Purple Nova at the French School
Purple Nova at the French School, originally uploaded by neocles.
I noticed the purple Nova while biking to work one morning. The intense color caught my eye. I took a couple shots, and I noticed right away on the camera that the color was not as bright and not as purple in the image. This was true on the computer as well, and I sort of forgot about it for a while. I didn’t think it would amount to much.
A couple weeks later, I started fooling around with the post-processing work on it, and got something I rather liked. I eventually uploaded something to flickr, and it suddenly turned out to be one of the more interesting and popular things I’d produced in awhile. (Bear in mind that I measure these metrics in small fractions of what most flickr pop stars do, so my data set is pretty limited. Nonetheless it seems meaningful to me!) I guess the moral of the story is that you can never tell what is going to resonate with people. At least I can’t.
Getting old is a bitch
They say, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” That’s not true.
Actually, life’s a bitch, then you get where you can’t see or hear very well, then you get wrinkly, then you get batty, then you can’t walk very well and have hip ad knee replacements, then you take lots of drugs every day, then you get slower and more batty, then you can only walk with a walker, then you get more batty and start wearing diapers again, then you move to a depressing place with other people in the same sorry state and slug away a couple years, then you are broke, then your kids are broke, then you fall and break your hip, then you spend two weeks in the hospital and/or nursing facility, and then you die. But right before all that starts, you go through all it with your parents.
Fortunately, there’s cocktails, and, in particular, new and wonderful bourbons with which to make them. That’s what the NYTimes says, although they didn’t mention flora.
Russian Christmas Dinner
Russian Christmas Dinner
at Chez Serafimidis
Rocky Hill, Executive Chef
Our fun, Russian-themed menu for Christmas dinner this year.
First Courses
Chicken Pate, Neo
Dolmas, Neo
Smoked Salmon, Neo and Rocky
Pickled Herring, Rocky
Black Bread, Rocky
Soup Course
Christmas Borscht, recipe ideas, 1, 2, 3, 4, Ray and Marge
Main Course
Mushroom Pie, recipe idea, Ray and Marge
Red Beans with Herb Dressing, recipe idea, Carrie
Egg Noodle and Cottage Cheese Casserole, recipe idea, Kate
Goose stuffed with Apples, recipe ideas, 1, 2, Neo
Desserts
Apple Charlotte, Rocky
Sour Cream Cake, Rocky
Flip-book Life
We recently took a trip to Seattle for our dear friend Jen Dixon’s birthday. Jen’s friends from all over the country came for this one, and so we saw a lot of people. We had a wonderful time, and it was actually rejuvenating. It just felt like we reconnected with our friends there in a much more significant way this time. I suppose that because it was a tough year marked by personal loss, and because we saw people we had not seen in years, and because we are all older, there was this pervasive sense that being with people you care for is what matters in life. It sounds corny, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
One of the really nice things we had a chance to do was take a drive up Aurora Ave to see Jen’s public art work installed on the Interurban Trail. I really loved the work. It has a playfulness and a sense of place. Yet the combination of the simple, colorful, unfolding content on a form usually reserved for the concise delivery of important information for travelers creates a semiotic mystery. “What does that sign mean? What is it telling me about what’s ahead?” I love that in a work.
Our moment, our time
Essex St. Our moment,our time, originally uploaded by january20th2009.
I am amazed. Politics has been subject matter for street art for as long as they have both been around, I am sure. But in my experience, the political message of this kind of work is almost always critical of the dominant political party, and when it comes to elected officials, nearly always scathing in its portrayals and parodies. I’ve seen plenty of this for all the presidents I have lived through going back to Nixon. Admittedly most of the criticism has been directed at Republicans. No one, however, was sneaking around putting up triumphal representations of Slick Willy or Jimmy, as far as I remember.
I just don’t remember street artists ever busting out to celebrate the election of an American president like I’m seeing happen for Obama. It is almost disorienting to see newstands and telephone poles plastered with stylized images of Barack bearing slogans of support. I think it is another indication of what an enormous cultural and political earthquake this election has turned out to be.
It’s almost as if one needs to be continually reminded of this fact because it is so hard to really grasp. And the artists are doing it. They are reminding me to be amazed.
Night Rambler 5
It showed up one day earlier this week. It sat quietly over to the side minding its own business, not making a peep. I went by once and noticed it immediately, but I, too, didn’t say anything. Life is like that a lot these days. One makes mental notes and tries to find them later amid the clutter of scraps of paper, children’s toys, empty wine bottles, and job postings.
I went by again and the tug was more insistent; the mental note came floating down from the rafters, landed in plain view. For two days I shuffled it to the top of the stack of other mental notes.
Sarah had noticed it sitting there and said something to me about it. Tuesday night it was still there when I left the house to run the errand in another note. I threw my tripod in the car on my way to get milk.
On the way back home, i went by again. This time I stopped. I didn’t care that it was night. The moon was almost full. The golden convertible gleamed in the cocktail glow of moonlight and sodium vapor.
It was accidental at the time, brought about by the time constraints of modern suburban living. But these two great tastes taste great together: suburban neighborhood car photography, and night photography.
a poem for our times
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
Tiny Point in Last Night’s Presidential Debate
OK. This thing is probably done, but I am still curious about something. During the debate last night, McCain was discussing the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, if I heard him correctly, he said, “We forced the Soviets out of Aghanistan by supporting the freedom fighters, but then we left and the Taliban came in…” Please correct me if I am misremembering, but are they not one in the same? Was it not in fact the Taliban that we supported as freedom fighters when we wanted the USSR out of there.
It seems to me this is either a huge blunder or a huge mistruth for a potential president to make, particularly the one who claims to have superior foreign policy experience. If our government cannot remember it’s own policies and strategies, and the very history and origins of the situation we are now facing with the so-called “war on terror”, then how can we possibly find a solution?
Small Town Centennial
When we first moved to Albany, I thought of it as a decent, reasonably safe place in the east bay that’s close enough to SF, which is, of course, the center of the universe. There is plenty of stuff within walking distance, including Solano Ave shopping and dining. Berkeley culture is just a few blocks away. And I could garden to my heart’s content.
But after being here for a couple years, it came to seem a little too sleepy, a little too cool and foggy for kick-ass tomatoes (and other fruits), a bit too far away for genuinely impromptu trips into the City, and at the back end of the some of the worst traffic in the Bay Area. Not only that, but most of the shops and restaurants seemed a far cry from the hip joints found in neighborhoods like Rockridge, Elmwood, and even 4th St, much less places in the City. It seemed like a sort of overpriced suburb.
Maybe it just takes time, maybe it takes having a kid, or maybe it just takes a change of perspective, but I think I have come to see that the most valuable quality of this place is the sense of community, and in fact, the actual community. It sounds kinda hokey, but going to community events and seeing so many friendly faces really gives one a sense of place and stability. There is always something going on, like July 4th pancake breakfasts at the Veterans Memorial Building, parades of soccer kids and high school bands, Santa Claus visiting on a fire engine, a month of music in the park, and on and on. The latest event to bring everyone together was a dinner to celebrate Albany’s centennial. The entire town was invited to come down to Solano Ave for dinner, music and dancing in the street. It was an absolute blast. And there are not too many places around here where you can put a couple thousand people together in the street with loud music and alcohol and have it all come off without trouble.
Before it starts to sound too much like a Norman Rockwell cover, consider that many of the everyday folks who live here are recent transplants from the SF or other nearby cities looking for a safe place to raise their kids. The place is chock full of interesting people. So it turns out the likelihood of meeting a parent who is either a punk musician, artist, surgeon, web programmer, scientist, landscape architect, or [fill in the blank] ready to pound a few beers and dance in the street is really very high. A conversation ranges from avant garde music to research on climate change, to bluegrass, to growing apricots, and of course to progressive politics. So, I am loving my community. I am sorry I doubted you.
Season of Obsession
Well, I keep saying that I am going to write more. I keep saying that I am going to simply repost content from other blogs just to stay in the habit of updating the blog. I have failed. But now I have a really good excuse. I have become totally obsessive about the election.
It has been a roller coast, and i can’t stand not knowing when the next precipitous dip or steep climb is going to come. So, I have been checking with some number of polling site constantly throughout the day to see the updates as they happen. It is like watching water heat to a boil, but I cannot help myself.
One would hope that I’d be super-well informed by now, but alas, no. I don’t have time to read the fine print! I just need the quick fix of scanning the top-line numbers. That’s all i have time for at work, when in fact, I have a huge pile of work to do. 20 seconds is all the time i can spend on any given visit.
I’d love to repost some other people’s content here, but wordpress does not seem to like the code form pollster.com. Dropping a link is hardly satisfactory. And this is the second time in the last couple weeks that i could not embed content here. AAARRGG!