Post your secrets

The New York Times recently had an article on this site called PostSecret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) that I found interesting. People create these text/image postcards (4" x 6") with some dark secret written on them (only one secret per card, please, they say) and then they mail them in anonymously. The best ones are scanned and posted on their site. Some of them are high art, others are just kind of shocking or fun. One of my favorites is: "I got a parking citation and so did the car next to me. I replaced the ticket on the car next to me with mine. My ticket got paid. And the one I took? I mailed it to PostSecret." I mailed in my own "postsecret" card this morning. I'll let you know if it gets posted, but I'll never admit which one is mine (otherwise it wouldn't be a secret)!

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Ice Cream on Moorea

Ice Cream in Moorea
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

I was in French Polynesia a year ago on a belated honeymoon, cruising around the island of Moorea on a scooter with my wife on the back yelling for me to slow down. We stopped to get ice cream at this roadside stand and ran into these two local boys. They seemed to find me amusing and were more than happy to have me take their photo. Anyway, with the weather finally turning summer-like lately, this felt like an appropriate image.

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Naked Yoga

Well, I don't know if I'll be joining any time soon, but you can now do nude yoga classes in San Francisco. Click on the title of this blog for an article in the SF Chronicle (with discreet photos). I've done Bikram yoga where the temperature is over 100 degrees, and it has always seemed just one step away from nude yoga because your sweat-drenched clothes stick to you like a second skin. I don't want to make fun of this naked yoga class though. I just love some of the quotes in the article, especially this keen observation from the reporter:

"Despite the variety in figures, some thin, some heavy, some taut, some sagging, there were no furtive glances at one another's bodies, no signs of arousal, just deep concentration on the tasks at hand: proper alignment, stretching and breathing."

I'm glad their were no "signs" of arousal--that could have been awkward, especially for certain prone mat positions (sorry, I couldn't resist a dumb comment).

I was going to talk about two movies I saw over the weekend, but now it seems too strange to jump into them after bringing up naked yoga, which is such a pure thing. I predict that naked yoga will only begin to increase in popularity over the next few years and eventually sweep the country as a major new trend. Actors will want to do it to become more comfortable with their bodies. Super attractive people will want to do it to show themselves off. Out of shape people will want to do it to torture the attractive people and improve themselves. Naked yoga is clearly the future. Be there now.

I'll leave you with another quote from a nude yoga participant:

"I like the sheer vulnerability of having no clothing and letting everything hang. There's no concealing anything anymore. There's no place to hide.''

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A Walk in the Park

A Walk in the Park
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

Here's another image from the weekend in Los Angeles. We walked our dogs through a crowded Beverly Hills outdoor art show. That's Pop-Eye (left) trying to ignore the advances of a larger, even more unusual-looking dog. I like the shadow of the dog walker--it looks like he has a sweater wrapped around his shoulders.

Where's Dave?

Where's Dave?
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

I was in LA/Beverly Hills over the weekend and saw this billboard of the missing Dave Chappelle. Time magazine caught up with a sane Dave in South Africa, so I assume he's going to be all right. Somehow I feel like I can relate to Dave's plight, although he's got a $50 million contract and I don't. "I'm an introspective dude," he told the Time reporter. Like a lot of people, I love Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central and wish Dave the best. Charlie Murphy is awesome, too, whenever he's on.

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Saturday Night in Staunton

Saturday Night in Staunton
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

I'm working on a photo documentary of Staunton, Virginia--my hometown--and this is another image from it. On Saturday nights, I found that a lot of the high school boys met up in this grocery store parking lot across from the mall. They parked their pick-up trucks in a row side-by-side and visited with each other. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good shot of the line-up, so this image will have to do. It is blurry because I was driving and it was night, but I think it works perfectly to capture the mood of the moment. That's also rain on the windshield.

Random Notes on Current Events

In today's NY Times there's an Op/Ed piece by Bob Herbert about the real current job situation in the U.S. that I thought should be duly noted. Basically, Herbert says that while Bush and his cronies are slapping each other with high-fives over the creation of 274,000 jobs in April, the real story here is much less cheery. To quote Herbert: "Whatever the politicians and the business-booster types may be saying, the simple truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs available for the many millions of out-of-work or underworked men and women who need them. The wages of those who are employed are not even keeping up with inflation."

He mentions that benefits are being cut for workers across the board (see the recent United pension woes), the distribution of income is heavily favoring the already wealthy instead of the typical worker, our younger generations of workers in general have a lower standard of living than their parents' generations, and the profits are being concentrated into a smaller and smaller segment of the population, which Herbert says, "(is) leaving an entire generation of essentially powerless workers largely at the mercy of employers."

I am irked that the TV news and many newspaper headlines simply conveyed the message that 274,000 jobs were supposedly created in April, up from super low expectations, when the real story is more along the lines that the unemployment levels are still very high with lots of very capable people either unemployed or underemployed. The Bush Administration has nothing to jump up and down about.

Here's another recent newspaper article that caught my attention yesterday. The Wall Street Journal (my roommate gets a free subscription from his father for no apparent reason since he's a painter) had a front page article about artists who have gone from creating fake severed body parts for movies and television to making them for U.S. soldiers who have lost limbs during recent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's a key paragraph from the article:

"For years there was limited demand for high-end prostheses, which cost thousands of dollars and are too expensive for most patients. But the Iraq war (war not being capitalized) has generated a large number of amputees for the first time since the Vietnam War (war being capitalized). New body armor, which covers only vital organs, has meant that more soldiers are surviving attacks but losing limbs than in previous conflicts. The Pentagon has promised to spare no expense for war amputees."

I guess it is in the Pentagon's best interest to hire top artists to help hide the many amputated limbs of our unfortunate soldiers (or fortunate to be alive soldiers). The less the public has to think about the true horrors of our actions in Iraq, the better for the powers that be. Still, you can't help but be happy for the soldiers who absolutely do deserve the very best in care. As one Marine corporal at Walter Reed medical hospital says of the new foot that is being painted for him, "It's going to look great in a flip-flop."

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Our Rockridge Garden

Our Rockridge Garden
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

This photo gives you some idea of our current front yard (see blog below). It was taken yesterday right after the next door neighbor trimmed back the plants along the sidewalk to the left because they were rapidly engulfing the concrete. The cat belongs to the woman who lives in the basement of our house. The cat lounges on our porch in the sun most of the time, but runs away whenever I come outside and try to pet him.

Garden

I live in the neighborhood of Rockridge in Oakland, right off College Avenue near the Berkeley border. Apparently this area is known for its "cute bungalows and abundant gardens (click on title link)." What's funny here is that I live in what I believe is a bungalow house, and we have what some might call a garden in our front yard. It certainly contains lots of flowers at the moment (and weeds). Every day I come home and something in our yard changes, but not because anyone in our house has done anything to it. Actually, it's usually the work of our next door neighbor and her son. "I love the sunshine," our next door neighbor told me very early one morning when I came outside to walk my dog and found her pulling weeds and other plants out of our yard. She is 85 if she isn't 100, but with energy and wide smiles to burn. She always says that the owner of our house (I'm renting an attic room) gave her permission to work in our yard any time she wants. She is nobody you can argue with, so I just said that's great and went about my business. Then today I came home from some chores and found her son clipping away at the tall plants along the edge of our yard with a pair of hedge clippers. I asked him if somebody had paid him to work on our yard and he said, again, that the owner of the house had given him permission long ago to cut things in our yard any time he likes.

Maybe I'm not explaining this situation very well. Most people on our street have nicely manicured little front yards with lots of pretty plants and a clear sense of landscaping and design. When I first moved into this house a little over six months ago, the front yard was two patches of dirt on either side of the sidewalk. They had just chopped down a pine tree in the front yard. My roommate Al had invited a friend of his, a woman whom he refers to as "the scientist" because she works at UC-Berkeley in one of the science departments, to come over and help out our yard. She planted some type of native grass seed and in a short time tiny green buds appeared in the soil, and it seemed like we were going to have a nice little grass lawn. But somewhere along the line our "grass" turned into this wild jungle of many different plants including some with thick, hearty stems and the ability to grow like wildfire (as the saying goes). Anyway, now to look at it we have an impressive "garden" overflowing out over the sidewalk on all sides and meanwhile cats, birds, mice, insects--you name it--are finding little homes down under the brush, and neighbors seem to all notice it as they walk by, for better or worse.

I keep telling Al that we need to ask the owner to do something about the yard. We have been told that the owner's daughter will be working on it "when the rain stops" but that's all we know. Al tells me it is beautiful just the way it is anyhow, and he tries to make me agree every time I bring the subject up. "For somebody who calls himself an artist (well, a photographer anyway)," he said to me not long ago, "You sure don't appreciate beauty." I'm not saying that I don't like the beautiful bougainvillea blooming bright magenta over to the side of the house, although it too is rather unwieldly-looking, or many of the other flowers currently blooming there in our front yard. It's just that anyone in their right mind can tell that none of this was planned (except of course the bougainvillea). It is growing wild in a way that you would normally only expect to find in a vacant lot somewhere or outside an abandonded house near Watsonville, say, or somewhere similarly rural. Don't get me wrong either--I like interesting gardens. Robert Irwin's garden design at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles is one of my favorite of its kind in the world. It's just that our yard makes it look like nobody lives in the house, or that anybody who does live in the house is probably a penniless invalid.

"Why don't you do something about it yourself," Al tells me, and we've been through this before. I realize he makes a good argument there.

"I don't have any garden tools," I tell him. "And," I go on, "It seems like I shouldn't have to invest in them for somebody else's yard, even if I do live here." But he's right, I guess I should go next door and borrow those hedge clippers that the neighbor's son was using earlier today. After all, I love the sunshine, too.

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Haruki Murakami

(*My friend Jim K. says I don't update my blog often enough, which is true, so this one is dedicated to him.)

If you're never read any of his work, then you owe it to yourself to check out the novels and short stories of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. To date, he's had about 14 translated stories published in The New Yorker alone, including one last week entitled "Where I'm Likely To Find It." Most of his stories have a surreal quality, somethinng akin to magical realism but with a decidedly Japanese twist that seems far removed from that of Latin American master Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In Murakami's novel "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," for example, the main character spends at least 50 pages existing at the bottom of a dry well only to eventually be brought inside from underground into a mysterious other world. I think that's an accurate description--it's been a few years since I read that one. You get the idea. Strange things happen, often involving elevators, dry wells, and even men in sheep's clothing, so to speak.

I first heard about Murakami-san right around the time that "Wind-Up Bird" came out in English, which was 1997. I wish I could recall the circumstances better. I lived in Seattle at the time (now I live in Oakland), and I had a habit of checking out author readings at Elliott Bay Books in Pioneer Square. Something told me to go hear this Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, when I saw that he was reading there. Maybe I had read about him in The New Yorker, to which I have subscribed since around 1992. The date was Monday, November 24 because I still have the red ticket stub--tucked into my hardback copy of "Wind-Up Bird" and torn in half so that it reads, "Haruki Mura..."

The basement of Elliott Bay where they hold their readings filled up quickly that night, but I got there early and found myself a good seat to the right of the podium, next to an attractive Japanese graduate student from the University of Washington. I found this out later because she very politely explained to me just how huge Murakami was/is in Japan--probably their most famous and beloved modern author (along with Kenzaburo Oe, I'd say). The crowd that night was divided almost exactly in half between somewhat casual American readers and hardcore Japanese fans.

When Murakami was first introduced and stepped up to the microphone, I was almost underwhelmed by his modest presence. He is not very tall, and he carries himself with a very calm, humble bearing. He seemed almost shy, in fact, but I think part of this was his reluctance to speak English in front of a large crowd. At any rate, he didn't have to do much to win the audience over, and soon he was reading from the first chapter of his novel in Japanese, which was to be followed by a short reading of the same material in the translated English. His English was fine, but he apologized repeatedly for not being more fluent.

Now we get to the truly funny part of the evening. As he read aloud in Japanese, one familiar word kept popping up that made sense to those of us who only understood English in the audience--"spaghetti." The chapter is about a man cooking pasta and receiving an odd phone call, and as he read he kept occasionally repeating the word "spaghetti" over and over, to the point that I could honestly sense in half the audience this anticipation for the next time he would say that one familiar word, "spaghetti." At the end of this reading, everyone applauded wildly, and then he read in English and we could put our new favorite word, spaghetti, into context with the rest of the story--"Ah, it's about a guy cooking a spaghetti dinner by himself," we collectively thought.

After this reading he took questions from the audience, and about this time poet Tess Gallagher stood up from the middle of the audience and paid tribute to the friendship forged between her late husband, the writer Raymond Carver, and Murakami. Murakami had translated many of Carver's stories into Japanese and made Carver's work quite popular there, and during the translation process the two men had become very close friends, she said. Murakami was again very humble about all of this, but it added a nice local literary connection (Carver lived and is buried in Port Angeles, WA).

When the reading was over, I bought a copy of "Wind-Up Bird" and thought about having it signed by the author. However, his excited Japanese fans had already rushed to the front of the line ahead of me, making it quite long. I hadn't eaten dinner yet and was experiencing serious low blood sugar, so I shot up the stairs and went out into the Seattle night looking for a quick meal. Of course, in hindsight, I would give anything now to be able to go back and have Murakami-san sign my book for me. I have never had an opportuntiy to see him read again. I realize now how rarely he travels the U.S. book tour circuit. I've just had to content myself ever since by reading all of his books that have been translated into English, the latest of which is "Kafka on the Shore" which I bought when it first came out but haven't delved very far into yet.

Incidentally, his only stab at straight realism is "Norwegian Wood" (a huge bestseller everywhere) which is a love story set in the late 1960's when Murakami was in college in Tokyo at Waseda University. I like all of his books, but my favorite will probably always be "Wind-Up Bird" and the first collection of short stories "The Elephant Vanishes" because those were the first things I read. I also highly recommend "A Wild Sheep Chase" as a good place to start with his work.

In parting, I have to say that I'm haunted by Murakami's account of how he first knew he could write a novel when he saw Dave Hilton, an American player, hit a double during a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Japan. I'm still waiting for my similar moment of epiphany, although I've always thought I would some day be a writer, ever since I was about 7 or 8 years old. Anyway, the novel Murakami wrote after this insight was "Hear the Wind Sing" which is almost impossible to find in English (although I have a Kodansha copy). The first lines in it are a quote from a fictional writer mentioned in the story:

"There is no such thing as perfect writing. Just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."

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