Friday, February 05, 2016

Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward - 1997

This is re-posting of a photograph that is immediately in front on the wall opposite our bed in our new home. This portrait has charm in spades and I am so glad that my daughter Alexandra Elizabeth accepted my request that she pose with my mother’s Mandarin coat. More on that Mandarin coat here.

The coat will now hang in Ale’s armoire which is in our piano room. This armoire will be dedicated to family stuff, memorabilia and dresses that my daughters and granddaughters wore as little girls. In that room with our newly re-finished Chickering baby grand and five antique stacking lawyer’s bookcases is the genuine psychiatric couch that used to grace my studio. Countless women sat or reclined on it in various stages of undrapery. The couch is now finished in a lovely vermillion material.

As soon as I get all the boxes out of the piano room I will be posting here what it looks like. Meanwhile I smile as I gaze on Ale’s portrait and I remember how it is that my mother attempted to educate her as a little girl. One day back in Arboledas, Estado de Mexico, she complained that Ale had thrown the books that my mother was reading to her out of the window.

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Las Momias de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico 1970

Today, the first day where there is enough normality after our stressful move and I can sit at my computer (it was AWOL for weeks) I thought of the expression, “he is dead”. It occurred to me that there is no real finality in those three words. Finality comes with the addition of, “and buried.”

So I was dead for at least three weeks when I was off facebook (note that facebook should be written in lowercase). Comments and likes disappeared overnight. I was dead. If you are no longer in facebook you are dead. If it cannot be found in Google it does not exist. Kierkegaard would have been depressed.

I wonder what Sartre might have thought of all this. Kierkegaard would have been depressed.

Perhaps it was Christmas 1977 when I sent cards with the above image. There were four of us in the family so I thought it was a good idea. I received many complaints.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato