30Jul / 2013

Sat down besider

Little Miss Muffet was trying out the 5:2 diet, and it was a ‘2’ day, is why she was eating cottage cheese. Also, she lived in a cottage so it seemed somehow appropriate.

She sat down on the tuffet and waited.

Somewhere, a clock ticked dog barked truck shifted gears lawnmower buzzed ice cream truck tinkled a song someone hollered at someone else across the street something went BANG airplane flew termites gnawed bees buzzed leaky faucet dripped hearts beat fly bashed its head against window ambient hum hummed.

“Looks good, if you’re into dairy,” said the Spider. Capital S.

“I expect it is a source of lean protein,” said Miss Muffet.

The Spider watched eight different things at once through his eight eyes, arranged in two rows of four.

The Spider watched Miss Muffet, because you can’t be too careful.

The Spider watched a hollyhock sway in the wind outside the window.

The Spider watched shadows moving on the floor.

The Spider watched the fly.

The Spider watched another fly.

The Spider watched the clock.

The Spider watched the soul of an old man leave his body two houses down.

The Spider watched the beating heart of the earth itself.

Miss Muffet finished her lunch.

“I admire your resolve, sticking with the 5:2 diet,” said the Spider.

“It’s actually easy, and plus I’ve lost five pounds already,” said Miss Muffet.

The two of them sat there side-by-side, watching.

“It’s a life-long thing, isn’t it,” sighed Miss Muffet.

“The only alternative is not having a heart,” said the Spider. He spread out five of his eight legs, gesturing everywhere. “And that is no real alternative, in this lovely, lovely universe.”

“We love, and our hearts break, and it hurts, and we love stubbornly on.”

“One eye laughs, and one eye cries,” said the Spider. “At all times. And six watch. One watches humorously, one watches hopefully, one watches without hope. One watches warily, one lovingly, and one objectively.”

“One with joy, one with curiosity, one with suspicion, one with sadness, one with grief, one with elation,” said Miss Muffet. “One with gratitude, one with amazement.”

“That, too,” said the Spider.

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18Jul / 2013

The god of the office and the god of the streetcar

The god of the office is headed somewhere to learn something and gets on a streetcar to take him to the subway, but it is a different streetcar and turns left where the streetcar he wanted would have gone straight, but he looks at the chart showing the streetcar’s route and it will take him to an even better subway station so he decides to stay put and enjoy the ride.

There is a puddle of something under a seat two rows up, that is why the god of the office is sitting in the back row. He is quickly thankful for what looks like a puddle of piss because a few rows up, closer to where he would otherwise have sat, the god of the streetcar is saying something in a loud voice. The god of the office leans over for a better look. The god of the streetcar is in his thirties or maybe late twenties, pig shave, wife-beater shirt, random tattoos, large can of beer, open, despite the fact that it is just after nine in the morning.

And what a glorious morning it is! Vienna never looked this nice. Or, this section of Vienna, which the god of the office has never before seen, has never looked this good to him.

A woman wearing a head scarf gets off the street car and that is the god of the street car’s cue to give his opinion of foreigners, who are stealing jobs from Austrians, and apartments, and although they cannot speak German can somehow communicate well enough when they want to to take advantage of welfare and social services. There are some, in the past, and maybe even present, who would say kill the foreigners, but the god of the street car would not kill them, because he is a Mensch – he would just send them home, every last one of them.

The god of the office, who is himself a foreigner, imagines someone speaking up to the god of the streetcar and getting knifed.

The god of the office notes that no one is seated within three rows of the god of the subway. He looks out the window, where there is a park with large cages inside which boys play soccer. The god of the office is careful to keep his feet well away from the puddle of piss, which migrates slowly here and there as the street car accelerates, or slows, or goes around corners.

The god of the office first wants to tune out the other man’s ranting, but decides to listen closely instead. Because, crazy thing: who knows what something is good for? The universe has funny ways of communicating with us.

The god of the street car says his grandfather said, and he agrees, that politicians should be sewn up in a large sack and beaten with a baseball bat because they are nothing but lackeys of the rich and powerful.

The god of the office raises his eyebrows. When did the god of the street car’s rant take this tack? He does not condone violence such as that detailed by the god of the street car, but otherwise this could be something he has preached to his daughters in the car on the way to town.

Servants of bankers and high finance. The curse of materialism.

The god of the street car is channeling the god of the office!

That is me, thinks the god of the office. Never shall I rant again, for evermore.

Thanks, universe, he says out loud.

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16Jul / 2013

The coolest thing I’ve done since 1988

Natali, Laurent, and Agnes

(I also gush a little about wet plate collodion here on medium.com.)

Vienna photographer Agnes Prammer uses a variety of technologies, including wet plate collodion. I wrote about meeting Agnes last October. Since then I have been bugging her to give a workshop.

Last weekend she did and I signed up and the universe did not smite me and I went and this is the story.

Wet plate collodion photography, executive summary: coolest photographic technology ever.

How it is done: collodion solution poured over metal or glass plate to form thin layer. When it gets a little tacky, but not dry, it is put in a silver nitrate bath. This gives you a light-sensitive emulsion. The plate goes into a plate holder, that goes into the camera, the lens cap is removed (there is no shutter), the plate is exposed, the lens cap is replaced, the plate holder is taken to the darkroom, where developer is poured over it, (these steps must all be completed before the plate dries out, hence the name) then once it develops washed off with water to stop the process, then put into the fixative solution, then a water bath, and you’re done.

It’s that simple.

The first day was devoted to technical and theoretical stuff, the second day we went outside to a park by the Alte Donau and took pictures.

I won’t go into the technical and theoretical angle here, it’s all available online if you’re interested, although it is very useful to hear face to face in a workshop. A couple of interesting facts, though: it dates back to the 1850s; collodion contains ether, that explosively flammable party drug of the 19th century; fixative solution sometimes contains cyanide (which we did not use thank god).

The image at the top of this post is my first attempt at wet plate photography. It shows the other participants, left to right: Agnes’s assistant Natali, Laurent, and Agnes.

Look at that picture. Don’t you just want to give them a hug? I sure did, when I walked into the studio where they were sitting around the table talking about ether and cyanide, but acting like Lennie Small is a bad idea in the first impressions department so I held myself back.

Natali and Laurent

Weather was changeable. Mostly cloudy, a little windier than necessary, the second day. We shot in a park near the Alte Donau, water off the Danube by the Vienna International Centre where there are a lot of parks, boats, swimming, etc. We started off by mixing developer and for some reason no police showed up to ask what we were up to, sitting around a picnic table with our chemicals and rubber gloves like an early episode of Breaking Bad.

Then we took pictures with Agnes’s antique camera and developed the plates in her portable darkroom, which she made from a baby carriage. The camera, enormous, with a black cloth you put over your head to see the frosted glass plate when you compose and focus the picture, is a great ice breaker. Quite a few people stop to ask questions.

Natali

Wet plate collodion photography is a slow, fussy process. At the fastest, you can get a plate prepared, shot and developed in about fifteen minutes. I got three made all day, and they all are ruined by a variety of technical mistakes I made – pouring the collodion wrong, poor composition, poor focusing, pouring developer wrong, developing for too long, overexposure, light leaks in the darkroom, and a number of other things.

All the same, they are the best photos I have ever taken. Wet plate photography is my new favorite art form. Even in my inexperienced hands, it captures something magical and wonderful about humans that other forms of photography miss – and you should really go look at Agnes’s website to see what a talented photographer can do with it.

When I got home Saturday night, I went for a walk along the creek with my wife and gushed about the workshop and the people I had met.

“It was the coolest thing I have done since I took a pee with Boris Yeltsin at the Moscow airport men’s room in 1988,” I said.

“That’s what you said after you did your public performance of your composition for theremin, soprano and cash register a few years ago,” she said.

“I think this was even cooler,” I said.

Then something else happened. It got dark and the world came out and I saw it all — everything I looked at I saw: green fields of wheat white in the dark, the moon reflecting in the creek, the black shrubs and blacker path. The church steeple and the wino sitting at a picnic table under the half dead wild cherry tree and the bugs swarming the floodlights of the tennis club.

I saw it all with new eyes, thanks to doing something new, I guess.

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12Jul / 2013

Careers in Science: Deontology

The deontologist looks at the cat that woke him up. How can such a young cat be so huge, he wonders. The other day the deontologist opened the back window so the cat could climb in and he (the cat) fell off the fence before he reached the window, he is so fat. Not fat, exactly, though, just… huge.

The deontologist feeds all three cats and enjoys the few minutes during which huge cat is distracted by food and not walking figure eights around the deontologist’s feet. The deontologist thinks about everything he wants to do that morning: practice cello for half an hour in the cellar, meditate, do yoga, water things in the garden, feed the tortoise, and a number of other things.

His wife and kid are sick, though, so he postpones his new regimen of morning cello practice until the weekend.

He does the other stuff, though. And push-ups. See, the deontologist saw a website where a young woman describes teaching herself to dance in a year, by means of obsessive practice. The deontologist is all fired up.

Outside it is cool and looks as if it might rain, or might not. He puts two sections of the wooden fence his daughter is painting onto sawhorses in the back yard, as they are too heavy/bulky for her to move around.

The plum tree is heavy with green plums. The pie cherry tree is full of ripe pie cherries and blackbirds. The apple tree is full of green apples. The row of strawberries is over, but there will be raspberries all summer, and the grape vine is heavy with green grapes.

The deontologist checks on the vegetable garden at the rear of his abundant back yard. There is a big green zucchini hidden among the weeds, and a couple yellow zucchini. There are two big cucumbers ready to go. His vegetable garden is, at this time of the summer, most abundant in zucchini, mosquitos and slugs. He considers whether zucchini are the slugs of the vegetable world.

The slug traps are full of dead slugs, dozens of them, all drowned humanely in beer.

He spies a few ripe cherry tomatoes and plum tomatoes. The big beefsteak tomatoes are starting to change color. But tomato and cucumber season won’t really get going for another week or two.

At lunch, the deontologist walks to the noodle shop and buys a takeout thing of chicken and rice. He walks around and finds a bench under a tree where he had shared a sandwich with two crows earlier in the week.

Two minutes later, the crows are back. The same two crows – a large, grey-black one and a slightly smaller black one. The larger one seems more intelligent because it is more cautious. It won’t come any closer than two or three meters. The smaller one comes up within five feet of him. The deontologist throws them a couple pieces of chicken after making sure it is not too hot.

Crows are always so surprised when he is nice to them!

The crows move away when cars drive by, but come right back. They leave for longer when someone walks past with a dog.

The deontologist wonders if there are hygiene rules against sharing your lunch with crows inside the city limits.

He throws a little rice into the gutter for grey crow, but it lands too close. The deontologist moves a couple steps away so the crow can eat the rice.

There are laws against feeding pigeons, he knows. Pigeons are degenerate birds, rats with wings, but certain people get a kick out of them.

The deontologist prefers ravens and crows.

If there were coyotes in Vienna, he’d feed those too.

But there are no coyotes in Vienna.

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09Jul / 2013

There is a word for it

Definition: the emotion a parent feels when their 16-year old daughter returns home from a weekend at a boy-laden rock festival in a city three hours away, happy, thorn-scratched, sunburnt, exhausted, hungry, filthy, robbed of sleeping bag and backpack (including contents) but not purse(+more important contents such as phone, ID, money, etc), long hair wild and glamorous and full of twigs, a goofy smile on her face and glad to be home.

Relief might be the word.

Or gratitude. Thanks for watching out for my kid, universe! And for the dozens of stories you gave her!

As others have said, this is the deal. If you do a good job, they leave. If you do a really good job, they come back. Now and then, at least.

Her sister’s still in the States. She’ll come back too, eventually. I hope.

We have her cat.

Her early-rising cat.

It’s fence-painting season. It’s Gamma’s summer job this year. I keep forgetting to tell her the Tom Sawyer story, but it’s just as well, I can’t imagine any other kids doing as good a job as she does.

Meanwhile, I found myself in a cloud of mosquitos yesterday evening trying to get the pool set up, because my wife wants her pool set up, and also it would be nice if Gamma could jump in when she gets hot out painting the fence.

Definition: the period of time in which a person forgets how the hoses connecting the pool to the filter and pump are connected; equivalent to the time from the end of pool season one year to the beginning of the next pool season the following year.

Imagine me standing there in a tie-dyed T-shirt and old running shorts, slapping mosquitos, staring at the pump, then the pool, then the hose in my hand, trying to grok the nature of this set-up. Eventually I do, of course, I am actually not bad at this sort of stuff, but this is where the fun part begins.

The pool is almost full, just a few more inches to the inlet/outlet holes. I turn on the hose, do stuff around the house, write myself a postit note to turn off the hose before I leave, and go to work. At lunchtime I call Gamma and tell her to turn off the hose and ask her if anything is flooding or leaking.

Flooding no, leaking yes, she says.

When I get home in the evening, I change back into my pool assembly clothes and reality morphs into a version of the cake factory episode of I Love Lucy only instead of cakes moving ever faster down a conveyor belt, I find ever more new leaks. I replace a leaking hose with a new one. I tape up another hose, but I can’t find duct tape and the packing tape I use does not stop the leak and looks decidedly white trashy so I cut more fresh hose but before I can take off the old hose I have to drain the pool below the outlet, so I get a pump into the pool and water the garden.

All of this is done, by the way, with Beta’s cat walking in a figure eight around and between my feet.

I also tighten every screw on the pump and filter that can be tightened, and that stops a lot of the leaks too. Ditto the screws on the leaking skimmer thing on the pool.

Yes, then the water is down and the new hose goes on and the pool gets filled back up and I’m done.

Kind of wet, and covered in mosquito bites, but done. As happy and relieved as a girl arriving home from a pop music festival.

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Metamorphosism

Monthly Archives: July 2013

Sat down besider

The god of the office and the god of the streetcar

The coolest thing I’ve done since 1988

Careers in Science: Deontology

There is a word for it