Really tired post

We drive and drive. Orange County suburbs yes ma'am. I sing vaguely along with this CD my sisters don't like. In the air between me and the windshield I am plotting the relationship of tiredness versus hours of sleep and my mom thinks my hands which are indicating the axes are like drunk hands that can't find their nose.

There are these trees on the median, big tall trees with pale pale smooth bark. I think, bone-pale branches into the sky. Which I think is maybe a creepy image? But these trees are actually lovely, whereas the truly creepy things about So Cal suburbs are the things that are supposed to give off vibes of Friendly and Happy and Successful. And I repeat, Please God do not let me end up in suburbs like these I will stick my head in the oven or run away.

Lois Greenfield on creativity

credit: Lois Greenfield

I have a book of Lois Greenfield's dance photography out from the library at present. The photos are pretty darn cool, though I don't deeply love them. What I found fascinating was the included interview, especially her discussion of the distinction between depicting and creating:

"I realized that although people are used to seeing carefully crafted images which glorify the dance, these pictures don't tell you anything more; they don't develop, extend, explore. People would look at one of my pictures of Baryshnikov in a spectacular leap ten feet off the ground and say, 'What a great photograph!', but I knew it wasn't; it was merely a great dance moment competently captured...

I later wrote on Duane Michals — whose outlook has had a profound effect on me--on Man Ray and on Lucas Samaras, all photographers who invent, rather than depict....

When I was in college I went to hear him [Michals] speak at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this iconoclastic lecture he said to a crowd of Minor White/zone system enthusaists, 'If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.'"

- Lois Greenfield
in interview with William A. Ewing

This idea that creativity means changing something through your experience of it-- making something new, rather than just capturing something that already existed--really engages me.

Greenfield has an online portfolio of her photography here, for the interested.

"Its density and drowned events..."

Today there is wind from across the ocean that seems to blow parts of me away with it.

I am thinking of one of those moments from childhood that you aren't sure whether you imagined or not — a rainy day, I am small and carrying an umbrella, and a strong wind lifts me onto the tips of my toes and — for an instant, off my toes?

I am thinking of pointe class at night, after a long technique class. While the other half of the class danced their exercises in the center, I pushed the window high and ducked my head and shoulders out of the noise of piano and corrections, into the night. I thought that the wind was very exalting, that cold wind through my sweaty fingers as I looked out along Market Street, the city glittering all around.

What are you thinking about the wind?

Tuesday joy

This is when I am happy: when what I do conveys who I am, epitomizes me even; when I am doing the sort of thing I do when I am brave and joyous and certain; when I am exactly who I want to be and living just the way that I am meant, essence-outward, to live.

Her? Yes, that one — the girl walking the line of roofs with a dead flower in her hair, fedora between her teeth as she climbs a fence, candy bracelet and cut-up fingers, eating a cupcake perched outside the library like the stone lion that never came, knees pulled up on the subway, scribbling away as worlds whirl by.

I pass my barefoot verdict on life:
whelming, with not an over or under in sight.

In which A. is profoundly moved by a waterfall, and I put some rocks in my pockets

[Returning to the long-neglected November-December Iceland narrative]

We drive to the third stop on the Golden Circle, a double waterfall called Gullfoss, or Golden Falls.

It is kind of hard, angle-wise, to get a good shot of both parts of the falls. These photos give a better idea of how it looks.


Looking downriver.

A. heads down the rest of the trail and has some sort of religious experience with the falls while E. and I wait in the visitor's center. I took the above picture from the threshold. That's how a lot of the interior of southwest Iceland looks.

This being nearly Christmas season, tons of houses have these wreaths of Christmas lights in their windows.

Wait for A. some more, take some more pictures.

E. and A. heading back to The Jazz (our rental Honda) in the icy icy parking lot. Sunset? Well, it is nearly four pm!

Driving back to the coast.

The spots in the above picture are Icelandic horses, which are all over the place.

E. dozing. You can see him a little bit in the side mirror.

More driving. I watch the landscape and nag A. and E. to put on more heat in the car. We stop to get pizza for dinner, as well as some provisions from a grocery store.

NEXT: Tales of a freaky hostel.