As you may have figured out, I am photographing life in Burlington as seen on the street and in the parks. You cannot have figured out that back in Linkoeping, Sweden I will do the same thing at the same times daytime and early evening in Linkoepings corresponding public places.
There are two or three things on my mind, as you may also have figured out. Here are two.
What's happening?
What is going on out there? What are people doing on a Friday and Saturday in a small city in America? Who's there? Who are the people out there? Bystanders, watchers, performers - people
Here are samples. Then I am on my way back. No time to be hanging out creating blog posts but a sample might be worthwhile.
Here is Sid, 14 years old. Playing Miles Davis Four, for example.
Here is a face, on paper. The original will be revealed tomorrow, perhaps.
And to close this off for the afternoon, here is a face and a bass.
American faces, American music - Only fitting given that it is the 4th of July tomorrow. I will celebrate early since the Clarence Demar Memorial Race takes place in South Hero at 8 AM.
Stay tuned.
July 2d - Let Me Count the Ways Continued.
In the beginning of July 2, I found Michel George of Champlain College in a transformed ice house on Battery Street. More about that another day. On leaving the Ice House, I was faced with this question- What's your passion?
I won't transcribe what I wrote but the words are the skeleton of a text on counting the ways.
Friday night on Church Street defies description. Images not yet edited will tell part of the story sometime. They will help to tell the story answering the question "What is the central experience that life in the USA, at least Church Street USA, offers that is an alternative definition of American Exceptionalism?" Not to worry, no pedagogy tonight.
Here you simply see the place to which I retreat when sensory overload threatens. Muddy Waters Coffee House on a Friday night at about 8 PM - three people, one of them in the middle with Sicilian background supplemented by St. George backup, who asked the simple question, "What pictures have you been taking?" The answer will begin tomorrow.
For the present, just wish yourself to be in this picture and say to the man in the middle "Small dark here."
I promised on the 19th of June to start writing and now on July 1 I understand that I will have to go into retirement to write everything that I want to tell the world (my one blog reader, if that). The Sufi "mystic" Rumi wrote in Farsi (Persian) that there are a hundred ways to pray, and English speaking poets have taken the liberty to express that as "There are a hundred ways to kiss the earth."
In a sense, they are one and the same statement as I hope you can see from my annual homage to my mountain, Camels Hump Mountain in Vermont. The picture was taken today at the summit but the wind was blowing so hard and the rain was driving horizontally that I only had one chance and had to take shelter a bit lower down.
That is one of the ways I love Vermont or being in Vermont.
Another way I love Vermont is that in Burlington, Vermont, I am given endless opportunities to enjoy environments like this one, Speeder Earls Coffee on Pine Street. Never in Sweden, sadly.
And here at Speeder Earls I take chances and occasionally ask a question as I did just now - no picture. A woman was engaged in discussion with two young women with magnificent corn rows (there may be a more accurate name but that is the best I can do) who looked as if they might have African roots in the sense that they, unlike the standard African-American, were born there. I asked and I was rewarded. The three were discussing something planned - perhaps - by the Vermont Multicultural Alliance for Democracy. My question always is - What languages do you speak? Here part of the answer was French, Swahili, English, and ?. Now you, my lonely reader can place them in the country to which NPR has devoted much of its day, the country freed from King Leopold Fifty years ago. They are not (yet) in the picture.
So let us hope the pictures appear here, then I must leave. But stay tuned!
I'm in the USA now and enjoying every minute of it. I have promised various people that I will start writing again here but not quite yet. I am on the Massachusetts coast - with luck there will be a pic or two here to prove that - with one new family member arriving each day. So with so much to talk about, serious blog entries will have to wait. Perhaps if I list what I want to write about I will force myself to act.
1) Enjoyable experiences without exception at each medical caregiver I visit. (Since I benefit from the USAs "Socialized medicine" called Medicaid, I make the most of the chance to check up on everything while I am here, all at no cost.)
2)The well known friendliness of all kinds of people, something that is experienced most dramatically before, during, and after each 5 km race I take part in. So far Day of Portugal last Sunday and tomorrow, the 21st Father's Day Race in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.
3)My endless unsuccessful efforts to get the New York Times to accept and publish a letter from me in which I use Sweden as a guide for Barack Obama's Clean Energy Policy, which so far is only a phrase.
So let's see if I can sign off with a picture of my beloved Horseneck Beach. There is what I see as I walk from the dunes to the beach. And perhaps there is even me in my traditional stance - celebrating!
Added 18:07 Swedish time - At the bottom of this post is the URL to the comment on the Friedman article in the New York Times to which I refer.
On the other side of the Atlantic the two major news items of the day - 5 May 2010 - are about the BP oil-rig failure in the Gulf of Mexico and the capture of the Pakistani-American said to have admitted being the "Times Square (almost) Bomber."
The BP oil-rig failure has given at least some of the "Drill baby, drill" (for oil that is) enthusiasts cause for pause. Arnold S. (the one in California) has proclaimed "Not here, not now, never." Sarah Palin has not been heard from as far as I know.
This has led me to try to find a few free minutes to begin again my small-scale campaign to find someone in The Green Mountain State (Vermont), my home-away-from-home who is truly knowledgeable about what is called here in Sweden "bergvärme" and in the USA by some as ground-source heat.
I have sent a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times (always an exercise in futility), inquiries to the Burlington Free Press (only residents may have their letters published), and even to Senator Bernie Sanders who at least seems to know what geothermal energy means.
In today's New York Times OnLine I have already read Tom Friedman's plea for serious energy policy och till min förvåning see that already the Times had approved 32 comments. (Usually no comments get approved until around 7 AM Eastern Time). I have submitted mine. Let's see what happens. (Added 18:07 - The Times readers liked my comment)
Stay tuned
URL to my comment on the Friedman article recommended by 31 of the 109 and selected by the site.
Yes, three weeks have gone by since I could report on something completely enjoyable. Since writing that entry I have listened to many of the tracks on Live at the Black Door and have ordered Tony Whedon's book from Amazon. These pleasant interludes are always played against a darker background, the daily reports of an America that seems more and more dysfunctional at home, yet fully willing to wage war half a world away.
Therefore I enter my comment just submitted to the New York Times "At War" section - NYT must approve every entry so if you were to go to the NYT OnLine and then to At War (today a box shows down on the right hand side on the first web page) you might not see my comment. I enter it here to tell anyone who might read this that that person would be well advised to go to the NPR URL further down the page and listen to one of the few people I would trust to report from Afghanistan, NPRs Soray Sahaddi Nelson who speaks Farsi and Dari and is therefore far better qualified than most to know what is going on there.
Submitted as Comment to the NYT At War
The At War entries are essential reading and should be given Front Page position. This particular entry originally titled Who Are We Fighting in Marja (still the title seen on the first web page) now corrected to Who Is Fighting in Marja is important and, of course, leads many commentators to raise the question “Why Are American Military Fighting in Marja?”
I recommend that you who are reading Who is Fighting in Marja and my entry here go ASAP to the following URL
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123898317
where you will be taken to both the transcript and the podcast of the gifted and brave Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson of NPR who reports in this podcast from her position as embedded reporter in Marja. You will hear her report on the death of a young Navajo American not long after the picture of him was taken that appears in this story.
Then you will hear something expressed by her that Barack Obama should have considered before he, Nobel Peace Prize winner, decided to become the War President in Afghanistan. Sarhaddi Nelson first corrects one military estimate that it will take 30 days “to clear” this area, stating that the estimates she heard from military officials were 60 to 90 days.
Then, much more important, she addresses the question “What exactly does ‘cleared’ mean?” She says that the supposedly cleared area is still occupied by IEDs in the ground – a few feet away – and by people – call them what you will – who are shooting from scattered locations within the cleared area. Call it \"cleared\" if you will but consider carefully what that might mean.
In short, what happens the day the military leave? I asked my Iraqi friends and my lone Afghani friend on Friday what they think. The Afghani said – leave now. Many others said that Barack Obama, who first gave them some hope, should never have made the decision to send the 30,000 even though it might well have meant he would be only a one-term president. I agree.
Whitney Balliett, long the jazz critic for The New Yorker, once, long ago, wrote a book The Sound of Surprise. That phrase SoS is never far from the surface in my memory because it so well captured what jazz has meant to me – there is always a surprise waiting just around the corner precisely when you thought the corner would not be taken by surprise.
So this is about a series of surprises that have captured me Body and Soul these last 72 hours. (Also at the surface of my memory are a thousand song titles, with lyrics to match – no chord progressions sad to say, so why not recycle them, titles and lyrics?)
"It’s Three O’clock in the Morning” on January 30th, and I am sleeping but in which state of sleep I do not know. Sounds are pouring in, however, sounds from Vermont Public Radio (VPR) OnLine, sounds that were first, when I was falling asleep those of All Things Considered.
A few minutes later consciousness began to take over, opened up by jazz from somewhere by somebody – the first of the surprises – and then, the second surprise superimposed on the first, a poetic voice - soloing. Now, briefly, short-term memory took over to remind me that I had read at VPR OnLine that a jazz and poetry group, PoJazz, would be performing live at VPR’s studio in Burlington, Vermont. All that a recently sleeping brain could take in at the time was impressions, mostly impressions of wonder and a question: "How was it possible for this to be happening – northern Vermont is not NYC but it sounded that way.
A few hours later – maybe 5 or so – my morning story began by opening George Thomas page at VPR to get a glimpse of the sources of my surprises. A few hours later – 7:30 AM Vermont time/13:30 Swedish time, I was composing an Email to Tony Whedon, trombonist and poet and leader of the group PoJazz. Then that Email was on its way across the Atlantic that my grandparents (some of them) and my great grandparents (some of them) had crossed a century and then-some ago.
Exactly one hour later there in my Gmail was the most delightful reply anyone could ever ask for – from Tony Whedon in little Johnson, Vermont, starting his day with words of surprise and coincidence. What surprise, what coincidence? How had he been starting his day?
Let him speak: “I’d been listening to Monika Zetterlund singing “Waltz for Debbie” with Bill Evans…it’s just beautiful”
Well Monika Zetterlund is, of course, the Swedish jazz singer who became a soulmate to Bill Evans. Coincidence right from the world of Paul Auster - Tony Wehdon gets the first Email in his life from Sweden while he is listening to Monika.
So lets let her (in Swedish) and Bill Evans (universal piano language)help you to understand how Tony Whedon started his day by hearing a voice from where I was writing (Sweden) with a piano “voice” from where I used to live (the US of A), two voices brought together here thanks to YouTube.
I have been able to embed the polished in-performance version, but the rehearsal version is blocked from embedding. (It is 23.00 here in Linköping and I have just come home from orchestra and am listening to the rehearsal version at the bottom of the post. I suggest you go down and copy the URL at the bottom of this post and just get lost listening and watching - if this does not speak to you, nothing will. But it will.)
Here is the URL to the both beautiful and touching session where Bill Evans and bassist Eddie Gomez are in the foreground and Monica Zetterlund is taking in what she hears before telling them OK "nu kör vi". I started by writing that jazz is about surprise but here you can see and hear that it is also about listening - so don't miss it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tp-nbchmHU&feature=player_embedded
