And again, I've been looking through old photos, in my search for images to use for the piece with Allen. Today we finally looked at things together and he handed me a disc with about 4 minutes of music. It's fantastic. But to that, tomorrow. For tonight, I wanted to post some photos I took out the window on a train trip from New York to North Carolina in 2007, starting out at Penn Station in the cold rain of an early spring day and ending up in the South in the crepuscular light of a place that had already turned green.

Scrolling through my daily email from Boing Boing I saw a post about Houdini with this picture. Below it is a photo of my dad, taken, I think, on the occasion of his high school graduation from De Witt Clinton in New York in 1922. Looks to me like they could be related. My sense of their being connected goes beyond the fact that both photos are sepia toned. The facial structure (though Houdini doesn't have my dad's large and protruding ears, a feature, I am sorry to say, I inherited), the eyes, the hair, the musculature. Of course you can't SEE my dad's muscles, but they were there. I have a photo somewhere, where he's got what we called Popeye arms.

I've been printing for the Alice show, which doesn't go up till mid March, but I feel I need to be prepared. I have the whole show laid out and I'm printing the pieces in order. Just got to Alice with a long neck today. Here she is...

Here's the ad that appears on the inside front cover of the February issue of Modern Painters, thanks to George.
(Ooops, not inside front cover. I was mistaken. Still, it's towards the front of the magazine.)

Today, once again, I've been searching my archives for images to use for my piece with Allen. It's 2 1/2 minutes long so far, so not many images will eventually be used, and I've already collected at least 500 to choose from. Oh well, lots of editing in store. But I came across these colorful images from one of my trips to New York, taken in a window on 5th Avenue, with my image in a few of them.

Looking through thousands of photos today, starting to gather images for the collaboration I'll be doing with Allen. Here are a few things I found. And while I was in the neighborhood (of my external drive archived folders) I found this, which is a collaboration I did with Claire (and Lehmann and Vermeer), a few years ago.

Having watched (most of, we will finish it tonight) Julie & Julia last night I have been thinking, lots, about Somerville/Cambridge, circa 1975. Here we are, Allen and I, around that time...



... and thinking about riding my bike everywhere, before we had a car, or walking, to Harvard Square, the unbelievably decadent hot fudge sundaes we would get at Bailey's Ice Cream with the fudge dripping over the sides of the stemmed metal bowl to the metal plate below, mocha chip ice cream drenched in fudge and whipped cream that didn't keep me up all night from the caffein and lactose, before I was so sensitive to those elements. Allen met Julia Child around that time. Bumping into Carla Pollack at the Harvard Coop where she had just purchased Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she asked him to accompany her to Julia's house so she could get her autograph. Julia was a fixture in our lives - we watched her on TV, saw her VW Bug toodling around town with its soup ladle antenna, passing Savenor's butcher shop, where Julia bought her meat, and going in once, as a pilgrimage. Carla and Allen arrived at her house at lunchtime. She invited them in, and what Allen remembers is a wall of copper pots. She and Paul were having lunch. She signed Carla's book and they were off. Very generous of her, not to be bothered by autograph seekers. Seeker, I guess; Allen did not get her signature on anything, Claire was very disappointed to learn last night, while watching the movie and skimming through OUR two-volume set of Julia's book, quite disgusted by some goose liver pate or other such meat innard dish. Claire had been uninterested in watching the movie with us the night before so we watched something else of her choosing and grudgingly sat and watched with us at dinner last night. "Who IS she", she moaned, utterly bored at the beginning. As I said, by the end of the evening she was under Julia's spell, with Meryl Streep magically and brilliantly embodying The French Chef. Hmmmmmm, what to cook tonight....

Automotive Art

Some photos from November, when we noticed the hood of Ellis's car had turned into a canvas of sorts. Well, more like an etching plate. Reminded me of the prints I did in 1973. The car, which had been mine for 14 years but which now belongs to Ellis, was parked under a tree in our neighbor's driveway. The hood, which had been replaced a few years ago after a small fender bender Ellis had with his friend Grear, had not been painted (would have cost an extra $300) and hence seems to be doing it's own thing in terms of decay.

Rainy, cold day here after weeks of dry weather.

Saturday at Roll's Florist

I went once again to Emily's garden that she is renovating along with/under the guidance of her dad, Jeff. It was a day for volunteers to come and help with various tasks - weeding, clearing, sweeping, scraping, oiling planks for the greenhouse, whatever needs to be done, which is a lot, and for which all hands were at the ready. Well, most hands; mine, on the OTHER hand, were taking photos. I find that when I'm there every pile of old lumber, every barrel of rusted tools, every crate of wire and bolts and bobbins and tags becomes a beautiful still life. I love photographing the shadows and vines caught on the plastic sheeting covering the roof of the greenhouse, draping into the space below; like photograms, sepia toned images behind veils of light.