Zen
This image was taken during a maternity shoot with a lovely young woman who is due to give birth at the end of the month, it is my favorite shot of the whole shoot.
Beautiful Niece
My sister Joanna and I are in the process of starting a home based portrait photography business. We’re starting small and taking it step by step, but the last week or so has been a whirlwind of getting things to the point that we can start taking some shots to build a portfolio. We’ve built a website: www.visualpoetryphotos.com, almost all of our equipment (starting with the bare basics that we need) is in, and it is exciting to be making these steps together. My sister Emily does makeup and will be doing some makeup for clients who want their makeup done so we got our niece Becca to come over to let us take a “my normal makeup” picture and a “look how gorgeous I am with my makeup done” picture. The only problem is, she is too beautiful to show much difference between the two!
As I cycled through the pictures trying to find the best “before and after” shots (we had a great light come in, however, we forgot to order a light bulb to go with said light and had to make due with not so great light–it was an interesting learning experience though!)…anyway, while cycling through all the pictures I found that out of 67 usable photos there were about 67 different faces–some subtle, but most distinct. Many of the pictures were unguarded as we were just snapping away twiddling with the lights or camera settings getting our bearing with the new setup and new cameras. When the house emptied out and I started going through them in the quiet, I found the experience of seeing so many faces of this beautiful young woman uplifting. There is something amazing about the human face and all the subtle and not so subtle shifts and turns that move a full laugh into a serious contemplation into a clowning around face into a beautiful smile. There is something even more amazing about the human spirit that cannot be contained in a single expression but bursts out in so many ways. I think one could look at facial expressions for a lifetime and always be amazed.
Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway–random bits
I didn’t know they were coming out with a DVD of the Broadway performance of Rent after the production closed after running for 12 years! It showed up on iTunes movies and I’m downloading and watching it at the same time. I love the movie cast, which has a lot of the original cast, but I just had to see how they do it on stage as I know that as much as I LOVE the movie, and I do love the movie, that it was meant to be seen on stage.
[The rest was random scraps written while watching it.]
Opening sequences are fabulous, I really like Mark a lot and think he is doing a great job (actually, Adam Kantor really is about perfect as Mark.), Roger is good, shows a little more of the grit that Roger’s character probably has that doesn’t show as much in the movie. I think in the movie I see more of a defeated Roger (which works) but this Roger seems more conflicted and warring internally with himself. One of my favorite songs is “Another Day” and I think the movie version is sung better than this stage version, but the stage version does a better job showing the way the two charcters really bounce off each other and how Mimi both attracts and repels Roger. When “Life Support” comes back after that scene, it is very powerful (as was the movie) but in a different, more real, on the street, painfulness of wanting so badly to hold onto dignity when everything is getting stripped away.
Collins is equally lovable, his character is just wonderful, like a big teddy bear (still, love love Jesse Martin). I missed Wilson Heredia’s Angel (movie)–he plays Angel perfectly, in my opinion. Traci Thomas does a great job as Joann again, I think she was able to do even more with the character on the stage version, it was fun to see a bit more of her dual life and her trying to juggle it all.
I LOVED the “carolers,” and the whole “it’s beginning to snow” sequence, that wasn’t in the movie version.
I have to say that I don’t think anyone can replace Idina Menzel as Maureen–Eden Espinosa sings great, but the whole time I kept thinking she just wasn’t Idina. But then the “Here Goes” scene comes with Roger and Mimi and the emotions are much more intense and you see Roger struggling to let himself go and find love–very beautiful.
I don’t know how anyone can watch the whole funeral scene without crying (in either version)–so sad. The fight scene between Mark & Roger and goodbye with Mimi was really touching–heartbreaking really. That is the power of this whole musical, there is so much joy for life, so much fear of death, so much conflicting emotions and real humans living out real life. It is beautiful and dirty and gritty and heartfelt–”connection in an isolating age.”
Cried through the whole end and loved having past & present actors come on the stage at the end to sing the reprise. Whew, what a rambling bit of nothing post, but I’m glad I watched it!
Reading on the Horizon
Between the crazy last few months full of doctor’s appointments and testing and life being turned upside down along with the normal chaos of life and topped with trying to keep up with graduate school last semester, writing has gone on the back burner. Still, it is a new year, a full month with no trip to Cincinnati, a working plan to stay on top of reading for school, life is full of potential. One thing I know for certain is that my reading for this semester is quite intriguing and I look forward to each book (other than possibly being a bit leery of Middlemarch) even though I’ve read many of them. I have a blog set up for my Independent Study class called A World Without Amputations (taken from a quote by Marge Piercy: All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations).
19th Century Literature:
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- East Lynne by Ellen Wood
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Speculative Fiction independent study class:
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- The Female Man by Joanna Russ
- Kindred by Octavia Butler
- Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
- He, She, or It by Marge Piercy (one of my favorite books)
- Deerskin by Robin McKinley
So far I’ve finished Orlando and Frankenstein and am in the middle of reading Jane Eyre and The Female Man (VERY different style and an odd juxtaposition of two different styles and different times dealing with some similar issues).
Why Literature?
In my Critical Practices class for graduate school in Literature, we discussed the development of English and Literature as an academic subject and the difficulties that the humanities are having present day in universities where people prefer to have a degree that has a job title attached to it and question the relevence of literature. Near the end of the class, my professor asked us to think of her as an administrator faced with making cuts to departments and to convince her as to why we should even keep a literature department functioning. It was interesting and funny to see all our reactions, which tended to incredulation, irritation, laughter, and even anger. Of course, we are all graduate literature students, some of us, like myself, even did their undergraduate in literature, so there was a bit of a bias. Still, we collectively struggled to voice why literature was so important at first. All I could think of was two things, the book 1984, while not about the death of literature, I kept thinking about what kind of world it would be if creative thinking were abandoned and only the logical and “useful” and preciseness was left. The other was what Martin Luther King Jr’s “I had a dream” would have been if it was written by a technical writer! I thought, while driving home, that for me, the true importance in literature lies in its record of history. While history is a litany of dates and facts–literature is a history of humanity. We can know historically that there was place called Auschwitz in a country called Germany being run from this date to this date and that untold numbers of people died. But it is in books, like Shindler’s List and Ellie Wiesel’s Night and Anne Frank’s Diary that we can begin to imagine what it felt like and smelt like and tasted like in a way that facts never can engender. Without imagination, we will forget and there is nothing more dangerous than forgetting the inherent truth in the lives of the people and the society that facts and dates can never encapsulate.
Then while working on a final exam in my Romantic Literature class, I remembered a passage from Shelley’s Defense of Poetry:
But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
It exceeds all imagination.
To The Lighthouse
I just finished reading To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf last night for school and it is the first book that has really peaked my interest this fall–although, truth be told, I haven’t been able to do much reading outside of school. Luckily I have enjoyed my reading for school–well, again, to be truthful, I really did not enjoy reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I had to drag my way through it. While I love Whitman’s Song of Myself, somehow I could not get into Wordsworth’s ponderous epic on himself and his memories.
The Lighthouse, however, was so beautifully done that it felt like a hauntingly sad ghost story. I felt so strongly for the too beautiful, imperfect, trapped Mrs. Ramsey who struggled to accept the role she felt she had chosen (an atypical Victorian marriage) and yet still maintain an identity. There is a poignant scene where she finally gets to sit down in the evening by herself (always so conscious of staying busy and doing her duty that she used knitting as a way to appear productive but give her a space to think and be):
…it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, of being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. (62)
I felt like a lot of the scholarship missed the inherent sadness in Mrs. Ramsey’s character and viewed her as just the Victorian “past” counterpoint to Lily or Cam’s moving into the modern idea of being a woman. She seemed to be relegated to being a dusty relic of a time when women were bound by the gender issues of the time–and she was, but they seem to neglect the understanding that she was still a human being and did not go gently into that dark night–but struggled with those issues.
Anyway, as I said, the book was beautifully done and really gives a glimpse into how memories change and shift for each person, about the inevitability of time and how people reconcile the past and present and give themselves space to move forward.
Belated Happy Halloween!
Note: Please ignore my husband’s sign! LOL! I told him the other side had to say “Buddhist Hippie who will NOT be voting for McCain or the good looking chick”! We are most definitely a blended family of peace loving wannabe hippies!
Face of Reality
I think Sumedh Prasad at Dripping Vanilla is simply brilliant in his poetry. I have mentioned his piece that has become one of mine and my daughter’s favorite poem, Found in a grain of Sand. This weekend he posted another piece that ties in so much with what I have been thinking about in terms of masks and identity and… well, see for yourself, it is called Face of Reality and his works are well worth the time to look (as is his photography) at.
Edited to fix gender assumption! Sumedh is a he, not a she, and either way, brilliant in his poetry and well worth sitting down with a cup of tea and passing a morning reading his works!
Where is my cape?
I used to have the whole fabulously integrated uniform of a super hero. I had the armor plated jumpsuit, the all important mask settled carefully into place so as not to reveal my true identity, and a cape that fluttered behind me in the wind. I knew just what to say, just how to act, I was the mom that doctors thought was a nurse because I had it all together, I was the mom that sat in on procedures because I would not fall apart, and I very rarely cried in front of anyone. I’ve cried in front of three friends in the last week and I want to know–who took my cape?
Of course, I was also the one with the terrible “irritable bowel syndrome” thats true medical description was “woman who won’t cry or talk about her emotions or fears and so her body is forced to release all the pent up emotions SOME way so please pass her the Immodium and make sure it is the Advanced formula.”
I know that the way I handled the stress of Michael’s illnesses the first few years of his life was not healthy, I am so much older, and so much wiser, and I have learned so much–so why do I find myself digging through the back of my closet for my mask? I’ll do without the jumpsuit, and really, you can keep the cape, but I need the mask! I find myself annoyed with the world, irritated at the grown women at the mall stealing $6 earrings–really? you really MUST have those earrings even though don’t you realize there are children in the world with serious medical issues and PLEASE just let me buy you those earrings if they are so vital. I am irritated that our whole world has stopped and we are holding our breath yet again and waiting for it to, please, start turning–and the rest of the world keeps moving.
Still. I catch myself breathing little worthless staccato breaths and I stop and take a breath. I am kinder to myself this time around, I look in the mirror at tired, puffy eyes and tell myself it is okay, it is okay to be sad and afraid and it is okay to not be “just fine, I’m just fine, it’s all okay” to myself or to the world in general. It’s also okay to laugh, to stay up too late and watch TV with my kids, to dance around the house singing “I’m a Survivor” with Destiny’s Child while a ridiculous lump builds up in my throat and my daughter laughs and my son groans at what he deems to be the most irritating song ever–it’s okay.
I found a picture the other day when I got the sudden and uncontrollable urge to clean up a little shelf under my records that is full of a mess of everything I didn’t bother to find a place for–even though no one can see it and it isn’t bothering anything but who needs to work on that paper when I need to clean this space out NOW…now would be the time for that breath.
It’s a picture of my grandfather holding me when I was a baby and even though he died when I was eight and he never knew my children I know that he would have loved them so much, and I miss him painfully and inexplicably.
I’ve been thinking a lot about coping the last few weeks, and this is what it looks like. It looks like a woman who is going on too little sleep, cries more than usual, but also laughs and dances, who forgets to breathe but then remembers, who snaps too quickly at her husband but loves him and is glad he is here. Coping looks like me with no armor plated jumpsuit, no cape fluttering in the wind, and no mask. Just me.
