I began this series because I was having trouble beginning. (If that ain’t the sound of one hand clapping, I don’t know what is.) I thought that if I kept things small, I could keep things going—I could keep beginning, every day. And damned if it didn’t work, until about two-thirds of the way through, [...]
21 day salutes
While I’ve been away from it quite a bit this past year, Los Angeles averages 186 days of sunshine per year. On the other hand, my second-favorite city, “the People’s Republic of Portland”, gets a measly 68 days of sunshine per year. This is as much of a reason to visit as any: never, ever do [...]
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Embracing the tiny, Day 19: Full of care
It doesn’t take all that long to tie up a packet of teas with a nice piece of string. But doing it 640 times takes a long, long time. Yet that is what the fine organizers of the conference I’m attending did. Along with a number of other small things I can’t disclose, lest I [...]
Do you remember what the world looked like when you were four years old? How tall everything was, and how mysterious? How grownups navigated these mysterious things with astonishing agility—driving cars, getting on and off buses at the right stops, counting change, ordering food. And how they seemed to just know, without anyone having to [...]
It is not, as it turns out, that hard to take a half-decent picture. What’s hard is taking 4,000 horrible pictures first. What’s hard is standing in the middle of the street like a stupid tourist hick taking two, three, seventeen horrible pictures while people stare at you with your doofus camera and your zero [...]
To earn its keep on my cooktop, a tea kettle must do three things: Be as easy to de-scale as it is to fill. This rules out those ridiculous kettles with only a spout. Be easy to pour. All of those “helpful” kettles whose handles wobble? OUT. Double-ditto for those ones that leverage gravity so [...]
On a rare Saturday off from my big, fat advertising job, I took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to meet my friend Claudia for a movie. The weather that was gorgeous and sunny and at least warm-ish when I got on at Park Slope was New-York-awful by the time I emerged from my stop [...]
The building I’ve lived in for the past 13 years—a double-eternity-plus-one in itinerant Los Angeles—was built in the late 1950s. Undoubtedly, something grand was razed to make this possible. Equally likely, the neighbors on the block, most of whom lived in substantial structures dating back to the 1920s, found it an abomination. The exterior is [...]
Early last year, I started touring my little how-to-market-yourself-without-being-a-tool talk at a series of conferences hosted by the American Society for Media Photographers (ASMP). I like to keep things lively, so I tend to use a lot of photos, much as I do here on the bloggity-blog. And, because I’ve never been especially good—okay, because [...]
I took a silkscreening class in college with an instructor who regularly railed against various indignities: the complacency of his lazy, American students (he was a Polish émigré); the Communists (ditto); the weather (Ithaca being quite possibly the only place worse than Poland as far as this went). He had particular disdain for what he considered the [...]
