a perfume of protection to wear under my homemade clothes.
I moved to New York City from San Francisco to run CBS Records’ Customer Merchandising department, a heady job for a young woman barely two years out of college, producing graphic and photographic merchandising visuals at the recording label that was home to so many musical artists I had loved in my young life.
You can’t always get what you want, mmm!
Get what you need, Oooh, yeah!
…I like to take long walks through the villages and cities I visit, taking pictures of street scenes and landscapes as I go. But mostly, I like to take pictures of people, stopping them to ask if they would mind. If they don’t mind, interesting things can happen.
An Asphalt Shadow Self-Portrait remembrance of The Great American Eclipse.
I spent the last two months driving back and forth between New York City and photographer Cheryl Machat Dorskind’s home in Westhampton, New York, shooting her in her studio and in her backyard, accompanying her on professional portrait shoots, a photography boat safari, and random photography walks in the inland wetlands and on the beaches and marsh landscape of Eastern Long Island.
Went to see The Lion King last night.
I got the last copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad at B’s & N’s yesterday.
You haven’t had a burger until you’ve had a Sugar Burger. Somehow you have to get yourself to Embudo, New Mexico (some say Dixon, some say Velarde) beside the Rio Grande River between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico to get your hands on one of them, but once you do it will be difficult, if not impossible, to eat any other kind of burger once you’ve tasted a Sugar Burger.
There is much to be learned from communicating without speaking, using movement, music and the body to reach another. Last night I ‘watched’ the movie Casablanca by ‘listening’ to it instead of actually watching it. I was exercising on the floor in a part of the room where I could not see the television. I heard and understood lines of dialogue and nuance in conversation between characters as though I was ‘watching’ the movie for the first time, even though it would be safe to say I have probably seen the move two dozen times.
In Cornolo, Italy, I met this woman.
Make Art, not War is a philosophy that I grew up with. My parents were surrounded by artists, artists who worked obscurely at their crafts in the deserts of Northern New Mexico, artists who took a long time to make names for themselves, because things taking a long time is rather part and parcel of working in obscurity.
Ummmm….So no, the Eagles have not played like they were wearing tutus.
“You’ve said that twice in the last 15 minutes,” my friend Hartley noted, watching me wolf down a spicy fish taco at Bill’s Burger Bar just off Rockefeller Plaza.
E.B. White’s Here is New York is my favorite book about my favorite American city. Published in 1949, it is considered an essay, most likely because of its short length, a mere 56 pages, into which White packed such timeless observations about the island of Manhattan that this ‘book’ has a permanent place on my desk in New York.
At the Kentucky Women Writers Conference in Lexington, Kentucky.
In the Summer of 2006, the day before I returned to New York after using my entire year’s vacation to study Italian at the Università per Stranieri in Siena, Italy, I took an early bus to Arezzo and spent the morning roaming the city taking pictures. After the cool early hours had morphed into lunchtime, I found a little trattoria on a small piazza where I could have a salad and a cold glass of Prosecco to ward off the heat that had begun to rise from the cobbled vicolos.
I watch the mesquite-scented smoke plume rise from the incense burner and remember Winters in the New Mexico desert.
I ought to have been born between the World Wars, when it was romantic to be sentimental, when having an attachment to the past was normal, when lovers would hand-write nostalgia-filled letters whenever apart, when taking a journey down a memory lane strewn with tales of adventures and friends and events long gone by could rouse a spontaneous and unembarrassed launch into Doris Day’s and Les Brown’s rendition of A Sentimental Journey.
I don’t watch much television, but these past few months I have looked forward to late Sunday nights with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, an update of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which aired in 1980 to mesmerized viewing.
Standing on the barren landscape of what was once Uruk in ancient Sumer, now known as Iraq, in The Immortals (Episode 11 of the modernized series), Tyson tells us about Enheduanna, an Akkadian Princess (2285-2250 BCE) about whom I had never heard until The Immortals aired on May 18, 2014.
Lovers loving. Dancers dancing. Fountains rising and falling. At the ballet.
My favorite writer has died.