Bread & Roses Centennial and my last ditch attempt and Zoe Strauss

 Fortunately S. came for a visit, arrived Wed. evening and we drove out to Lawrence in the morning. Labor history is one of her many interests so the Centennial celebration was particularly meaningful to her. We got there just as Rosario of Justice for Janitors was speaking...and I dearly wish that we'd heard all of her speech and been able to get a glimpse of her... The room was packed, standing room only  behind informational flats ...or crowding against the back wall. It was great to see this group, many of whom were students listening or not, but who perhaps had the chance of walking down Essex Street in the rain behind flags shouting strike, strike, strike early in the day. We missed that, but I would have liked to walk in that crowd, to, in some way, mimic the original march. And it's nice that it was so dismal, a bit icy, since Jan. 12th, 1912, was one of the coldest in recorded history, as were those two months of active striking.

 I didn't realize until the next morning that I'd been holding my breath in worry that someone wouldn't like his or her interview. But of course they couldn't have seen them, newly installed, and turned off in all the noise and celebration.

At any rate, when the History Center gets earphones, it will be an attractive video installation, the mechanics hidden by two vintage wooden boxes...quite handsome. I'll try to add a few more in Spanish before long, just not right now.

I'm tired. Partly from all the work I've been doing this summer and more particularly in finishing up these seven interviews in English and two in Spanish, but also by trying to hold my stomach in, and push my shoulders back and do the exercises necessary to make this last ditch attempt to straighten myself out...having seen a physical therapist, Lorna Brown, who somberly instructs me that I am responsible for making a decision about whether I want to continue this work everyday, everyday, and not slack off because even if I make progress in these eight weeks while she's watching me, it's easy to fall into my stoopedness.

Having considered myself a head carried around by a not too important, but often annoying, body, it's a big adjustment to pay quite this much attention to the mechanics of learning to undo extremely bad habits.

One of the few things that I remember from the otherwise nearly blank first twelve years when my mother was alive, is her saying, "Don't sit on your spine." How can I remember that if I've forgotten her? Almost entirely. But never mind, that reprimand has lodged in my brain and I can recall it, though I can recall nothing else of what she might have said that I've used as unconscious reasons for being so self-destructive and making such poor choices that I know would have annoyed her.

So, what was also interesting is that S. brought Zoe Strauss's book, Ten Years...and I had a chance at it...

I've never been in love with photographs, though I've seen hundreds of thousands and made an endless amount myself. It's just not a medium I find very interesting unless there is text.

So I didn't find her photographs particularly interesting, except a few, one of which is totally magnificent and covers the hard binding, though you can't see it because of the dust jacket...but it's a fabulous image of these two men on a bed with what seems to be such a display of affection, dare I say love...it's exudes warmth and spontaneity...

I couldn't understand what all the fuss is about, all these color plates and three essays, a fat, heavy book with a boring dust jacket...

since many of her images have ordinary right angles and not very inventive framing, the sort of images we're used to seeing, (though I'm certain they are considered by many curators to be remarkable in themselves,  not as emblems for her original thinking, etc., )

But once I read her introduction, I really liked her thinking, her premise, her tenacity, her ambition......her ten year plan to make herself into a photographer...(she's one of the blessed few who are young and haven't been through MFA programs!!! and wasn't programmed, except by her own intelligence and competitive nature..).to exhibit prints once a year on pillars under the I-95 in Philadelphia, arranged in four categories, one of which is  defining gender.

I understand now why S. has been so enthusiastic about her work, the broader social concerns and the intelligence with which she defined her process.  

I can't remember whether Strauss explains the wedding ring gold teeth image in her introduction, but the woman she photographed has one (or two?) gold front teeth because her husband works as a mechanic and his ring got caught on various objects, so they decided to melt them both down and cap their teeth with the gold...this is the reason I need text, why I love text. It's far more interesting to me to look at that image, a smiling woman near a gas pump, if I remember correctly, and know that she's wearing her wedding ring.. she's okay on her own, but nothing like with the story...

but that's my personal bias...and my take on photographs in general...that they're flat and silent, but for the visual noise that they might or might not supply......

From my point of view, Strauss' premise is unusual as is her thrust toward photographing folks from the lower end of the economic scale, the often subtle references to what's befallen us as a country over the last ten years and I do enjoy that she occasionally throws in a photograph to tweak the images (made by men) in the canon of well-known photographs.

And I greatly appreciate the very small footnote at the very back of the book remarking that even though Strauss refers to Lynn Bloom as her wife, it is not legal for two women to marry in Pennsylvania.

(It is from my seventy-two-year-old perspective quiet amazing that marriage between two people of the same gender is legal in Massachusetts...we, (the human race), advance glacially, but that is an advance..Let's hope for Pennsylvania...)

I can't wait to read her blog....

a tantrum on the 30th...

My car drives to Lawrence automatically after first stopping at Starbucks for a latte. It drove there three times last week, or was it twice, I can't remember. One was for an interview with Whimpper who seems to me like an angel in a human form that grew up in Ecuador, became a lawyer and also a volunteer firefighter two nights a week before moving to Lawrence where he teaches AP Spanish in one of the six high school divisions. He loves Lawrence, and I don't think that's a misplaced word, and the potential of the kids to whom he teaches language and life. He speaks in a marvelous way and I did a visually boring, but intensely interesting video of him. Now I'm hoping that he might facilitate an interview with five or six students about their lives. I was impressed by his mild-mannered dedication.

Lawrence, like Chelsea, is a city of immigrant, a gate-way city.

 And then my car took me to interview Esther, from Spain, who I first met in Cafe Verde where I crawled after photographing my brains out on the third floor of the Lawrence Public Library, aided immeasurably by Louise Sandberg, the archivist, who keeps candy on her desk and had a box of figs covered and filled with dark chocolate that someone had given to her husband. If I were to die by chocolate, I would die happily eating those....  

Esther was eating at another table and we smiled at each other. The next time I went there, she was eating with friends and I stopped at her table to talk and, no, I don't live in Lawrence, I'm doing blah and blah for the Centennial Celebration which will open on the 12th, interviews that will then be deposited in the Lawrence History Center, which is another whole story with a terrific staff and Susan Grabski who is part of getting that exhibit up.

 I have taken well over a thousand photographs, which doesn't mean that I've photographed a thousand pictures, but that I've bent over the table in that history room at the library, taking many of the same one, or stood by a shelf in the History Center, taking many of one...and then gone home and sorted them out and dumped the bad ones and turned what I wanted into jpgs for a long, long, long video of Jonas which was the first one I did, way back in June, when I was starting to hunt for interviews which I imagined would be quite short and shown at the Essex Art Center....

 Now I have to do another whole set for that show because I somehow got caught up, thanks to having met Karen at one of Cathy McLaurin's workshops, in this upcoming celebration.

 In general I have worked very hard this year, 22 videos about folks in Chelsea, and many photographs for 2 local shows, and now this. I have been productive and proactive and not really been in a rush, except now when I put more on my plate than I could manage, technically. Luckily Cathy put out a call and Stephen responded so my car also goes toward the Museum School where it obligingly finds a parking space and I find him waiting for me at the desk. He has saved the two long interviews with Jonas ...  dolled them up and made them more interesting than watching one person talk for an hour would be. He added some pizzaz to all the photographs I stuck in there, a good rough edit, but no fancy stuff. He's responsible for the fancy stuff, I'm overjoyed to say.

But I have three more videos to edit by tomorrow and I just couldn't do even one yesterday. My first tantrum. Generally I've been quite good this year. I've gone to openings and turned up at various activities and participated, etc., etc., The usual depression that starts on Thanksgiving and ends in early January skipped over me and I've managed to work in Lawrence this December and come back and, if necessary, go out with K. to shop or have a bit to eat or whatever....only occasionally going to sleep at 6, calling it quits.

But yesterday I could not force myself to go to Madeline (spelling) and Muna's party. I could not say happy new year to one person, not one. Bogie and Sherlock only demand treats and no wishes for the year to come. Oh, another year. How is that possible?

A Vacation

 Going to Foxwoods on the bus with folks from the Senior Center isn't nearly as good as taking a vacation with Nance and Wendell in Tucson, but it will have to do and it did...   Earlier on in my life, when I was a steady rebel, I could not have imagined myself doing this, but something in me said, why not, and I did....Eileen and I went together and were taught the ropes by Mary. We are all Empty Spools Quilters...and sometimes Eileen and I do things like when she came with me to video tape Jean who has macular degeneration, is 90 and does just fine, thank you.

Eileen and I have the same sense of humor and amuse each other. I doubt that anyone else finds us funny or understands what we are laughing about.

$18, a bus that leaves at 7 and gets back at 7, free buffet, all you can eat, and table service by a woman who has four children, all boys, the two oldest are in college (one is at Texas A&M and studying something like space engineering) and the youngest is three.

I paid $10 for bingo which I will never, never play again. It takes a type of brain organization that I don't have -- quickly reading the numbers under B, for instance, from the upper left, down, up, down again, up, across the six cards (many people have many more...) I'm absolutely not that organized, since my mind jumps around, here and there...   So I played a bit, then walked around, and then went back and played again and then gave up entirely.

This is the only sign I saw that wasn't in English. That means none of them were written in Spanish at Foxwoods. Our bus was slightly more full of people who speak English. Eileen and I sat at the divide between the groups and I tried to eavesdrop with my bits of newly acquired knowledge. Sharifa, who is from Afghanistan, sat in front of us.

 I walked over to the Grand Hotel, thinking I might see the Diana exhibit. There was a long, long line of quite properly dressed ladies, a long, long line. I might have paid the $20 if the line had been shorter.

One of the things I found out in the hotel is that they provide no comfortable chairs, none. All straight back or benches. I wanted to sit down in an arm chair, the kind they always have in hotel lobbies and in Starbucks, and write.

Late in the day, I discovered that you can put a five dollar bill in the penny slot machines and it takes a long time to loose money. I didn't have time to play, so I only lost a dollar and some cents, but I could happily have played for a couple of hours, slowly loosing my money.

 Mary's sense is that there were so few people because it's near the holidays and people don't have the extra money to spend. Usually the huge bingo hall is filled for the Early Morning Special which costs $10 to get the basic package, but most people buy more inside. Mary had all the equipment, the daubers, etc. We were delighted that she won a couple of hundred dollars...

At one point Eieen and I walked around, past endless shops, into a fantastic Chinese bakery and then into the poker hall where all the action was. We decided that I really couldn't take photographs there and that my presence had been noted by ceiling cameras in the slot machine parlors, but that I was considered harmless in those almost empty rooms.

Anyway, the poker rooms were where I would have wanted to be if only I could play poker. But my aptitude with numbers, games, logic is minimal and that fact makes me furious because it means I'm so much less intelligent than my father who got his PhD in math from the University of Chicago, undoubtedly as if it was just the next thing for a poor guy from the mid-west to do. He was extremely intelligent and very logical and I, at least, got to observe manner in which that sort of person goes about managing practical tasks when he's not pickled in Scotch.

Later we learned that Sharifa had spent her day playing poker.

 One of the changes in my face is that the fat that's under the surface when a woman in producing hormones vanishes when she isn't. It's very strange to see the scarring, now, so obvious. When I had that bout with ulcerative colitis and was taking prednisone, it puffed up pleasantly and I'd lost so much weight that it didn't look fat, only filled out.

Who can imagine the changes ahead?

This self-portrait was quite purposeful, next to one of the two lion statues that were near a large plastic horse drawing a sleigh that was next to a huge Christmas tree. There were many decorated trees here and there, but the space was so massive that their presence was diminished and it was possible, almost possible, to ignore the Christmas carols.

I also took many photographs of myself in the bathroom with oval mirrors framed in gold.

Eileen said that I'm like a jumping bean, always getting up to do something else and constantly eating. Even if I'd liked bingo, I couldn't have sat there for two and a half hours. When we were walking in, a woman told me that going to bingo was so restful for her, took her mind off of everything.

If I went again, I would take the free shuttle from the hotel to the Pequot Museum. That would be interesting and I'd be happier to pay $20 to get in there than I would have been to pay $20 to see Diana memorabilia, though I would have gone in as a lark had the line not been so long.

whatever

I can't stop making the stick folks, such a relief from hunting for jpgs and making yet another 11x17 print..it all has to be done by Tuesday...so I'm close. But in the meantime, I distract myself with the figures, though this morning I was actually cleaning, foolish as that was, and broke the leg off a figure stored in a corner, waiting for an upper body.

 Had I not been so broke when I started my obsessional photographing, born out of not knowing what my mother looked like except through some snapshots, I would have done video. I like the talking. I've never been all that interested in photographs, though they serve as markers, as ways to discuss issues, preserve memories...they are, of course, lies, fictions, as much as stories and poems are, but serve as a jumping off point....

Though I took an etching class and sculpture at the Art Student's League, and for a few months imagined I'd be a sculptor (my mother's father was a sculptor of religious statuary). At least I imagined that before I started the class and unfortunately positioned my stand in back of a young woman who must have been working for months, if not years, and, of course, eager to fail, I measured myself by her work and left the class....I did that with drawing also, leaving my easel when the instructor, George Grosz came around. His was the only name I recognized, which is why I took his class, and it was shortly before he returned to Germany. And in college I took art classes also...... but I wasn't intent on becoming anything, much less an artist, until my daughter was born and I began taking photographs of her. And reluctantly and slowly became a photographer.

It's a luxury now to be working on a project for the Bread and Roses Centennial. I have gotten myself into making videos for it, and am in way over my head with that. However, thanks to Cathy McLaurin's day long workshop, I've also found myself making meditations on "Bread & Roses" by Bruce Watson. They are very relaxing, a pleasure to make.

One group of photos are up at the senior center and seem to enliven people. That's too the good.
And the next goes up later this week.
and tomorrow I'll look for more sticks with my dear-heart-stick friend.

Complicated...

This image is from the first workshop, all one Saturday, that I took with Cathy McLaurin  at a studio she rented near the Essex Art Center. It was about exploring, which I did, starting with layering newspapers on garbage bags. She believes in creating a complicated ground for work and spends quite a bit of time building one up...but mine was just newspapers plunked down, glued, washed over with gesso (so I didn't shoot myself because of the mess I'd made) and my first attempt at some way of using material about the Bread and Roses Strike in 1912.

The other night I went to a dinner party for a friend's birthday...it was like being in a movie set without having dressed for the occasion. But I wasn't an extra nor was I kitchen help, much as I would have liked that role.

There were many speeches given, glasses clinked. And I found myself standing up to comment about the birthday woman and also about another guest. This brave event brought up, naturally, many nighttime rehearsals of what I might/should have added. So now I'll elaborate.

The general conversation had come around to UMass, a very interesting place to teach with students who I considered quite remarkable. Those who had been involved there certainly praised it lavishly. They were all more prestigious than I am, which doesn't mean I wasn't an effective teacher, but perhaps I wanted to speak about a different type of experience.

At any rate, there I was, standing up at this long, elegant table, speaking about having moved up here from a tenement in New York for my first teaching job at MIT. I have learned enough over the years to realize that it was important to mention my one coup to this particular audience -- teaching at MIT. And to say that after my three years were over, I was like a barking seal, waiting for sardines to be thrown my way, little jobs (I don't think anyone there could understand what that's like, single parent, having to earn a living catch-as-catch-can) when I was offered a night Photo I class at UMass.

Obviously one class wouldn't have done much and I was so dumb that I didn't know I had any chips that I could have played, hadn't heard of CAA (College Art Association where one hunts for jobs)....didn't know how to look for another one so it was as if I'd been cast adrift in Brookline, spending more than half my income for that apartment so my daughter could go to that particular school for that particular tutoring).

But the point of this was that by the next fall, I had been slid from one evening Photo I class into a tenure-track position which is entirely illegal!

And that the fellow who had performed this leger de main (sp?) couldn't undo it. (I don't really understand why, if he'd been so free with the rules, he couldn't just drop me off the cliff as he'd done to the man teaching full-time previously. But he couldn't.)

So, there I was, much to his distress.
And that's where I met the woman whose birthday we were attending.
And the man, who happened to be Dean when I was up for tenure, was sitting two seats away from me.

So I could take the chance/opportunity of telling the story of my tenure case which took a very, very, very long time to go through the College Personnel Committee.

The woman who had come to my aid, who decided I was worth helping, was from the Woman's Studies Department. She combed my long, required statements for any sign of self-deprecation.

(This is what I forgot to say at that dinner party...how much she helped me and how hard a time she had convincing me that self-deprecation is not allowed in making a tenure case. A person must be sure-footed, positive and never weigh possibilities or elude to the fact that one isn't terribly important.

Of course, I think self-deprecation is perspective. A sense that no one is all that important, even people deemed extremely important, and that the game is usually rigged, there are ghosts in closets and there's always the strong possibility that someone who would have done as well just happened not to have had that opportunity...we can move into discussions of economic and class differences, educational and economic opportunities, race and gender quite easily from here...)

But anyway, I stood there talking, and muddled on to the point where I'd gotten really tired of waiting for the process of my dossier passing through that Committee which seemed very hopeless and tedious. Why not go back to working in the Women's Shelter? Didn't pay as much, longer hours, perhaps I wouldn't be as effective as I was in teaching, but why not go back, I thought.

And wrote a note saying that the whole promotion process felt like being pushed out on an iceberg with a rusty tea kettle and a hairpin. (there were means of collecting water and spearing fish, I assume...) And I was finished with it. Or some other phrase that to any sensible person would have read as the fact that I was resigning.

But I'd passed the committee on day before they received the note. (I passed because they leaned far to the left and knew that I did also...)

And the Dean, having received their reccomendation and my note, called me, asking about the iceberg, the tea kettle, etc,. and I explained that it was a letter of resignation (perfectly obvious, I thought) and he said, "Well, let's just consider it a blip on the radar."

That was very nice of him.
And actually very good for me. And perhaps good for students.

Of course, he hadn't remember this.
And probably other people at the dinner were surprised when I managed to reveal that the Chair, who so hated me, would leave faculty meetings in a rage, saying "Fuck you...".  He had, actually, a lot of fun in his role...quite a bit of power and a grant outlet for his temperament.
Folks with PhD's don't seem to have as volatile temperaments or at least I haven't met any that do.

Any rate, the guests did laugh when I ended it thanking the former dean for my pension

and my friend, whose birthday party I was attending called me the next day to talk about the remarkable event (very elegant speeches and much high praise and laughter, a gorgeous setting, sparkling everything,) so I gather that I'd acquitted myself adequately, managing to be amusing enough.

But damn, I wish I'd remembered the phrase self-deprecation and to thank the faculty member from another department whose hard work allowed me to survive.....

at any rate, I had my Spanish lesson at Target today...
and am now aided and abetted by a dear heart who encourages me to find more sticks...

Stick Ladies

 So, I went to a day-long workshop at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence with Cathy McLaurin (that could be spelled incorrectly, I never know with spelling.) Actually I took two of her workshops...and would like to take more since they are so far away from anything I ever think about, much less do...  It was quite easy to put aside preoccupations after the first ten minutes when I thought -- what am I doing here? I don't have time for this -- and realized that I'd driven all the way out there (without going on highways), paid for the deal and should just flow with it...

If I weren't so deadly wedded to so-called reality, I might have been an artist -- in the sense of making it up from interior promptings instead of picking bits and pieces from what's in front of me as a photographer does.

I hadn't imagined making anything I liked at the workshop, that wasn't a goal, but the stick woman was certainly acceptable. In fact, I like her.

And have started another couple. And been collecting a lot of sticks. Sometimes, especially after the hurricane, I fill the back seat with branches and withered leaves. Actually, I rather want human forms, if abbreviated, instead of bug-like stick creatures, so most of what I pick up isn't entirely useful. (I must say that my daughter was hardly pleased at this new habit...yet another thing her old mother is collecting, another sign of dotage?)

Now, should one of my rules be that the stick has to be the 'correct' form without breaking off bits? I allow myself to attach sticks, tape holding them in place, before I wind the yarn around that joint. That's okay. But what about the problem of a three-legged stick?

Every project has rules devised by the person doing it..nothing is entirely in free form.

One of my rules for my photographs was not cropping. Never cropping. Using the black edge when I printed because then, in those old days, it really meant having used the full frame.

Occasionally, now, I crop. Yesterday I thought about it and cropped the part of the kitchen from the right side of a stick lady photograph because the video camera I'd taken out to record the kittens Krissy had rescued, temporarily living on the back porch. But the game I played for years was -- no cropping. And I still think about it even when the photograph is hardly important.

And I certainly never saw color in the viewfinder of my Leica...I was seeing in shades and space.

Now, when I transfer my digital color photographs to black and white (as I'm doing for a book with recipes that folks are writing in Spanish in the Senior Center), they don't work at all. I know I could have taken a better photograph, meaning with black and white film.

(But I don't want to develop film or work in a darkroom. Besides, my beloved Leica had developed a habit of scratching the negatives unpredictably, a fact I hid from myself rather than solve it. And I still like taking images to keep myself from being bored, so.............I take a vast number of color digital photographs and my poor computer is exhausted from storing them.)

Anyway, when I get over this endless making-of-prints for the Chelsea City Cafe and the Senior Center, around 70 11x17 prints so far, far easier with color and digital prints, but still time consuming, maybe I'll do stick figures and then start on the Lawrence project. Or do stick figures while I work on that project. 
On to the next.

It's October, already...

 How is this possible? That it's October? And Clemente will be heading to Tampa soon. In the meantime, he gives me a Spanish lesson on Sunday mornings at the Starbucks in Target near the racetrack. Since I don't really know exactly what that sound system is -- what ll and j and the vowels sound like -- my spelling isn't very good. And he talks very fast and takes out his teeth to eat and it's a foreign language...and Italian would be easier. But it's terrific fun.

I'm learning various impractical things like Yo voi a la (or parra) Florida and por que ella estraba apprendiendo Espagnol con migo. (I've forgotten what this means.)

Gordo is fat. and hija is daughter (pronounced e-ha in English.)

I've hardly been at the track this meet, having spent endless time at the Senior Center, photographing, video taping, taking yoga, learning Spanish in the class where they are learning English. The "Harvest Celebration" will be late this month, the last Wednesday, at the Sr. Center, my photographs, food, visit from "Garden Girl," we hope, who has a show on a cable program. I think that there are around 40 framed photographs, so far. I may reprint and combine a couple, but my obsession is showing as many of the seniors in as many activities as possible which is how I got introduced to Mike at bocce.

(The question is whether I'll join bocce next year...it's so tempting, sitting around in the sun watching, until it's your turn. But in grade school, I know I got in the back of the line, hoping I'd never come up to bat. And this would be as terrible... with someone like Mike wanting to win.)

At any rate, he didn't. Win. His team lost the champsionship by two points. "We lost by two. We lost by two," he said in wonderment. He's almost ninety, from Italy, spent four years in the war on an island off of Greece. "That Mussolini, twenty-seven from my village died, twenty-seven. He was drafting men age 50, with families. Terrible." When he was discharged, after the war, it took a month for him to get back to the village in the Abruzzi mountains, outside of, way outside of, Rome. When he got there, groups of neighbors greeted him. When he got to the house, his mother said, "Michael, you got to marry Maria."  "What you mean, I just got back from the war. Let me rest. Who is Maria?" "You know. You just saw her."  When he went away, he said, his sister had a friend in the house across from them, a skinny girl. How could he know she was Maria, that beautiful young woman. He didn't recognize her. How could he?

There were no jobs, no food, nothing. But finally he got something in construction. And after a year, he married Maria. His brother in America asked him to come over. He did, but he didn't know what was going to happen, so he left her and their son and daughter. In two years, they came. (In the meantime, he worked hard and went to dance clubs. He's loved to dance.) Finally they moved to Chelsea and he got out of construction and worked in the pharmacy at Mass. General for twenty-seven years.

He's distraught. Depressed. Maria died four or five months ago. He doesn't know what to do without her. He misses her so much. They had a wonderful marriage.

Mike played bocce as a kid, in the streets, with stones. He's very good.