Pretty

Philharmonic in Prospect Park. Gorgeous sunset on the hurricaine clouds. Moon up on the other side. People sleeping on blankets. The nuns drink coca-cola. Next to me, she strokes her husband's back as he lays his head on her chest. They seem like love. All around little kids scream and run oblivious to joyful music. The world is for them. Fireflies and glowsticks take over from the pink now darkling clouds. i am here by accident, though it is merely steps from my abode, and i'm here alone, though there is contentment in that fact also. At times a big crowd is the perfect place to be alone.

Glory, shouts the odd man to my right. Allelujah. I thought he was yelling "boring". Imagine that.

There are things i miss sharing with you. Will miss sharing with you. I won't be able to watch you fall in love with someone who isn't me. But i'll always write to you. I love these moments of clarity.

Of the spectacle made just for my musings. A symphony in the park. A summer sky after the storm. The people.

And earlier today, at lunch the strangest thing, shared a table with a young woman since they wouldn't seat us alone at tables. She said lets sit together, i hate the barstools. We ate our grilled cheese and talked. She wants to go work in africa and then study for the LSAT. She's from Detroit. Hates her job and has been here less than a year.  We were real with each other and in the end, it was a good lunch.

Life is strange and wonderful. But I'm cat-sitting and think i should go and walking away, the william tell overture and the sound of fireworks chase me into the
night.

 

 

Ah, it was indeed a thing of beauty. Something truly worthwhile. At that moment, there was nowhere else I would have rather been. Certain phrases, her word order, word choice, sensibility of rhyme. I've been in love with this music for awhile now.

 

There are certain poems, songs, sayings, quotes that come to mind when we are sad or happy, things we say to ourselves or think to ourselves that give us courage or soothe our sorrows simply because we know it’s a shared experience, since someone else has expressed it and we recognize it.

 

I think that is the function of art, to share the pain of a solitary human life. I mean, when things happen to us we often feel alone and that no one else can possibly understand. But if we take the time to talk with others, to commiserate as an act of healing, we find that there are similar emotions under almost everyone's surface. And while this may not help immediately, it gives one the perspective to know that "this too shall pass" and the courage to keep on living and moving forward.

 

 

It's slightly disconcerting to hear such things from someone so young, but as I think back I too remember feeling deeply at 22 , breaking up with my girlfriend of 4 years or at 26 learning that the australian had gotten married without letting me know, so why wouldn't this youth also have learned some wisdom, simply by interacting and loving others in her life? I too wrote broken-hearted poetry in my 20's! How could I forget or hold that against anyone?

 

I accept her poetry. It soars. It means something to me. When she sings "and we spoke up in turns till the silence crept over me", I know what she means, or at least what that phrase means to me.

As well as "enough of this terror we deserve to know light and grow ever more lighter and lighter, you would have seen me through but I could not undo that desire..."

 

And the topic of her musicianship, well it's obvious. There's nothing really to say except it's intricate, sustained, overwhelming, deep, exhibiting a thorough understanding of melody and rhythm and form and lyricism. The philharmonic gave such texture and layers to her already complex compositions. The songs themselves demand attention while at the same time their length and lack of traditional verse, verse, chorus, verse gives one time to think about what is actually going on in the song. There is time to think and savor what has just been sung and played, even as it all goes forward. The brain is doing two to three things at once processing, anticipating, interpreting as well as remembering. At times you feel this has gone on too long, but at the end you don't want it to stop.

 

Her voice, insanely unique.

 

Her long black dress worn with the orchestra in total contrast to the "how can you possibly wear that short of dress and sit at the harp" hot pink number for the second set was another stroke of genius.

 

"From the top of the flight of the wide white stairs, through the rest of my life, Do you wait for me there?"

 

The answer is yes.

There are people in the world who will inspire no matter their age.

 

 

Excerpt from an interview discussing the influences on her style:

 

I started going to this folk music camp—a really informal camp, more like a hippie gathering in the Mendocino redwoods—every summer, for six or so years, along with my mom. there were always these amazing musicians playing together, around the campfires, late into the night, or perched on some stump in the middle of the forest. that's where I got kind of obsessed with west African harp figures—these strange, rhythmically disjunctive, meditative little patterns, which totally changed the way I've written music ever since! they're really different from western music, to such an extent that I struggled just to wrap my head around them. like, in western music, things are broken down by meter—you know, music will be notated in 4/4 (a four-beat-based rhythmic structure) or 3/4 (a three-beat-based rhythmic structure), etc.... but, in this west African harp stuff, the right hand plays in 3/4, and the left hand plays in 4/4 (though of course that's a western way of explaining it...the music isn't really thought of in those terms). this creates a sense of disorientation, with two rhythmically discordant and seemingly unrelated melodic lines playing at the same time...but then, every twelve beats, the two figures intersect, come back to the beginning. anyway, ever since then, I've found myself playing with new variations on the idea...for example, one of my songs uses a five-beat-based pattern in the right hand, and a three-beat-based pattern in the left hand, creating a figure that intersects and begins anew every fifteen beats. that folk music camp also got me really into all sorts of musical traditions—Venezuelan music, Celtic music, Andean music, Balinese music, Bulgarian polyphony, etc—but most of all, Appalachian music. that was where I first sort of fell in love with the American folk sound.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcsBGR9uHmc

 

10-28-07

New York Phone Interview: San Diego

By: Sean Wallace

 

Lynette Smith of Jamul, California is holed up at her parents house in San Diego proper. Safe in the urban environment, while her husband, who happens to be a firefighter, sits vigil in their darkened yet still standing home. The pigs, cows, goats and other random animals kept by neighbors in this rural community are his to feed and monitor, as he was the only one able to get back to his home in this area during the enforced evacuations.

Lynette visits neighbors who have set up a temporary encampment in the parking lot of the nearest Target. The horses have been brought down, tents and trailers have been set up, and food is abundant. “I haven't eaten so much or well in a long time”, she said of her visits to these sites. Still she feels lucky to have family in town and to be able to sleep in her childhood bed with her 4 year old son, a bit of comfort amidst the chaos.

 

All this is without the assistance of any official agency. The Red Cross set up at a local high school is similarly flush with food and good cheer. It seems that this fire has brought out the best in people. Even as it will be the worst of times for some, when they return to see if their life is in ashes, or merely covered in ashes.

 

-------------------

I grew up in Southern California. the Santa Anas are a fact of life. A weather phenomena of the Fall that is as melancholy as any New England leaf fall, in its own way. In my mind, they were an extension of a summer just past. A few slightly chilly days of Fall would be replaced by nights so warm you wore t-shirts and sat outside to feel the blow. Occasionally they would be so strong you had to escape inside from the grit. Once every few years, the drought and some off-road vehicle would result in big burn, which was then usually solved by a quenching rain that appeared from nowhere. These are my memories.

The dry stillness. The sudden beginnings of wind.  The scent of smoke. The smell of hot asphalt cooling in the rain that follows.

 

But now the winds are record setting. The humidity at an all time low. The fires as big as they get. Did we do this to ourselves. We live in dangerous environments and call it luxury or splendid isolation. We forget nature doesn't care about us.

 

But we need to care about nature, the same way you never turn your backs on the waves. The same way we shouldn't be experimenting with how much CO2 it takes to changes a planet's ability cool itself. The same way we shouldn't ignore another's need in a relationship. We need to always be aware of our effect on our surroundings. I'm seeing this more and more clearly for myself these days.

 

 

8 Facts

A Poetry Study of Translation and Influence. Cavafy, Durrell and Cohen

"Alexandra Leaving"
Leonard Cohen
2001 from Ten New Songs

Suddenly the night has grown colder.
The god of love preparing to depart.
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder,
They slip between the sentries of the heart.

Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure,
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine;
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine.

It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving,
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;
Even though she wakes you with a kiss.
Do not say the moment was imagined;
Do not stoop to strategies like this.

As someone long prepared for this to happen,
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in.
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.
Your first commitments tangible again.

And you who had the honor of her evening,
And by the honor had your own restored –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving;
Alexandra leaving with her lord.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;
Even though she wakes you with a kiss.
Do not say the moment was imagined;
Do not stoop to strategies like this.

As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked –
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect.

And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.




The God Abandons Antony
As translated in Lawrence Durrell’s Novel “Justine (1957):

When suddenly at darkest midnight heard,
The invisible company passing, the clear voices,
Ravishing music of invisible choirs-
Your fortunes having failed you now,
Hopes gone aground, a lifetime of desires
Turned into smoke. Ah! Do not agonize
At what is past deceiving
But like a man long since prepared
With courage say your last good-byes
To Alexandria as she is leaving.
Do not be tricked and never say
It was a dream or that your ear misled,
Leave cowards their entreaties and complaints,
Let all such useless hopes as these be shed,
And like a man long since prepared,
Deliberately, with pride, with resignation
Befitting you and worthy of such a city
Turn to the open window and look down
To drink past all deceiving
Your last black rapture from the mystical throng,
And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving.


The god forsakes Antony
Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

When suddenly, at the midnight hour,
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts --
your fortune that fails you now, your works
that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions, do not mourn in vain.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who have been worthy of such a city,
approach the window with firm step,
and with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.


The poem refers to Plutarch's story that, when Antony was besieged in Alexandria by Octavian, he heard the sounds of instruments and voices, which made its way through the city, and then passed out; the god Bacchus (Dionysus), Antony's protector, was deserting him.
Ref:
http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/antony.html

 Original Greek – Cavafy was greek.
Απολείπειν ο θεός Αντώνιον
Σαν έξαφνα, ώρα μεσάνυχτ', ακουσθεί
αόρατος θίασος να περνά
με μουσικές εξαίσιες, με φωνές --
την τύχη σου που ενδίδει πια, τα έργα σου
που απέτυχαν, τα σχέδια της ζωής σου
που βγήκαν όλα πλάνες, μη ανοφέλετα θρηνήσεις.
Σαν έτοιμος από καιρό, σα θαρραλέος,
αποχαιρέτα την, την Αλεξάνδρεια που φεύγει.
Προ πάντων να μη γελασθείς, μην πείς πως ήταν
ένα όνειρο, πως απατήθηκεν η ακοή σου·
μάταιες ελπίδες τέτοιες μην καταδεχθείς.
Σαν έτοιμος από καιρό, σα θαρραλέος,
σαν που ταιριάζει σε που αξιώθηκες μια τέτοια πόλι,
πλησίασε σταθερά προς το παράθυρο,
κι άκουσε με συγκίνησιν, αλλ' όχι
με των δειλών τα παρακάλια και παράπονα,
ως τελευταία απόλαυσι τους ήχους,
τα εξαίσια όργανα του μυστικού θιάσου,
κι αποχαιρέτα την, την Αλεξάνδρεια που χάνεις.

Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης (1911)

  

Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery

Grisha Perelman, where are you?

Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.

After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.

Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.

As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.

“It’s really a great moment in mathematics,” said Bruce Kleiner of Yale, who has spent the last three years helping to explicate Dr. Perelman’s work. “It could have happened 100 years from now, or never.”

In a speech at a conference in Beijing this summer, Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard said the understanding of three-dimensional space brought about by Poincaré’s conjecture could be one of the major pillars of math in the 21st century.

Quoting Poincaré himself, Dr.Yau said, “Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.”

But at the moment of his putative triumph, Dr. Perelman is nowhere in sight. He is an odds-on favorite to win a Fields Medal, math’s version of the Nobel Prize, when the International Mathematics Union convenes in Madrid next Tuesday. But there is no indication whether he will show up.

Also left hanging, for now, is $1 million offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., for the first published proof of the conjecture, one of seven outstanding questions for which they offered a ransom back at the beginning of the millennium.

“It’s very unusual in math that somebody announces a result this big and leaves it hanging,” said John Morgan of Columbia, one of the scholars who has also been filling in the details of Dr. Perelman’s work.

Mathematicians have been waiting for this result for more than 100 years, ever since the French polymath Henri Poincaré posed the problem in 1904. And they acknowledge that it may be another 100 years before its full implications for math and physics are understood. For now, they say, it is just beautiful, like art or a challenging new opera.

Dr. Morgan said the excitement came not from the final proof of the conjecture, which everybody felt was true, but the method, “finding deep connections between what were unrelated fields of mathematics.”

William Thurston of Cornell, the author of a deeper conjecture that includes Poincaré’s and that is now apparently proved, said, “Math is really about the human mind, about how people can think effectively, and why curiosity is quite a good guide,” explaining that curiosity is tied in some way with intuition.

“You don’t see what you’re seeing until you see it,” Dr. Thurston said, “but when you do see it, it lets you see many other things.”

Depending on who is talking, Poincaré’s conjecture can sound either daunting or deceptively simple. It asserts that if any loop in a certain kind of three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point without ripping or tearing either the loop or the space, the space is equivalent to a sphere.

The conjecture is fundamental to topology, the branch of math that deals with shapes, sometimes described as geometry without the details. To a topologist, a sphere, a cigar and a rabbit’s head are all the same because they can be deformed into one another. Likewise, a coffee mug and a doughnut are also the same because each has one hole, but they are not equivalent to a sphere.

In effect, what Poincaré suggested was that anything without holes has to be a sphere. The one qualification was that this “anything” had to be what mathematicians call compact, or closed, meaning that it has a finite extent: no matter how far you strike out in one direction or another, you can get only so far away before you start coming back, the way you can never get more than 12,500 miles from home on the Earth.

In the case of two dimensions, like the surface of a sphere or a doughnut, it is easy to see what Poincaré was talking about: imagine a rubber band stretched around an apple or a doughnut; on the apple, the rubber band can be shrunk without limit, but on the doughnut it is stopped by the hole.

With three dimensions, it is harder to discern the overall shape of something; we cannot see where the holes might be. “We can’t draw pictures of 3-D spaces,” Dr. Morgan said, explaining that when we envision the surface of a sphere or an apple, we are really seeing a two-dimensional object embedded in three dimensions. Indeed, astronomers are still arguing about the overall shape of the universe, wondering if its topology resembles a sphere, a bagel or something even more complicated.

Poincaré’s conjecture was subsequently generalized to any number of dimensions, but in fact the three-dimensional version has turned out to be the most difficult of all cases to prove. In 1960 Stephen Smale, now at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, proved that it is true in five or more dimensions and was awarded a Fields Medal. In 1983, Michael Freedman, now at Microsoft, proved that it is true in four dimensions and also won a Fields.

“You get a Fields Medal for just getting close to this conjecture,” Dr. Morgan said.

In the late 1970’s, Dr. Thurston extended Poincaré’s conjecture, showing that it was only a special case of a more powerful and general conjecture about three-dimensional geometry, namely that any space can be decomposed into a few basic shapes.

Mathematicians had known since the time of Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, in the 19th century, that in two dimensions there are only three possible shapes: flat like a sheet of paper, closed like a sphere, or curved uniformly in two opposite directions like a saddle or the flare of a trumpet. Dr. Thurston suggested that eight different shapes could be used to make up any three-dimensional space.

“Thurston’s conjecture almost leads to a list,” Dr. Morgan said. “If it is true,” he added, “Poincaré’s conjecture falls out immediately.” Dr. Thurston won a Fields in 1986.

Topologists have developed an elaborate set of tools to study and dissect shapes, including imaginary cutting and pasting, which they refer to as “surgery,” but they were not getting anywhere for a long time.

In the early 1980’s Richard Hamilton of Columbia suggested a new technique, called the Ricci flow, borrowed from the kind of mathematics that underlies Einstein’s general theory of relativity and string theory, to investigate the shapes of spaces.

Dr. Hamilton’s technique makes use of the fact that for any kind of geometric space there is a formula called the metric, which determines the distance between any pair of nearby points. Applied mathematically to this metric, the Ricci flow acts like heat, flowing through the space in question, smoothing and straightening all its bumps and curves to reveal its essential shape, the way a hair dryer shrink-wraps plastic.

Dr. Hamilton succeeded in showing that certain generally round objects, like a head, would evolve into spheres under this process, but the fates of more complicated objects were problematic. As the Ricci flow progressed, kinks and neck pinches, places of infinite density known as singularities, could appear, pinch off and even shrink away. Topologists could cut them away, but there was no guarantee that new ones would not keep popping up forever.

“All sorts of things can potentially happen in the Ricci flow,” said Robert Greene, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nobody knew what to do with these things, so the result was a logjam.

It was Dr. Perelman who broke the logjam. He was able to show that the singularities were all friendly. They turned into spheres or tubes. Moreover, they did it in a finite time once the Ricci flow started. That meant topologists could, in their fashion, cut them off, and allow the Ricci process to continue to its end, revealing the topologically spherical essence of the space in question, and thus proving the conjectures of both Poincaré and Thurston.

Dr. Perelman’s first paper, promising “a sketch of an eclectic proof,” came as a bolt from the blue when it was posted on the Internet in November 2002. “Nobody knew he was working on the Poincaré conjecture,” said Michael T. Anderson of the State University of New York in Stony Brook.

Dr. Perelman had already established himself as a master of differential geometry, the study of curves and surfaces, which is essential to, among other things, relativity and string theory. Born in St. Petersburg in 1966, he distinguished himself as a high school student by winning a gold medal with a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1982. After getting a Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State, he joined the Steklov Institute of Mathematics at St. Petersburg.

In a series of postdoctoral fellowships in the United States in the early 1990’s, Dr. Perelman impressed his colleagues as “a kind of unworldly person,” in the words of Dr. Greene of U.C.L.A. — friendly, but shy and not interested in material wealth.

“He looked like Rasputin, with long hair and fingernails,” Dr. Greene said.

Asked about Dr. Perelman’s pleasures, Dr. Anderson said that he talked a lot about hiking in the woods near St. Petersburg looking for mushrooms.

Dr. Perelman returned to those woods, and the Steklov Institute, in 1995, spurning offers from Stanford and Princeton, among others. In 1996 he added to his legend by turning down a prize for young mathematicians from the European Mathematics Society.

Until his papers on Poincaré started appearing, some friends thought Dr. Perelman had left mathematics. Although they were so technical and abbreviated that few mathematicians could read them, they quickly attracted interest among experts. In the spring of 2003, Dr. Perelman came back to the United States to give a series of lectures at Stony Brook and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also spoke at Columbia, New York University and Princeton.

But once he was back in St. Petersburg, he did not respond to further invitations. The e-mail gradually ceased.

“He came once, he explained things, and that was it,” Dr. Anderson said. “Anything else was superfluous.”

Recently, Dr. Perelman is said to have resigned from Steklov. E-mail messages addressed to him and to the Steklov Institute went unanswered.

In his absence, others have taken the lead in trying to verify and disseminate his work. Dr. Kleiner of Yale and John Lott of the University of Michigan have assembled a monograph annotating and explicating Dr. Perelman’s proof of the two conjectures..

Dr. Morgan of Columbia and Gang Tian of Princeton have followed Dr. Perelman’s prescription to produce a more detailed 473-page step-by-step proof only of Poincaré’s Conjecture. “Perelman did all the work,” Dr. Morgan said. “This is just explaining it.”

Both works were supported by the Clay institute, which has posted them on its Web site, claymath.org. Meanwhile, Huai-Dong Cao of Lehigh University and Xi-Ping Zhu of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China, have published their own 318-page proof of both conjectures in The Asian Journal of Mathematics (www.ims.cuhk.edu.hk/).

Although these works were all hammered out in the midst of discussion and argument by experts, in workshops and lectures, they are about to receive even stricter scrutiny and perhaps crossfire. “Caution is appropriate,” said Dr. Kleiner, because the Poincaré conjecture is not just famous, but important.

James Carlson, president of the Clay Institute, said the appearance of these papers had started the clock ticking on a two-year waiting period mandated by the rules of the Clay Millennium Prize. After two years, he said, a committee will be appointed to recommend a winner or winners if it decides the proof has stood the test of time.

“There is nothing in the rules to prevent Perelman from receiving all or part of the prize,” Dr. Carlson said, saying that Dr. Perelman and Dr. Hamilton had obviously made the main contributions to the proof.

In a lecture at M.I.T. in 2003, Dr. Perelman described himself “in a way” as Dr. Hamilton’s disciple, although they had never worked together. Dr. Hamilton, who got his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1966, is too old to win the Fields medal, which is given only up to the age of 40, but he is slated to give the major address about the Poincaré conjecture in Madrid next week. He did not respond to requests for an interview.

Allowing that Dr. Perelman, should he win the Clay Prize, might refuse the honor, Dr. Carlson said the institute could decide instead to use award money to support Russian mathematicians, the Steklov Institute or even the Math Olympiad.

Dr. Anderson said that to some extent the new round of papers already represented a kind of peer review of Dr. Perelman’s work. “All these together make the case pretty clear,” he said. “The community accepts the validity of his work. It’s commendable that the community has gotten together.”

 

I remember those seasons. It would be unbelievably hot all summer. 100 degree+ days spent in the pool or in friends pools, sleeping out on the patio cause the house was baking hot (pre-central air), the smoke in the air from fires all around. The smog.

Then glorious Fall. Crisp air. The cactus spines glinting with dew in the morning.
And then rain, sudden and thunderous. Huge rivers sweeping down our street, turning the gutters into whitewater rapids, which we would ride in inner tubes from our pools, right into the pools of water at the intersection caused by clogged storm drains. Weather still warm enough to tempt us to stand around soaking wet waiting our turn to be swept into oncoming traffic.

Across the street, the water, the empty field where we played, almost inaccessible from the water that would gouge huge deep canyons in the dirt shoulder. We would leap across and pretend we were evil kneival at snake river.  At one point they put in a curb and asphalt on the shoulder but didn’t go in far enough and this new shoulder would get undermined by each flash rain.

Now the field is full of half million dollar homes and a modern drainage system. The wildness across the street is gone. But that is the way of childhood memories.

Still I love to hear of rain in Southern California.

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

 

SANDRA DILLON

SOLITARIUS

Recent Photographic Works

 

In her latest series of images, photographer Sandra Dillon continues her exploration of portraiture by focusing on the notion of anecdotal solitude and stoic beauty.

The portraits exhibited are from a journey through Iceland's barren interior and the artist's ancestral hometowns in Italy.

 

Shifting between portraits of strangers and family, Dillon creates images that evoke strong emotions, seducing the viewer into reflecting upon the subject's provocative candor. Standing alone, but not lonely nor abandoned, the person is aware of the camera and there is a subtle interaction between photographer and subject. The moment captured speaks of the person's self-reflection and contemplation. Yet, there is a narrative - a moment discovered - through color, light and pose, creating a stillness and serenity in the mood of the piece.

 

To create her images, Dillon uses a medium format camera and color film. She considers herself a traditionalist by never cropping her images or over-printing them in the darkroom, believing good composition should not be an after-thought. Always gravitating towards portraiture, she has had a camera in her hand since the age of 15.

 

Dillon received a BFA in Painting from the Parsons School of Design in Paris, France, and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Having traveled extensively, to more than 30 countries worldwide, she has also lived in Paris, London and Prague. Her work is internationally exhibited, collected and published.

She is currently living in Brooklyn, NY, where she photographs, paints and works as a film editor.

 

Solitarius has recently traveled from the ArtDimensions’ Centre Gallery in St. Louis and will be on display at the ConTemp Museum from April 29th to May 14, 2006.

An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday April 29th at 5pm.

 

ConTemp Museum

299 Bedford Avenue @ S. 1st

Brooklyn, NY 646.567.0348

 

http://www.fotografka.com.

There is noththing much more humiliating than getting your car towed. I think because at this moment, you have no one to blame but yourself, for your decision. You can't be mad at the agents of your humiliation, for you gave them that power, by deciding to do what you did. Park two small feet into a bus stop, where the bus never stops this late at night. No excuses matter to the worker paid to take the vector of your humiliation, which used to be a source of pride, your car, he just does his job.

Ones arrogance is quickly delineated by the rule of law. If not one way than another. I think I boasted one too many times about how I can always find a spot. I respect karma.

On the other hand, it certainly was great meeting some buzznet types in my own backyard and hope to keep in touch with a bunch.  Foresight, thanks for organizing, Jayv, thanks for the heads up on the imminent tow, mark, jack, orangeros, mitya, great to meet ya! Tomdog, it's been way too long, honeytoes, i'm keeping the lost items. who else, sorry for spacing. i just got my car back. Hey Yoko, how about you?

keep on posting, keep on supporting, and thanks to everyone.

seawall

But still we got some good out of each other. Never met her in person.

Found this one going through old papers:

Fear and Terror

just brush off everything but the heartbeat

reaching and pulling you to me

my lips on yours

your iresponsible hands

I come to you,  I touch you

feel the shiver of terror in you

bring you to your knees

feed the fear in you

      I kiss your sorrow

      I take it from you

your secrets, like clouds, form cries

      I suffocate

      I bring to life

they circle us

they hold us close

         I touch your cheek, your throat

          I taste your flesh, your strength

your heart beats so fast

I become your desire

and back

of  it all

is you.

by Jane 1995

That's why I post her thoughts. Though today I did take the opportunity to check out the new Trader Joe's near Union Square. They made us line up on the sidewalk out front to keep the store from being too crowded. Apparently it was a mad house this past weekend. (who in their right mind would go shopping on a weekend near union square anyway?) So there's a little line of anxious shoppers, afraid they won't be cool enough to get in the front door, but when you get to the front there's a woman handing out cookies with an infectious smile and asking everyone how they're doing, and just wait it won't be long. Eight at a time. And people respond and are telling stories about their favorite TJ product, or TJ store back home (mine's the one on Milpas) anyway, needless to say, a very un-NYC experience, but still kinda nice. I'm looking for more nice in my life right now.

 

I got my big bucket of cookies and will eat them til they're gone, which may be before the end of this post.

You know when you see a leak that it will be at least
one week before anything happens. That's why it is so
depressing to come back and see it. You know you are
in for long irritation.
SO I don't want to talk about it but the plumber was
supposed to come today and he didn't and said he would
come tomorrow, but the woman in the apartment upstairs
cannot be there tomorrow because of the greve.
Tomorrow is Black Tuesday--a big national strike day,
when there will be no transport and thousands will
march in the streets and the hooligans will take the
opportunity to vandalize whatever they can. All this
because the prime minister introduced a new kind of
contract for people getting their first job. Called a
first job contract it means the person is on probation
for 2 years and can be fired at any time. Now the
period is 3 months. It's a measure to make more jobs,
but the young people/students have decided they want
what their parents had--guaranteed jobs for life with
great slaries and benefits. They haven't noticed how
the world has changed and that there are no jobs.

Anyway, the plumber will come on Wednesday.

Allons, citoyens!

The Mistake

 

 

Once upon a time in Heaven, Minnesota, a mistake was made at the most important factory in town. On the conveyer belt where all human bodies were made, a glitch, perhaps a speck of dust, perhaps a star winking at the wrong moment caused a power surge, but a glitch and one body came through with only two stumps where the legs should have been.

     As was supposed to happen with the very, very rare mistake, he was immediately tipped off the conveyer belt and into a box for disposal by the only human who worked in the plant-Old Barney.

He picked up the Mistake with great curiosity, not having seen anything but perfect bodies for so long. To his surprise it spoke to him.

     "Hey Man, what you gonna do with me now?"

     Barney shook his head, "Sorry, son, you're going where all mistakes go, in the incinerator. This is a perfect world now, no need for physical imperfection except, of course, for the one we build in-and believe me, that one is really necessary."

     "What's that?" asked the Mistake, playing for time.

     "The gap," proclaimed Barney a little dramatically as he got ready to satisfy his thirst for human communication, "the gap, the emptiness, the lonely awful feeling people get from time to time that cries out to be filled. We need it so people will feel dissatisfied, so they will spend their lives searching, wanting, feeling hungry for something, desiring they don't know what and so trying to get everything. If they didn't have this gap to fill, they wouldn't buy anything, they wouldn't spend their lives working to get

money to buy the house, the car they think will fill the gap, or the success they think will feed the hunger. They would be happy, complete, satisfied.

And people like that don't work. They sing and dance all day. They enjoy nature, converse with each other and love their children. They love life and they don't waste it working at something they hate. And without their labor, the world economy would collapse and what would happen to civilization?"

     The Mistake was astonished.

     "And that gap is created here?"

     "Yeah, you wanna see how?"

     Barney cradled the Mistake in his arms and took him to another part of the conveyer belt. It was almost the end of the body-making process. Each body passed under a laser gun that made an invisible hole in each heart.

     "There, you see," said Barney, "No physical problem at all, but my,my,my, the emotional pain it causes. It's always only very short though 'cause nobody could stand it for more than an instant. And it comes at the oddest times, no one can predict the time or place. Sometimes in Spring when new life is all around you, you get a tug on a heart string and there it is-that loneliness, that need, that gap that cries out to be filled. Men without wives think it's a woman they need; and women without husbands look for a man. Orphans long for their parents, and couples long to have children. Everyone looks outside for something to fill the gap. Sometimes it's the smell of hawthorne or jasmine, sometimes a sound, music, the haunting melody you were sure was playing when love walked away. Sometimes the sheer beauty of the world cries out to be shared and we don't know with whom. At times it's a look we see in a baby's eyes-the promise of joy that we know is bound to fail. Sometimes it's the way the body of a stranger opens up to us and implies no barriers. Sometimes it's a rainy day when the world is several different shades of grey and you long for the little golden light the warmth of love would bring. Sometimes it's in the puddles, in the raindrops bouncing in cups and reminding you of a childhood when life was not a problem. Whenever it comes, that moment hurts as nothing physical can hurt. That moment is unbearable. That moment drives all the others, that moment when we recognize the need to fill the gap."

     Barney paused, his head bowed, quite taken with his own oration and amazed that he could remember so much of  what life had been like.

     "Listen, Man," said the Mistake urgently, "you gotta let me go. Don't

put me in the incinerator. Give me a chance."

     "A chance? No way! I'm doing you a favor. What's a black man with no legs gonna do in a world where all bodies are perfect?"

     "And anyway," he continued, "you haven't been finished yet. You have no gap and no heart lock."

     "What's a heart lock? Show me that, too."

     Barney obliged. They moved to the last step where a chain and padlock of completely  transparent but obviously very strong material was wrapped around each heart.

     Barney explained.

     "Can't have people going around loving each other. Would have the same effect as no gap. They wouldn't work. They would love each other. They wouldn't pollute their own or their neighbor's space. They'd consider each other. It would be a disaster for the global economy. They would fill the gap and everyone would be happy. And you know by now where happiness leads. TO THE DESTRUCTION OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT."

     Barney laughed so hard the Mistake thought it must be all a big joke.

     "But enough explaining. It's time to dispose of you."

      The Mistake looked at the conveyer belt and the procedures he had missed and suddenly knew what he had gained. He turned a big smile on Barney and said to him "You gotta let me go, Man."

      And Barney was caught in the full force of a smile that came through eyes so warm and loving they seemed to caress his soul. He felt something he hadn't felt before. He felt the chains around his heart melt. He felt he was opening up and melting all at the same time. He felt all the years in the factory drop away, the bodies and their perfection irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the Mistake looking to him for help.

     He picked up the imperfect body and carried him to the last part of the belt, the door marked "Exit to the world". He kissed the Mistake on the forehead and whispered "Good Luck!"

     And  the Mistake smiled all the way to the little village on the Ivory Coast of Africa where he was born to a poor woman who, nine months ago, had exchanged her favors with a sailor after he played his guitar and sang to her of love.

     The Mistake smiled at his mother and lit up her life.

     He had the same effect on the people in the village. His lack of legs was hardly noticed, certainly not by anyone he ever smiled upon. Village people carried him everywhere. He was a gift from God,they said,  a smile that made them forget the coldness of the world.

     When he was only two years old he lay down beside his father's guitar and began to pluck the strings. He never had to learn to play. The music flowedas abundantly life-giving as his smile.

     When he grew up, he began to be restless and want to see some of the world outside. A neighbor who had emigrated to Paris visited the village bringing tales of that great and beautiful city.

The Mistake wondered what life would be like in the country that had so boldly marched into the Cote d'Ivoire and commandeered its riches.

     The world arranged itself for him and he found himself in Paris, happily swinging down the streets and watching the Parisians get out of his way in case they had to help him. He had crutches and a guitar on his back, and when he ran out of the little money the villagers had sent with him, he decided he could make a living  busking on the metro.

     And so it was that one cold grey January morning, feeling neither happy nor sad, but idling in neutral, I walked down the steps of the Denfert-Rochereau metro station to take the train to my job at the Gare du Nord. Entering the platform I noticed a stillness as if I had walked into a cathedral during an important part of the service. There was none of the usual talking, laughing, coughing, spitting, sneezing.  The air seemed sacred.

Everyone was quiet and reverently listening to what I heard then: the guitar played by the Mistake, who was sitting across the tracks from me.

     The melody no sooner hit my ears than it hit my heart. I felt that a giant hand had reached out and rearranged my feelings. I felt my whole body melt and every warm and loving emotion it was possible to feel crowded into the small room that had been my heart. Pity, compassion, love for the whole human race, love for myself, for my poor unloved self, for the woes of humanity, for the misery we cause each other, for the promise of joy that we could have, for all the lonely gaps in all the lonely hearts in the world the music tried to fill.

     It seemed to me to be the most human thing I had ever done in my life. I felt something. The chains were melted. I was trying to hold back tears when the train arrived. I wanted it to go away. I wanted nothing to interfere with this feeling. It seemed to me so important surely everyone was affected in the same way and we would stop the ordinary world and create another one. But no, the train stopped, people poured off, pushing and shoving and clicking in polite irritation the way Parisians do. I let them pass. I let the train go.

I wanted more of the music. But the Mistake had taken the train in the opposite direction. I came out of my dream and boarded the next train for the Gare du Nord.

     And on the train and in the office and  shops all that day I tried to find the melody again in my head. But it was in my heart and locked up tightly.

     Every time I balk at taking the metro with its ever-growing crowds of cold-looking Parisians and truly smelly rejects of society, I remind myself that maybe he will be there. Maybe he'll be playing that music. Maybe I'll see him on the Ile St Louis on a summer night playing for the tourists.

Mayb I'll see him in front of Notre Dame or on the banks of the Seine. Living in Paris doesn't seem so lonely anymore. Somewhere the Mistake is playing his guitar. Somewhere hearts are melting, somewhere padlocks are falling off and humans are feeling what they were created to feel before robots reasoned that love was too harmful to them. Somewhere love is flowering. And everywhere my life is lightened by the hope that someday I will hear again the redemptive sound of the music made by the Mistake made in Heaven, Minnesota.

 

 

Well, as usual when I come back from America, there is
a leak in the ceiling and it is threatening to fall down.
I don't know why, but I got up out of bed and walked
into the living room and looked up at the corner and
saw a big new stain. Nasty!
This got me upstairs to meet all my new neighbours and
get re-aquainted with some old ones--all Polish. One
guy, who speaks English, said "I know your ceiling
very well."
The other guy, who only spoke enough French to mutter
"Catastrophe" when he looked at the stain, said it
wasn't coming from his washing machine but must be
coming from the roof (conveniently bypassing his
apartment.)
They all agreed it must be coming from the apartment
of the women who doesn't come home until midnight and
who has a toilet that they call a sort of mixer
because it pulverizes everything with a horrible noise
before disposing and wakes them all up at midnight.
There are no real facilities for toilets up there, but
most of them have installed them.
So now I have to wait until tomorrow and of course she
will say it is not her toilet and I will call the
plumber and he will say he has to get into everyone's
apartment and they will not let him and I might just
move to Liverpool.
Monday.

Oh the heart comes in pieces
Without a guide
And we think it should be whole
But why
Who told us so
And who can show
What that means?
We are fragments
Of hope
A timeline of dreams
Explorers of the fantasy
Of completeness
Subject at all times
To the
Geometry
Of Desire.

3-23-06

 

Things that steal your soul. In order to share in you. So that you share
in their world.
I understand.

Sometimes.

My Wonder Wheel Poem

I have fond memories of the Wonder Wheel.

though time will have its sway with us, and those people
nearby then, laughing, screaming, tears of joy at a sudden jolt,

will move away at different speeds,
so that memory seems
distant or
still near,
depending
on a perspective.
and the Wonder Wheel sometimes
feels like an ancient toy, dusty, creaky
of another life,
and sometimes
its a fresh wound
of mirth
and smiles,
-Still the echo
of laughter
and sillouhette of
tears
brings us back around
to that moment
when we hit
ground.