Field Report

I put my rainboots and a hoody on, and I go out into the street. The sky is dark deep blue, fading to black. I choose blue. Walking down the sidewalk, I think about blue. Tidy sign blue, dented newspaper box blue, cigarette-smoky neon blue. Meanwhile the sky is deepening, richer, darker. The clouds define patches of sky. Meanwhile, on the street, illuminated awning blue, flat telephone booth blue. All the items on the street are so flat and drab in comparison to the sky. I think about art, how impossible it is to capture the true color and texture of the natural world. Heading home, I see printed blue on ridiculous maps of Paris in a shop window, patchwork blue on a pillow, blue glass mugs. Those things I can connect to. Paper, cloth, glass. The paper evens out the pigment, softens it. The textures of the fabric chop the color into pieces, make your eye jump. The glass creates depth, imitates water. Blue.
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I watched the movie Born Into Brothels this weekend, and it reached out and shook me. All these smart, laughing kids dodging and navigating and surviving in dirty drunken red light alleys, taking the most amazing, saturated, intuitive photos. They really showed their world in pictures.
I think about myself behind the camera, hesitant and hiding- These kids had cameras like an extension of their arms and eyes.

I looked all over for calcium carbonate once, to make milk paint. Turns out it’s chalk. What’s good about chalk?
-Armed with chalk, urban renegades can make all the statements they want, on streets and walls, without indelible illegal implications. My neighbor can sometimes be spied drawing intricate designs on downtown sidewalks. Late night sneakiness, no criminal consequences.
-Buildings painted black by bizarre landlords turn into instant chalkboards. White chalk on black walls. What an opportunity!
-Some Saturday evening in April, the streets are swarming with kids and parents and town-people. The cops pass out buckets of chalk to bystanders, and the kids converge in the middle of the street. Before the parade is almost as good as the parade itself. Anything in the street that’s not cars.

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Eight years ago I wrote a manifesto denouncing cell phones. Now 90% of my closest friends have one. When I started college 13 years ago I refused to touch Photoshop. I worked in a black and white photo studio. Now I own a digital camera. The other night I was talking to my friend on the phone, instant messaging another friend, and looking through some internet personals webpage. While I was doing all that at once, I was also thinking: This is crazy. I can’t even focus on one of these activities, yet I am doing them all at once. And I can’t tear myself away from any of them.
That is the setup of these times. There are so many things demanding our attention constantly, and for some reason, it is necessary to pay attention to all of them. At once. The technology demands it. We can’t just be talking on the phone. No. We have to talk on the phone, wash the dishes, and be checking email all at the same time. It’s a fracturing way to live.
My computer is sometimes like a pulsating beacon, begging me to noodle around on the internet, check some junk email, see if anyone else is online. The promise is connection. The reality for me is total confusion. When I leave my computer, I stumble into the rest of my house with a sense of amnesia, totally exhausted.
I feel that way now. So this will be continued.

I don’t really know about this whole blog business anyway. It’s part of the new technology world that I’m sneaking up on sideways. when I was 20, my friends and I reinvented everything. We made up a whole new way of speaking english, adjusted love and marriage to fit our own needs, redefined learning and schooling, and made up community the way we thought it should be. We rewrote the rules. A brilliant new world that had never existed before. Except that as I get older, I realize that actually all those things did exist, we just had to figure them out for ourselves and make them our own in order to really believe in them. I’m pretty sure my intention in writing this blog is to distract myself for another half hour before I go read some book Khaela wanted me to read, I apologize if you thought it might be insightful. Catch me in June for the smart ideas.
The other day it was warm, and there was a sunset. As I was walking downtown with a friend, we spied friends across the street, playing 4-square. Street games at dusk!! It was suddenly quintessential summer, sweet freedom, to abandon plans and bounce a ball around in a parking lot. To meet new people and visit with friends from all over. I remembered the lulling calm of relaxed evenings. I fell in love with my town again.