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Art and Creativity
Proust At Rush Hour
My job is a drag — like most nine-to-five gigs, I imagine. But, oh, the commute! The commute is a golden border at the beginning and end of each workday, shedding some of its shimmer onto the leaden expanse in between.
March 2009
My Father’s Art
Photography suited my father, loner that he was. He’d come home from his job as an airline pilot, give Mother a peck on the cheek before changing out of his uniform, and drive off again with at least one of his three Rolleiflex cameras. When I was a child growing up in North Carolina during the early fifties, he’d acknowledge me only if I was in his direct path.
February 2009
The Three Ages Of Woman
Once a man promised to wait all day for me at Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica, to wait all day and into the night for me to arrive. I was taking an overnight bus from Prague to Venice, then a water taxi from the bus to the train station, and finally a train from Venice to Rome. We had no idea how long it would take.
December 2008
Somewhere In His Eyes
Somewhere in his eyes I see the five-year-old that he once was. I see him in the back of a kindergarten class, pacing, unable to sit down. I see him at home, leaning on the arm of a chair as his daddy blows marijuana smoke into his nostrils. Later he staggers around the room, making the grown-ups laugh.
November 2008
Seven Days: A Diary
We already know that our lives will not be as they were before September 11. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, a deep, long crack appeared in the old reality. The muffled roar of everything that might burst out can be heard through the crack: violence, cruelty, fanaticism, and madness. The wish that we might keep what we have, keep up a daily schedule, suddenly seems exposed and vulnerable. The effort to maintain some sort of routine — to keep family, home, friends together — now seems so touching, even heroic.
October 2008The Magic-Makers Of Havana
In a globalized world of interlocking economies, is it possible for a culture to evolve at its own pace, or does change come in only two packages: fast-tracked by corporate-sponsored leaders, or arrested entirely by dictators and juntas? I’ve seen savvy indigenous communities in Ecuador and Chiapas, Mexico, incorporate what they like of the outside world and reject the rest, but can this be done on the scale of an entire country? Is there even a possibility that Cuba can preserve its culture while opening to the world, to dissent, to change?
October 2008
The Piano
We had been preparing for months, slowly ridding ourselves of possessions we had once thought essential. By the time we left, everything that was ours fit into three brown vinyl suitcases. My parents told me this would be enough, but, like so much they said, these words of comfort were not particularly plausible. Still, there was consolation. On our last day in Russia, as the fall of 1979 slid into winter, my brother Viktor lost his piano.
March 2008
Circus Act
“In the circus,” photographer Gordon Stettinius writes, “reality becomes mutable and life an illusion. . . . Everything is not necessarily what it purports to be. But then, what is?”
February 2008
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