Weeknotes: January 27–31, 2025
Monday January 27
Over the weekend I shot over 100 photos in multiple locations with the borrowed Canon, but forgot to change the settings to RAW. None will be usable for our first class project. My first lesson learned. This evening the light is similar and I head out at the same hour to try and recreate some of my favorite shots, knowing it's a fool's errand. Of course, yesterday's magic is nowhere to be found, but today's magic gathers around me the longer I look.
Weeknotes: January 20–24, 2025
Monday January 20
When he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said this:
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
Weeknotes: January 13–17, 2025
Monday January 13
My limbs trundle reluctantly up the hill past the south edge of campus, the wind biting my bare face. The first half mile is accomplished by will alone, but it gets better. I gauge my footfalls gingerly over the ice patches and head down the ginnel that connects College Place with Pearl. By the time I cross onto Spring Street, my body feels relaxed and lithe. At Waterworks Park a woman stands over the hood of her blue minivan arranging loaves of supermarket bread to feed to the assemblage of ducks and geese closing in around her.
I think of my mom, a lifetime nurturer of urban waterfowl populations. I picture her tiny figure holding up a bag of hamburger buns to feed the squawking gulls. For a brief time she and I kept up a Christmas Eve tradition of emptying a large bag of cracked corn on the grass by the Brighton Mill Pond, a gift to the cold feathered peasantry. Even now when I go to visit my parents, she is constantly managing a half dozen feeding stations. Just yesterday I caught her scattering seed on the front porch for her favorite possum and then on a metal table out behind the kitchen for her resident doves. She loves her doves. My parents have always had big hearts for wild things.
Weeknotes: January 6–10, 2025
Monday January 6
Outside the giant home decor superstore shreds of yellow caution tape flap like pennants, suggesting unknown drama. Scant cars punctuate the desolate parking lot. Grim is the word that comes to mind. In Chris Frantz's Talking Heads memoir (which I've stuck with, and am now enjoying) he recalls how Johnny Ramone used that word over and over to describe their shared 1977 tour of Europe ("Oh shit, man, this is gonna be grim").
I don't go to this store very often. It's one of those wastelands of excess that makes me feel edgy and cynical. It's like a blander Pier 1 without any curation, a shelter for the world’s decorative vases and wicker plant stands to live out their days in a heady fug of candle store aroma. I'm in the market for new bathroom rugs that will pair well with the tricky seafoam walls and faux driftwood floor covering I inherited when I rented the house. Last winter I spontaneously bought a complete set of grass green rugs and matching towels which I pretended to like for a couple days before recognizing I'd turned my bathroom into a 1980s Holiday Inn. January is when I'm most inclined to tackle these problems. Aren't we all working on our interiors this time of year?
Weeknotes: December 30, 2024 – January 3, 2025
Monday December 30
The sun returns after several days of drear and what a difference it makes. I visit my parents and eat chili seasoned with brown sugar. My mom puts brown sugar in everything, a secret ingredient of her long happy life. My dad and I work down in the woodshop cutting and sanding some lumber for a couple home improvement projects I hope to complete before my vacation ends. Last night I saw the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, and was unexpectedly moved by it. It made me think of my parents and I urge them to go see it while it's in theaters.
I've had a lifelong respect for Dylan, but he's never really been my guy. I’ve owned various records, sung his songs, watched documentaries, and even read his memoir. I've flirted with "going through a Dylan phase" many times in my life, but it just never quite clicks. I didn't really have any expectations for Timothée Chalamet; my only reference was the recent Dune movies, but I've seen David Lynch's version so many times, it's hard for me to accept anyone but Kyle MacLachlan as my Paul Atreides.
Anyway, I loved the movie and was won over by Chalamet. I think biopics are always more successful when they set limitations and examine a specific era of a subject's life. The Greenwich Village folk scene of the early-'60s has always held an allure for me. Although they grew up in Chicago, my parents were the perfect age for that time. Together since they were 16, they graduated high school in 1963 and loved music more than anything. They were bopping around the clubs and coffeehouses of Chicago, steeping in the cultural abundance of that era during their late-teens. How lucky for them. I loved my teendom in the mid-'90s, but if there were another era I could be young in, I bet I would have thrived in that one. I'll just have to try and thrive in the present, a worthy goal for 2025.