The Unbearables Big Book of Sex at FusionArts part one

What do I know about the Unbearables? Not much, but the more I think of the name of this loose assembly of writers and artists, the more I think of the essential unbearablity of life and how the arts, music and literature lift some of that burden. Maybe, after a good read, or time spent contemplating a work of art, life becomes a few ounces lighter.

Last January 31, 2010, a Saturday night, I attended a reading by Unbearables at the FusionArts Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There was a nice crowd there, and the reading was raucous, in part because of the subject - sex in many of its varieties - and partly because there was a lot of energy in the gallery.

I took photos and then forgot about them. I was busy with getting the last pages of the novel I was writing finished, and then I was revising it. I wasn't taking as many photos and I wasn't thinking about them either. Maybe I even felt a little guilty not sharing them.

Enough time has passed and they've matured, sitting there, in the digital vault. I've taken them out, examined them, discarded the utterly useless, hidden the uglier ones and chosen these for anyone to enjoy or revile. I hope nobody is offended by them - I find them thoroughly inoffensive - and if you are, please go away and deal with your problem somewhere else.

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Ron Kolm

Bob Holmon of the Bowery Poetry Club

audience

If you think I know who all these people are, you are wrong. I'll label the ones I know, but honestly, does it really matter?

Jim Feast

Jim Feast

Publish Post

Tsaurah Litzky - a demonstrative reader, indeed.

Tom Savage - he read too

Shalom Neuman held temporarily hostage by Jim Feast

Bonny Finberg

Tom Savage competing for attention with the installation

Shalom Neuman

Carl Watson

Leonard Abrams

Catherine Sand

In the background, Ron Kolm and Jim Feast. In the middle, a woman either captivated or terrorized by the goings on around her. You decide.

Thanks to Ron Kolm for helping me identify people in the pictures. If you recognize someone and want to help me, post a comment and I'll caption the photos.
If you made it this far, thanks. I'll post the more tomorrow.

Is there ever enough time?

I've got a problem.

I like to write, I get a lot of pleasure from writing. Hell, I even enjoy reading the things I write.

I also like taking photographs. I get pleasure taking them. I even enjoy looking at them when I finish working on them.

My problem is that I don't have enough time to write, and the reason I don't have enough time to write is because I spend a big chunk of my spare time writing. The writing I'm doing is long, but blogs like this need to be short.

I also don't have enough time to work on the photos, throwing out the really crappy ones, and cropping and editing the ones I like.

What should I do?

If only the time dilation effect made a twenty four hour day have twenty six hours.

Answers on the 11 o'clock news - or maybe not.

View from Olana

This year, the July 4th weekend was hot and humid in the New York City region, and up the Hudson valley as well. Monday looked like a good day to go to Olana, the painter Frederic Edwin Church's home south of Hudson, NY. The website, olana.org stated that the house was open on holiday Mondays. Foolish me, I believed them. The house was closed but the grounds were open.

Frederic Church was a terrific painter, one of that group, which included Thomas Cole, whose house and studio were just across the river, called the Hudson River School. Their works were dramatic and filled with a special light that you recognize when you visit the Hudson Valley. They painted their locale: the Hudson, the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills, as well as remote locations they visited, such as the Andes. If you aren't familiar with their work, you ought to look them up.

Here's a link to Church's "Clouds over Olana".
Here's a link to Cole's "Falls of Kaaterskill".

They were greater painters than I a photographer, but still, I took a few photos. It was hazy as well as hot, but the views across the Hudson demanded I try. You can judge the results:

 

I don't know what house that is across the Hudson in Catskill, NY - I was hoping to see the painter Thomas Cole's home, but I'm pretty sure that isn't it.

That's the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. It's a few miles south of Hudson, and driving past it a little earlier, I thought about the Hudson River crossings from the George Washington Bridge in NYC up to this one - there aren't a lot of them and they are all dramatic.

Bryant Park on a Friday Evening

Summertime in New York City can either be the best or the worst. Tonight, after a 102˚day, with the temperature still in the high 80s, it stinks. But last Friday night, it was wonderful to be a New Yorker at large in NYC.

I was going to write about Bryant Park, which, if you didn't know it back in the 1970s and early 1980s, before it was restored, you wouldn't know what a long-time resident of the city feels when he sits in it now. Anyway, there I was, Friday evening after work, waiting to meet some friends, with my camera. I walked around, I sat at a small table, I chatted with a couple of tourists and I took some pictures that describe the evening rather well.

Happy Father's Day, you tough mother, you!

On the Friday before Mother's Day, overhearing people at a bank wishing each other a happy Mother's Day, I found myself a little annoyed. After all, I've been called many things, including one tough mother. So I said to these women, "Some people I know call me a tough mother, but nobody ever wishes me a happy Mother's Day!" They all laughed and as I left called after me "Have a happy Mother's Day."

Sunday is Father's day and it occurred to me that though a man might be called a mother, either derisively or with begrudging admiration, Father is never used this way. Imagine "hey man, you are one tough father!"

Why doesn't it work?

Back to Fertile

I went back to Fertile, MN at the end of May. This time I did a bit of walking on the gravel roads that criss-cross the area outside the town. The corn was just pushing up through the soil, and other crops hadn't germinated yet or were just greening the fields. There's beauty in the fields, but it isn't a beauty I want to spend my life surrounded by.

The town seemed a little less down and out than last time. The Gullicksen (a before and after picture) building now has tenants on the ground floor and that, by itself, spruces up that side of the street - the second picture is the before. Carole Larson is the owner of the Boutique of Joy, and she's trying her best to keep some things up to date - her shop has wifi and she plans on opening the network to her customers and folk who sit down on one of the plastic Adirondack chairs she keeps on the sidewalk. Carole also runs the Willow Creek Bed & Breakfast, about five miles outside the town. Her efforts as a booster for Fertile deserve recognition and approval.

I also noticed that the Sand Hill River Watershed has taken over the bank building that was empty and desolate the first time I was in Fertile, and some of the other North Mill Street buildings are now occupied.

Across the street from the Gullicksen building is a brand new War Memorial. It's right there, in the middle of town on the main street, so you can't miss it. It was a hot and sunny day, just before Memorial Day, so it felt quite appropriate to spend a few minutes there. The people of Fertile have sent soldiers to fight in every American war since the town was settled in the latter part of the 19th Century. It's a tasteful and attractive plaza.

A few days later I spoke with Eric Bergeson, the proprietor of the

Bergeson Nursery and a life-long resident. He was generally very positive about this project and the town in general. He seems to be smarter than average: he heads to Arizona every winter for three months or so, dodging the worst of the winter weather. I like him enough to read his column in the Fertile Journal, when our copy arrives at home. The Journal is old fashioned: they keep their subscriber lists on 3x5 file cards at the Journal, and don't send out reminders when the subscription ends ("the date's on the label," the nice lady at their office said to me when I mentioned it to her, as if anyone ever reads the label. When I got home, I noticed it's not there. Oh well.) They don't publish on the web, which makes sense if you are a weekly highly dependent on local advertising and subscriptions. Broadband access to the web is not a universal there, nor universally needed. Of course everyone in town reads the Journal and so do many of the town's expatriates.

I mentioned in a previous post the opening of the Willow Creek Bed & Breakfast. There was no way that I would stay anywhere else during this visit, and both Mary and I enjoyed our stay. The location is on quite a farm lane - and a quiet one, too - about five miles outside the town. The old farmhouse has been restored into a comfortable place to stay. It offers privacy and is about as scenic as this corner of NW Minnesota can be. Carole comes in every morning to cook a delicious Norwegian American farmer's breakfast. We took walks in the early morning and late afternoon along the back roads. For Mary, the house brought back memories because it was her Great Aunt Ida's home, and when she was a kid, she used to play in the attic. Carole let her go up there just to refresh her memories.

The best thing about a big city boy like me taking a vacation in this remote corner of Minnesota is how much it made me miss being home. You can take the boy out of the city but you can't take the city out of the boy.

Why I haven't been posting and a photograph of my late father

One of the things I do is take pictures. I take a lot of them, and sometimes I show them to other people, but mostly I don't. This isn't because they aren't good - many of them are very good, and it isn't because I'm modest, because I'm not - anyone who knows me will agree with this. Mostly it's because I'm too lazy to organize them into a slide show. If I'm going to show off any of them, it's because they sort of fell into a natural order because they were all shot at one event - for instance these at the Flea Theater's web site or because it's just one or two photos of some person or thing that works so well for me, or has so particular and strong a meaning for me, that I find myself compelled to show it off. That is what this is about.

It's been nearly two years since I last posted anything to this blog. Alone, this wouldn't rate an explanation. Plenty of people start to blog, expect to do it regularly, and find themselves rather soon not blogging at all. I am one of those who prefers not to have a public confessional, and if I'm going to put some piece of writing on the web, there ought to be a reason for it: a rant about something I find particularly annoying; something that moved me to words; an event that really got me thinking about the world in a way I could write about. That said, it was about a week after my last post that my father passed away at age 89 after a brief illness. I don't think it's coincidental that I didn't write anything here since then because I've written a great deal in other places. It's just what happened.

So to relaunch myself, here's a photo of my dad I took just a few weeks before he passed away. My brother is the only other person with a copy. He said it he liked it, but he wouldn't show it because it made him feel sad. It makes me feel sad, too, but it allows me to see that 89 years of a real life leaves marks. In this photo he seems calm and thoughtful.

A day after I took this photo, my father was in the emergency room of a hospital in West Palm Beach, FL. I spent hours sitting by his bedside. He was semi- conscious, the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong and I couldn't do anything. One of them told me that a lot was wrong and that there wasn't anything I could do. He sent me back to my hotel room with a promise that I'd be called if anything changed. It was after midnight.

Later that morning I went back to the hospital. Dad had been admitted but was waiting for a bed in intensive care. He was conscious and bitching that he was hungry and nobody had fed him. I was happier than I'd been in 24 hours. I called the nurse and she got a meal to him stat. I fed him and a little later he was moved to a bed on the ward. I spent that day with him and the next day my brother, who'd been on a short vacation, got back. What could we do? Keep him comfortable. He wasn't going to be there long, and in fact, he was discharged a couple of days later.

My father wanted to die at home. My brother arranged home hospice for him, and for the next few weeks Dad thought he was getting better. I won't say we knew better, but what my brother and I knew was that his heart was going, that there was a reason he could barely walk from bed to bathroom, and whether it was a week, a month or a year, we were lucky he was comfortable and could still have some small pleasures in life.

When he died, I was sad, but I didn't think it was a tragedy. I spoke with him briefly the night before, he was having trouble staying on the phone for more than a few minutes, unlike our more usual 45 minute discussions. That morning about 4AM he woke up and told the aide he was hungry. She said it was too early to go out, but that she'd give him some fruit and later they would go out to breakfast. He ate a banana and went back to sleep. About 6AM she went in to check on him and found that he had slipped away. Writing this, my eyes are misting, but that's okay, because I miss him. She called my brother and I guess whoever else had to be called in Florida. My brother called me and we each got busy with our sides of the job. Later he called me to tell me he looked peaceful and calm. I knew that even before I was told.

When I think of my dad, I remember a lot of things, and this photo helps me to remember that at the end I was close with him, and that he mattered to me right up until then.

So that's the story.

Ringtone madness

I am perversely proud of being a cell-phone (sell the phone) rejectionist - had one, hated it, didn't renew my contract. Free at last! Free at last! Free at last!

But being personally cell-phone free doesn't eliminate cell-phone's annoyances from my environment. But really, it's not the cell-phones, it is the people who use them. It is my opinion that people are impolite using them because we as a culture/society haven't gotten used to using them, and established what is polite and what is rude when it comes to cell-phone use in public.

Personally, I don't tolerate someone letting a ringing cell-phone interrupt a conversation. If someone stops talking to me to answer the phone, I walk away from the conversation.

But I don't want to go on about cell-phones in society. Instead, I want to mention an idea I had to make cell-phones even more annoying than they already are - really useful self-reflexive ringtones.

Imagine these:

1. Phone off the hook
2. Busy signal
3. "the number you have reached is no longer in service..."

You get the point.

But upon checking I discover that at least one of these is already available for purchase.

Just goes to show.

Sudanese Teddy Bear

I was going to rant about the insanity of a woman arrested, dragged from her home in shackles, because the seven year old students in her class named a teddy bear Muhammad. But I decided not too, because it's too absurd, and now that the judge found her guilty and sentenced her to 15 days in jail, hard-time, I presume, just like Paris Hilton had to serve, it's time to move on to other absurdities.

But still, the thing that got people in Sudan all lathered up about this was the alleged insult to the prophet of Islam. He's dead, isn't he? And how can a dead person be insulted? He has no feelings to be hurt, and no thin skin to be pierced. I could call a teddy bear Teddy Roosevelt, spit on it, poke its eyes out with a stick, dip it in honey and bury it up to its neck in an ant hill, and nobody would threaten me with jail.

If only we could live in a world where the insult is the insulter's problem, and not the insultee's. Where I grew up, kids, when insulted used to chant "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." In Sudan, this just isn't so.

Is Fertile full of fertilizer?

I was going to write this letter to a small-
town* weekly newspaper in northwestern Minnesota, but my wife, who is from the town, wouldn't let me send it because, well, she said "my sister still has to go to church every Sunday, and show her face at the recreational center during the week."

In the end, I directed the letter, in a form much edited and censored, to one of the newspaper's columnists:

I am writing to you because you are the only person from Fertile whose email address I could find, and who has a column in the town's newspaper.

All my wife will let me say is "congratulations to the Larsons on their new venture."

But that isn't what I really want to say. But since, according to my wife, it's a small town, and people's feelings and appearances must not be hurt, I won't say much more.

[at my wife's insistence, this was taken out of the letter I sent:]
I hope the people of Fertile have the sense to take a little bit of constructive criticism with humor, and understand that anything I say is said with affection. I am a native of New York City and I am married to a daughter of Fertile, MN. I have learned during the nearly 10 years I have been involved with this wonderful woman, that there is more difference between people from Fertile and NYC than there is between people from NYC and Tokyo, Japan. Be that as it may, Fertile seemed a nice enough place when I visited, except for the mosquitoes and the weak coffee.

Being married to a native of Fertile, I cannot help but stay in touch with the goings on there. And I have discovered something you need to know.

[this made it in:]
Do you know you got trouble, right there in Fertile city, and it's spelled with a capital T-R-O-U-B-L-E, and it's name is MODESTY. That's right, modesty. Because, if I understand my wife and my sister-in-law right, people that are proud of what they do, and let others know it, are not respected or respectable. There's something wrong with a frown at someone's accomplishment instead of a hearty congratulations and keep up the good work.

[Here's some of the good stuff she made me take out of the letter:]
Now mind you, what I'm about to say has my wife rather annoyed with me, because just as modesty can be a problem, shaking the bush is, too. But as she knows, I am one hell of a bush-shaker. I say let the berries fall where they may.

What brings this up was an article in the Fertile Journal trumpeting the opening of a bed and breakfast, The Willow Creek, right there, in Fertile. Now I saw this and I said to my wife, now isn't that nice, Fertile's got a B&B, and it looks like a nice place, too. The only thing I scratched my head about was why the proud new owners chose to decorate it in 1940s style, a period noted for not being notable in American home decorating for reasons I prefer to not discuss, as that would be a bit of a digression.

Reading on, my wife and I discovered that my wife's aunt, Ida Johnson, lived in that house, and my wife used to play in the attic. This brought back found memories, and we chuckled about it, and how nice it is that the house is going to be taken care of now. And as my wife reminisced, she remembered how her niece was friends Carole Bevolden, now Carole Larson, the new owner, and my wife was Carole's sister's friend, and they were they were always getting in teenage trouble, because that's what teenagers do.

"So," I said, "what's the problem, it's obvious that Carole Bevolden grew up nice, and became a nurse, a worthy profession."

And my wife said "nursing runs in that family, her sister's a nurse."

And I said, "there's nothing wrong with that."

My wife and her niece grew up nice, too.

"But," my wife said, "my sister isn't going to approve because she doesn't like it when people are self-promoting."

And there's the problem. Because it isn't just my sister-in-law that has a problem with self-promoting. According to what I've heard from reliable sources, people in Fertile, in general, have a problem with self-promotion, and, as I said, this is a problem.

When someone does something good, and that thing is a commercial venture, that person has a responsibility to him or herself and anyone else involved in that venture to go out there and blow a horn and bang a drum. There were surely hundreds or thousands of mousetrap inventors who starved waiting for the world to beat a path to their door, but the world never did because nobody ever heard about that mouse trap. And here's somebody opening a bed and breakfast in Fertile, MN, I mean, where is Fertile MN? Nobody I know except for people who know my wife know where it is, and they wouldn't know if I didn't take the trouble to show them on a map , and make sure they know that the tallest building in town's the grain elevator, and that even though Fargo's the nearest city, and Fargo isn't much of a city, the people are nicer and smarter than those people in the Coen brothers movie, and yes, not much happens there, and much of that not much is about the same as it is everywhere else, but the people there like it, and they get to eat Northern and Walleye, and we don't but so what? We have other pleasures.

So Carole Bevolden Larsen, should be this weeks toast of Fertile, for giving Fertile something nicer than a motel as a place to spend a night or the weekend or even longer, when coming into town and not wanting to put the in-laws out for a weeks stay - or perhaps, being the cranky kind of guy I am, preferring to not have to always be polite to my hosts.† I don't want to be condescending and say that the Larsen's have brought a bit of civilization to Fertile, when I was there, Fertile seemed as civil as any place I've ever been - but it isn't a commercial hub, and so let's forget about modesty and instead of disapproval for being proud and saying it out loud, all of the good of Fertile should get out there and let everyone know that something good is happening there.

By the way, when my sister-in-law asks me why I'm not out visiting over the Christmas/New Year Holiday, I always answer with a question: What's the temperature? Usually the answer is something below zero Farenheit, which allows me to say "there's the reason." I'm from a place where the temperature usually stays in two digits, and those two digits are always above zero.

But winter's coming, so I hope you dress warm, and enjoy it.
--
* Hyphen's used in an effort to preserve the horizontality of the text. See my previous post.
† I was going to mention the fact that the guest bed at my sister-in-law's home isn't good for my back, but I was asked to not say that.

Is the hyphen dying?

I am a little behind on the news, so you too may not have heard: The end of the hyphen is at hand. What's next? No more semi-colons? Of course, the colon is safe because academics and pundits need them for the titles of their books.

The decline of the hyphen was reported in September, when the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was published with approximately 16,000 compound nouns either concatenated or separated.

Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, said "People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for."

Ok, what are they for? Emphasis, for one, because if you put a hyphen in a word, it looks more important, right? And it's sort of like a word perineum, a nice place to rest your chin. I think they should be required for oxymorons, sort of like a double-headed arrow with the barbs removed, so that the brain-thickened, hyphen-challenged bloggers get the point.

Stevenson also said "Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

In this day-and-age of spell- and grammar-checkers, all it takes is a few lines of code to create an automatic de-hyphenator. Write your blog entry, have it spell-check your work, and voilá, no more messy, old-fashioned looking hyphens.

Hmmph.