Archive for 2009
You’re Gonna Move Where to Do What?
It’s been interesting to note people’s reactions when I tell them I am moving abroad indefinitely, namely Vietnam (yes, I finally decided to say to hell with it all and take off for parts unknown — to me, at any rate — as my heart has been yearning to do for four years now). It’s an interesting reflection of people’s personalities and their fear, knowledge (or lack thereof) and prejudices. Having moved around a lot in my two decades as a more-or-less adult, and having traveled a bit abroad, it hasn’t been surprising, what some people are harboring inside their heads when tell them I’ll be moving to Saigon/Ho Ch Minh City at the end of the year with no specific plans to return in the immediate future. But that’s not to say it is not still an interesting and sometimes amusing window into people’s thoughts.
When the subject of your departure comes up you expect inquiries into why you are moving and when, of course. You expect people that have traveled there or similar places to share their own experiences, discussing the merits/drawbacks to moving to such a place and living in such a culture. These are generally the responses you get. But sometimes the people you least expect are the ones that have excellent advice or otherwise worthwhile observations to make about your destination or its culture, having been there themselves, or having had friends that have visited there or are even from there. Still others surprise you with envy — people you might not expect are harboring dreams of far-away lands and exotic cultures.
Then there are those who offer the odd non-sequitur or reveal a typical bias, the kind that boggles the mind that it still exists in this day and age. Those are the ones that are the most amusing.
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And Then the World Changed
Dear Jeffrey,
It was a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for applying to do a CELTA course with ILA and I am happy to offer you a place on the January course.
How much is fate or luck, and how much is self-determination? It matters not; I feel a joie de vivre today that I have not felt in some time. Phở — it’s what’s for breakfast. Or soon will be.
Interstitial Chevette
The wind tugs at her hair, longer now than when she lived here, and a feeling that she can’t name comes like something she has always known, and she has no interest climbing farther, because she knows now that the home she remembers is no longer there. Only its shell, humming in the wind, where once she lay wrapped in blankets, smelling machinist’s grease and coffee and fresh-cut wood.
Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring.
And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it. Read the rest of this entry »
Irving Penn: the Day the Platinum Print Died
One of my favorite photographers shuffled off this mortal coil October 7, and I feel compelled to mark his passage here. He wasn’t an Ansel Adams or an Annie Leibowitz; unless you are into photography and art, or fashion, you would not have heard of Irving Penn.
It is a shame, because there are many lesser artists out there in the public consciousness; many hacks who have enjoyed more fortune and fame. But this in no way diminishes him or his work. He was one of those rare commercial photographers that made art. There are a number of ways that one could interpret that statement; I’ll leave it up to you. He was a photographer’s photographer ; the methods that he developed are still in use by many today, both in the fashion and art worlds — the use of a dark, stark studio backdrop, and the placement of his subjects within a narrow corner created with his backdrop, for example.
But praising a photographer or an artist with words is kind of silly, I suppose, if not downright ironic. I first noticed an image of Penn’s back in the 1990s; it was a nude of Kate Moss, which you will find below. It’s NSFW, so if you click on the “read more” link, consider yourself warned; if you navigated to this page directly, sorry. But his images really moved me, but not because of his subject, but rather what he managed to do with her image. Moss is certainly beautiful in that near anorexic, super-model kind of way; a pixie that almost makes one feel perverted for enjoying her — at least that is how she typically comes across in fashion shoots.
The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters
It’s funny, but not in an amusing way, but rather in an odd, “isn’t-it-strange” kind of way, how sometimes it all comes flooding back, the ghosts and the memories they bear. A month or two can go by, and there are no dreams, even though it comes up in casual conversation, that death of a loved one.
But they are never far away though. They are always there, lurking just below the surface, that frail veneer of normalcy you present to the world. You know this, because you’ve lived with it for some years now. But sometimes, there are stretches of time when the environment around you, the fates, and your own mind all collude to lull you into a false sense of security; perhaps you even foolishly dare to think that you are “over it,” as if you ever can or will be over it – as if you have a choice in this matter — when deep down you know that can never be. That at best, you’ll adapt, like an amputee adjusting to losing a limb: her life goes on and she learns how to do without, but that phantom pain never quite goes away — indeed, it flares up when she least expects it.
In much the same way, you never know when something will whisk you back into those moments to relive yet again for the gods-only-know-how-many times those awful, terrible moments, the dreadful movie playing behind your eyes in all its vivid, mental Technicolor glory. Sometimes you don’t see it coming; the most tenuous reminders – a smell, an uttered phrase, an object on your dresser – they can collude to send you back to those moments unwillingly to live them all again. And sometimes it’s just for the briefest of moments before you can return to your façade; sometimes the ghosts even let you sleep unperturbed.