Easter Redux

Sorry, Easter. Sorry I never managed to come up with a firm, reliable tradition for you. Besides the baskets-full-of-candy-dyed-egg-thing, I mean. And that is almost good enough for the entire day. But we've never quite figured it all out. Is Easter a BIG holiday? Do we invite all the family over for a BIG dinner? We have a few times, either here or at another house (apparently we all all similarly inclined towards confusion about the nature of celebrating Easter...) but the traditon never took hold for any of us. I am thinking a few things here.

1. Easter is just too religious for our family. Christmas is nice as it is at base, simply a celebration of a birth. Easter flat out celebrates one of the miracles of Christianity and none of us are actual believers. So greeting someone with a "Happy Easter!" seems almost hypocritical, particularly if you are not handing them jelly beans or Hershey eggs.

2. The weather is so unreliable here. Today we have light fluffy snow falling. Pretty! It is quite the Currier and Ives scene. And listen! Is that the sound of snowplows grinding down the streets? Pretty far removed from spring grasses and tulips and little girls in pastel-colored dresses collecting flowers from the garden. (Although I do have a memory of lilies of the valley in bloom once during my childhood. Must have been an extremely late Easter that year.) And Easter egg hunts? A foreign concept here due to winter condition prevailing the majority of the time.

3. The date is so terribly changeable. My understanding is that we have t least a four week span here--I decline to go consult a perpetual calendar (though I do love those things)-- but I am certain Easter has been held as late as April 19. And today of course is March 23. This gigantic gap messes with the holiday spirit in a dangerous way for some of us. We need more predictibility!

4. Never figured out what to eat for Easter dinner. There was a long span of vegetarianism around here and the idea of a ham or a lamb roast was just too meaty to contemplate. Turkey (although not a vegetable, yes, I do undestand that) was an alternative but...nah. How about piles of candy instead? Got to get to work on those chocolate rabbits sometime. Make it today, around six PM!

Sorry, Easter. But thanks for all the candy anyway.

St. Augustine Triple Exposure

When I started digging around my hard drive looking at photos to make into triple exposures, it dawned on me that photos that didn't really work on their own for one reason or another--bad focus, too dark, off-center subject-- were ideal candidates for layering with other images. This one uses a close-up of James,  Jacksonville at sunset seen from the freeway, and the Indian River logo from a store selling citrus. Piled together, they evoke  the sleepy funky nature of our trip to St. Augustine.

Triple Exposure

September 15, 2009 was my dad's 90th birthday. I know, awesome! And he really is an amazing man--handsome and smart. We had a party that was pretty fabulous and I got some fairly good shots. It happened that right around that time I figured out how to create a type of triple "exposure" by layering photos and messing with the opacity. This one features my dad and his birthday cake, my nephew James taking photos (so meta!) and, less obviously, some Norwegian candy emblazoned (naturally)with Norwegian script that James brought back from a trip to Scandinavia. It's really wonderful for me to show these triple layer photos to people and to observe how intently the picture is studied. It can be work to find all three elements but people are invariably excited to do it.

Every Nail & Staple Tells A Story

You've seen a thousand of these, I know. Telephone poles on street corners, with "Lost Dog" or "Handyman for Hire" notices stapled on. I've been awed by the simply uncountable number of tacks that evidence a neighborhood's long, long history of missing pets and men in need of work. And look at this pole--look at the texture! Want to run your hands over it, don't you? I mean bleeding palms aside, I know I'd like to, but I can't. I know exactly where I took this photo but a day or so later I drove by and was shocked to see that this pole was gone. Ripped right out of the ground. Making way for new street corner technology, I presume

Washington Avenue Bridge/Weisman Museum

We're on the Washington Avenue Bridge crossing the Mississippi River and that pile of hammered together metal shapes is the wonderful little Weisman Art Museum, designed by Frank Gehry. It sits on the East Bank of the University of Minnesota and picks up the blue of the sky (and the water, when not frozen) pretty intensely, all day long. I've got to try and get a photo of it when the sun is setting--it must look like it's on fire!

Like the tilt?

Roadside Winter Landscape

I like the way this photo came out--it's bleak and busy at the same time.

Sound of Music, Redux

Full disclosure--just ate an M&M off the floor.

Also, can't stop thinking about "The Sound of Music" which aired on network TV last night. You all know the story, right? Young Fraulein Maria Wants-to-be-a-nun is sent by her convent's abbess to be governess for the emotionally dead dead dead Captain Von Trapp and his seven resentful offspring. Maria immediately brings MUSIC! back into their life. The Captain is so grateful he dumps his savvy, svelte rich blonde Baroness to marry boyish Fraulein Maria with her sensible shoes andlove of syrupy Tyrolean ballads. Sadly, I missed the first ten minutes of the movie so I didn't get to hear the gang of nuns back at the abbey dissing Maria in that song called How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria which incidentally we hear them sing at her wedding a mere three hours later! It's a fairly passive aggressive little ditty in which the other nuns all bond by making up mean stuff about Maria (...underneath her wimple...she wears curlers in her hair!--oh she does not--her hair is like two inches long!) before the Mother Superior kicks her out and sends her off to catch a bus to the Von Trapp compound. For her trip away from the convent Maria carries a carpet bag she stole from Mary Poppins and wears an odd, pieced-leather hat, sort of a snug fitting beanie with a huge floppy brim. Perfect for warding off rain and sun and attention from the opposite sex! I kid. She's totally cute and the hat is actually kind of appealing in a Curious George Man With the Big Yellow Hat kind of way

Anyway, I noticed a few little things I hadn't before, in all my many, many viewings of this classic musical starring the lovely and sexless Julie Andrews. Such as--oh my god, the butler is a Nazi! And an informer! He's constantly prowling around the Von Trapp mansion lifting an eyebrow and then before you know it there's a Nazi officer at the door asking probing questions about the Captain's sex life. Also, every single male cast member is outfitted in snug pants and was definitely directed to play it homosexual. Captain VonTrapp? Prissy and gay. Uncle Max? Flamboyant and gay. Fourteen-year-old Friedrich? Repressed and gay. Ten-year-old Kurt? Adorable and gay.

The movie is endless and is full of disturbing close-ups of Maria in which the Gaussian blur is so thick I kept turning the TV volume up so I could hear through it. Oh, but then the Captain gets behind the blur so they can smooch--just a little!--and rub foreheads together because that is spelled out in Julie's contract--"for every event where my lips must meet those of my co-star I stipulate no less than four(4) instances of upper cranial contact lasting at least twenty seconds." You just know Julie's kinky, in a sleep-with-stuffed-animals-until-she's-forty kind of way.

So what got me through the long, long LONG three hours of prancing and sneering from Captain Von Trapp (played by the perpetually annoyed Christopher Plummer)? Three solid hours of watching all seven Von Trapp children parade around outfitted in amazingly ugly "playclothes" that gifted needlewoman Maria whipped up from her bedroom curtains (um, Scarlett O'Hara ripoff or what)? Incidentally the "children" include a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old girl who spends the entire movie plotting to get her junior Nazi boyfriend (panicky and gay) to notice her. Tip--lose the chartreuse-paisley-apron-front dirndl, honey.

I don't know. I lay back on the pillows of my bed, tossing back cough drops in a contented stupor. The Sound of Music is just a beautiful movie. Those damn awesome alps, the camera swooping us here and there up amidst the clouds and down amongst the edelweiss. The charming town of Salzburg with its, its --is that a Roman Coliseum the family performs in? Amazing. The cobblestone streets and the old buildings and the stunningly symmetrical VonTrapp family mansion... just perfect. Oh and the gorgeous wedding in the enormous Gothic Abbey--sigh. It is all so ornate yet simple and lovely. I couldn't tear myself away, not even to watch Battle Tomato on Iron Chef. And when the entire family trudges across the Alps to Switzerland to escape the Nazis I sat straight up and drank in every detail of the scene. I cheered for them. They're going to make it! Hurrah for freedom! And lederhosen! Hurrah for strudel and schnitzel! And warm copper kittens!

(Wait--how does that song go?)




Originally posted January 9, 2009