January 2009 Archives

Funny, I never used to like green.
I don't know how this could have happened. I like to think that I'm in tune with the Earth. And although the atmosphere of our planet is something like 75% nitrogen, which is basically blue, some people just equate green with Earth.
Some even refer to it as a green planet.
Planetary tourists and other first time visitors to Earth would be overwhelmed by it's blueness on approach. This is particularly true of immigrants coming here from places that are dominated by hues in other positions on the color wheel.
For example, Martians would get a chill down their spine, provided thay had a spine, when getting their first glimpse of the brisk tones rushing up toward them as they approached Earth's stratosphere.
Mars' atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide.
Nasty stuff. Think about the view from the Sepulveda Pass looking toward the westside on a hot summer day -- in 1969.
Co2 makes for a not-so-lovely rusty melancholy.
And as Elton John once said, 'Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.'
It's clearly not alone in this category but green, is an earth tone.
Nothing is green on Mars.
But there is lots of green on Earth.
Chlorophyll for one.
I once owned a key lime martini green van but that's another story.
I have at least 3-4 different tones of green shirts hanging in my closet. I don't own a single green T-shirt, even though I prefer to wear T-shirts over ones with collars.
I love nearly every kind of green food, although I don't consume nearly enough of it.
I've been trying to convince Linda for years that she should color at least some of her hair green.
But when I became a photographer and a designer, I avoided green.
This is not to say that I preferred primary colors in my photographs or typography or whatever.
I always loved Earth tones.
They are my colors.
But I would never use green. Green just seemed icky to me.
Cold and forbidding green, I thought, was just unfriendly.
When Linda came along I learned that her favorite color, the color that she looks best in, the color of the majority of her clothes, food and the color that always seems to show in designs she's done, is green.
Soon, I began to see the light.
With a wavelength roughly 520-570 nanometres it sits, big as shit, smack in the middle of the visible color spectrum, I should have noticed it before!
I started experimenting with it. Just some nice, safe dark, grass greens at first moving on to more kelly greens and eventually finding appreciation for the likes of ... sea foam.
I know, it's crazy.
Now I use it almost every day. I put it in my photos, typography and meals.
I'm calmed by it now and I couldn't be happier.
I like an olive color mixed with a burnt orange.
I also like olives but not burnt oranges.
I have Linda to thank for turning me on to green.

Recently, the Daily News' Kevin Modesti wrote a piece called "Nine Things to Look Forward to in 2009." You can read that along with a goofy, collage thing that I made to go with it at the bottom of this page.

Kevin is just a damn fine writer and I am no match for his pithy (the most overused word of 2008) wit, but it did make me think about some stuff. So, I'll try to put that stuff into some 2009 kind of context.

Disclaimer: The following may well be somewhat less-than-Modesti-optimistic and you might rather go here.

Here's more than nine things I think:

POLITICS
George Bush and maybe more importantly, Dick Cheney will be gone. Need I say more? If that is not something to look forward to in 2009 than I will shoot myself in the face with a shotgun.
We get a bright, young, charismatic (the second most overused word of 2008) visionary in the White House. The always clairvoyant Joe Biden may have predicted that, "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy," but my guess is that he will not authorize an invasion of Cuba (or Iran or North Korea or Venezuela, or Pakistan or Pacoima.)
 George Bush and maybe more importantly, Dick Cheney will be gone -- sorry, I just love the sound of that.

ECONOMY

• I keep reading that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Has anybody else heard this?

FOREIGN POLICY

• The war in Iraq has so far cost a staggering $585,457,262,785.  That's about $341.4 million per day or $1,721 per person. Raise your hand if you can think of a better way to spend a half trillion dollars.  Why don't we just:

• Get out of Iraq and take $100 million dollars per day and pump it into the economies of countries that hate us.

• Take another $100 million dollars per day and subsidize farmers in Columbia and Afghanistan so it would be more lucrative to grow coffee and fruit crops than coca and poppies.

• Take another $100 million dollars per day and pump it into health care and education in places like, oh, I dunno, Pittsburgh and Pacoima.

• Take the last $41.4 million dollars per day and put it into research and development of renewable energy sources.

• Maybe we could skim a teeny amount off to try to save the newspaper industry.

If we did all of the above, I doubt we would be in any worse shape than we are now economically, socially or politically.

ENTERTAINMENT

• How is it possible that with all the extraordinary talent in Hollywood that none of the major studios can come up with an original idea? Entertainment Weekly's cover story this week is about the new year's must-see movies which include yet another "Harry Potter," (the sixth) "Wolverine,"  which is a spin-off of the three previous "X-Men" films (which are spun up from comic books) and there are no less than two more in the works, "Terminator," (the fourth) and "Public Enemies," a John Dillinger biopic starring Johnny Depp. Hmmm, that's never been done. Although I enjoy most of these films, love Johnny Depp and Terminator, I'm just sayin.

• In 2009 major Hollywood studio execs should step away from the comic book store and go to the Lammele, maybe see a film made in France or Spain or Ireland or even Romania. What? You can't make $400 million on a film about a street musician and an czech immigrant or  illegal abortion? Maybe a better plan is to make films about a 1960s era cartoon family that lives in the stone age or a modern day version of TV show witch who is married to a mortal advertising executive.

• Don't get me started in the e-v-i-l RIAA. I'll let others speak on that.

SPORTS

• Besides bookies, does anybody really care?

FINALLY
A few things that we should just do:

• Get rid of paper dollars and use dollar coins and get rid of pennies. Anybody ever been to Europe? The single dollar bill, as iconic (overused word alert) as it is, has lost it's charm. Either redesign it (like the prettier $5 bill) or discontinue it. And pennies now cost more to make than a penny. How does that make sense? It's another classic example of Americans showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing for "simpler times."

• When we text or IM each other we should try harder to use decent grammar and punctuation and ... stuff. (This is one of my resolutions.)

• Carry around a few dollar coins in your pocket and give a person living on the street one or two once in a while.

• Stop texting or IMing someone's phone with your phone.

• Live greener (another overused word.)

• With a little creepy emphasis, try to insert the word "ladies" into sentences during normal conversations and business meetings. "I think our site needs a better SEO strategy, laaaaaadies."

• Be a Maverick.

OK, not that one. Not only is that an overused word, but it's dull as dishwater.

Shooo word, shoo.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and back then, I won't give away my age here but it was sometime during the last ice age, we pretty much counted on a white Christmas every year.

It was a time when sea levels were much lower than they are now and there was a land bridge between North America and Asia.

And it snowed in the winter. A lot.

It snowed so much that we never wondered if we would have a white Christmas or not. We rarely wondered if we would have a white Thanksgiving.

We just did.

Most of the times, for some reason, even though there was already snow on the ground on Christmas Eve, the universe would dump another foot or two overnight as if to make sure that six-year-olds, with brand-new sleds, would have plenty of virgin power to test them out in.

Nearly every memory I have of Christmas, as a kid growing up in that great, white north was just extraordinary, bordering on supernatural. I'm sure that's true of most kids growing up in middle class America during the last ice age. But there is something otherworldly about waking up on Christmas morning before the sun, standing in the twinkling light of the Christmas tree, looking out the front door and not being able to see the steps up to the front porch.

There are no streets or curbs or sidewalks. There is only a single, unbroken blanket of fizzy, brilliance as snowflakes the size of silver dollars fall silently and constantly straight down, as if in slow motion.

This morning, Linda and I went out to a local Starbucks for coffee and just outside the door was a young girl, probably about 13-years-old, sitting on what was clearly a brand-new Christmas bicycle and guarding a second one nearby, likely belonging to her older sister.

As I passed her I asked, "Is that a new Christmas bike you have there?"

"Yes!"

Of course it was. Once inside Linda and I talked about how a new bike had to be one of the ultimate Christmas presents a kid could get. I told her that we never got bikes for Christmas because you couldn't use it for another 6 months. You'd just sit in the basement and look at it and dream about summer as an ice storm raged outside.

Standard Christmas gifts for kids growing up in the great, white north during the last ice age were, sleds, toboggans, ice skates and usually some newmittens or boots or a scarf.

The way I remember it, we weren't rich or even as well off as more than half the kids I knew at school, but the economy was pretty good during the last ice age and we all loved Christmas.

One of the things that has stayed with me for all these millennia was the excitement of dragging all the boxes of Christmas lights and decorations down from the attic. Opening up those boxes and taking out all that Christmas stuff meant Christmas was finally and officially here and it always slammed me back to the year before.

I would remember packing all that stuff away the year before like it was yesterday

Then, there was the smell.

The scent of last year's Christmas tree still lingered inside those boxes as if you'd just cut it down and rolled around in the sap.

Inevitably, in the haste to put an end to Christmas and return it to it's tomb, some pine needles or maybe a small bit of a branch still attached to a bulb or an icicle would get packed away. I  loved the smell of the remnants of last year's Christmas tree. It is still one of my favorite memories of Christmas as a kid.

Now, and for the past few years, Linda and I purposely take a piece of our tree from the current year and pack it away with all the ornaments and decorations.

The photo above is of the top of our tree from last year and a small slice of the trunk which we packed away on January 5, 2008 at about 4:45 p.m.

When we took it out of it's storage tub a few weeks ago, it smelled awesome and as always, slammed me back to Christmases during the last ice age.

Yesterday, we took all the Christmas stuff down, packed it all away inside large plastic tubs with red lids on them and and stored those tubs in the rafters out in the garage.

The last thing to go up there was about a 6-inch piece of the Noble fir we had in our house this year. It seems to get bigger every year.