new camera


Test photo: our dining room Buddha.

By hoarding my personal money like one of my young cousins and pooling all of my birthday and Christmas cash, I was able to buy the new camera that I’ve been lusting after! (At least no one had to drive me to the mall to do so.) I’ve wanted a digital SLR for years, and finally took the plunge. After getting over a few new-toy hurdles (such as running out to the store since there was no memory card in the box, the adult equivalent of “batteries not included”), I took a series of test photos and proclaimed the camera to be “really nice” and to have “a much better flash than the old one.” To which my partner replied, I SHOULD HOPE SO. Did I mention it was pricey? Yes, but it’s so nice to have a real camera back in my hands: I had no idea how much I missed looking through a view finder. (And yes, I realize it’s odd to illustrate a post about rewarding your material cravings with a picture of a buddha, but what can I say? It’s pretty! And, the camera will feed my creativity, which is an important part of my core self and brings me happiness. Or something.)


Test photo: Ellie the elephant, part of our newly-accessorized living room.

In addition to the better flash system, the big improvement of the new automatic settings (for my purposes) of this camera over my little point-and-shoot one (which is and was a good solid little camera in a fully-metal body that served me well on an AIDS ride and numerous vacations; it’s not the camera’s fault that I deleted all the Maine photos before we got it home!) is the ability to take decent photos of small things up close and personal. Yes it’s dorky, but I can’t wait to be able to get better pictures of everything growing in the garden come spring. I don’t have any truly artsy photography plans at the moment, I just plan to take the same pictures I’ve been taking and have them turn out better. Food photos that don’t all look shiny (for example). Photos of the interior of our house without the colors all washed out. Pictures of the baby where he doesn’t look like a red-eyed demon. I’m confident that as I use the camera more, more shots will occur to me. I’m less confident that my brain will be alert enough anytime soon to go back to manual shooting with any degree of success, but there’s plenty of time for that.

new camera

vacation : we arrive in Maine

On the Tuesday after Labor Day we drove up to Maine from Rhode Island. It was a beautiful day for a drive, and we weren’t expected at the house until the evening, so we stopped at several places along the way. At the Kittery Visitors’ Center, we picked up a number of leaflets about regional artists and a map of the state. We also staged a cute photo of me at the ‘Relax, you’re in Maine!’ sign, which was lost along with all the other vacation photos when I inadvertently reformatted the drives on the last day of the trip. (Which is to say: no illustrations, sorry.)

Our first off-highway detour was to the Maine Potters Market shop in Portland. I was hoping to find a piece or two to take back with us, however we didn’t find anything that fit into what I was looking for. We both really enjoyed Barbara Walch’s work, it was just more delicate that the general style of our house and art pieces. Of all of the pieces we saw, her set of three nesting bowls was the closest to something we’d use, for nibbly bits and the like.

The next jaunt was to Lisbon, for a visit to the Stained Glass (and Insect) Museum. The gallery is housed in a converted church, so there’s lots of space and light to be able to get a good look at the works on display. The basement is an active studio, and we saw several artists working on various pieces. The insect museum was a bit disappointing—I was expecting more of a Smithsonian-style live insect zoo or Harvard-style entomological collection—but probably more interesting if you visit the live tarantulas in the annex (which we did not). After the museum, we had lunch at Dr. Mike’s Madness Café just down the road. The sandwiches (I had egg salad) and pie (I had mixed berry) were great, and just what we needed to keep on keeping on. The purple vinyl seats and the guy who had two creme brulées and a glass of milk for lunch alone made it worth the trip.

Just before joining the Maine turnpike at Augusta, we stopped in to a Visitors’ Center advertised as having a selection of Maine arts and crafts. We were planning to continue from there on to Brahms Mount Textiles; after seeing a selection of their absolutely beautiful blankets at the Visitors’ Center, we decided to save it for another trip since we were unlikely to buy one as a souvenir on this trip. However, one of their hand-loomed cotton basketweave throws would nicely complement the hand-loomed wool herringbone throw we brought back from Ireland (after getting to see Eddie at work at his loom, which is a story for a different time, about a different vacation). We saw several more examples of local pottery in the shop, and I found a bag made from recycled sails to covet. What can I say, I like bags!

From here we just carried on through to the house, which we settled into relatively well despite arriving after dark. We took a few moments to check for wayward spiders and then headed over to Bar Harbor for some dinner. After considering several options, we settled on the relatively new Finback Alehouse, which had both beer (the regionally local Voodoo Porter) and chicken sandwiches. It doesn’t appear that the pub has a website, but in searching for it I did learn that the manager who got us through the door from the street ran into trouble a week later (along with a whole slew of other folks, mostly drunkards; the Mount Desert Island police report gives our local one a run for its money for humor value).

After dinner we walked down to the Main Street, nipped into the Acadia Shop for a look at their blueberry-themed merchandise, and then headed back to the house, where we laid out our clothes and set the alarm for 5am.

vacation : we arrive in Maine

Radio Golf at Studio Theater

One of our Christmas presents last year was a gift certificate for The Studio Theatre, on 14th Street just blocks from where we used to live. After investigating the shows playing this season, we chose Radio Golf, August Wilson‘s last play in his Pittsburgh Cycle, completed just before his death in 2005. I had heard of August Wilson’s plays—even before the Obamas flew to NYC to see one—but had never seen a performance. The show last weekend was obviously popular; the theater was sold out and we’d had to bump our chosen performance date back a few weeks in order to get four seats together. The seats were excellent, in the center of the second or third row; definitely worth the wait.

The play itself was superb and engrossing. The actors were completely convincing, and the characters could have been around the corner in an office in DC. Although questioning gentrification itself wasn’t the point of the play, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the dynamics that have been going on in DC for the past ten or fifteen years. Old houses being bought up for back taxes, poor and older black folks moving out of their neighborhoods to make way for high rise complexes with doormen and Starbucks ™ on the ground floor. Radio Golf takes that dynamic as the starting point and moves on to questions of ethics, of the ways in which these things move forward whether or not they are above-board in the beginning. The play succeeds at providing completely recognizable late-20th-century middle-class black characters while avoiding stereotypes. Wilson manages to convey the social context that produces the desire to move forward and never look back in a way that allows the audience to remain sympathetic even to the play’s less appealing character, the friend who is willing to be the black face that allows white investors to get a piece of the federal minority-headed project pie. Overall, it was a poignant example of how projects move beyond the control of the creator when big money becomes involved, and a reminder of why I wasn’t comfortable being part of this kind of revitalization by buying in similar areas in DC.

More than anything, Radio Golf made me want to see Wilson’s other plays, and I hope that a DC theater will start to perform the cycle again from the beginning. It’s rare to see such an insightful and accurate portrayal of city life balanced with both humor and compassion. Certainly, August Wilson’s talented eye and voice created the platform, but the five actors made the story come alive. We’ll definitely return for future productions.

Radio Golf at Studio Theater

MJ, you were our Elvis

Like most people my age, Thriller was my first album. My dad got it for me for Christmas that year and claimed it came from Santa. Before then, I only knew Michael as one of the voices of Motown on the holiday album we played every year on Christmas morning, whom I was just old enough not to believe in anymore but not able to fully interrogate on account of a younger brother who was still a true believer. That year, we played Thriller. I fell in love with the entire thing, from the first addictive beat of track one all the way to the crooning fadeout of track nine. I became expert at putting the needle on the record in just the right places to listen to The Girl Is Mine over and over, far more careful of scratching this record than I’d been with my parents’ Led Zeppelin or Helen Reddy, favorites that were quickly displaced. When we traveled to my grandparents’ house later that day, I brought the album with me, just the first of many days that Michael Jackson and I were inseparable. In one of my all-time favorite photos of me as a child I am standing in my grandparents’ living room, wearing the enormous padded headphones my grandmother made my grandfather use when he watched soccer. The headphones are plugged into the stereo-hidden-in-a-console, already by that point my favorite piece of furniture, which I was actually being allowed to use for the first time because I had a record of my own to play. I am wearing a raglan-sleeved baseball-shirt-type nightshirt, and my grandfather is looking over my shoulder as I intently sing along by reading the liner notes (the side where Michael and Paul are pulling the girl apart, in the drawing Michael did himself, which is perhaps the most impressive thing about the whole experience for me).

For most of that year, and much of the years to follow if we’re honest, I listened to Thriller as much as I could. I played it on the stereo that I wasn’t really supposed to use when my parents were at work, turning it up louder than we were really supposed to in the duplex so that I could hear it out the windows on the front lawn. I learned the Beat It steps from the girl next door, who had cable and therefore the ability to see the Beat It steps, and when she moved away I practiced them by myself in the living room. When kids in my class had birthday parties at the skating rink, we all skated our most suave to Billy Jean. Most of all, during those years, we coveted the inimitable red jackets covered in zippers of the rich kids.

It was an embarrassment to us when Michael’s hair caught on fire, because what was he doing pimping Pepsi when everyone knew Pepsi sucked, New Coke or no New Coke. By the time he put out Bad, we were old enough that our younger brothers and sisters were more into Weird Al’s satire (about which we were actually pretty proud, since it just proved what awesome songwriting abilities MJ still had). Eventually, though, it got to be too much: the hair and the nose and all the ugly stuff around kids. We ceded him to the Japanese teens (about whom we were actually pretty happy because it proved that MJ still had it going on even if it was painfully clear that he was way too uncool for us to be associated with anymore, especially now that we had discovered punk, wave, and hardcore). Of course, there were diehards, and we lived vicariously through their devotion, mocking them even as we suffered willingly through yet another playing of Dangerous in the car.

And then we were grown, and MJ became the stuff of tabloid stories involving Elvis’s daughter (about which we were actually pretty accepting, because it proved that someone could still see the spirit we’d loved inside the man about whom we’d come to feel so awkward). We still paid homage to his musical greatness at parties when it was just late enough and we were just drunk enough to be able to rock out to Thriller like we were eight again, or at karaoke where it was a matter of pride to be the one best able to belt out The Way You Make Me Feel. Or maybe my friends just indulged me; it’s true that they were remarkably okay with me claiming their Thriller CD as my own, when I was so obviously ecstatic to be reunited after years without a turntable on which to play my first love.

So, Michael, thank you. Thank you for being the hip highlight of my childhood. Thank you for setting the bar so high as the King of Pop that 90s top 40 never stood a chance. Thank you for hanging in and not dying on a toilet seat.

Tonight I got an extension cord out of the basement and played that nicked Thriller CD on the boombox on the porch while I deadheaded the front flowerbeds. When I was done after side one, I sat on the porch and watched the fireflies come out, thinking about Indiana and the eighties and way music gets inside you and becomes intertwined with the small moments of your own family. One of the college kids across the street came home and sat on his stoop talking on the phone until the end of the album. As he went inside and The Lady In My Life came to a crooning end, I poured out a shot of my best Scotch (Inchgower, 22 year old single malt, cask strength) and had a moment of silence for the man. May you finally have some peace, Michael. Really, that’s all we ever wanted for you.

And who knows: maybe I’ll visit Neverland Ranch one day; maybe I’ll even buy a velvet painting.

MJ, you were our Elvis

home : sewing machine

In addition to all the other things that happened the first weekend of June, I scored a sewing machine at a yard sale in Takoma Park. The machine is five years old, but unused: the cord was still secured with a twist-tie and little plastic cover on the plug, and the accessories were still sealed in a plastic bag. While Singer doesn’t make this model anymore, it appears to have been replaced with several in the $200 range; I bought mine for $70! I say this not to gloat, but because this is the kind of thing that never happens to me, the finding of something I’ve been waffling over getting because of the cost for a totally affordable price at a yard sale that I wasn’t even planning to visit (my partner saw the machine when he passed the sale to go to an appointment, and alerted me to it when I arrived to pick him up). I hope that the person who sold it to me is as happy to have the $70 as I am to have the machine!

Following this exciting development, I was able to return the loaner machine to my neighbor across the street (just in time for her grandchildren to insist on using it when they visit this summer). I now have all the quilt blocks squared up, and just need to cut the on-point triangles and then the top will be ready to be assembled. I have several ideas for the next quilts I want to make; first, however, I need to come up with a plan for the back and decide whether I want to try actually quilting it myself. Having a machine that I’m not concerned about breaking that comes with the necessary accessories goes a long way toward that option being an actual possibility.

home : sewing machine