It seems to be a week of male celebrities getting naked for commercial pursuits, and I’m not complaining. Here is Hugh Jackman getting nude for R.M. Williams Boots. Mr. Jackman has been half-naked here before a number of times (click here, here and not here but it’s so worth a click) and it’s always a treat.
These beautiful Japanese painted ferns overcame their own 2020 horror story, as early on in the summer season some animal ate them down to the ground. As evidenced here, they recovered in a valiant, and gorgeous, show of defiance and resilience. The afternoon sun of October shows them off to great splendor, and is a reminder that somehow nature endures, no matter how much awfulness humans, and non-humans, may attempt to inflict.
The Japanese painted fern’s delicate beauty belies its hardiness. From a single small specimen planted several years ago, this clumps has expanded, notably by spores – popping up in damp unexpected places (such as around the pool pump) and I’ve managed to transplant them successfully. A couple now populate the side yard garden, lending an additional Japanese element to a space now planted with bamboo, Japanese aralia, and a Japanese maple. It is the peaceful portion of our yard, shaded from the hot afternoon sun, filled with subtle performers who express themselves in soft shades of green and architectural interest rather than boffo-blooms of hot pink or fiery orange. That sort of quiet and respite is necessary in the summer months.
Here’s what the Phony Negroni looks like when you use a blood orange – it’s a bit deeper and richer in hue than the one that uses a typical orange. I prefer this, as it steers the color closer to the traditional, where Campari adds such a rich shade. We will stock up on blood oranges this season. Such prettiness deserves to be repeated.
Rob Gronkowski has come close to this before, posing naked here and here and here, and in this manscaping commercial he pretends to expose a bit more. It’s a nifty little reminder that manscaping matters, even in the age of COVID.
“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Some of the angst I’ve been feeling was explained in the weekly recap yesterday, but not all of it, and I’ve felt so icky about the past few days that I’m going to excise a bit more here. Since it was supposed to start with a once-a-year-get-together with a family friend and end with a fun couple of days in Boston, sitting glued to the television and watching the news was probably a poor idea, and I have no one to blame but myself.
I ended up staying home due to Boston’s rising Covid numbers, our family get-together was cut slightly short, and the Harvest Moon was in full effect. For three days I mostly watched the news, and it was the perfect recipe for a run-down funk. Wallowing in the misery of our country, I broke through my vegetative state only for meditation, a couple of meals, showers, and a smudging. I’ll get into that another time, I think, as it was a minor point in the weekend. Better than that was sausage and pasta dinner Andy made on Sunday afternoon, and the shared commiseration as we watched the news together.
Those quiet moments took the place of dinners out and shopping excursions on Newbury Street. The occasional walk around the yard, when the sun was slanting low in the afternoon, punctuated my lounging, but the extensive inactivity fed upon itself, and I gave in to the laziness of the weekend. And it was such a pretty weekend, it felt like a bit of a waste, and a bit like it played out exactly as it needed to play out.
Lenny Kravitz should have been featured here a few times before now, because he’s simply amazing. Today he gets a post because a recent fitness magazine spread has everyone envious about the abs he’s showing off at age 56. I should be so lucky to find such muscles at 45. Anyway, let this be an inspiration to all of us.
A full Harvest Moon is nothing to fuck around with, and so the insanity of the past week was not wholly unexpected. I did not take that into consideration when I planned to spend the weekend in Boston, so when the COVID numbers started to rise, I decided against the trip, but took the day off from work anyway. That turned out to be a good thing, not only because I honestly didn’t realize how badly I needed a break, but I also didn’t know Andy and I would be glued to the television seeing Trump being transferred to the hospital and watching his team of doctors spew lies and tales of obfuscation. A good doctor will not lie or give a rosy account of their patient; these are not good doctors. But that’s on them, and deceiving the American people about the health of the President rarely works out well.
As far as days off go, it wasn’t quite as relaxing as I would have liked, but I have a number of vacation days I need to use before the end of the year, so we will try this again soon enough. The moon exhibited its tumultuous full-force in more ridiculous family drama, but you’ve heard it all before so I won’t get into that yet. On with the recap…
Keeping with the craziness of 2020, here is an azalea in bloom right now.
Floral preparation and planning.
Unimpressed with snickerdoodles.
All lives won’t matter until Black Lives Matter.
I have a huge problem with people who write ‘All Lives Matter’ in response to or even in conjunction with ’Black Lives Matter.’ First of all, all lives won’t matter until Black Lives Matter. Second, that’s like responding to a ‘Save the Whales’ comment with ‘Save All The Animals’. It’s dumb and completely misses the point. As for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it is very much needed, and will be for quite some time. History has shown it, and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor continue to show it.
“People still get shot because of their color – people still get mistrusted because of their religion – people still get sneered at because of their gender and sexuality. Does this look like a civilized world? We may have the tangible brain capacity to build a civilized world, but we are not there yet, and we are not going to reach that destination any time soon. However, the work must begin now.†―
I hate snickerdoodles. What is the point of them? One of the greatest disappointments in life is the realization that snickerdoodles have nothing to do with Snickers candy bars. That’s one of life’s little fuckovers. And is there a more dull and boring cookie in existence? I mean, cinnamon. And blandness. Big whoop.
The walls back then were an unabashed bordello red. I tried tempering it with a rag-off technique, but there’s just so much one can rag off when blood red is splattered over all the plaster. It didn’t translate to most photos anyway, so for all intents and purposes it was as red as the reddest rose. The kitchen, adjacent but for an occasional curtain (at the time it was purple velvet, I believe) was a bright Kelly green. The recessed lights glowed warmly, bouncing off the shiny wooden floors and lending more visual heat in a Boston fall which grew colder and colder with each passing day. This then was the condo in the fall of 1997, a mostly uneventful pocket of time – and one that is slightly hazy for its lack of memorable events. I’d just gone around the world in the first half of the year, and now I was back in Boston a little lost and a little found.
On the stereo, the new Janet Jackson CD spun its challenging music and concepts, and the title track provided the aural backdrop to a photo shoot for that year’s holiday card. The song became a fall staple, bringing me back to that cozy evening, where I made myself one of the first true martinis I ever had, as much as in service to the photo as to the desire to try something new. I didn’t do a very good job. Consulting Mr. Boston’s book of cocktails, I found the requisite ingredients (gin and dry vermouth from a recent party) but didn’t have any ice readily made, so I tried it without. (I know, I know – one, how was there a time when I didn’t have ice on hand, and two, what on earth was I thinking to make a martini without chilling it?)
Early days. Fledgling kills. Myriad mistakes.
It went down my throat like fire, and I cringed. What in hell was this all about? What the fuck was wrong with James Bond? And why would anyone drink this? I set up the camera and posed, the martini would mostly be a prop that night, and I sipped a few more sips for photographic documentation. Wearing an acid green 60’s/70’s wide-collar shirt in swirls of psychedelic paisley, I had on a pair of matching tights. Yeah, tights. These shots would end up on the cutting-room floor, as the outfit wasn’t quite reading the way I wanted it to – the final holiday card would show me in a more dramatic ostrich feather robe, and a blue cocktail in hand (composed mostly of Windex and quite clearly for looks only). It was the 90’s. I was a fucking mess, but I didn’t see it then.
Ms. Jackson sang of the need to belong, and ‘Velvet Rope’ became one of my main songs that fall, mostly due to this single evening of solitude in the condo, continuing a tradition of fall songs that came to signal the shift in seasons, and the short path to the holidays. There was a coziness to it, and a certain dramatic flair that came with the falling leaves and the harsher winds.
Outside, Boston twinkled and glowed in the night – as my head danced with visions of those holidays to come, the friends and family I’d get to see, and a time we would be together again. This distance – of time and space – kept me feeling safe. I didn’t need the martini as anything more than a prop, and on that night I didn’t even bother to finish it. Feeling a twinge of waste as I poured it down the kitchen sink drain, I couldn’t stomach finishing it, as lovely as I suddenly felt.
The rest of the ‘Velvet Rope’ album played out in the background as I cleaned up and gathered the rolls of film for developing. (Does anyone remember 35mm film anymore? Oh you kids – you had no idea how much work we once had to go through to get a decent image…) It ended with something called ‘Special’ – an echo of the sentiment of ‘Velvet Rope’ – and this remains one of Ms. Jackson’s under-appreciated jewels. This too became a song of that fall, and every fall afterward.
“You see, you can’t run away from your pain, because wherever you will, there you will be. You have to learn to water your spiritual garden. Then, you will be free.” ~ Janet Jackson
Hidden behind an arbor made of the boughs of an Easter Pine and a Coral-Barked Maple tree, the side yard of our house, behind the wooden fence, is one of the relatively uninhabited and unused sections of our small property. It comes into prominence mostly at this time of the year, when the sun slants prettily through the oak leaves and the maple lights up its corner with a brilliant show of bright chartreuse color, echoing its spring emergence in one of those parallels only nature can conjure without seeming trite.
In this space, the sun can bake the ground a bit when it’s clear during the day, and the scent of pine needles and pine cones rises like a batch of potpourri emblematic of a cozy fall day. I favor this place at this time of the year, and I pause here in my daily ambulations, taking in the afternoon light, the fading warmth of the year.
“We like to filter new information through our own experiences to see if it computes. If it matches up with what we have experiences, it’s valid. If it doesn’t match up, it’s not. But race is not a universal experience. If you are white, there is a good chance you may have been poor at some point in your life, you may have been sick, you may have been discriminated against for being fat or being disabled or being short or being conventionally unattractive, you may have been many things—but you have not been a person of color. So, when a person of color comes to you and says “this is different for me because I’m not white,” when you run the situation through your own lived experience, it often won’t compute. This is usually where the desire to dismiss claims of racial oppression come from—it just doesn’t make sense to you so it cannot be right.
But if you are white, and you are feeling this way, I ask you this: is your lived experience real? Are the situations you’ve lived through real? Are your interpretations of those situations valid?…So if your lived experience and your interpretation of that lived experience are valid, why wouldn’t the lived experience of people of color be just as valid? If I don’t have the right to deem your life, what you see and hear and feel, a lie, why do you have the right to do that to me? Why do you deserve to be believed and people of color don’t?†― Ijeoma Oluo
Asters remind me of fall in Maine.
There’s a small little shaded nook that’s on the path to the Marginal Way.
While technically the space is heavily trafficked, most people rush on by for the more dramatic gardens further down the path, and for the sea itself, crashing against the rocky outcroppings. There is also a little grove of trees that lowers some of its limbs to somewhat obscure the purple asters, the kind seen here in some sunlight.
I needed this memory right now. We also needed Maine this year, but COVID circumstances have kept us home. Seeing these asters the other day brought it all back…
In its somewhat secretive spot, the asters in Ogunquit winked only to those of us who noticed them. You had to slow down a bit, and you had to look a little closer. In the shade, the purple hues were even better at hiding than had they been conspicuously in the spotlight of the sun. Their shyness resonates with me.
For many years, this would traditionally be the time when we’d be preparing for our fall trip to Maine, packing for temperatures that could swing dizzily from eighty-degree beach days to thirty-degree night flurries. The same held true for our Memorial Day weekend visits, so we are accustomed to bringing a little of everything.
In the smiling faces of these asters, I see those happy days again. I recall lazily rolling out of bed and trundling along to Amore Breakfast with Andy, and I can picture the leaves beneath our feet, the receding frost as the sun ascends. I remember our siestas in the knotty pine room, when I’d return from Bread and Roses with some coffee for Andy and a cookie for later.
Nowadays it’s Andy who makes the coffee in our kitchen as fall whips through the fountain grass outside the window, shaking the finches still clinging to the seedbeds of the cup plant. They seem as sad to see summer go by as we are, but it’s warm inside, and our focus shifts cozily to the warm hearth…
Happily, these three favorite people of mine are still dining out and about whenever possible, and in whatever manner and means this new world demands. The featured photo is from a sunny October weekend visit to Amore Breakfast in Ogunquit, something we will look to do again possibly next year, because there is always hope. All four of us keenly felt our extended absence from Ogunquit this year – it’s been too long, and we can’t wait to return when things get back to normal, or at least into a mode of new normality.
The other photos are from a recent birthday dinner at Yono’s, which is probably our favorite Albany restaurant (tied perhaps with dp: An American Brasserie) and I put them up here to remind myself as much as anyone else the importance of family at such times. In the next few weeks, when our country tears itself apart and who knows what may come of it, I find myself retreating and relying on those who mean the most to me – the family and the friends I have made into my family – and that’s how I’m getting through it.
Luckily, I have Andy to help see us through the difficult times, and operating under a safe veil of social isolation and a quarantine-like fortress, we will batten down the hatches and hole up in our home for the fall and winter to come. We will be all right. We have to be.
One of the unheralded joys of the Chinese dogwood tree is its crop of fruit. While not genuinely viewed as edible (the fibrous fruits don’t taste awful as much as their pithy texture makes them undesirable) they are enjoyed by birds and squirrels, which have been going crazy for this year’s crop of bright red berry-like fruit.
For humans, they are more ornamental than functional, and they’re like a second round of blooms before the foliage lights itself on ghostly fire. It’s one of the many charms held by the Chinese dogwood tree, and why we have several in our yard. The finale is about to begin, and by the time it’s done, the buds will have been set for next spring, proof that this lovely tree is always thinking ahead. A tree after my own heart.
