Yesterday, the snowpack was in retreat, revealing hidden activity in the front gardens on my block.
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In one of his poems e.e. cummings mocks the inventor who builds “an instrument to measure spring with.” His description of the inventor — “some oneyed son for a bitch”– brings to mind a camera.
Hands off my camera, e.e.
Photos of a “reserved” parking spot on my street in Washington, DC, February 13, 2010. It’s nice to see the tradition of using two metal lawn chairs as space savers is being upheld, well into the 21st century.
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So here’s the difference between Philadelphia (where I grew up) and Washington, DC (where I live): In Philadelphia it is understood that if you take the time to clear a parking space in front of your house after a snow storm, you then have a valid claim to its exclusive use. Sweat equity confers upon you that right and interest. Digging out gives you dibs. No questions asked.
But in Washington, questions are asked, ethics are examined, situational nuances are parsed. Commentators turn to Locke and Hobbes for guidance. See, for example, the lively discussion engendered by the article: “Can Shovelers “Reserve” Parking Spots They Clear?” in the Washington Post, here; additional views here and here. BTW, WaPo’s online poll, which has received 5000+ votes so far, finds 76% answering “Yes”. The reaction is more even-handed (but less even-tempered) in the dozens of comments posted by readers.
I awoke this morning to a Hiroshige-like scene of bare tree limbs filled with cottony snow:
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Below is Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Evening Snow at Asukayama” (1837-38), a Japanese wookblock print from his series, “Eight Views from the Neighborhood of Edo”:
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It’s not clear whether the pack animal in the second picture came from an early Honda dealership.
A personal essay by David Owen (“The Dime Store Floor”) graces the Jan. 25, 2010 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Throughout the piece Owen’s narrative is intermittently brilliant, as he riffs on a theme posed as a question: What did childhood smell like? I think Owen should try his hand at writing a novel. At one point he describes a recent bike ride near his home, as he came upon members of a girls’ high-school cross-country team running in tight formation:
“As I passed the girls I rode through the invisible trailing cloud of their mingled shampoo fragrances, and suddenly I felt a sort of dumbbell patriotism. My thought was something like this: This is the tremendous strength of America — our vigorous, optimistic young people and their clean, clean hair.”
Dumbbell patriotism. I like that formulation. As an expression of aw-shucks awe at this, our country, and what this country hosts, it captures what I feel each time I come across some vibrant display of the nation’s life-blood.
I’m especially moved to thanks-giving by instances of everyday, nonchalant tolerance. In concept America is defined by freedom and diversity of thought in the public sphere. Happily, there are still a visible examples of that in practice. Consider the advertisement I spotted this week on the rear end of a public bus chugging along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.
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British novelist Ian McEwan, in conversation with Richard Dawkins, is less sanguine about the durability of America’s greatness in this regard. Video here. Dawkins mentions what he sees as an America “rapidly degenerating into a theocracy.” McEwan agrees, and says this development is “one of the most extraordinary reversals in history, isn’t it? You have this extraordinary social experiment: America, an immigrant state, founded in reaction to the religious absolutisms of Old Europe. And then, fast-forward a couple of hundred years, you have at least in Western Europe, more or less entirely, a set of secular governments, and political conversations conducted without any reference to God, while the United States is a place where you cannot hold high office without invoking this Deity.”
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This week I raked leaves in front of the house. While cleaning out the tree box near the curb I found, amongst brown oak leaves blown there from up the block and around the corner, a crumpled piece of paper. Unfolded, it revealed a drawing done with colored pencils. The artist’s use of line and color suggests it is from the hand of the same child artist responsible for the sidewalk chalk-drawing of a Mouse Musketeer I came upon last summer. (That earlier work is reproduced here.)
On the 9″ by 6″ sheet are two figures: a reindeer and snowman. The snowman sports a two-tiered hat, a classic carrot-orange nose, a lopsided mouth like Dick Cheney’s – and a rarely seen pair of legs and feet.
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The relational displacement of the snowman’s eyes, nose and mouth recall the portrait innovation Picasso developed in the 1930s — a style that led many exasperated viewers to blurt out, “My kid could do that!”:
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The first six words in the title of this post — if you count each un-capitalized “i” as a word — is the tagline of a new advertising campaign for Jeep vehicles. The campaign’s 30-second TV commercials have not been well received by media observers. See, for example, comments here, here, and here. Jeep is also placing “i live, i ride, i am” advertisements in magazines, and in my opinion these are truly, madly, deeply, bad. I’m talking about text so awful it defies parody. Here is a two-page spread in the December 14, 2009 edition of TIME magazine (pages 34-35):
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The words that appear in faint gray type in the upper right quadrant — the text providing the premise for the punchy tagline — reads as follows:
i’ve been through hell and high water
i can text but prefer to talk
i read Keats and wear cleats
i think toy dogs are ok
but big dogs rule
i get my “fresh catch” from
the sushi bar sometimes
i wear all earth tones,
but mud is my favorite.
Yes, those lower-case “i”s are indigenous to the copy. It wouldn’t surprise me if a phalanx of Apple attorneys were suspiciously eyeing those “i”s. It also wouldn’t surprise me if those same lawyers offer Chrysler, in lieu of crippling litigation, a friendly settlement proposal calling for minor changes in the tag line:
i live. i ride. i phone. i pod. i mac. i am.
But for now let’s give credit where credit is due. It was the Mad Men at Jeep’s advertising firm who came up with the idea of eschewing margins in favor of pseudo-poetically centering each of the nine descriptive lines. And it was their idea to italicize the word sometimes — a nuance sure to render many a reader weak-kneed.
I confess I was puzzled, however, to find the bold lack of punctuation surrendering to convention just when the statement reaches its final two lines. It’s as if the copywriter, almost done with the task, was suddenly touched by the ghost of her tenth grade English teacher, who whispered a plea: A comma and a period, please!
On the other hand, who among us can resist forming a wry smile at the rhyming of Keats with cleats? Clever.
As for the trendy sentiments expressed in the ad, yes, they’re sophomoric. But so what? (The visiting ghost came from the tenth grade, remember?) Maybe the whole thing is an homage to the malarkey found in the Manifesto of Thompson Hotels?
But enough about words. The bigger oddity is the photo in the left panel of the ad. This, presumably, is the Keatsian survivor of the fabled watery hell (or was it hellish waters?). This is a man who does not know for sure whether tonight’s dinner will include sushi. Can you blame him for scowling at us? Of course not.
But I wonder: Why was he asked to take a pose that is in-your-face and awkward, macho and goofy? Hey, I know the arm swing’s a guy thing; I do it too. But here’s the risk: Someone will be tempted to suggest this guy’s next gig ought to be on stage playing opposite Katisha (She: “My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.” He: “Ditto my left, baby.”)
Is it just me, or do you also find the more you stare at the picture the more his bare forearm looks like a raw turkey drumstick attached to his left ear? (OK, maybe it’s just too close to Thanksgiving for me.) Whether it be a drumstick or an arm, the fact is the thing’s projecting forward from pictorial space, and none too elegantly. As artists will testify, foreshortening can be a bitch. See, for example, Durer’s posthumously published treatise, De Symmetria. So why did the creator of the ad go there, and why compound the problem by featuring a limb that’s freakishly fingerless?
At least when we watch Simon Cowell’s bad habit of scratching the back of his neck, we see him in motion (as in this video at 1:41 – 1:43) and we get to see his hand, as shown in this screen shot:
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[As for the title of this post, if you want to read more about "i yi yi" (aka, "Aye Yi Yi"), an expression used to show frustration, hopelessness, sadness, annoyance, click here and here.]
I recently acquired at auction this abstract sculpture. Four views:
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Just 16″ tall, this is an early work in iron by the contemporary sculptor, Herb Babcock. Babcock was born in Bloomdale, Ohio in 1946. In 1967 he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, then received his BFA in sculpture from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1969 and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1973. He currently serves as Chairman of the Glass Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where he has been a professor since 1974. Babcock lives in Oxford, Michigan. His website is here; a curriculum vitae, which unfortunately stops at the year 2000, is found here. An example of his work in glass is this beautiful vessel. Today Babcock may be known best for his public commissions, often of a monumental size, that combine glass, steel, and stone.
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In the grainy images below, an old and crumbling parking garage is captured through the lens of a two-pixel cell phone camera. The building is a bare-bones concrete structure with 14 levels, its roof open to the city. As night falls and closing time approaches, owners retrieve a few remaining cars and drive a curling path down to the street. What remains behind is brutal architecture . . . and a spooky emptiness.
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This afternoon at 4:00pm:
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Driving through rural Maryland this afternoon, I saw a sign announcing two country roads, left and right, up ahead.
Sure enough, a hundred yards further along I came upon a turn-off.
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So warned, I stuck to the main road.