill, for instance, but I didn’t know how these places connected above ground. When I started graduate classes at Northeastern, for instance, I’d take the Green Line from my Beacon Hill apartment to the aptly named “Northeastern” stop that let me off in front of campus…but it took my slow-witted self about a semester or so to realize the Orange Line “Ruggles” stop let me off on the side of campus where my office was located. It came as a silly surprise to realize a stop on the Orange Line could be so close to a stop on the Green: just one side of campus to the other! It was a realization I had to come to on-foot, leaving the safety of train or trolley to explore the neighborhood (and possibly get lost) on my own.

If you’ve been visiting Hoarded Ordinaries for a while, you’ve gotten some individual blog-stop views of the greater Boston area…but unless you’ve been to Boston, you might not understand how these individual blog-stations connect. So when I described Cambridge’s vintage Shell sign and freeway revolt mural as both being located at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Magazine Street, you might not have realized that these two landmarks really are so close to one another, you can shoot them both in a single shot.

 

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?

 

Strength

Never underestimate the strength of a group of angry Cantabrigians.

As long as I can remember, there’s been a mural on the backside of the Microcenter store on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA commemorating the 1970s freeway revolt that is the reason why Interstate 95 goes around rather than through Boston. It might seem easy to pave a neighborhood: who in their right mind, after all, would stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress? Some twenty years before I moved to Cambridge to live for two and a half years at the Zen Center that’s only about a mile from this mural, a bunch of residents stood up to the road builders and said “Not in my backyard.” In a very real way, I owe the ongoing existence of the neighborhood that once was my neighborhood to folks I never met apart from their symbolic representations on this wall.

I was back in Cambridge yesterday giving consulting interviews at the Zen Center, a role that still feels foreign to me. I’ve been a Senior Dharma Teacher in my Zen school for four years now, but I still expect to be sitting on the student rather than the teacher cushion in the Zen Center interview room. Who am I to be giving anyone advice about anything, I wonder every time I pick up the bell that says “Next!” to Dharma room meditators awaiting an interview. On a good day, I’ll try to share a glimpse of what I’ve experienced during some eighteen years of Zen practice, and I let the person on the other side of my mat decide what to keep and what to reject. On a bad day, I take the tenuous job of “teacher” too seriously, saying more than is technically helpful and breaking the Number One Zen Dictum, “Open mouth, already a mistake.”

Spending any amount of time in meditation–on a certain level, eighteen years, eighteen minutes, or eighteen seconds are merely microcosms of the same immeasurable experience–feels a bit like standing up to an oncoming bulldozer. When I first began meditating, I’d often experience bouts of panic where I thought I’d literally die from the terror of simply sitting and watching my own karmic crap. In daily life, there are countless ways to ignore, drug, or drown out your inner insecurity, insanity, or inanity. When you’re sitting on a meditation cushion, however, you can’t reach for a drink, the TV remote, a bag of fattening snacks, or your preferred Distractor of Choice. When you’re sitting on a meditation cushion, the only defense you have against whatever you’ve spent your conscious hours ignoring is your own breath, and that’s a shield that feels as flimsy as air.

One of my favorite Zen sayings (and one I observe much more faithfully than “Open mouth, already a mistake”) is “You’re stronger than you think.” I suspect that had those nameless Cantabrigians who saved what would eventually become my erstwhile neighborhood seriously thought about how big a task standing up to a bulldozer is, they might never have undertaken it. Instead, activism starts with one action, and one action leads to another. The way you sit out a Dharma room panic attack, I’ve learned, is to use the mantra of “One more breath” like a lifeline: you can live an entire life surviving from breath to breath. I suspect the secret to a successful freeway revolt is something similar: signature by signature, you fill your petitions; moment by moment, you refuse to be moved.

Today, some twenty years after the citizens of Cambridge said “no” to the freeway that would have bisected their neighborhood, the citizens of Boston’s North End, who have lived in the shadow of Interstate 93 since the 1950s, saw a long-promised park open where the Central Artery has since gone underground. There’s one sort of strength that says “Hell, no”; there’s another sort of strength that says, “Someday, this too shall pass.” The citizens of Cambridge earned their freeway-free neighborhood; on a sunny Sunday, even Memorial Drive is closed to vehicular traffic so locals and visitors alike can walk, jog, push baby-strollers, roller-blade, escort dogs, and otherwise move motor-free down a normally busy thoroughfare. The residents, too, of the North End amply deserve the parks that have replaced the freeway there. The last time I was in the North End, I kept looking slack-jawed at the sky, shocked to see air where an ugly Artery once stood. It’s been a long time coming.

Each of us, individually, is stronger than we think; collectively, gathered into neighborhoods and united by even the smallest vision of what could be, our strength is greater than bulldozers. One breath is the merest tickle; many breaths become a mighty wind. Heaven help the power that tries to fight that strength.

This is my belated contribution to last week’s Photo Friday theme, Strength.

 

Layers

The first (and last) time I posted a picture of this faded, multi-layered Coca-Cola mural on Washington Street here in Keene was almost three years ago. At the time, I was married and leading a Zen group in this same building; now, I’m divorced and no longer lead a Zen group, only an informal meditation group on campus. This mural hasn’t changed much in the almost three years I’ve known it, but I feel I have changed a great deal, having moved from a narrow, crowded place into a happier and more expansive one.

What I love about this mural isn’t simply its age and the fact it endures; what I love about this mural is the way time has laid bare its layers. At one time, this brick wall boasted Coca-Cola’s “Delicious and Refreshing” qualities; at another, Coca-Cola was lauded for its ability to “Relieve Fatigue.” Which Coca-Cola is the better and truer version? Which Coca-Cola do you prefer? It strikes me that we as living creatures are always in process–always sloughing off layers of identity like snakes who grow from the inside out, splitting at their seams and then shedding when they exceed the limits of their own skin.

Where and who will I be in three years? What new layers will accrue, and what deeper layers will be revealed? If Coca-Cola promised to be an prognosticating elixir, I might hazard a guess…but for now, only time will tell as individual days with their translucent layers gradually unfold.

 

Happiness is…

…an afternoon chat with a friend. This photo, snapped during a daytrip to Ann Arbor, Michigan with Gary several weekends ago, is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Happiness is…. For another take on the same theme, see my January post of the same title.

 

The writing on the wall

A decade or more ago, when I was married and living in Boston, my then-husband and I spent an impromptu weekend in Montreal, where he had occasionally traveled on business. I remember precisely three things from that weekend. First (and probably at my insistence), we walked around the Parc du Mont Royal, climbing the humble hill that gives Montreal its name. Second, we went to a Saturday night hockey game in which the at-home Canadiens were beaten by the visiting Senators. And third, we walked down Rue Ste. Catherine on Sunday morning while proper matrons in church-going finery walked past strip clubs displaying full-length posters touting the earthly delights within.

Although this weekend I didn’t stroll down Rue Ste. Catherine, that image of church-going women in dresses and heels clicking past life-sized strip-club posters remains indelibly etched in my memory, an emblem of how French Canadian sensibilities differ so greatly from the puritanical dualities we are saddled with here in the States. South of the Canadian border, we Americans see sex and spirit as being irrevocably separate…and we let loose to cheer on our sports teams only when we’re sloshingly soused. At that long-ago Saturday night hockey game, there were women who were similarly attired as those church-going ladies on Rue Ste. Catherine: although passionate about sport, the Canadian fans I observed a decade or more ago weren’t smashingly drunk like the hockey hooligans you’d encounter at a Boston Bruins game. In French Canada, it seemed, people knew how to indulge their appetites both appropriately and in moderation, not fearing the bodiliness of either sport or sexuality but allowing both body and spirit their proper expressions.

I hope, over time, to remember and cherish more than three things about this past weekend’s return to Montreal, this time husband-less and accompanied by a band of blog-friends. My bloggish appetite for word and image, I think, has awoken me over time to the writing on the wall: whereas a decade or more ago I didn’t dare admit the puritanical abstinences and ricocheting excesses that marked a marriage headed toward dissolution, these days I’ve honed myself both to look and see. Montreal and cities like it are no longer his destination, places I visited as a tag-along as if travel were the ultimate Gentlemen’s Club: this weekend I drove as Leslee navigated, and I saw Montreal streets as if for the first time, again.

Montreal is a city of paradoxes, an alluring mix of the sacred and the profane. What better place to meet in the flesh (either again or for the first time) some of the virtual strangers with whom I’ve felt spiritually akin over the years. A decade or more ago, I learned the hard way that sharing even a bed doesn’t preclude you from loneliness…how odd, then, to meet this weekend someone like Dale, a blogger with whom I’ve meditated across time zones for 100 days and then some.

What does it mean to “commune” with a person? Must you have sat together in the same place and at the same time? Or is it enough to have glimpsed glimmers of the same Self, or to be on the path toward such glimmerings? Christians sometimes talk of living amongst a “cloud of believers”: an intangible aura of persons past and present who support and watch over one’s way. If spirits can transcend space and time, why can’t living souls? Is friendship something that walls, distance, or even bodies can contain?

Saturday was unrelentingly rainy in Montreal, much as it was when I visited that girl in New York in October, where we toured Chelsea galleries with one of the Anonymous Ones I saw again this weekend. The Internet, they say, is a World-Wide Web of connections, but it would be wrong to say these connections are merely technological. Walking the rain-slicked streets of Vieux Montreal on Saturday with a barely contained band of rowdies–at times walking together, at times wandering apart–I was struck again at how easily the essence of individuality is communicated across the Internet ether, each of these blog-friends seeming exactly how I’d imagined them, only more so.

I’ve met enough virtual strangers by now to have thought long and deeply about the process: what is it that makes meeting a long-time blog-read seem so natural? There’s nothing, of course, intrinsically natural about typing words onto a screen and clicking “Send” or “Publish”…and yet as social creatures, we’re always reaching for both connection and mutual understanding. In meeting long-time blog-reads this weekend and in the past, it strikes me that these in-person relationships start in medias res: instead of frittering through the usual geting-to-know-you chitchat, you can settle in to talk about the things that truly matter, things that longtime friends or even spouses have never touched.

What I’ll remember from this weekend won’t be the things people said, for I’ve already read plenty of words from Beth, Dave, Tom, and the like. No, what I’ll remember from this weekend are the ephemeral images of memory: Dave’s ivory-billed woodpecker hat, the curl of qB‘s perpetual grin. Tom is taller than I’d imagined, and he was surprised at my shortness; Beth has a hitherto unsuspected ability to appear almost silently and to instill a palpable sense of calmness on a bustling Rue St. Denis coffee-shop, the sort of funky hang-out where I’ll now eternally imagine her.

On Sunday morning while the others went to church, Leslee, Dale, Rachel, and I played pagan, watching unleashed dogs cavorting with human and canine companions in the Parc Lafontaine. After a weekend of massive (and massively talkative) meet-ups, it felt appropriate to wander as a small group, there being little need for profound conversation. As I’ve said here before, “with a dear, true friend, there’s so much more to say than words can capture.” I’ve read enough writing on the virtual wall to know the best time in blogging is when the blogging stops: when presence replaces words, and you and several cherished others can dwell simply together in the place called Real Life.