Thank you Jerry

Too Tired to Drive

There’s this line I keep singing over and over again from my favorite new song by The National.  “I’m too tired to drive anyway, anyway right now…do you care if I stayed?”  The song moves through me like tumbleweed moves through the desert – sometimes sailing, sometimes scraping by.   Kind of like me.  Right now.  Sometimes sailing and other times dragging myself across the landscape without the help of a rudder.

  Click here to play this song…it’ll be a nice soundtrack for what’s about to follow.

I’ve uploaded a shit ton of photographs since my last post and, frankly, it’s too much to get into here.   If one photo is worth a 1000 words than I uploaded a novel.  It’s quite a good story, actually, and if you want to peruse, flickr would be the easiest way to see what you missed.  People that don’t know me and only experience my flickr stream must think that I have mastered Star Trek’s ‘beam me up’ technology….showing up here and there like the time-space continuum is no problem.

America's On Sale

So, yeah.  No rudder.  I’ve felt a little bit like a ping pong or pinball and the downside of that is the wondering if I put myself into these odd positions or if I was shot here by the cosmic bumbers.  The upside is that life bounces, blinks and whizzes.  A particularly bouncy, blinky moment was standing front row at a sold out Radio City Music Hall – camera in hand – for The National.  Shooting a wonderful band in an iconic New York venue is the stuff of dreams for this gal and it lived up to the hype.  The concert was inspiring and filled with friends…here are some of my favorite shots from the night

The National - Radio City Music Hall

It was a great night of music and if you want to peruse the rest of the images I shot, click here.  Shooting shows like that can be addictive.  It’s motivated me to come back to Hong Kong with a little more fervor than before to find the nuggets of awesome that are laying around here.  Should it surprise you that it worked?  Last night I headed out to see what the Dutch singer Prins Nitram had to offer and I liked it.  A projected band of clones were the back up….

Prins Nitram - Rock School - Wan Chai

I’m headed into the week fairly rocked, with a new do and the peace that comes with finishing the pile of editing that’s been accumulating since Seattle.  Let’s make it a good week, eh?

Poetry in Architecture…Progress in Wind

On my way to the office yesterday I was watching the clouds reflected in the glass of the skyscrapers…organic and fluid imprisoned into cubes and lines.  Like order was somehow raining down from the heavens, the sky morphed into pixels before becoming glass and then concrete.  Sitting in the swimming pool in Victoria Park last night was no different.  A box of water banging and slapping the walls with bigger plans.  Plans that entailed flash-flooding the island until joining the sea.  Just another pixel amongst the mega-millions.  Containing the sky in your reflection is something like poetry and all of Hong Kong’s skyline is the poet.

Pixel Poetry

Wrapping intangible things into tidy, tangible packages has been my task for the last months in a way and I am looking for meaning and help from the universe on how to do it with style.   Something about the ease with which the landscape here does that is giving me hope that there’s hope.  Those moments when I can gaze out at the world and contemplate poetry in architecture and progress in wind are the moments when life slows down just enough to be reasonable.  To make sense.  Those moments were rare the last weeks and so I find that I am savoring them when they come to me.

Speaking of savoring…how about if we shift from my weird nether-dimension of babble to something we can all relate to:  bubbles!

Lucia Dreams Big

I finally got through the family time photographs.  Looking through them makes me smile and sigh and laugh and then laugh harder.  Whimsical and sweet like bubbles on the back patio.  The kids are growing up fast and the other kids are growing old faster, it seems.  Inches to feet.  Strollers to skateboards.  It’s really an amazing thing to watch people become themselves…knowing that as soon as they feel good in that skin its going to stretch some more and they’re going to evolve again.  and again.  and again. Same goes for the ones that came before us you know.  They’re still looking for themselves in the iridescent sparkle…grasping at the light…reaching for…pop! I can see my own journey through the eyes of my niece or my grandpas horn-rimmed glasses.  It’s nice, I suppose that we can all morph and move together.

There are a lot of photos from our time in New Jersey and I’m only going to share a few of my favorites here.  If you want to come blow bubbles with us, click here…travel back in time and join the family.

These Boots

Everyone Acting Natural

Lu & Cal - Bowler City

Momma & Annie

Aunt Bean Gave Me This Hat

Birthday Boys

It really did fill me up.  All up until the part when Calvin asked me, “Aunt Bean?  Why are you always going some place?”  It filled me up until then…right around the time that it emptied me completely.  He’s right, though.  I am often waving out a car window, blowing kisses and looking forward to the next visit.  I guess this is the plight of the Aunt…the sister…a 21st century Sisyphus.

Sometime before this love-in in Ridgefield Park came a love-in at the Mercury Lounge.  Nothing dirty.  Just some rock and roll and a dark cherry float and chile cheese fries among friends.  Attack Release played and I (finally) had the geography and the gear bag prioritized correctly.  Here’s a fav, but see the radness right here in its totality.

Attack Release - Mercury Lounge

Good times, indeed.  Believe it or not I still have about 600 photos and 3 weeks of roaming America to sift through before this story is complete.  No wonder I’m losing myself in the lights and sounds…Im time traveling…it makes perfect sense now.

There Moves a Thread That Has No End

The hot Hong Kong air is liquid on my windows this morning.  My morning feels like night, well lit and somehow sleepy.  More than a month has passed since I made the trek East to Quarry Bay though I trust that my office looks the way I left it.  A blank whiteboard ready to be scrawled upon and then erased as usual.  Scanning the 1,000 images that accumulated the last weeks felt a bit like a cut scene from A Clockwork Orange…my life passing, one frame at a time, smiling friends stopped in time, blurry, drunk and fleeting.  Like crocus budding up through snow in the springtime, these memories and moments will emerge here as I am able to tend to them…in the order in which the seeds were planted.

As work is bound to swallow me whole today, I wanted to post a peek at the first of many stories from America…Ween at the Starland Ballroom.  All of my love to Ween….

Ween @ Starland Ballroom

– – – x – o – x – o – – –

I Dreamed I Was Flying

on a ship that sails the moon or Cathay Pacific….i’m coming home.  for a little while anyway.

(big smile)

Remember to Play!

“Bishops, if not developed early, may get bogged by your own pawns blocking the diagonals. Be aware of this.”

Walking in diagonal lines, blocked by pawns here and there, open to the possibility of reclaiming a Knight if I ever make it to the other side I can’t help but feel like my world is an epic game of chess.

I heard myself on the phone with my Step-Mom earlier this week and for the thousandth time, I found myself justifying my isolated and windblown life under the guise that I am ‘building something.’  This is absolute truth and I am but for whatever reason I was irritated at myself for saying it again.  Today I left my office at 6pm on the nose, the first day in longer than I can remember when I haven’t worked-a-holic, and at 6:27 I got an email saying, “swung by your office and must have missed you today…”  Blah, blah, blah.  In the course of my building of ‘something’ I have also managed to inflate expectations in a way that finds me contemplating some minor (and stylish) deconstruction.  Not demolition-style shit but more like visible seams on an expensive jacket with the tiniest bit of thread pulling at the sleeves.  Well-put-together and yet somehow also a little raw….this is the look I am aiming for this summer.

Anyway, back to walking diagonally.  I’m not actually doing that but I do like the visual.  The majority of pedestrians in Hong Kong scuttle like sand crabs so if I was on the diagonal I’d probably be less frustrated.  The chess analogy has more to do with my career path then my gait.  It is an intense time and this building and developing and foundation-laying is working but it’s a strange combination of a Herculean effort and Sisyphean (there he is again!) task.  The motion up the hill is strong and decisive and the roll back down is the pace as it has been for eternity.  It’s oddly compelling if also killing me one email at a time.  I am in the process now of trying to establish some kind of mile marker or milestone where I look in the mirror and ask myself, “are you really happy?” and, if the answer is not adequate, I will have to leap again.  Not off anything tall, mind you…but more the Kierkegaardian variety.

The work is a happy distraction when viewed next to the ‘real stuff’ happening 6 degrees in any direction.  Not even talking about the ‘black gold’ killing the Gulf one barrel at a time, I was talking even closer to home.  Sick ones, sad ones, isolated ones…I wish I had a well big enough to hold all the hurt that people I love are feeling right now.  An underground silo or, better yet, a rocket ship that could blast that bad news into some black hole in some far off galaxy.  When I have a sense of humor about all of it I say stuff like, “if this doesn’t squeeze a book out of me, I don’t know what will!”  But then there’s the rest of the time when my soul aches with a desire to wrap my arms around the world and bear-hug the pain away.

In another week or so I should board the first of what may end up being 7 airplanes in what will amount to a ’round-the-world tour of America.  Into LA, out of Boston it could end up being one of the zaniest business trips ever.  Chock it up to the equivalent of ‘dry walling’ this “thing” I’m building…During this massive trip I will be able to secure QT with almost all of the people that I miss, miss , miss.  Most of them (you, too?) don’t know the details yet but that’s because I don’t either.  For a control freak like myself this dependence on others and last minute planning is essentially polishing me.  Or buffering, at least.  It’s softening my edges and injecting me with a new form of patience that I probably could have benefited from having found some years back.  In any case, it appears to be working and in no time I’ll breathe some wonderful American air.  Yes I will.

Even if my bag weighs a zillion pounds I will bring my camera and I will find time for some creative self-expression. Days without writing, weeks without photos is too far away from the Bean that I know myself to be and I am happy to be waking up to this reality before I get too stuck in the mud to remember to play.

This stretch of highway is the equivalent of New York’s West Side Highway.  It sits between my apartment and Victoria Harbour which, in my humble opinion, is the aquatic equivalent of Interstate 95.  These descriptors are here to help you imagine the smell, noise and atmosphere of the area.  It’s something.  All that said, above is a neighbor of mine…a local Shark Fin Distributor…drying some of his wares.  Necessity is the mother of invention, sure, but after 7 months this still makes no sense to me.

Just ’cause I’d hate to end things on a negative, what with all the this and the that and the whathaveyou that’s circulating, I’ll come back to my earlier thought:  remember to play!  and I’ll share one of my favorite songs with you.  “Here’s to all the poetry and pickin’ down the line”

  Press play…

Baroque Rock & Roll Trim

“I still only travel by foot and by foot, it’s a slow climb,
But I’m good at being uncomfortable, so
I can’t stop changing all the time…”

The topic of ‘making the most of it’ has crept into conversation the last couple weeks and something about that theme makes me ask myself if things are good enough if ‘making the most of it’ is how we roll…but on the other hand I can’t help but consider the luck of being surrounded (mostly) with a diverse group of people with this mindset.  Think about the possibilities.

The weekend went by way too fast and I moved way too slow to slam dunk it but Sunday managed to surprise me with some adventure so tonight I feel full and ready for the mayhem that is sure to begin tomorrow morning.  Friday night saw me miss a boat to Disco Bay and get drunk on sake instead.  Saturday consisted of a portrait session with The Buddies and some old movies so the thought-provoking wandering was condensed into this afternoon, starting with a sushi brunch and ending with a Caprese Salad.

Walter Sobchak

I’ve been aware the last week or so of the lack of creativity in my new world.  Sure, I write and take photographs but it’s been ages since I’ve made anything with my hands and painting or sculpting or crafting have always been some of what I do to stay sane.  Those of you who have tried it can vouch for the fact that life in a serviced apartment is sterile to the point of…the point of, well, it’s sterile.  Leaving my shoes spread around or some books on my table, I come home to find them put into cupboards or stacked neatly in the corner. Whatever creative burst I might have tonight will be stowed, dusted and vacuumed by the time I return to it and that’s not a hot thought.  I’m feeling corked in that capacity which could mean that something good could be brewing.

We headed out to Sham Shui Po today and went to town at the ribbon suppliers that line the place.  Neon pink, daffodil yellow, sea-foam green, beet velvet, slate gray and some baroque rock and roll trim was like aromatherapy for my eyes.  Not sure if you guys know this, but color therapy works.  I would just open the bag and see the tangle of color and feel a little jolt of electricity stream out from my eye sockets, into my brain.  I’m thinking that sewing is an easy enough craft to put down between sessions and might let loose with some color on an old tote bag.  Something about carrying heavy weight in a bag colored in with light and life and lust for all things rich and enveloping is a nice juxtaposition.  Perhaps this is why so many women will drop thousands of dollars on sunshine yellow Proenza Schouler satchels..so the weight of what they carry is contained in something comforting.  The weight that I carry now is heavy.  So much on the horizon.  Trips to book, plans to make, work to do…so much that it drives me to finding solace in a mash-up of neon velvet, pink lemonade and (the last couple days, anyway) Fiona Apple.

I appear to be on schedule.  I should be right at home around the time its time to pack my bag and hit the road. ‘If there was a better way to go than it would find me…I can’t help it but the road just rolls out behind me….’

Newbies and Smogglers

Music that has space inside is a good remedy for a bed that was made with the sheets tucked in too tight or an oppressive sky that lays thick and gray and heavy on the the tops of the buildings here.  The fog is getting to me and The Album Leaf’s show at Grappa’s Cellar proved to be good medicine.

Simulate the Sun

My day slipped into evening without so much as a reminder and, before I realized, it was time to head to the show.  I find myself more and more in these pockets of “normalcy” when I forget that I’m in Hong Kong and that everything is new.  Perhaps a sign that things aren’t so new anymore?  In any case, it felt good to have somewhere to be besides my office…and better to have familiar faces in my midst.  For an Italian restaurant, the place reorganizes itself well into a rock club.  Next time I’m there I’m gonna have to try some ‘za and see if it rocks and rolls.

I’ve had some Album Leaf lurking on my hard drive for what feels like years but I’m pretty sure that I never managed a listen….I say this because I recognized none of the music last night at all.  Somewhere between postrock and postpop and folkwave (I made those last two up) it left enough room to kind of linger, bouyant on the surface like the Dead Sea.  I didn’t know this about myself until last night but, as it turns out, I prefer a bit more melancholy or rage in my ambient rock and definitely a shit ton more volume.

The Album Leaf - Grappa's Cellar - Hong Kong

Yeah.  You heard that right…er, read that right.  I like my postrock loud.  Anyway, it turned out to be good that the music wasn’t so loud since it left some sonic space to gab with my newbie HK’ers and fellow smogglers.  I don’t know why its so fascinating to me that people find themselves living in this town but the awe hasn’t worn off yet.  I sort of bounced between snapping photos, scoping the ‘club’ and making nice.  I dialed in for a few numbers and just let the violin creep into my spine which was nice but as easy as I slipped into it I slipped back out of it.  One can only shoot so many photographs of a bunch of bearded shy guys in the dark, though I can say that they are a good band and they deserve some sparkly kudos for working wonders with a few LED sticks…

Leaves more room than a guitar it seems

If you want to see some more photos from the show or from the local Hong Kong act, Snoblind, that opened for them.  You should go and do it.

It’s possible that there’s some more tunes on the horizon…it’s guaranteed that there’s some kind of brunchy celebration too but we’ll save the 34 year long short list for lucky number 11.  Until then then,,,

Here We Are Inside a Novel

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times….living *always* trumps writing about living or, hard for me to admit sometimes, taking pictures of living.  We know this and do not need to debate it here but, it is often the case that presence and momentary connectedness can pass through us like radio waves leaving us seemingly untouched and yet with a faint melody ringing in our ears.  Untouched from a superficial perspective, I guess, implying somehow that if it isn’t pasted in 12pt courier font than it didn’t happen.  I guess this is why the newspaper business boomed for so long.  The point, you ask?  The point is that I feel some guilt when I don’t write about my life for so many days that I couldn’t write about it all.  It’s not an OCD over-sharing kind of thing, more a genuine desire to think about what I experience and make those experiences a part of me.  I am mildly addicted to TED and was watching Jill Bolte Taylor the other day…Her description of how the left brain picks and chooses the bits and bytes it processes as our past and future struck me as utterly amazing.  This blog, in fact, is then the left to my left filtering even further and farther away from reality and how I experience in the present, capturing in even more detail my idle thoughts and feelings in words.  I’m not sure why but this seems like a relevant revelation.    It also makes me hope that, somewhere, there is a right to my right. 

Anyway, the past weeks have been full to the brim.  My cup has runneth over, as it were, and I feel bad that I can’t spin you a tale about each and every single-serving adventure that made me drunk or happy because that’s not practical for a working woman like myself.  What I can do, however, is share some snippets and some tidbits and a smidge or a dollop of what was, and now IS, my story.  Let’s start with the last of a long list of loved ones rolling into town.  It’s poetic that the Rock Goddess descends upon HK to find the first (of my) rock and roll experiences underway at Grappa’s Cellar.  The Secret Machines were a super welcome for her and a dose of electric guitar that I was in desperate need of.  It was a perfect start to a super fun, super long weekend.  Click here for the whole album.

It felt refreshing to have a 1,000 pound camera around my neck and inspired me to get a little more proactive about making sure this is a more regular occurence.  The following days were spent traipsing all over Hong Kong island and out to Lantau Island, being tourists and giggling like school girls.  The cable car out to Lantau was awesome and, more awesome, was the big buddha that we went to see.  The peaks and ocean and view from out there gave me some insight on my new hometown and it was much-needed.   Something about the light out there in the late afternoon shown this town in a whole new perspective…all soft and pink and bent and gentle.  Oh wait, that might have been the pollution.  The wonderful thing about an eternal optimist is that she can find magic in the molecules. 

Take a click right here to see the rest of what happened when a six foot tall red head and yours truly have some time to play.  Before too long it was time to scoop up another dear friend from the airport express station and, without his knowledge or permission, we throttled into a whiskey-fuled night of ukulele rock, paparazzi-style photo shoots and drunken skyping.  It ruled.  The Bobby McGees played Rock School and I thought I might try to shoot the show proper but when things begin with a shot of Jamesons (ick!) it so happens that you need to relinquish your plan.  It could happen that you could harsh-judge me upon seeing the images from that mayhem so I will share with you only two and let you dig for the rest…

The kind of good times that leave you asking yourself, “what?”  are usually good times.  It was stupid fun and long overdue for this workaholic.  Recovery came in the form of a 3 hour brunch, croque madam, epic caesar salad (poached egg on top anyone?) and some slow-moving.  The next day we had a little more get-up-and-go so we got-up-and-went to Lamma Island to keep it fleezy and enjoy the sunshine.  Slow, sunny and the kind of quality time you dream about when watching corona commercials…well, beer commercials with enormous, ominous power plants looming behind the water skiers… 

It was hard to kiss my lovlies goodbye but house guests insist in this, for the most part.  I shipped one off to Bali for surf school and the other off to Taichung to make some bicycles and headed back to the grind where I was reacquainted with my workaholic self and the Herculean effort that is my current job.  It was a fine contrast and not a bad week, in the scheme of things, and ended with a(nother) new posse of peeps and the 2010 Hong Kong Sevens.  Generally speaking, I wouldn’t say that I give a shit about rugby but I do fancy getting down with champagne and Quiche.  That was the hook…and a chance to meet some people who live here and like to have fun.  My upstairs neighbor rallied me to the mid-levels for some totes yummers bloddy-mary-bar-decked-croissant-encrusted-quich party.  Followed by 12 hours of rugby, Pimms (by the pitcher!), sushi, more beer and enough laughter to hurt my dimples.  Seriously, they are not yet recovered.  It was immense fun and leads me to believe that there will be more on the horizon.  Much like the Bobby McGee set, you’re gonna have to click on it and subject yourself to the silliness as I will only share a couple here…

Generally speaking this is the kind of event that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole but it ended up being a great night and a great group of people.  America did get their ass handed to them by Fiji but that didn’t ruin anybody’s night.  If you want to see more, click here.  The artist in me can’t, in good conscience, leave you with pictures of meatheads and rugby butts so I’m gonna throw up a few random shots that occurred between all of these and wish you a good day and a happy song

http://www.2beanornot2bean.com/Music/HangOn.mp3″

namaste

Every Breath We Drew Was Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ is ringing in my ears and, generally speaking, I can’t write when there’s music playing.  This song is more like wind or air than like music and I’m hopeful that the gentle breeze blows through my ears, turning the gears that move my thoughts out my fingertips and into words.  I’ve sat down to write a few times in the last few days and always found myself stumped.  I’ve yet to recap my good times and surprise foot massage adventures with Albi and Alex and all that’s occurred between now and then.  I bought a magic pen some weeks ago that turns handwriting into text…now if only it had a special plug to extract the thoughts from my head and import them onto a page for me to read.  Now that would be something.

That thought makes me think of one of the other ideas I was circling like a cat at breakfast…more of a figure eight if I use that analogy…anyway I was contemplating what might happen if I spilled the whole narrative here on 2bean and wrote the things that I think one layer above or below this string of thought.  The layer above, all things superficial, could likely be laced with the same shitty crack that Perez Hilton must stir into his latte.  You know what I mean.  Naming names.  Making judgments.  Having good fun at the expense of  people and giving you a peek at the loony cast of characters that share my experience or airspace….not to mention a slew of images of  things I think I want.  It would entertain, to be sure, but at somebody’s expense – quite possibly my own.

Then there’s the layer below.  The core.  The id, I guess its called or maybe not.  I’m referring to the foundation that I throw all the rest of myself on top of.  This narrative would sound more like Mongolian throat singing than the effervescent bubble gum pop that is the layer on top.  These songs find their way out…usually into an old leather notebook that my sister gave me within which to tell my story or, not recently, onto a canvas spelled in paint.  The pure fear and joy and drive and lust and love is too intense a place to linger so I can only pepper the these notions here or there.

I think this narrative, though never fully detailed or ever really raw, seems to be the compromise.  It is a vehicle to share what’s on my mind but in the last days (er, months & years) I have not stopped thinking about writing a book.  Something where I can braid the 3 narratives together – a rope to hang onto or hang by, perhaps.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that the story has a beginning…it has a thousand middles and I have no idea about the end.  I keep telling myself that when I know how the story ends then I’ll write it.  Does that sound like a cop out?  Can any of my dearly loved poets or songwriters share with me an experience where there was no end but you stopped anyway?

Anyway, enough with that for now.  How about if I tell you that I’m still working my ass off.  Still traveling like a globe-trottin’ rock star.  Still entertaining friends and peeps at my digs in Hong Kong.  Still not doing my yoga classes like I knew would be the case.  Still taking photographs.  Still lovin’ up my 2 4-legged boys and still, always, grateful for this ridiculous adventure even though I do ask myself more often, “Am I really happy?”  So far the answer is yes.

Now then.

Photographs.

Half With You, Half Without You

Wave Goodbye

Lit

Silent Haul

And just ’cause this was one of the first times I managed to write and listen to music at the same time, I’m gonna share the song with you…

Jonathan Livingston Seagull Has Nothing On Me

celebrating a tiny new piece of my ever evolving liberation with a song.

i know how it feels…