When we visited Vienna/Wien in 2015, it coincided with diplomatic talks about Syria, at the Hotel Imperial. These were the first talks Iran deigned to attend, so the atmosphere was quite hopeful that progress could be made.
We were in the hotelโs Cafรฉ Imperial when I overheard that line from the distinguished gentleman above, presumably in one delegation or another. If you recognize the image, itโs because yes, this is the source for one of my banners.
August Sanderโs 1928 photo of a pastry chef (Konditor in Deutsch, which, given the business name konditori in Swedish, makes sense). This was maybe 12 feet high in sepia atโฆ was it Old Town Bakery? in Pasadena.
Our favorite dish was their zuccotto, orange cream with a chocolate bombe-like cake around it, sprinkled with fine cocoa.
Lexicon. Pretty simple. If the concept of heteronormative exists โ and it clearly does โ then the idea of placing the agenda of what great apes want also exists. Thus, primatonormative.
Here we have our cat Boots, obviously thinking our primatonormative agenda doesnโt interest him:
This is a nighttime photograph, by Nancy Matoba, of the soon-to-open Little Tokyo subway station in LA. Itโs of the above-ground plaza used by the station at 1st & Alameda, the approximate location of where the Atomic Cafe was, and shows the very large mural commemorating it on a stainless steel building that has a staircase and an elevator. (Compare the mural to the elevator doors for size.) The image of the Cafe at night used for the top two-thirds of the mural was made by me; the bottom third is explanatory text. You wonโt even need to go underground to the rest of the station to see it. Iโm proud to join the landscape of LA, and humbled to pay tribute to the place and the Matoba family this way.
(All praise and thanks to Nancyโs daughter, Zen Sekizawa, for finding my photo online in the first place, and her tireless efforts seeing this project through with Metro. Zen first mentioned this idea to me in March, 2018, showing how the wheels of government grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.)
And the original image, from my photo portfolio site:
Rummaging through my old photos is this, a bust in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. I have no other notes, other than I made the photo in October, 2015. Iโd say itโs Roman, but what do I know?
Made by our friend Moshe Feder in New York.
Made by leaning out our top-story mansard window. The middle of the 5e arrondissement in Paris, looking northwest up the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The thing about making black and white photos in Paris is, so many older buildings are still extant your image can be compared to classic images from the past.
Just in case itโs not obvious, all the header images are either by me, or of me. The woman shown across multiple headers is my beautiful, smart, and forbearing wife Ulrika (who also made many of the images of me).
At a pub called The Lincolnshire Poacher, in Nottingham, back in 2016.
Venice is a space station.
Hear me out. I’m not saying this just to accept the Mary McCarthy Challenge (“Nothing can be said here (including this statement) that has not been said before.”).
The picture above is of the Campo San Barnaba. You can just see a boat in green, with some carts in front of it.
Those carts are for trash. Venetians put out their trash every day in bags, and carts like those are pushed by hand to come along and pick them up. The mechanical arm that’s also just visible on the boat picks up the cart, the bottom falls out, and the trash goes into the hold of the boat.
Why?
Because everything in Venice comes in by boat, and everything has to go out by boat.
Yes, there’s the Piazzale Roma, where the buses come in, and its garage. But even then, to get to anyplace in the city itself, it has to be transferred to a boat.
The fire department (Vigili del Fuoco). Police. Ambulances. Groceries. Packages. Produce. Mass transit. All of these we saw as boats, at one point or another on our visit.
The boats orbit the city, like a hazy swarm of fireflies.
And if the boats are the shuttle pods of the city, the railway coming into Ferrovia Santa Lucia is the space elevator. Tying the city to the mainland by means of the causeway.
Others have commented on how Venice is without cars. That carlessness also plays into the space station nature of the town — one is forever going up and down stairs, down narrow passageways, seeing the boats just in the corner of one’s eye, or one rides on the vaporetti through the tunnels of the Grand Canal, the Giudecca Canal, or the northern edge by the Fondamenta Nove.
Another aspect that’s like a space station is how Venice is fully urbanized, edge to edge of the archipelago. Others have commented on this, but it makes the calli and canali seem all of a piece, all going to the skin where Venice meets the laguna.
Venice is of the Earth, but not on the Earth. Tethered, but floating. That it floats on water instead of in space is immaterial.
Venexia is a space station.