Legal or Moral?

A few days ago, thanks to the hive mind of Facebook, I came across this article, about people who invested 20 to 30 years ago in lifetime, first-class passes on American Airlines that would allow them to fly with a companion anywhere in the world, anytime they wanted. And boy, did they fly. One man thought nothing of making a spur-of-the-moment jaunt from his home in Chicago to San Francisco to pick up a friend, and then traveling with her to Paris to see a museum exhibit. In July 2004 alone, he flew 18 times, "visiting Nova Scotia, New York, Miami, London, Los Angeles, Maine, Denver and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., some of them several times over." Another man flew from Chicago to London 16 times in 25 days. Their carbon footprints must be huge.

Not only that -- the passes entitled them to elite booking agents who could help them make reservations,  sometimes so many that couldn't possibly take all the flights. They had access to American's VIP lounges and other special services. They reserved companion seats just to have more elbow room. They ferried other passengers, sometimes people they'd just met. And occasionally they accepted reimbursement from those people, effectively selling the seats.

Eventually, the airline got wise to all this, investigated and revoked their passes. What will happen next is up to courts to decide.

The article got me thinking about the difference between what might be legally right versus what's morally right. I am no fan of corporations or the airlines, by any means. But as the article described the behavior of these men -- and interestingly, they are all men -- it seemed to me they were abusing the system.

They might argue that nothing in the rulebook prohibits what they were doing. I haven't read the rulebook, so I don't know. But at some point, you'd think a little switch would have gone off in their brain -- a sort of fuse -- that would have made them think, "Gee, maybe I'm stretching the limits of this program."

A side effect of our overly litigious society is that everything must be spelled out, written out, defined and verbalized. Otherwise, people feel free to take a mile when they're given (or when they purchase) an inch. I think that tendency, in turn, stems from our business-oriented culture, in which people are taught to do whatever isn't explicitly prohibited in order to make a buck.

But we can't stop relying on our own internal compasses. I don't dispute that our perceptions differ, and what one person recognizes as excessive another may not. But in extreme situations nearly everyone knows when they're doing wrong. I can't believe these guys never doubted their behavior. And if they didn't, why not?

(Photo: Evening reflections on a front stoop near Porchester Road.)

Bay Window

This is one of the best features of our flat -- the bay window in our bedroom. It looks out on at the apartment buildings of the Portobello Court housing estate across the street, and Trellick Tower in the right-hand distance. And like all our windows, it has incredibly good light and deep windowsills for storage or display.

I parked a couple of my artworks here, as well as a pottery lizard that my friend Sue bought me in Tampa almost 20 years ago (right). On the left is a bowl I made, holding beach glass from Sidi Ifni in Morocco and shells from Madagascar. And next to it is a huge fossilized scallop that I found near the beach in Venice, Fla. We bought the plant on Portobello Road -- it's a Dracaena or Dragon Tree, one of my favorite houseplants. 

The windows are double-glazed and one of them isn't sealed well, so it fogs up between the panes. But still, I love this window. Pity it isn't a more comfortable place to sit -- though I suppose we could add cushions and try to improve it. In any case, we'll get to enjoy it for a while more -- we've arranged a lease extension with the landlords to keep this flat at least through July 2013!

Bag of Bread

Dave made dinner for our next-door neighbors, Chris and Linda, on Sunday night. The meal required toast points, which meant trimming crusts and shaping bread, creating a lot of crusty leftovers.

Throwing out the trimmings seemed wasteful, and thus not an option. The Moroccans taught me that bread should be respected. No matter where you go in Morocco, you'll see chunks of yesterday's bread left on doorsteps for poor people, or -- if it's really stale -- for goats or even dogs.

So I put the bread in an electric-blue plastic bag and tucked it away, planning to take it down to the Grand Union Canal on Monday to feed the ducks.

When I got to the canal on Monday, though, I was surprised to find copious amounts of bread already floating in the water, and nary a duck nearby. It looked like someone had dumped a restaurant-sized bag of dinner rolls. Adding my modest stash seemed like overkill. So I decided to walk the towpath a bit, until I found some potentially hungry birds.

After a couple hundred yards, I came upon a pair of lazily swimming Canada geese, and I pitched them some crusts. They swam over and had a nibble. Two coots frantically paddled to the scene, sampled one or two cubes of bread, and frantically paddled away again. (Coots do everything frantically.) The geese drifted off too, seeming distinctly unappreciative of the soggy cubes that remained in the water. (Maybe they'd already visited the dinner rolls.)

A bit farther along I fed some pigeons, but feeding pigeons is risky business, because in two seconds flat a pair of birds will turn into 500 and you'll have your eyes pecked out, a la Alfred Hitchcock. So I returned home, still with about three-quarters of my blue bag of bread.

At this point, I should have just thrown it out. But even though I knew I was being ridiculous, I just couldn't do it. So yesterday I took my remaining bread to Kensington Gardens, and sprinkled it beneath some trees. Birds or squirrels -- maybe even rats -- would surely find it there.

I never imagined that pesky bread would be so hard to get rid of!

(Photos: Horse chestnut trees in Kensington Gardens, yesterday.)

Wisteria

It's wisteria season here in London. I'm enjoying walking past townhouses with huge purple vines clambering up their facades, sweetening the air.

Wisteria (paired with clematis in the photo above) seems like such an urban plant. I always see it in cities. In fact, there used to be a great wisteria vine around the corner from my apartment in New York.

I can only think of one exception, and that was a wisteria vine that grew in a cluster of melaleuca trees overhanging our church parking lot when I was a kid in Florida. One of the streets in the neighborhood where I grew up is named Wisteria, but I never saw wisteria actually growing there.

One of the bloggers I regularly read posted last week about the death of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch -- how the death of one so young serves as a reminder of our own fleeting mortality. I liked the post, derived from the Zen teachings of Dogen, even though I never liked the Beastie Boys. I'm mentioning this only incidentally, not to force a metaphor -- while the wisteria blossoms are fleeting too, at least they come back each year!

Art and Ideas

"I never will start a museum, or, apart from an odd or end, an art collection. Part of me doesn’t warm to owning precious things. I’m glad there are museums where art can be kept, dusted and safe and out of my apartment. Personally I love ideas as much as objects, not that I can separate them: I feel ideas are as sensuous as things." 

-- From a May 3 article by Holland Cotter, art critic for The New York Times, about the $120 million recently paid for an 1895 pastel version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." It's the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.

(Photo: Red curtains in Shoreditch, March 17.)

Boulevard

Prompted by my friend Sally, I went to see an amazing photography show at the Saatchi Gallery on Friday. It featured hallucinogenic landscapes, high-definition depictions of the beauty and chaos of artists' studios, abstractions that explored the line (if there is one) between photography and computer technology, and some incredible portraits. Katy Grannan's "Boulevard" project really blew me away -- a series of large, almost forensically detailed portraits of characters from the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Every wrinkle, flyaway hair and blot of smudged mascara is visible on the faces of the addicts, senior citizens, bikers, cross-dressers and others that Grannan chose as her subjects. Are they beautiful or grotesque -- or both? I took some photos of the photos, but I couldn't begin to do them justice. If you'd like to check them out, some accompany this article about her work.

After seeing the show, I walked home from the gallery through Chelsea and Kensington. I stopped at a cafe for cappuccino and an unremarkable square of raspberry lemon cake, and then took photos all the way back.

In fact, it's been a weekend of small pleasures. Yesterday Dave and I took it easy, watching "Saturday Kitchen" on BBC and then going for massages at our neighborhood spa. I still smell like minty, spicy massage oil.

In the evening we had Taco Night and watched the really terrible movie "Dune." I hadn't seen "Dune" since right after its release in the mid-'80s and I'd been wondering whether my memory of it was accurate -- could it really have been all that incomprehensible and tedious? Did the special effects really look like they were produced in someone's basement? The answer, on both counts, is yes.

(Photo: A lonely-looking potted plant behind a building that I think is part of Royal Brompton Hospital, in Chelsea.)

Household Curiosities

Our last dozen eggs came complete with a feather!

Dave bought a huge fresh horseradish root at the grocery store. After grating most of it, we planted the two knobby ends to see what would happen. Voila, we have a horseradish plant! We're curious to see what it will look like as it matures.

This tiny purple blossom appeared on our rosemary plant -- which, sadly, we had to discard because it was infected with some kind of pestilence. (See all the white fuzz on the leaves?)

My friend Pam brought us some peanut brittle from Spain when she visited a few weeks ago. It was dee-lish. The ripply reflections created by the plastic wrapper were merely a bonus.

Remember our sorry seeds-in-a-can from Amsterdam, none of which ever grew? Well, our one similarly canned bulb is now going gangbusters, as you can see. I'll post photos if and when it blooms!