Yesterday, Wide Open Spaces, today, One-Minute Play Festival (runs Mon & Tues nights, at Plays & Players, includes work by OPWer Matt  Casarino). This afternoon, a kindly worded rejection e-mail for This Is Halloween. 

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life. 

Now I've got Mo on my belly demanding attention, and so, to bed. 

Wide Open Spaces, pre-reading setup.

Later that night, Mo responded to The Cat Signal. 

I used to be good at writing. I used to have concentration and was able to build worlds with words and trying to connect each string and build upon that. Sadly, lately it's more a race to be an adult and work on things outside of what I'm trying to get done. But I'm trying, and I think that's what counts. I have projects I want to do next year, and I'm going to have them finished and prepped for getting it done. There's nothing standing in the way that can't be taken on and overcome.  I just wish it would go faster.

Took a big hit by not landing a job that would have taken me to the next level. And then on top of that, lost two more jobs of smaller importance. And I'm just sitting here thinking... Okay... one large step back, but need to put my best foot forward and jump back on track. Which means universe, I have goals and I need to meet them, so either help or get out of my way.

I have loved Richard Avedon since I lived in Pittsburgh and found his photos in a magazine (Rolling Stone, maybe) and felt like I was in the room with the subjects and they were looking at me.  I bought a huge coffee table book of his work and hauled it around for years before sadly decluttering it (I don't like coffee tables because they collect stuff, and coffee table books don't fit on bookshelves).

When Avedon took portraits, he stood next to the camera, not behind it, so that the subject was looking at a human, not a lens.  He fixed them with his intense gaze and got back an intimate portrait, a view of their soul, if you will.  He got a genuine engagement, not just a pose.  This is one of his most famous portraits - Marilyn Monroe, except not looking like a glamour shot, looking like a vulnerable human:

I found out recently that Avedon was Jewish (he died in 2004), and that an exhibition of his portraits was in Philly at the National Museum of American Jewish History, which is around 8 blocks from my job.  The exhibit closes on Sunday, and I was determined to get there, so I took off half an hour early from work and speedwalked there in the rain so I could get half an hour in the Avedon gallery.  The exhibit lives in Israel normally and Philly is the only United States location where it will be seen.

Entitled Family Affairs, the exhibit featured portraits that Avedon had taken of Allen Ginsburg and his family.  Relevant to our other conversations, Ginsburg's father was a poet. The other part of the exhibit was a set of 69 portraits entitled, "The Family."

Rolling Stone tasked Avedon with election coverage leading up to the 1976 Presidential Election and paired him with a writer to do so.  What he did, instead of illustrating articles, was to take 69 portraits of the people who he thought were relevant to the election, including many faces the public never saw.  As an example of his perspective on history, of how visionary he was, he clearly did not take pictures of every politician, but he did photograph Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (though Bush makes sense since he was the director of the CIA at the time).  He photographed Jules Stein, the head of MCA Records, Donald Rumsfeld, Pete Rozelle (head of the NFL, creator of Monday Night Football), Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, the head of the teamsters union, the head of the mine workers' union, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm ...

Anyway, he photographed the power and the power behind the power.  He saw the wheels turning inside the machine, he didn't just see what came out on the conveyor belt at the end of the line.  My father also has that perspective, he looks at world events and sees the underlying issues and what is really at stake.  I admire them both.

I want to submit this assemblage to the MoMA with the title, stuff my mom is holding on to in case my Grandmom comes back. ​

Out with:

• facebook
  
• reddit
  
• imgur
  
• twitter
  
• instgram
  
• netflix
  
• amazon instant video
• fark

Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, except to clear space for...

In with:

• onepostwonder
  
• khanacademy
  
• github
  
• https://berniesanders.com/news/
• news.ycombinator
• project euler
• goodreads
• rmbryan.com

I've always loved that California uses the letter Q on license plates (is it the only state to do so?). They make it a bit smaller than the other letters to better emphasize the squiggly thing that cuts through diagonally on the lower right corner of the Q, and said diminutive size makes it extremely cute! Click here for a photo I found on the internet illustrating the Q.

Well, I finally decided to make my move here official and get California plates last week, and wouldn't you know it, by sheer marvelous luck of the draw, I got a Q! I am thrilled!

So now I'm a member of The Q Club. The Q club, while a small minority, still comprises many members--the only thing is, none of them (to my knowledge) even knows about the club, or that they are in it. So I guess that makes me the de facto president of The Q Club.

I guess one other member knows about it--a woman in one of my dance classes has a Q, and I showed her my new plates the other day and told her that "see, now we are both in The Q Club." She smiled, although I'm not sure if it was from pleasure with her newfound knowledge about her membership in a club she hadn't known about before, or just pity.

And now, if you will excuse me, I will go about the rest of my wonderful president-of-The-Q-Club day!