Southampton, N.Y., July 2007

Back from a weekend in Southampton with my friends Pam and Bryan and their two children. As the novelty in the family, I wound up being the center of attention for little Amanda, who’s three, and who wouldn’t let me out of her sight. It’s always such an ego boost to spend time with a little kid!

We swam in the pool, where we tried to show Amanda how to dog-paddle, and we lazed around the house. We took Amanda to soccer practice. We went to Sag Harbor for ice cream, and had a little birthday party for Pam, a friend of mine from the Peace Corps. It was all very domestic. (Amanda’s little brother Spencer was there for all of this, but he’s a mostly quiet baby, and tends to blend into the background!)


Small kids can be very intimidating. They’re so unfiltered, they’re likely to say anything. But they’re also very Zen - invested in the moment, and full of the energy of the moment, whether it’s happy or sad or something in between. (It’s rarely in between.)

Of course, they’re deluded too, full of desires that demand to be met. But you can see flashes of their little Buddha natures as they watch a bug or play a game or color in the coloring book - the intensity, the focus, even the kindness.

I don’t know how parents do it. I’m exhausted!

Baruch College, June 2007

I’ve had a busy Broadway week. I went to see “110 in the Shade” on Tuesday night, with Audra McDonald, and it was terrific. For some reason I was initially kind of lukewarm about seeing it, but her accolades are well-deserved - she puts such incredible energy into her performance. The rest of the cast is excellent as well.

Last night I went to see “Frost Nixon,” the play about David Frost’s legendary TV interview with Richard Nixon in 1977. Again, more good performances, but I thought Michael Sheen as Frost was stronger than Frank Langella as Nixon - and Langella won the Tony. Go figure!

Now I’m off to Southampton to spend the weekend with some friends. I think I need a bit of a blog break, so I’ll be away from the blog (and Flickr) until Monday. In fact, I may not even take my camera - SHOCK.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Catherine Street, June 2007

If any of you were expecting fireworks photography today, I have to disappoint. But let me soften the blow by explaining that it is impossible for me to take a good fireworks photo! With my little point-and-shoot, all I ever get is a colored smudge in the sky. I didn’t even try to take photos this year.

Pictures of fireworks seem a little pointless to me anyway. If anything is meant to be transient, enjoyed only as it occurs, it’s fireworks. What would they be without the motion, the resonant percussive explosions, the smell of the drifting smoke?

For a while, I thought we might get rained out last night. My friends Jan, Helen and I made our way down to the river shortly before sunset, and found ourselves caught in intermittent drizzle. We did bring umbrellas, but you can’t really watch fireworks from beneath an umbrella!

Then, magically, the rain stopped just as the show was ready to begin. We stood and watched, a crisp breeze blowing over us, and had a great time. The engineering of fireworks is amazing to me - how do you pack bits of powder and whatnot so that when they explode, they create a smiley face? Or a cube? It’s pretty incredible.

Monroe Street, June 2007

Finally getting around to posting this morning. As you can see, I'm moving more slowly than usual. Guess this will be the theme of the holiday - which is a good thing!

It's still freakishly cool here in New York, which is such a change from our normal July 4 weather. I'm supposed to go with a friend tonight to watch the fireworks over the East River - when we've gone in years past we've sweltered. This year promises to be much more pleasant.

Hope to get out and take some more photos, too. Don't want the well to run dry!

Chatham Square, June 2007

On Saturday as I walked through Chinatown, I stumbled onto a little rally or celebration in Chatham Square, overlooked by the somber statues of Lin Ze Xu and Confucius. There was fun Chinese pop music playing, and balloons and flags. An arch had been erected covered with Chinese writing. Of course I had no idea what any of this was about.

I lingered for a few minutes, enjoying the color and the sounds, and I took some photos which I posted to Flickr. If any of you read Chinese, fill me in, OK?

Update: I should know by now not to post a question without doing a little research first. With a few Google and Wikipedia clicks, I figured out that the middle flag is for Hong Kong, which was handed over to the Chinese exactly 10 years ago on June 30. Hence, the celebration.

Kenmare Street, June 2007

On Saturday, I went to see “Evening,” a new movie with a roster of incredible actresses including Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Natasha Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave, with the hunky Patrick Wilson thrown in for good measure. It was an ambitious movie and it was more or less effective, but I couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t as good as it should have been with that cast. I’m not sure what the weakness was.

Toni Collette is a personal favorite of mine and I make it a policy to see everything she does. As usual, she was one of the best things about this film. She’s great.

Then, on Sunday, I went to the Whitney Museum to see its exhibit “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.” I have always been infatuated with the ‘60s, which were just barely out of my reach - I lived through the latter half of the decade but I was too young to remember any of it. It’s fascinating to consider how profoundly the world changed between 1965 and 1970, in many exciting and traumatic ways.

Anyway, this was a great exhibit, with groovy psychedelic light shows, poster art, album covers, music and even tabs of LSD on display. I came home and immediately put on “The White Album” to preserve the mood!

Spring Street, June 2007

Yesterday’s entry got me thinking about the human need to classify the world around us. After all, I don’t just classify and categorize street art. I classify everything, in one form or another, as do most of us.

I think I picked this up as a kid, when I collected rocks and shells and leaves and stamps, and learned how to sort and determine which items belonged to which larger group. Was the rock igneous or sedimentary? Was the stamp from France or a French colony?

Yet classifying is fraught with problems, particularly in the natural world, where nature doesn’t always conform to our neat specifications. It’s one thing to classify a stamp, but something else to classify a snail. Particularly when it looks a lot like a neighboring snail that we determine, for some reason, to be a slightly different species.

Perhaps this is why Zen frowns on dividing things up artificially. Because the lines don’t really hold and the barriers aren’t real. Establishing barriers is the first step toward determining what we like and what we don't, and what's good and what's bad, and in extreme cases, what we allow to live and what we kill.

The snails are themselves and each other, and even more so, they are us and we are them.