Times Square to 72nd

There was this odd looking guy on the uptown local standing against the train door on my commute home yesterday evening. He was playing what looked like a heavy cast iron circular instrument that I’ve never seen before. The sound it made when he tapped it reminded me a little of a steel pan but it relied on a different internal construction to produce notes. The guy wasn't performing or anything. He was just standing there and I noticed in my peripheral vision when he pulled the instrument out and these soft, clean, melodic tones began to escape beneath the white noise of the train wheels, people chatter and movement.

I was sitting next to the woman who was in the seat next to the door where he stood. She had her ear buds in. I pulled my cell phone out as well, but only so I could hit record.

You can listen to the sound here on my Soundcloud account.


Now I need to find out what that instrument was.

Permanent Traveller

"He doesn’t look at people in a judgmental way. He avoids asking a lot of questions. Instead it is just this experience of observing and being present, and defining life through this flow.” 

Every once in a while, even someone as odd as me discovers that someone in the world is living a life closest to the one I aspire to. Someone does something that although seemingly trivial to some, gets me right in the core of myself which I thought was wavering beyond recognition. And I start to get excited and cry at the same time because I'm moved by beauty...or my period is coming. Whatever...

Here's one of many reasons I'm happy I deactivated my FB account for the New Year. Focus. I use a secondary FB account to manage my special interest pages and that's about it. I journal a lot more and I funnel all my time killing searches into what I'm actually interested in rather than let myself be drawn into scattered internet activity because I'm bored or distracted. It's not to say that I don't occasional dress an avatar or two, but I'm no longer thinking in FB status updates which was a problem for me pre-deactivation. I don't blame it on Facebook or the internet. The fault was all my own. So I made the decision to change it. and it's been hard, but it's also been rewarding in a personal way.

anyway... Adam Magyar....

I was on the FB page I had created for my photography this morning where I subscribe to, post and promote only photography related things when I saw this post from Gregory Crewdson, whose photo essay, "Twilight" rocked me years ago when I was working at Barnes & Noble. A self taught photographer and computer software writer, Adam Magyar has created a scanning/photography tool for capturing something very hard for me to describe but which kind of stopped my heart when I viewed it this morning. And in reading more about how he came to be who he is, a deep undercurrent of longing is stirred.

As a native New Yorker, I ride the subways just about every single day. I see the circus of misery, of  creativity, of joy, violence, loneliness, madness, comradery and isolation. Sometimes I'm dead to it. Other times, I long for it. Still other times, I want nothing more than to get as far away from it as possible. But always I know, this is my city. I am one of these people, caught in a range of infinite realities we understand as the life we have made for ourselves.

It is clear, as in in the quote above, that Magyar's observation of these things in his piece, "Stainless" is stunningly lacking in judgement. Viewing it is almost as if looking with your own eyes from someplace distant at all these stories which usually whirl about to quickly for anyone to process all at once. Through his uniquely constructed technology, his piece allows you to take it all in, in slow motion and with haunting detail.

You don't need to climb the face of Ketu. Travel is what you make of it. And all the richness, the drama, the adventure, the sensuality, the encounters, the beauty of life and so much more are right where you are.

Adam Magyar - Stainless, 42 Street (excerpt) from Adam Magyar on Vimeo.

iOS 7 Wisdom

About a week ago I updated my iphone 4S Operating System to iOS 7. Although a friend of mine had encouraged me to do it last year, I was still too grumpy about the lack of enthusiasm I felt over the new iphone release to do it. Additionally I didn’t have enough room on my phone for the update to occur without my getting rid of stuff.

But I needed a quick, free pick me up recently so I just sat down and looked at the apps, music and other items I didn’t really need or could live without. I archived a bunch of my photos. It took a while and was slightly irritating and even painful but eventually I made enough room for the update which has been available to iPhone users for over a year now. 

Mostly, I like it. There are a few tiny things I miss but for the most part I would describe the iOS 7 update as faster, ambient, unobtrusive and even more touch intuitive than before. But that’s not the best part. I’m not a tech person at all. I couldn’t tell you how many mbs equal a gb or even if they do. But I noticed that I now have more of my own music on my iphone than I had before. All the albums,  iTunes purchases and everything are there. I’ve even downloaded a few new apps and there’s still room for them. Beyonce’s videos that I deleted to make room for the update; they’re back. 

I’m certain there’s a technical explanation for it, but all I know is that I love the idea of giving up things I don’t need or thought I needed but don’t and getting back even more than I had before.  I’ve heard that works in non-digital life too.

Untermeyer Morrissey

Early one morning in the 90s, we met in the Central Park Conservancy before school. With our legs dangling in the empty Untermeyer fountain of “Three Dancing Maidens”, we ate our O-town breakfasts and listened to Morrissey singing the single “Used to be a sweet boy” on our Walkmans. Cassette singles used to come in those thin cardboard sheaths, remember?  Morrissey’s voice caught my ear on the radio with “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” long before I left for Bard College in 1994, long before I met Ben who introduced me to “The Smiths.” 

It was a song slipped in between the more traditional pop songs on popular radio which I listened to religiously in my youth. And I was struck by its genius, sarcasm, and conviction. 

“Beware, I bear more grudges than lonely high court judges. When you sleep I will creep into your thoughts like a bad debt that you can’t pay. Take the easy way and give in…”

Who was Morrissey? He used the pop genre but he was no pop singer, not really. He didn’t fit in anywhere.  But he got in. I heard him. 

At the time I thought you probably understood more about the deep meaning behind “Used to be a sweet boy” than I. In my imagination it was possibly one in a countless range of songs that came to mind when I imagined what the soundtrack to your life would be.  But now, reading Morrissey’s autobiography, I understand more. He was a survivor of his “childhood” and it was music that he held on to, that reached down to him in the hole of a miserable set of circumstances historically, geographically and culturally. He grabbed the long arm of music and held on until it dragged him up over the hot coals and broken glass of his unforgiving origins and into his fate.  

We listened to Morrissey as we listened to so much music that year, with a view to a connection with our own outsiderness. That was a year when you opened my Whitney Houston ears to Bjork, Ace of Base, Pet Shop Boys and Harcore Kickin Nations. I heard the harmony and rhythmic patterns in what I had previously dismissed as random chaotic noise. I heard machines, making art and voices, never trained to sing ballads reach into my soul and drag their nails down the walls with ecstasy.

In those days, there was still only fast forward, rewind, stop and play. There was no skipping.  

"Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy"

I secretly worry that the above sentiment expressed by comedian Louis CK is true most of the time. More than ever these days, myself included, people, children, we're all looking down into our mobile devices rather than at one another. I think the book was the first form this kind of distraction I ever employed as a young person. Except a book is not exactly a distraction. You're focused on a consistent narrative expressed by another human being which hopefully helps to connect you with human experience, rather than distract you from it. At least that's what it did for me. Reading is still very dear and intimate to me. But I find myself pulling out my smartphone in public and social settings for very different reasons than I would a book.

Louis CK's explanation of why he hates smart phones, though initially a bit crude and pessimistic (this is his comedic style) hits pretty close to home for me particularly in so far as it pertains to children. I don't hate smart phones on the whole but I do often hate the ways in which we as humans use them to disconnect from one another and I can only imagine that a smartphone in the hands of a child who has not yet learned the importance of looking up and being aware of whom and what is around you, eye contact when communicating and very simple things like not always blocking out unpleasant feelings that arise by playing Candy Crush, can be hugely problematic. Wait, I do that. But the point is I can also not do that. I know that I won't explode if I put my phone away and look at people. I can't imagine having had a cell phone, let alone a smart phone when I was in high school. I definitely hid books in my desk during boring lectures but a book doesn't text you back, doesn't send photo's, play music, and send alerts about the new release of Portlandia Seaosn 3 on Netflix. I feel so sorry for teachers who have to compete with smartphones to get the their student's attention. I just don't know how that works.

Feeling Like Unplugging

It's been a while. It's been a long while. There's been wedding plans made, breakthroughs/breakdowns, Mandela passing, "Scandal" Finale,  Beyonce's album,  and it's almost the end of another year on this planet. What I'm trying to say is, I'm ready to deactivate my facebook account for a while and make a start to the New Year Facebook free.

I always used to think that people who quit facebook were overdoing it. Like really? You can't handle it? You can't hang? But now I can see, we all have our reasons. We all have our limits and I've reached mine. It's not even forever, just for awhile. All I ever do anymore is think about what I did before facebook, what life was like before facebook and from what I can recall, I miss it. I don't know what I will accomplish when I leave but I do know that when or if I return, I don't want it to feel so much like a vast gaping hole of a headquarters for fragmented connections on important issues. I'm totally guilty of it. Vagueness, cryptic phrases, dropping and disappearing, posting and running, making too much of nothing. Making too little of something huge. But all through this media and never really touching anything or anyone.

You know what it's like?

Seven years ago, when I first started working at the job where I now currently employed I was given a copy of the time sheet I needed to fill out for full time civil service employees. That I know of, there is no "original" copy of this timesheet. If hard copies of this time sheet disappear forever, we don't have a pdf anywhere that I know. We operate in the stone age here as you may gather by now. So anyway, I have to make sure I have a stock of copies of this time sheet at all times, because if we run out of clean copies that's it. We aren't well equipped. Often I used to wonder, what did the original time sheet look like before it was copied into infinity? Where is it? Who created it? I will never know. I will only ever know copies, never the original. Never the source. That's how I feel about a lot of social media. That we as humans have become simulators of other peoples opinions, creations, ideas, but no longer care about the source, the origin. Everything is just copies, quotes, forwards and......likes. Very rarely do we make anything and then share it in a first person way anymore. Instagram is the new sharing device, literally. No one takes anyone places anymore. We armchair travel. I do it all the time. And because we armchair travel, shop, communicate and share, we don't actually move, touch, or feel the way we used to. We don't experience. We don't live the way we used to.

To some extent I understand that there is no going back, that giving up facebook does not mean taking back everything that came before because time has literally become re-circuited by social media. It gives us the illusion that we can hold on to everything. When I'm at my dad's and I see the old photos he's taken of me over the years, I take pictures of them with my phone. I don't need the hard copy anymore. I don't need the original, the source. I don't need the knowledge of darkroom photography, developing with chemicals, winding celluloid around a metal spool in a velvet bag. All the back story dissolves in a second as the photo is reborn in the world of social media as this new thing to people who don't know me, don't know my dad, don't know the story of the photo, how and why it was made. It is now remade for digital public consumption by people I know as well as people I will never meet, never know, people not even in this country.  It's astounding, amazing, frightening. Andy Warhol sure knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, quitting facebook is only one step in my attempt at liberating myself from my internet addiction. I would never delude myself to think I could give up the internet completely, nor do I feel it's necessary, at least not for me. And I still love my private IG account, because I only follow people that inspire me and it's very different than Facebook. It's easier for me handle. Facebook is a very special kind of monstrous hub that all internet roads seem to lead back to. It's all about who is using it and what it's being used for. And I've lost touch of what I really use it for. At first it was about keeping in contact with friends and old friends but then it was also a bit about stalking and spying. Then it was about games, some of them actually creative (remember graffiti?) and connecting to people that way. Then it became about sharing media, sharing ideas, sharing video, sharing photos, sharing statuses, sharing sharing sharing, liking liking liking, hating hating hating and changing your profile picture and "Scandal." LOL!

I just need a break. I need a break and if I come back, I hope to be like one of those people you never hear from. I have a friend and co-worker I really like who never ever does anything on his facebook account although he has one. And it used to annoy the hell out of me. Even though I see him like everyday and talk to him at least every week, I'd get really annoyed if we hung out on the weekend or something and I posted or tagged him in a commemorative photo knowing he would never look at it or respond to it! ARRRGGHH!! So what if I spent a lovely day with you and other mutual friends in real life! It's not real until you "like" the photo I took of you laughing uproariously and drinking a beer.

But at the same time I really admire him. It's not a struggle for him to stay away from facebook. He has other unrelated addictions probably. Facebook is not one of them. God Bless. I strive towards something like that.

It's not like I'm not still on twitter (not much), tumblr (still don't get it), flickr,  instagram and pinterest.

SO HAPPY 2014!!!! 

...just not on facebook.

Remembering a Friend

Across Brooklyn Bridge

And then I remembered the time we cut a Washington DC demonstration to go to the mall. I’m not sure how it happened.  We were committed to the cause but somehow we ended up in the mall eating fast food and looking at sterling silver jewelry together. You bought me a snake ring.

Further back, I remember that amazing walk we took on the Campus of Brown University. It was Winter at the time and the campus completely covered with snow, was like a wonderland. And we were lost in it for a bit like two of the only people left in the world. We had no idea how extensive Brown’s campus was.  It was the first College town we had ever visited. I remember we bought matching chartreuse colored hoodies at the Gap. It was nighttime when we entered a record store and I bought the album “Make it Big” by Wham on cassette tape. For a long time whenever I heard the song “What she wants” I thought of you and the way you smelled on that trip. 

We went to see “Mississippi Masala” together at a campus theater. There was not a lot of attention paid to that film. There was a lot of touching and kissing and hickeys, which garnered their share of teasing from our classmates. But I never felt ashamed. I felt very lucky to be there with you although I felt you were very forward and your affection put a significant amount of pressure on me, because you thought so much more of me than I felt I could take responsibility for. 

I remember us all being in the gymnasium pool together. How skinny we both were then and how I let my long legs entangle with yours under the water. How I enjoyed the feel of your skin on mine. I was careful to get out of the pool in a certain way so that no one would notice my flaws. Outside in the night air I remember you touching the skin of my back under my green denim jacket. I was still wearing my backless one piece bathing suit. Was it my old Eva Joia Gitano bathing suit? Probably. The same one I wore to Barbados one summer, the summer I almost drowned.

I remember you touched my back very gently, very lovingly as if it was more than just my back. We were standing on the steps of some building in a student campus quad, just out of the swimming pool at night and into dry clothes. I went to the dorm of a young woman whose face I can never recall who hosted me for a weekend. I sat on the corner of the bed and listened to Wham and I could smell you.