Meta Who?

Lately, in terms of non-photographic material, I’m floundering a bit in a very full sea of purposeful blogs, as mine, as I feared it might, seems to lack that cohesive “angle”. Having no sense of readership, apart from a few loyal friends, I either don’t know my audience, or know them too well to get my act together and amount to anything more than an occasional poster of pictures and a life updater.

A couple of months ago, after a particularly wordy post, I got an email from a friend which I initially interpreted as blatantly critical. Already a little doubtful about my little blog’s raison d'être, it immersed me in a cloud of self-doubt, and I almost withdrew my last post, which had included allusions to my job, and to a somewhat personal physical condition.

Instead, after a dialogue with said critic, I offer you a big old taste of meta-discretion by posting the whole conversation, with permission, of course, and omitting irrelevent (to you) banter.

I met Alex in November, 2004, in Viterbo, Italy, while I was living in Florence. He was raised in Brussels to an English mum and an Italian dad. As a preface, I may have fallen a wee bit out of touch leading up to this exchange…

He says:

Has modernity reared its ugly head once again to further dilute our contact with one another? Just when we sang its praises for letting us stay in contact to-the-second via email technology...

I have beef with your blog. I'm saddened that I have been reduced to learning about your life through what feels like a voyeuristic fashion! I might have an inflated ego of myself... that’s not entirely false… I do unapologetically classify myself as a narcissist for good reason.

But, the fact remains that it’s crap to catch up with my ol' friend Jessie on her webpage, like she's become so famous and I have to go to a secondary source.... (yes, I know you write the blog, but it’s a sensation - its not the same as receiving mail, I love that sensation, don’t you?)

Now, about your blog specifically, firstly I would like to say I did like most of your stories, and the twists, and how you managed to draw general conclusions from them rather than leave them as a report of events. Furthermore it’s clear you know what you are doing as you tie up all the events to make a point which always forces a smile in the reader near the end. Especially that one of the online message thing - missed connection - I thought that was great. Ooh, and the retail therapy article was very poignant, and true.

I'm in fact writing a piece about Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, blogs and all that - the way we pimp ourselves off online, sending people to our MSN space with shitloads of photos they can browse, and a profile to read so as to see if we are someone they'd like to know....but also how you can set the groundwork online - do all the stuff that used to be face to face or letter written, was made easier by SMS and which has now been sped up by photo albums - self-descriptions and emails or MSN......even friends of friends adding themselves or chicks/guys seen around campus poking each other virtually to attract attention, something they would never have had the balls to do in person.

However, one thing that strikes me with your blog is how, well, is how open, honest and maybe American it all is!!

Let me elaborate: When we go to a restaurant here [England] and we've booked a table, it says "Reserved" on the table... it’s specific to English people, cos we are uptight and prude you see.

Jokes aside - Unlike, oh my dear god, your last installment... granted I really enjoyed it and I thought it was very thoughtfully written. But the whole 'sharing' thing, sharing everything with everyone... I guess it might be my own personal ego that is hurt - I ain’t outruling it - but objectively, it’s a lot to tell to everyone. I am NOT telling you what’s appropriate content, but I might be hurt that none of the content is solely destined to me and I am definitely sad that I don’t get mail from you anymore.

I do sometimes feel like nothing is taboo anymore.

I am having trouble explaining this last bit, and it was the most important bit . . . I've been writing this mail for like ages now. Let me know if I can clarify anything, I hope you'll get it first time, I'll try again with mo examples if not.

I'd love to hear from you, I'd also love it if you wrote about the things I pointed out, I know I will after my "Online Pimping is Upon Us" article which is stewing for my blog.

Still looking forward to seeing you in May,

Ale

PS. Dear Jessie, I hope you can appreciate the up and down, angry, sad, come sarcastic tone of this email... I mean, it would be fair enough if you didn’t... it’s a bit like your hormones, its all over the place (sorry, could not resist, see what I mean about the blog - YOU'RE out there! We English can’t handle that... I mean , not that I cant handle you being out there, just that personally I would not put all those things about me up there...

But the point I never got to was that MSN Daily told me 60% of emails were interpreted badly - resulting in business downturn - so the phone in the end was vital to business. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. This email is
a) supposed to show I care
b) supposed to get your attention :p
c) supposed to raise what I deem to be an extremely valid point
d) To highlight some quirky cultural differences
and...
e) to make you laugh I hope.

Now, try and misinterpret that!!!!

Here’s my response:

Dear Alex,

Thank you so much for your email. I've been thinking about it a lot ever since I read it yesterday. It's incredibly valid, and honest, and it brings to light many issues about blogging/contact/openness that, for now, I'd just been sweeping under the rug for sake of experimentation. However, spurred by your email, I think it's time to re-evaluate some things.

Let me first apologize sincerely for dropping out of touch... it's funny, I hold people to rather high standards about that kind of thing, so it's really hypocritical when I myself fall below those standards. I've thought of you often and have no real excuse other than often feeling overwhelmed and without enough time, and I wanted to do a good job, so kept putting it off, which is stupid. In a way, you're right - a blog is as bad as a mass-email, if that's your target audience (your friends). No excuse.

But that's the bigger question, isn't it? Who becomes the audience when you become an under-the-radar, unpromoted "blogger"? That's the question I'd been avoiding. Let me back up: I started the blog because a) for a long time I've wanted a professional-looking website for hosting my photography and music, and although one is in the works, I wanted something a little more immediate that was easily update-able and user-friendly (unlike Dreamweaver, which I'm learning for my other site, which I find much more complex), b) I needed some writing "exercise", you know? Some little incentive to string words together in an interesting way, or post photos I'm proud of, or think about my life, for someone (some vague, anonymous someone) to see. And c), it was one of the means of distraction after I found out about X’s news (ironically, I stumbled onto that news on a MySpace page), like buying my camera and starting a class. I vaguely thought about my audience, and why I was writing, but got too hung-up on those questions, so decided to just push on and see what came out. And there you have it.

Of course, when you actually think about who does end up reading the blog - close friends, not so close friends, friends-of-friends, strangers, old lovers, current lovers, siblings, hopefully not parents but there's always a possibility when something's on the internet - you've got to think about what you're putting out there. As for what I've written about so far (and I think it's less shocking than you do, obviously), I think I'm relatively okay with all of those aforementioned people reading it. You're right - maybe I'm more open with "personal-health" issues than some, but I always have been... whether other people want to read about it is a different story, but I find that, in my realm of friends anyway, it's an open dialogue. While I can be private with my emotions, especially pain, I'm an open book about other details. And there you have that nothing-is-taboo reality. You're right. Not much is. Or at least nothing is taboo enough not to warrent discussion.

You definitely made me a little self-conscious... after some thought, and for the sake of anti-censorship, I'm not going to edit any of it, but it will make me think harder about the truths that I share, and how they'll impact/affect/impress upon other people. Blogs are inherently self-serving and ego-centric ("like she's become so famous..."). If they're popular (which mine is not, and I have no intentions for it to become so) they can really be a means of promoting or crushing other people, publicly. They can be really snide or underhanded or back-stabbing. I don't want to be any of those things. I'd never write about a conflict I was having with a friend. In fact, the thing I doubt the most is bitching about work, even though I wasn't person-specific (and trust me, it's tempting to be). I guess I just want to share musings and observations, some quirks, some stories, and, yes, I want it to be a means of "what-I've-been-up-to", even though it's not personal in nature. It's a weird phenomenon, being able to check up on people online, but I don't think it's entirely negative. It's just different than how it used to be. It means people have to come up with other things to talk about than "what have you been up to?" when they actually do talk.

( . . . )

Love,
Jessie

...

I kept a journal steadily from around 12 to 14. All starts after that were false, and my shelf is misleadingly full of 1/3-full blank books (and some completely empty ones, gifts too ugly and wrong to put to use). I willfully pretended to chart my philosophical ventures and overwraught social plights, but in truth the soliloquy was just as much for some unborn progeny many generations down the road.

The romance was somewhere in the idea of their being able to hold it, smell it, visualize their weird and tortured great-great-whoever writing it. Writing online, or even creating web traffic, for my adoring future offspring (or even having those future offspring) has never even occured to me. (Okay, well, the penultimate paranthetical isn't entirely true. I just have my doubts.)

I'll probably return to the pretty pictures. They're exempt from my self-consciousness, at least more so than words.

Don't Hate Them Because They're Beautiful

No rest for my camera shutter lately. And truly, who could ask for more charasmatic subjects? Check back soon for a whole bunch more from last weekend, but for now I give you...

Ian, who looked fantastic in any light I stuck him under...



Laura, who surprised herself by being nervous in front of the camera, but who, as you can see, is such a beauty...


And Jen P. from work, and her boyfriend Jake, who were so much fun to shoot.



And now, I think you should probably prepare yourselves for these insanely smoking hot photographs of Kim. No, really. My boyfriend near about had to leave the room (actually, the one that caused that particular reaction didn't make it to the blog. I use some discretion, after all.)

Here's Marilyn Kimroe.


I mean it. I didn't even do my usual edits on these photos. They were perfect as is.


Doing her hair and make-up was a good time. I love the result.


And now for the '50's "innocence"...


And the slightly deranged house frau...



And just, I mean, hot damn...


There is something so fascinating and self-indulgent about reading other people's descriptions of you, especially when it's not said with the intention of your reading/hearing about it. Matt's Borders friend Scott Hart, whose blog you probably shouldn't read at work due to its rather explicit nature (although I do once in a while anyway), wrote this in a recent entry:

We were talking about MattD and that hot photo-art chick he is dating and how attractive they both are (I said Matt was my premiere choice to play Peter Parker when I am asked to direct a Spiderman film) and I posited that you could walk into their apartment and think you'd come across them fighting when in fact you'd just find Matt kissing a mirror.

Well, it sounded funnier when I actually said it and I can't edit so fuck off.

Hot photo-art chick! I don't quite get the joke, but... do you know how I would have died if someone had said that about me in middle school? God, I want to summon up that skinny, underdeveloped, rather shy, awkward adolescent girl and tell her what carrying around a camera for long enough can do for your sex appeal. She might actually stop wishing her cats could talk back to her and chill out a little about what people thought.

(Actually, in truth I wasn't terribly obsessed with what people thought. At least any more than any other 12-year-old girl. Seventh grade was my hell-year. But I digress.)

And by the way, as for the Spiderman comment, you may know that I think Tobey Maguire is strangely, oddly, the sexiest man on Jessie's planet. I saw Spidey 2 three times, and once at an IMAX theater.

Thank you so much to those of you who swung by my photo opening, or have since stopped by the Beanstock to see my pictures. It was such a good learning experience. Like, for example, next time I'll eat something and down a glass of wine before people get there and I'm almost too jittery to answer basic requests like, "So tell me about this picture."

Lately there is so little time in a day, and I swear tomorrow it will be September already, and the next day I'll be 40. There are many things on which I want to expound... but sometimes by the end of the day the energy I can muster is required for watching Scrubs and melting further and further into the fold of the futon. Hopefully soon I will rise to the writing I want to do, but in the meantime, I'll keep my shutter-finger busy.

For some reason that sounds dirty to me, but I assure you that was not my intention.

Your Official Invitation

Click below for tonight's invitation.

For those of you who can make it, I'd like to encourange you to eat dinner at the Boston Beanstock... it would be a favor for them, since they're kind enough to close the shop to the public at 8 so I can have this little opening. Also, they have a great array of sandwiches, salads, and soups. Help support the shops support the arts!

See you tonight.

Sometimes, Julie Andrews Just Gets the Better of You.

La Vita è Bella, and Very Very Hot

A hearty ciao ciao from the island of Sardegna, where I've been whisked away by my family. Things are good: the locals all want their picture taken, the water is a heavenly blue, and so far I've avoided being sun-frenched and am merely sun-"kissed", I would say.

For those of you who haven't heard: my photo show is now up at the Boston Beanstock Coffee Co., and there will be an opening reception at 8pm on May 25, next Thursday. I'd love to see any and all of you there. See my site for the invite.

It had to go up rather quickly, and I really didn't have the money for the proper framing and enlarging I would have liked to do. That being said, once it all went up on the walls, I felt an odd sensation that tickled my sternum and lightened my step that I wouldn't argue might be associated with pride.

I hear those of you in Boston are all but floating away on the flood that is Spring. Just think of all those amazing broken umbrella shots I'm missing. Damn. You know... I think I'll live.

To What I've Been Up

So last week I was sick. See?


It was a perfect day to be sick, because it was raining a lot. See?


So I took pictures from my post on the futon of the rather wet birds out the window. They looked pretty rumpled.



This pigeon is always Bogarting the songbird seed.


On Saturday, feeling much better, I had two photo sessions: one with Malissa (my coworker), her daughter Marika, and Marika's kids, Ebony (2) and Irea (3 mos.).












Photography is easy when you've got such beautiful subjects.

Take Marie, for example. You may have seen her featured here before. She came by so I could take her picture for the studio where she teaches yoga.




And then tonight, at my class at NESOP, we were lucky enough to have three members of the Wicked Pissas, a Boston women's roller derby team, come in to pose for us. They were incredible. I wanted to be their best friends: Jennasauraus Rex, Amanda Conda, and Harlot Flava.









See y'all on the flip side.

Oh yeah... fear.

So it's Sunday and you're hanging around the house. You decide to take a bath, since you really have nothing better to do and it sounds like a luxurious thing to do on a Sunday afternoon, so you draw the tub, and wave to you roommate, who's heading out to the library. She gathers up her library materials and keys and tells you she'll be back late, and you tell her goodbye and close the bathroom door and step into the bath.

Ten minutes later, you sit up with a headfull of shampoo, and think you hear something on the other side of the bathroom door, in the living room. You jiggle water from your ear with your pinkie, and listen again. Yup, she's definitely back.

"Kim!"

No answer, more shuffling. Maybe it's coming from the hall. So you lean forward and strain to hear, but, no - it's definitely noise, and it's coming from your living room. There are unlocked windows overlooking a lower story's rooftop which lead into your living room. The rooftop has a fire escape leading down to a back alley which, feasibly, could be accessed in reverse of how a fire escape is intended to be traveled.

But it's got to be her, so you shake off the image of the unlocked windows and yell, loud this time, "Hey, Kimmy!"

But still no answer. Someone is in your apartment. Oh fuck. Your blood goes cold despite the steaming hot water, and you step in a flash from the bath and throw the latch on the door and grab a towel.

When I first moved to Boston a year ago, I stayed with Julia for a month in her apartment in Jamaica Plain. It was a loft above a grocery store, with twenty foot ceilings, makeshift wiring, bedrooms the size of small condos with large sleeping lofts, and a long, long hallway between Julia's room and the empty room that was alloted to me. I found it dark and often very cold, both in temperature and spirit.

Someone had broken a picture frame while moving out of that room, and although I'd swept it into a pile in the middle of the floor, I hadn't been able to find a dustpan so it had been sitting there for almost a week, forcing me to step around it. I was a little depressed then.

Well... one night, I heard noises below the loft, where I was sleeping. I figured it was probably just the cat, even though I'd closed the door to my room, so I waited for the noises to take cat-like shape. But they sounded weightier, more jolted, so I stuck a leg out of the bed and stomped loudly on the floor.

There was a flurry of motion below, and then icy silence. A cat would have scampered away, right? If I didn't hear anything leave the room, then it was still there, right? I froze with fear, then reached for my only weapon - my cellphone - and called Julia in her room, which was far enough down the cavernous hallway that I couldn't hear it ring. She answered drowsily and I requested with a mixture of embarrassment and terror that she and Jeremy make a visit down to my end of the apartment and make sure that there was no deranged killer poised below my loft.

There wasn't (thank god - I'd have either been dead, or had to live with the guilt of having sent them into the path of a murderer, or at the very least a pile of broken glass), and the lack of one appeared to suggest that it was only the spooky cat that had pushed open my door and caused the ruckus. Julia made me tea, and Jeremy shook his head and padded back to bed. I felt pretty stupid. But I was struck with the scarcity of the emotion, fear, and how specific and rare it tasted.

It's the very same feeling that finds you as you stand there dripping in your towel, listening to someone move things in your apartment. Having somewhat noisily latched the door, you throw open the bathroom window (which does not quite provide access to a rooftop, just a three-story drop) thinking maybe you could shout for help, too scared to open the bathroom door and face the intruder; scared, too, to make too much noise and call attention to yourself in such a completely defenseless state. It's the clearest feeling; you're in a lot of danger. You could get hurt. This is very, very bad. The timespan between each second, and between each heartpound in your ears, offers frantic escape plans and terrible scenarios.

One last time, maybe just to scare the person, you yell her name as loudly as you can, and this time she responds, "Yeah?"

Only sixty seconds, most, have passed, and another sixty in the time it takes for reality to shift, to wipe clean the board and depict your backpacked roommate in her white earbuds, the culprit of the misleading nonresponse, and in that sixty you sit weakly on the tub and hold out your hands to show how they're shaking like a Parkinson's patient's, for her to melt with apology and hug you, getting soap and water all over her jacket. "I should have told you I hadn't left yet! I put my music on, but then I forgot about some things I needed to get together! Oh, my god, I'm so sorry!"

And later, what a novelty of a memory, what fear felt like! Like getting to simulate the sensation of falling, from the safely of a themepark-issued harness on a wild ride, only this time you were convinced, really convinced, that the danger was real, not just physiologically, but mentally, too, with utmost, runaway certainty. It's like those incredibly sour, salt-covered licoraces Sanden brought back from Sweden in college: disgusting, shocking, thoroughly revolting, but radical and somehow just a little bit seductively foreign to suck on for a while.

Mamas Don't Let Their Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys

...Mamas should also warn their babies against posing for their portrait class in dopey hats. Hoo boy, I look goofy as hell.

My classmate Stephanie took the originals; the edits are mine.

Me and You and a Blue Canoe

[Thanks for your patience, folks... I give you the rather overdue Passover/Easter/Marathon entry. Brush off the Passover plate and hide the afikomen, here we go!]

Parades, standing ovations of any kind, that part of sporting events where all the athletes from competing teams run by and give each other high fives... just a handful of occasions when I always find myself fighting back tears of some weird, misguided emotion like pride.

Yesterday's Boston Marathon was no exception, and a real doozy for my emotions... I teared up every time someone standing near me spotted someone they knew, and I cheered with them (on the inside) as some sweaty friend or sister or roommate stagger-ran by. I pretty much full-on cried when a blond, pony-tailed girl began to slump in front of us, not 100 yards from the finish line, and was helped along for a few feet on either side by two medical attendants, before finally passing out completely and being lowered to the ground. She was finally driven off the track by a little green John Deer-type vehicle. I can only hope they drove her over the finish line. One hundred little yards, after 26 miles.


On Saturday, Georgia and I joined our incomplete spiritual halves (I like to think we make up one Jew and one Christian between us, although neither of us is particularly religious), and drove out to Western Massachusetts where her parents and younger brother live on the Connecticutt River. Actually, the house is situated on the top of a hill that leads to a medium-sized cove, just before it eases into the river. There was a canoe at the bottom of the hill that jarred a memory of just a few days before, either from a dream or a potential song lyric... I had definitely been visualizing a blue canoe, and there it was, and there was the skinny, blond, 16-year-old German exchange student towing it into the water.

While the Hollister Ismans prepared Passover dinner (y'all know I don't cook, right? It's not that I can't, I just don't like to! ...etc. etc. etc.), I treated the evening as a documentary project. Here are a few of the highlights from my work in progress.

Matzoh ball preparation!




Georgia scorches an egg and tastes the tears of the slaves to see if they're salty enough.

Now that's a beautiful Passover plate as you would ever hope to see.




Georgia's mom regales us of tales of an old Jewish boyfriend.



Georgia's father, Seth, delivers beautiful Hebrew and offers constant and delightful insight.


After the third raise of the glass or so, things were really moving along.




Georgia found the afikomen. Of course.



One of my best friends ever, and she makes a snarky pillow.


By the next morning, we'd switched religions and revamped our appetites.


Some of us did the crossword puzzle, even though it was Sunday. This is a smart family, the Hollister Ismans.


The rest of the day was spent lolling around the cove in that blue canoe. Thank you, surrogate family, for taking in my weary little self for a wonderful weekend of nourishment and love.