The Idylic Landscape of Childhood

Strange as it sounds, I kind of grew up on the UC Berkley campus. When I was little my dad was a student there and my family pretty much used the sprawling wooded Cal campus as our own personal playground. We had picnics there, we rolled down grassy hillsides, and played a game called Ralph the Dog which involved my chasing my father with a stick (in retrospect I can't believe I got away with that last one, though, come to think of it, watching this same man indulge the every whim of his granddaughter, maybe I can after all). 

And then when I was a teenager in our suburban town a few miles north, the very coolest thing my friends and I could do was to walk to the Bart station, take the train to the downtown Berkeley stop, and wander up through the campus to Telegraph Avenue with its cafes and record stores and pizza places.

All of which meant that, the other day when I went to visit the Berkley Art Museum, I naturally walked there from Bart up through the campus, tracking a route that my feet and my subconscious mind knew perfectly well, though I realized I probably hadn't laid eyes on, or even thought about, the place in over a decade.

And it turned out that around every bend in the path there was some delightful and beautiful surprise. Something I remembered on the deepest possible level. And perhaps most special of all, every single memory was warm and glowing and good. 

And I realized that, oddly enough, this university campus is my secret happy place. A landscape I have loads and loads of memories of, and every single one of them is happy. I mean, come on, really, how many places can any of us say that about? Not too many.

I was a smart kid and I recall a certain amount of pressure being brought to bear upon me by my high school teachers to try and get into Cal. At the time I didn't want to for my own murky teenage reasons. And now I find I'm so glad that I didn't. For surely in four years of college sooner or later I'd have been miserable on that campus, as all college students inevitably are at some point, and the elysium of my childhood would have been dispelled forever. Whereas instead it still forever and always remains glowing away in the autumn sunlight just across the bay.

Playing Tourist at China Gate

We thought it would be amusing to take the classic tourist photo with the lion at China Gate (which happens to be in our neighborhood), and Mabel thought it would be amusing to pretend to be terrified of the lion. Even in this less-than-crisp photo there's something about the angle of her head and the gesture of that left hand that telegraphs pretend fear rather than real fear, at least to me her mother. These days when ever walk by the lions she pauses to climb up to each one and give it a pat. Just to make sure they know this was all in good fun, I imagine.

On True Love

I was talking the other day with a coworker about the artists you first discover, and fall in love with, on your own when you're a young person. How some (Klimt, perhaps, or Rossetti) are tastes you later grow out of. But how a few persist and eventually you realize that these are lifelong love affairs. For me these are all Midcentury abstract painters. I've mentioned here before how much I dig classic Abstract Expressionism. And, credit where credit is due--the first artist whose work I independently discovered and fell for, all on my own, was Wassily Kandinsky. I remember pouring over an old art book of his paintings that I got somewhere for hours on end when I was in junior high.

Another such enduring artist schwarm of mine is with Mark Rothko--likely started by what remains to this day one of my all-time favorite paintings, No. 14, 1960, a piece in the permanent collection of the SFMOMA that, when you stand it front of it, positively glows (interesting fact I discovered while pulling up images for this post: this Rothko is by far the museum's most photographed work of art, something they demonstrate to very pleasing effect here).

And then there's Josef Albers, another dude whose work has been making a happy home in my consciousness for nearly as long as I've been aware there was such a thing as art or artists or paintings or painters, and which I still crush on to this very day. (Full, slightly embarrassing, disclosure--from the ages of about three to about thirteen I consistently and passionately answered the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up with the answer "an artist." This to me meant driving around the country in a motorhome painting pictures on an easel. Oh, and I would also have my horse with me. Naturally.)

Next in the Ever Ongoing Poem Series About the Winter of 2006

January 4, 2006
Today there was a woman

with an interesting sort of a carpetbag purse
walking right in front of me for a while

Like a classic
old-fashioned
marry poppins
tapestry handbag
but squashed flat vertically

Bright fuzzy floral print of green
pink
orange
black and white


image source is here

Why I Work In Publishing

This radiantly forthright image by designer Jason Bacher pretty much says it all. I do what I do because I love books, and I love art, and corny as it sounds I even love the fine publisher for which I work. Even on the days when it all drives me nuts or wears me out or makes me want to climb the walls, I love this shit. I just do. And I imagine just about anyone who works in publishing can relate. Because lord knows we're not in it for the money.

Art via the divine Ms. Jen Bekman.

This Is What I Look Like

You know how sometimes things collide and suddenly everywhere you turn a certain theme keeps emerging? Well that's happened to me lately around the two related subjects of self-portraiture and allowing oneself to be photographed. First there was my pal Susannah Conway's excellent book This I Know in which she talks about, among many other things, the taking of self portrait photos as a means to self acceptance. Those passages, and Susannah's own pictures, directly inspired the picture I took of myself, above. I only took the one shot, and I got lucky--this photo represents exactly what I think I look like at my current age of 36 years old.

Then there was this article by Allison Tate "Mom Stays in the Picture" which speaks quite astutely to the fact that many mothers--what with getting older, and the body image issues that often come post childbirth--avoid at all costs stepping in front of the camera with their children. But how sad is that going to be when the kid is grown and they look back at all these photos of their own face, seeming to grow up in a motherless vacuum? So reading those words, in turn, inspired me to stretch my arm out as far as possible and take the shot above. 

But then, I realized, of course I am very lucky in this regard. While it's good to be reminded of the power of turning the camera on yourself, I really don't have to worry that there won't be pictures of Mabel and me together. Because among the myriad amazing photos of the child captured by her grandfather, more than quite a few feature yours truly as well. And while posting a bunch of those here does feel a bit egomaniacal, I must admit also feels pretty great. There she is, tiny and then growing bigger, and there I am, looking, hey! not half bad! and loving her like crazycakes in frame after frame. 

Down here at the end I do just have to mention the third bit of text that made its way to my attention around this same time and helped firm up these subjects in my mind to the point where they shifted from low-level percolation to a conscious "I should write a blog post about that" level. It's a bit tricky, as a sex-positive article about erotic self-portraiture among teenagers is hardly in keeping with the otherwise warm and fuzzy mommy tone of the rest of these thoughts. But what the heck. It's a damn fine piece of writing and says some brave things most people would not be comfortable saying and if you can't bring together all the weird and disparate elements floating around harmoniously in your brain on your own site, where the heck can you, right? So here you go: "Don't Be Afraid: Sexting is the Polaroid of our Time."

Cooking

Here we see a rather ghostly-looking Mabel engaged in a favorite game: the box that lives just beside this low bookcase comes open, and out come all the pretend foods and cooking utensils, and the top of the bookshelf becomes a stove on which to cook. One hears a lot about the short attention-span of small children, but she will play at this play for long stretches at a time.

Special and ever-recurring thanks to Mabel's grandpa for his diligent scanning of the endlessly multiplying Polaroid collection.