The Unbearables Big Book of Sex at FusionArts part two

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It was a NYC winter's evening: cold and humid, yet the streets of lower Manhattan still echoed with the sounds of late winter partygoers, and the FusionArts gallery was filled with people come to hear the readers and view the art.

Tsaurah Litzky

Some of the readers were outrageous in their histrionics, their subject arousing them to heights of demonstration. Others wherefore subdued, as if the personal nature of their writing left them shy, even reticent, about the things revealed.

Carl Watson eventually took off the hat

Jim Fleming

Leonard Abrams and Carl Watson

Ron Kolm

Shalom Neuman

I would've shaken this guys hand and congratulated on him doing the best he could with that complexion, but he stood there in silence, gaping at me instead.

I've identified the people in these photos to the best of my ability. If you want to help, post a comment and I'll update the captions.

It was a good and pleasant time.

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.