Eclipsed, Massachusetts

I wish I could witness the total eclipse on August 21, but I'll have to make do with a partial experience in my home city. It doesn't help that Annie Dillard wrote in her brilliant 1982 essay 'Total Eclipse': "Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him." Oh well.

Eclipses are dramatic because they connect polar opposites. We expect the sun and moon to revolve in harmony. When the moon obstructs the sun, it breaks every rule we know about nature. It's unbalancing. Dillard wrote that seeing the eclipse in Yakima, Washington was like "slipping into a fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering."

Night skies of textured velvet can also feel like fever dreams. Vaporous skies fascinate me. I took this photo through our windshield as we drove in a purple haze late into the night. It felt to me like clouds were devouring the moon—a midnight of the soul. Then I remembered that both clouds and moon were in fact lit by the sun.

Profiled, New York

With our torrent of selfies, a humble paper-cut profile can feel as retro as a manual typewriter. But when I saw these friends and travelers silhouetted against the Lincoln Center fountain on a beautiful August night, I was absorbed by their inky shadows. The subtle yet compelling profiles made me nostalgic for restraint—for whispering instead of shouting, for listening over talking, for reflection over tweeting, and even for black-and-white over color. I decided the couple on the left was on a first date, the two women in the middle were cherished old friends, and the man on the left was an exhausted but happy tourist. I remember a wonderful teacher who told troublemakers, "Can you get my attention in a positive way?" That's what this group silhouette did for me, quietly and stealthily, until I realized I was not only mesmerized but becalmed.

Transplant, New York

Have you ever gone to bed in one place and woken up in another? I don't mean mind-glazing benders, but rather sleep or travel induced changes of location. I have wonderful childhood memories of surprise return. You are driven home, say, from a county fair with your head wedged awkwardly on the back seat armrest and your feet piled on your brother's. Suddenly bright morning is here and your head rests gently on your own soft bed pillow. You might have a vague memory of being slung over the magic carpet of your father's shoulder in the dark, but really the whole thing is so surprising that you wonder if yesterday was dreamed. 

Overnight arrival in a new place is more dislocating. You fall asleep on a plane, train or ship and you wake up to strangely invasive foreign sounds and smells. I once traveled to Chicago on an overnight railroad car and was stunned by the changes outside my window come morning. Or maybe you arrive at night somewhere, and when the next day comes, you awake to a jaw-dropping view you hadn't seen in the dark.

This lovely striped cucumber beetle traveled to my city kitchen on a berth of vibrant green and yellow squash blossoms from Wells Homestead farm in Aquebogue, Long Island. All I could think of was his immense surprise. He tucked into a soft blossom in a farm field under the stars at night, and ended up in Manhattan in the morning. It seemed cruel to kill him, so I captured him in a deli container and carried him outside to a new home in verdant Riverside Park. Long may he munch.

On The Fly, Millbrook

Hot air ballooning and baseball are not as different as you'd think. They both seduce you into searching a blue summer sky with joy and excitement. Time stands still—as in music or poetry— as you trace the fleeting arc of the soaring ball. The higher it flies, the more your feet don't touch the ground. The world around you quiets and disappears. For a moment, your heart is suspended in air and nothing else matters. And you think, this is weightlessness, what it feels like to fly.  This is being six-years-old and lying smack flat on the grass to absorb the sky.  This is summer, unfettered. 

This emerald green hot air balloon floated out of nowhere above a friend's country lawn in Millbrook, New York, and we all ran out to admire it. We could barely see the people in the bucket, but we waved anyway. The boldly striped flying machine looked down on us and towering evergreens with complete superiority. We were insignificant, but we didn't care. We listened to it inhale and exhale loudly, whooshing like a giant doing yoga. It was above us for just a half-dozen breaths, and then it sailed out of our patch of cumulus-filled sky. Even after it left, a little bit of it stayed, like a memory of a home run. We had more space inside us.

See if you agree. Check out this beautiful National Geographic short film by Joel Schat of a New Mexican hot air balloon festival by clicking here.

Housing Crisis, Boston

My first thoughts were of Dorothy when I came across this sunflower yellow Quaker-style house askew in the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston. Was there a dead Brahmin stuck underneath? Actually, all Oz allusions were accidental, according to Brooklyn artist Mark Reigelman. He created this art piece, "The Meeting House," from traditional building materials like Eastern white cedar and birch plywood to reference both the residential disruption caused by highway infrastructure projects and the healing qualities of communal civic structures.

As work and chores migrate to the web, I think places where people can gather and talk face to face and make progress as a community become even more appreciated. I've noticed that inviting lounges and shared worktables are super trendy, not just in expected places like hotel lobbies and coffee shops, but also in museums and even gyms. MoMA's new renovation, for example, adds 25-percent more public space, including a stunning second floor cafe and first floor lobby lounge. The stylish entrance space of my newly madeover Equinox gym fuses hotel lobby with high-tech workspace. Gym members give fingers and minds a workout while sitting at long shared work tables with electric outlets, rows of marble cafe tables or on stylish black upholstered chaise lounges. You could spend all day at the gym without breaking a sweat.

The irony is that people using these public work spaces often line up next to each other staring at glowing screens like toddlers in parallel play, communing without communicating. I call it public isolation. Perhaps if a large Meeting House landed in their midst they would put down their screens and talk to each other, which is why I think some people secretly love disasters. When you contrast Reigelman's colorful small house with the large impersonal glass skyscrapers in the distance, which one would you rather play in?

Banana Fish, MA

I've always had a bemused appreciation of carved radishes, pumpkins, watermelons and other spectacular examples of the celebrated Asian and European art of fruit carving. I mean, really, who doesn't love a watermelon turned into a samurai head? However, it's not often you run across a carved banana, and this abstract fruit art from Henrietta's Table in Cambridge, Massachusetts was my first encounter. First, I saw a deboned fish. Next, I saw a caterpillar. The longer I stared, the more it became a Rorschach banana with infinite possibilities.  A dinosaur backbone? A slightly gooey snake?  An intricate wooden block toy puzzle? What do you see? And, more radically, the next time you pick up a knife to cut your summer fruit, what could you make?

Ski Fourth, Aspen

Aspenites, apparently, don't need snow to ski. They just strap themselves in their skis to the rack on their car. But at least they get to hold poles. This Aspen rooftop skier is certainly telemarking his independence (From Britain? From winter?) in the town's annual July 4th parade. Or perhaps he's a dog lover making a sly homage to Mitt Romney's Irish Setter, Seamus? Whatever you think, it's little feats of homegrown ingenuity like roof-rack skiing that lead everybody to love a parade. I took this photo last year, but it stayed on my mind. This year I went to the beach. I wasn't about to follow in this guy's shoes.

High Anxiety, NYC

I imagine the small black sedan parked first. Next, the orange aerial platform truck lowered the boom. Both were tucked in for the night. Either way, the scene is the textbook definition of suspense. And a creative interpretation, too, of "double parking."

Followed, NYC

The minute you enter the vast dark space of "Hansel and Gretel" at the Park Avenue Armory, you have that creepy back-of-your-neck feeling that somebody or something is watching you. Indeed, somebody is. You are being surveilled by overhead night vision cameras and flying drones, and your image is being live-streamed not only to an exhibition room at the front of the Armory, but also to the Internet public here. Above, I'm taking a photo of myself surveilled taking a photo. My image is being captured from above in total darkness and projected in ghostly white onto the armory's floor.

The unsettling installation was conceived and designed by artist/activist Ai Weiwei and starchitects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to raise questions about the amount of surveillance used not only in war, but in our public spaces. I saw the exhibit the morning after I saw a theater version of George Orwell's "1984" at the Hudson Theater. It was a double helping of art-induced paranoia, courtesy of Big Brother.

It made me wonder who else is watching us, and where? Alexa? Your iPhone? The hobbyist's drone outside your apartment window (yes, this really happened to a friend of mine). The bugged guest room of your host's art-filled glass house (in Elizabeth Strout's new novel, Anything is Possible)? Can we have dignity without privacy? Does spying erode empathy? Let's ask and answer these essential questions before anything becomes possible.

Still Life, NYC

I was walking in the park when I passed this stock-still bench sitter. If he were a sculpture, I'd call him "The Meditator."  The idea of art imitating life is as old as Aristotle, but what I saw here flipped it on its back: Life was imitating art. The meditator's softly rounded back and relaxed, still presence reminded me of the lifelike sculptures of Duane Hanson, or in this case, a happier younger version of Hanson's  "Man on Bench". I wondered what the artist, who died in 1996, could have created in the past 15 years if he had lived into the iPhone era. I think he would have fun with tourists and the selfie-stick. Suddenly I started seeing contemporary flesh and blood Hansons everywhere. I saw one in the stationary young woman huddled over a tripod taking a photo of the grass. In the inert, wall-leaning texter hunched over his iPhone. In the becalmed children absorbed by an iPad game on the subway. And then I realized that portable phones and screens turn us into frozen statues more often than we know.  Technology has a Midas touch. A quiet tech-free meditation in the park may be the perfect antidote.

All Stars

My heart goes out to Betty. She was a mild-mannered saleswoman with a halo of grey curls who rang up a few houseware items for me. I was stunned to get this request to rate her a day later by email. I had to struggle to remember her. I guess our  interaction was fairly "seamless," though I did have to wait in line and fish out a credit card. I certainly wouldn't rank it "world-class"–not Betty's fault. So what would that make my rating? A three? A two?

Who said knockout interactions should be the goal, anyway? Sometimes I don't want anything more than a three-star interaction. Perky and relentless five-star pleasantries can be downright exhausting. Take the passive-aggressive "have a nice day!" or the too-friendly waitress who interrupts every story just as you're getting to the punch line. Someone's five is another's three. Trust me, the needs of the general public are varied and unreliable. The general public should not have rating power.

I fantasize that when Betty was growing up in Oklahoma, she learned if you didn't have something nice to say about somebody, you didn't say it at all.  It seems to me like living hell that every retail interaction she now has in later life is rated. 

Worse than video surveillance, this is attitude surveillance. It is soulless and blood-sucking and has got to stop. Nobody should have to be excellent all the time.

Yet the bottomless maw of voracious big data must be fed. Hotels, restaurants, college reunions, airport security, and Uber drivers all beg for ratings via button, app and email. In fact, some services, like Uber, are rude enough to rate you behind your back. You, the customer! Who knows what other sneaky secret ratings are going on. Did you smile and say thank you as you picked up your latte? Did you make a good shoe statement at that trendy restaurant? Maybe you are actually a three as a customer. Or a two. How does that make you feel?  

I can tolerate annoying surveys about places and experiences, but I draw the line at rating humans. It's inhuman. Fight back by giving everyone and everything all stars. Betty, here's five for you. 

On Guards

Museum guards are an under-appreciated bunch. They're essential to protecting and preserving art, but we art lovers barely acknowledge their presence. They are trained to be inconspicuous, and we may pass right by them without seeing them. That's bad. Not only are we denying their physicality, we are also failing to notice the details of the entire picture. They, and us, deserve more.

Artist Fred Wilson's experience as a museum guard in college lead him to create a piece that put the dynamic of the hidden guard front and center.  His 1991 work "Guarded View" (now in the Whitney Museum of Art's permanent collection) shows four headless black mannequins in real uniforms from New York City museums. As Wilson remarked, "[There's] something funny about being a guard in a museum. You're on display but you're also invisible." Wilson further proved his point by showing up to give a tour of the Whitney in a guard's uniform. He was well-known in the art world at the time, but the people who eagerly awaited his tour failed to recognize him.

If museums train us to "see," shouldn't we start with the people inside them? We need to embrace an entirely new etiquette, I think, regarding our interactions with the people who help make public viewing of art possible. A polite head nod or a smile would probably do it.

Some guards are so spatially talented, you want to applaud them. At the Louise Lawler show, WHY PICTURES NOW currently at MoMA, I was struck by how the guard (photo above) made graphic performance art by inhabiting the door space under an exit sign. It reminded me of the guards in their booths at Buckingham Palace. This guard's act of geometric occupation counterbalanced the spatial relationships in Lawler's adhesive vinyl wall piece, "Triangle (traced)." Impeccably dressed in black-and-white, he extends rather than distracts from the monochrome wall piece. His white shirt beneath his blazer mirrors Lawler's triangle, and his clever positioning creates a three-dimensional triangle with the black-clad art observer as the point. Thanks to this stealth performance artist, aka museum guard, I had a stunning moment where art and life perfectly intersected.

Put ons, London

I don't travel in a hat-wearing crowd. So I envy the British in their ability to preserve the tradition of making and wearing confections as ornate and extravagant as afternoon tea pastries. I stumbled across this eye-catching display of handmade black-and-white hats in the millinery department of the wonderful London department store, Fenwick (in my opinion, now far more authentically British than Harrod's). This handmade feathered fascinator by Nerida Fraiman, who has made head-turning pieces for the Paris National Opera, could be perfect for "weddings, parties, or The Races."  Of course, to need it you have to travel with the right flock. But to me it was a tiny piece of wearable art that simulates motion so perfectly it looks like a bird in flight. In fact, add a little battery power and it could turn any well-dressed female into a flying drone.

Sign, London

Along with Will Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Noel Coward, among others, the British can also lay claim to memorable (if anonymous) sign authors. Witness this sign on an iron gate outside St. James's Square in London. First there is the sweet misspelling,  "bycycle," which suggests cycling by things. So much more poetic than bicycle, which refers to the mechanics of two wheels and expands to tricycle for three wheels (hmmm, consider for a second, "trycycle"). Then there are the polite phrases, "causing obstruction,"  "danger to pedestrians," and "Please leave them elsewhere." It's the afternoon tea of signs. Who could refuse? By contrast, what would the New York City version say?  "Don't even think of parking here!" 

Tulip Garden, NYC

Flower shots can be as clichéd as sunsets and puppies.  Most of us know that. Yet, time after time, we are seduced into trying to freeze and hold captivating natural beauty. Maybe we try to grab and store it photographically because we know that memory will fail us. But so often, the photo disappoints us too. Shrunk and in 2-D, what was inspiring in real life comes out banal and unremarkable. When I saw this spectacular open tulip "singing in the rain," I couldn't help but try to capture the irrepressible joy I felt. There's nothing fancy or unusual about the shot, but I like it. Now I'm indulging myself again by posting it.

March Madness, NYC

If March looked in the mirror, what would it see? Most people think of March Madness as a basketball tournament, but I'd argue the real MM is its crazy weather. The month has a whopping identity crisis. It can't gracefully transition from winter to spring. It rages with snowstorms from its rapidly depleting stock. It taunts you with warm, jacket-shedding moments.  Erratic and volatile, it knocks you over with furious winds. Blizzards jump out of nowhere. Temperatures plunge and then rise. Snow falls furiously and then melts. Sometimes all of these things happen in one fragmented day. March can't make up its mind as it blows hot and cold. Only its bright, white light is consistent. And then, just when you can't bear it any longer,  you see crocus heads pop up through dirt or snow. March has thrown down its white flag and surrendered to spring.

Pitchers, Milan

Doesn't this colorful glass pitcher display look like rows of giant gum balls with lips and handles? And wouldn't it be convenient if gum balls did come with delicate handles? What would they be made of? My money's on rock sugar. Of course you'd have to stick your pinky out as you lifted the tiny gum ball handle to your mouth.

On and Off, Florence

Mysterious light switches annoy me everywhere I travel. But these Italian designs deliver an appealing low-tech solution. They're whimsical and speak a universal language. The efficiency (or not) of light switches has always fascinated me. When I was twelve, I was bothered by an overhead ceiling light with a switch far away from my bed. My idea was to tape a very long red ribbon to the top of the switch.  The ribbon ended at the side of my bed. By pulling down on it with a delicate tug, I could turn off the overhead light without getting up. The ribbon was one-directional and extremely low-cost, and it lasted for years. Soon switches themselves may be obsolete, due to high-tech improvements. We can already turn lights on and off by clapping, speaking, motion sensors or an off-premise smart phone. What do you think? Is turning on a light a burden or a joy?

Salad Days, Florence

I'm always looking for ideas to change up my life in little ways. You never know when that one small change will have a domino effect that leads to the big Eureka! This clear globe of colorful mixed salad totally amused me. It was served at breakfast in our small Italian hotel. It reminded me of the little forest terrariums I used to create as a kid and also of those enticing gum ball-style machines with plastic balls containing surprise toys. Imagine if a ball with fresh greens had rolled out of the metal chute! This ingenious presentation made me stop, look and admire. Suddenly, breakfast salad seemed like a perfectly compelling idea. And it has ever since.

Red in White, NYC

An angry blizzard wraps and quiets the city, slowing its rapid pulse. Furious sheets of white whip sideways and pummel faces. Sidewalks betray feet and lay icy traps for innocents. Here and there, handcuffed bicycles signal their surrender. Parked against a curb, a bright red car shouts its resistance.