I'm A Farmer!

How about this? Our very own balcony-grown tomatoes! We actually picked five of them yesterday, all tiny little cherry tomatoes. We ate three of them immediately, and they're everything you could want in a tomato -- sweet and pungent, like a bite of sunshine. We have three varieties -- the ones above are called "tigrella," striped red and orange. I really DO feel like Oliver Wendell Douglas.

The plants themselves still look pathetic. The lower leaves are very yellow. I'm hoping the rest of the tomatoes make it to harvest -- at least enough so we can give some to our neighbors Chris and Linda, who gave us the plants. Next year I'll know not to plant them so close together.

Our friend Adam, from New Jersey, is staying with us now. Fortunately Adam has been to London several times so he doesn't need to do the tourist circuit. We're just spending time together in a more leisurely way. Yesterday Dave took him up to the school where he teaches, and afterward we went to lunch at Masala Zone. (The sign above the restrooms there reads "Toilet Zone," which my juvenile mind finds very funny.) Then we went to a cafe on Old Compton Street, the traditionally gay neighborhood of Soho, where we had a great time people-watching -- guys with fluorescent hair or inches-high platform shoes, leggy female models transfixed by their cell phones.

We were going to walk back through Hyde Park, but of course it started spitting rain, so we saved our park outing for today.

Oh, and I picked up some paperwork related to my new part-time job as substitute teacher coordinator for the school where Dave teaches. I'll be the person on call to line up a substitute when someone's out sick or in training or on a school trip. I looked over all the documents last night, and began having some serious anxiety -- what if I can't find someone? How will I juggle all the requests? (It seems like there are at least ten teachers out every day, sometimes many more than that.) Yeesh. Job stress. I'd forgotten what that's like.

Calle de Elvira, Granada, 1994

A couple more scanned photos, this time from Spain, where I traveled in March 1994. The photo above is one of my earliest attempts at candid street photography. I was sitting with a friend at a cafe in Granada when I spotted these old men, survivors of Franco and maybe even the Spanish Civil War, doing what I imagine they did every day -- gathering on a favorite bench. I wanted to take their photo, but I didn't want to be obvious. So I pretended to point the camera at my friend -- that's his shoulder, lower right. The old guy on the left doesn't look fooled.

I wonder if any of them are alive now.

And here's an early attempt at storefront photography. This building on Calle de Elvira faced the same public square, Plaza Nueva, where I shot the old men. Why I couldn't line up the photo to shoot the building straight on, and not crop the sign on the left -- well, I'm not sure.

After scanning this photo, I got on Google Streetview to see what Cafe Ricardo looks like these days. It didn't take me long to find it, even though I had only the vaguest idea where it was and couldn't remember the name of the square. Sadly, it seems to have deteriorated in the ensuing years, much like Spain's economy:

Wonder why they took down their neon and that great old Burdon's Dry Gin sign? That made the place.

Panorama Nightclub, Portland, OR

This will seem completely out of the blue -- but yes, that's me, posing with Ethel Merman.

Where and when was this photo taken? Well, funny you should ask. It was taken in 1996, in downtown Portland, Oregon, in front of the now-defunct Panorama nightclub.

Just in case the huge figure of Ethel didn't give it away, the Panorama was a gay club. I was visiting Portland in the summer of '96 and was walking downtown with a friend when we happened to stumble onto it. We couldn't resist posing for a photo -- we thought that huge Ethel was just so terrific.

Was it part of the Panorama's permanent sign, or just a temporary addition? I haven't the slightest idea. My cousin, who lived in Oregon in the 1990s, said she doesn't remember it, for what that's worth.

A few weeks ago, I got to thinking about the Panorama. I'd often wondered whether Ethel still presided over her street corner. After doing some Internet research I learned that not only did the Panorama close, but Ethel is gone. This is the same corner today on Google StreetView:

I Googled and Googled, but I could not find another image of the Panorama and Ethel anywhere on the Internet. So I scanned my photo and uploaded it to Flickr, and I am now happy to report that Googling "Panorama Portland Ethel Merman" promptly produces my photo. I'm happy to have added that wonderful sign to our planetary photo archives. It would be such a shame if Ethel were lost to posterity.

Culture and the Chatterbox

Dave and I found ourselves with a few spare days this week and seized the opportunity to indulge in some culture.

On Tuesday we went with Sally and Liz to Sadler's Wells, a dance performance space in Islington, to see a production of Matthew Bourne's "Play Without Words." We loved it! I'd seen Bourne's "Swan Lake" years ago in New York, but this was the first time I'd seen anything else by him. Brilliant dancing, with multiple dancers identically dressed and simultaneously acting out different iterations of the same scenes.

On the way to dinner near Sadler's Wells, Dave and I passed the bar in these photos. What exactly is a "Hostess Bar"? Hmmm...

I went back a couple of times to shoot it during the day and at night. I love the wonderful, tawdry colored light in those windows.

Anyway, on Thursday I went to see "The Red Desert," a Michelangelo Antonioni film from 1964 and his last in Italy before he moved to London to make "Blow Up." I love "Blow Up," but although I found "The Red Desert" visually interesting, the plot was difficult to follow. Basically, it's about a woman struggling with depression in a diseased industrial environment. Apparently it was Antonioni's first color film, and color figures prominently in the cinematography and the storytelling. Dave, who didn't particularly care for "Blow Up," sat this one out.

Yesterday we went to see "The Dark Knight Rises," the latest batman flick. It was pretty good, but it didn't knock my socks off. It began with references to the last movie, and I couldn't remember anything about that one, even though I saw it. So I didn't get off on a good foot, and I was confused for the first hour or so. It more or less came together, in wildly implausible fashion, in the end.

Three Mediocre College Poems

With a title like that, how can you not want to read this entry?! Reverse psychology, I tell you.

Yes, here are three of my aforementioned college poems -- these admittedly not Wakoskian, because they're so short, and offered here because of that brevity. I was 19 or 20 when they were written.

------

After a Rain

i went out into the wet yard
and it was gray and green --
my feet hissed through the grass
                                                 water cold
and leaves clung to my damp shoes,
staying there
even when i went inside
a few minutes later.

(1986)

---------------

Soup Bowls

Smooth and deep

Around

Flowing and silent steam
Over knurled rim

Pipe
Pour
Stir

Until running low
Cold

And stroked with soap,
Clean again and
Upon one another.

(June 1987)

---------------

Haiku: Night

I often hear my
Breathing at night, and wonder
If it's really me.

(Feb. 1987)


(Photo: The carousel at South Bank, on July 9.)

My Secret Desire To Be Diane Wakoski

When I was in college, I wrote a lot of poems. I suppose most people with the writing instinct go through a poetry period. In some people it takes hold and sticks. Others write poetry fervently, even obsessively, for a few years and then find themselves moving on to other things -- like journalism, in my case.

Looking through my college poems recently made me think about my poetry phase. I won a writing award as a senior in high school, with an entry that included two poems -- one about a dandelion seed and one called "Inca," about the transience of civilizations. They're both really bad, of course, but I still have them.

My high school girlfriend wrote poetry; I took some cues from her. And in college, I began reading Diane Wakoski, whose book "Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands" I found in the downtown Tampa public library. I liked Wakoski's long, fragmented, loosely structured poems, which seemed more accessible than the impenetrable lines of, say, Wallace Stevens. I began emulating her style.

Unfortunately, loose structure does not befit a young wanna-be poet. Wakoski is brilliant with imagery and language, but I just rambled. (As the Poetry Foundation notes, "While the structure of Wakoski's poems appears to be informal and casually built, her artistic control is tight.")

One semester, much to the chagrin of my parents, I essentially took a break from school and enrolled in only one course -- Poetry 101, or whatever it was called. I quickly grew to dislike the teacher, probably because he didn't immediately fall prostrate at the feet of my staggering brilliance. He also wore a lot of turquoise jewelry, which made me consider him a poseur. (Was I any more authentic in my battered Jesus sandals and Goodwill castoffs?)

During this period, I wrote most of the schlock that I uncovered a few weeks ago in our file box. I not only wrote page after page of pseudo-Wakoski, but I sent it to magazines! I bought a "Poet's Market" and mailed out batches of hopeful submissions. I knew not to aim for The New Yorker; instead I went for small literary journals. A few of my poems actually got published, proving that persistence sometimes trumps talent, or lack thereof -- but of course most were rejected outright.

(Even publication turned out to be both blessing and curse. One poem was accepted by an Ohio literary magazine and typeset incorrectly, adding an extra word. Which ruined it, as far as I was concerned.)

The next semester I got back on track, and poetry took a back seat to the school newspaper. I still wrote poems occasionally, but they were less like dishwater-weak emulations of Wakoski. Only after I went into the Peace Corps in 1992 did I really work on poems again, and I was happier with the results. Some were published in the Peace Corps Morocco newsletter -- where they drew virtually no attention. Since leaving Morocco I've written only a handful.

Someone once said of poetry that perhaps nothing else is written by so many people and read by so few. (Blogs might rank right up there, though.)

Aside from my few publishing credits in the mid- and late-1980s, and my Peace Corps newsletter publications, I haven't shared my poems with anyone -- at least, not until I began blogging. Therein lies the beauty and the curse of the Internet. The beauty: I can publish what I think is up to snuff, without the hassle of submissions and editors. The curse: It may not be up to snuff! Sorry about that!

(Photo: My treasured Jesus sandals, in February 1987. They originally belonged to my high school girlfriend's father in the '70s. He gave them to me a decade later, and I wore them until they fell apart. Scanned from film.)

New Trellick Graffiti

I went back to Trellick Tower on Friday to shoot some graffiti. I hadn't been in several weeks, what with all our recent visitors, and of course the whole scene had changed. Among the amazing new pieces was this exploding owl by Nychos.

I also liked this nearby piece by Vans, depicting various London landmarks. You can see the O2 Arena, the Gherkin, the Eye, Tower Bridge and what looks like One Canada Square at Canary Wharf.

Wisher, meanwhile, took the cheesecake approach -- and he wasn't the only one! There were lots of other great pieces too. I can't post them all here but they're on Flickr.

I originally went hoping I'd find some Olympics-themed graffiti. The closest I came was this:

Not exactly what I had in mind, but a valid point of view nonetheless!