Another Weekend with Heidi

It's a Jungle in There

"So what's going on at kindergarten these days, Adinah?"

"You know what? Phillip and Simon always go to Mariella and say (adopts teasing, sing-song voice), 'Baby Mariella! Futzy Mariella!' All the boys do it. Not Oskar. Then Phillip and Simon say to Teresa that she has funny hair. So all the girls go to Simon and say, 'Baby Simon! Baby Simon!' And today Simon went around the kindergarten (adopts lurching, erratic movements) and bumped into Mariella and me and some other kids, and he said, 'I'm drunk, I'm drunk.' "

Translation: The two oldest boys in the group are claiming the oldest girl in the group is actually an infant and reeks of farts. A gender-specific mob mentality has developed. There are some who resist the savagery, including Adinah's best friend, the boy whom she has said she will live with (but not marry) when she gets older. The boys also tease the other Ethiopian girl in Adinah's class, who has a magnificent moptop. Simon, apparently the Lion King of the group, is acting out (when I mentioned his 'drunk' act to Anette, she asked, 'Have you ever met Simon's mother?')

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

V. climbed up onto the couch to sit next to me yesterday. She pushed in next to me and pressed her head back into my shoulder hard, just so I would put my arm around her. It was like a linebacker asking for a hug. Then she overdid it, made her whole body as stiff as a board, and almost fell back off the couch.

This was a remarkable thing. She has been living with us for a full six months now, and our second daughter has not only learned that she can ask for affection from Anette and I, but she's learned how to ask for it. Sort of.

She's sleeping through the night sometimes now. She's screaming and hitting less. I made a family portrait of us a few weeks ago and I didn't look at it closely until a week later, and V. looks so happy--and so much like one of us.

Something else is changing, but it's harder to quantify. Yesterday, we met V.'s biological mother again, and it went pretty well. But when we got back home, V. threw a minor tantrum. She cried, pointed to our bedroom and the spot where Anette sleeps, and she said "Mama." Which wouldn't be notable except that V.'s never said that word before. She has said and still says "Mami," but she uses that word for all adults--Anette, me, the waiter, the stranger next to us on the U-bahn.

She did it again today, while Anette was gone. Sitting in our dining room playing by herself, V. suddenly started whining low, pointing to a photograph of my wife, and miserably calling out, "Mama, mama!" I couldn't really console her. I was curious about her use of the word, so I got out a photo album which includes a picture of V. with her bio-mom. She pointed at her bio-mom and went off in that goo-goo-talk she speaks, like she was very patiently trying to explain game theory to me. But she didn't say "mama."

She probably understands her family a lot better than we think. Perhaps she's starting to use language to make sense of it.

I don't believe it

I don't believe in Santa Clause, or his evil Austrian cousin, Krampus.

I don't believe the President of the United States.

I don't believe the Apollo moon missions were faked.

I don't believe John was the best Beatle. (Ringo was.)

I don't believe in flu shots.

I don't believe in an "Austrian" character, nor an "American" one, though I do believe they both have a few identifying traits.

I don't believe in the end of the world. (Or maybe I just never think about it.)

I don't believe Brad and Angelina are doing it for the publicity.

I don't believe Jesus was a white man with a beard. She may have been a black woman on a motorcycle, though. Or an alien. Wait, no, hey, I don't believe in Jesus Christ. I mean, I don't think I do....

I don't believe I'm gonna live in Vienna for the rest of my life.

I don't believe I will become famous or rich or bitter.

I don't believe you can never be too rich or too thin.

Vienna Past/Perfect #3

The first district is the old city, and today, it's the Vienna that drive-thru tourists see, a hub of overpriced antiques and street quartets playing Strauss. I like it more than most Viennese, but then I'm still a tourist here myself. But in this photo from 1950, Karntnerstrasse looks pretty hopping--in a international spy movie sort of way. I suspect there were many rumba bars. Now it's a pedestrian zone with potted plants. Oh well.

the weary anti-intellectual

I'm preparing to teach my second photography course at a local university, and I've decided to make my students read "In Plato's Cave," the lead essay in Susan Sontag's On Photography. Not that I read it when I was learning how to take pictures: I learned by going to the public library in Austin, texas, and poring over monographs by everyone from Danny Lyon, Harry Callahan and Diane Arbus to Eugene Atget and Edward Sheriff Curtis. I learned by looking at great photographs. And by taking lots of pictures myself.

But after teaching my first photo course, I understand that college students who don't have photography in their blood may not learn much by simply looking at photos and listening to me talk about them. So, the Sontag. (I'm also considering making them suffer through John Berger's interpolation of Walter Benjamin, chapters from Beaumont Newhall's History of Photography, and something called Digital Photography: The Missing Manual.) But as I go back to read her for the first time in a while, I get excited then annoyed. Excited to read someone who can examine something as everyday as photography and then overturn some of our everyday assumptions about it. And annoyed because after awhile--in fact, just after she refers to August Sander's amazing early 20th century portraits of German people as nihilistic and abstract--I lose Sontag completely. I just don't understand this sort of critical language. (Which was one of the fundamental ironies of my life as a pop music critic.) And I start to suspect that it's all smoke and mirrors. Actually, I'm sure that some of it is just art theory fancy-walking, and some of it is actually good thinking. But I can't discern the line between the two.


Is everyone always at least partly mystified by theory like On Photography? I don't think so. Some humans seem to understand it. (Like my wife.) I think my excitement and irritation betrays a certain crankiness in me, as well as a deep-seated ambivalence towards the academy, and perhaps even a burning suspicion or two about the nature of intelligence itself, people!

Here's what I'm talking about:

Sontag: "To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker and go out; but with still photographs, the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store."

This makes sense. This is true of me. I have taken pictures of Nepal, punk rockers, Mexico City, clouds out the airplane window, and my wife and my daughters to collect my experience. Whatever happens to me next, I know that in those phases and places, "I got it." I captured something of the ever-disappearing stuff of life. Not The Truth, but one of them.

But here's Sontag again: "Ultimately having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

Is this true, or is it showboating? Is it live or is it Memorex?

One of my first lessons was that you can't photograph everything. You can't document your every profound or throwaway moment. This is true of blogging as well--some things get away from you. If I tried to commemorate all of my life, I wouldn't have time to live it.

I know, I know, Susan Sontag didn't mean this literally. She was writing rhetorically. But that's my problem with some criticism--it plays with ideas until they become half-baked notions. Cleverisms. Love and bitterness do not exist to end in a photograph.

Of course, some folks will tell you love is just a construct, invented in the nineteenth century.

Yeah, right.

question of the week

Here is a strange place.

Yesterday as I was walking down to the Strassenbahn stop, I saw one come around the corner, and started to run for it. Then realized I didn't want to run for it.

I saw a woman, mid-thirties, dressed for work, in heels, barreling up the street as fast as she could, to catch another train. This has always struck me as funny. Vienna has an excellent public transportation system. Miss a train, there'll be another one in three minutes. Yet you see otherwise dignified citizens sprinting, galloping and hooking-ass down the street or stairs to catch the 8:13 38a or the U4 or the U6. Never saw that in New York City (where, if you miss a train, you might be waiting for awhile.)

Why is shaving three minutes off our commute so important to us?