people doing things

Bill Dugan, an artist friend from Missouri, speaks for  many of us.

Donna's fashion forward streetwear

 Been hearing from all over. Apparently most people haven't been as slothful as I. Chien-Chi Chang has a story about the drug trade in the Golden Triangle in GQ, not to mention an almost finished movie. Hannah built a website for her loft for rent in Woonsocket, not to mention her business helping businesses, Dollars and Details. Friend Eddie Wong wrote a very long and thoughtful piece about how to stop hate crimes against Asians. Keri Pickett posted up her short film about building a float in Key West. Donna Ferrato, of course, is still raising money for a domestic violence shelter with a print sale—and may be almost done with her book! And her daughter, Fanny Ferrato, had her work featured by Visura. Erin sparked a bidding war on her beautiful house and sold after two days of showings.
  I spend my time trying to keep track of summer guests and whether they want to show up or not.

The guarded Block Island Grocery entrance

the virus blues

George Boyd, memorably the man who wore a black tie and nothing else to the Vassar prom while on LSD, is now living in Brazil. He is a classically trained pianist  as well as a classy cutup. He was also trained at Steinway as a piano tuner for concert grands, which was how he earned his keep until concerts and travel were shut down. Also his on-line dating has been interrupted. So now he has the virus blues.

not that confined

Cousin Alan visits.

 Am I lucky or what? My family is around, my place is beautiful, I have money and food and wheels and sunshine and internet. The thing I miss most is having my granddaughter sit in my lap. And the next time I am able to hold her, she will be too old.

Living room light

Brother in law Johnny's new place. He's been building it for five years.

the homestead

We have been having sunsets for the record books. Here's one. And red sky this morning with 30 mph gusts. I did not take its picture, because truthfully I find both sunset and sunrise pictures kind of trite. Also I did not want to get out of bed at 5 ayem. 

distance visiting

 I wanted to see Edie, who is still the queen of all at 90 something, so I used the excuse of dropping off some of Ed's Famous Seafood Stew (this time made with cod and salmon) to pay a brief call. And call it was, since we are both deaf and had to shout at each other through the window.
   "What are you doing?" she asked me at one point. "Taking pictures of my underwear?"
   "I always take pictures of your underwear," I said.
    And it's true. I love the way a laundry line looks, as do many other Block Island denizens, memorably the painters Sperry Andrews (and a happy birthday today to his daughter Barrett!) and Kate Knapp.
   So it was both a distanced visit and, given the undies, an intimate visit.

jumping the gun

On a nice day it seems impossible that we won't have a season on Block Island. All over town restaurants are installing outdoor seating and there is a flurry of painting and ordering and trips to the dump. The grocery store has opened to a few customers at a time, and they even have toilet paper. The ferry put on more boats a day. The stairs down the dunes to the beach have been installed. The telephone truck is on the move, and the Internet has slowed down. But the town council meets today to discuss new regulations, so we'll see. Meanwhile, with the help of my nice nieces, I am proceeding to get ready to open as well.

real estate news

The "garage" from the alleyway in the rear

The upstairs

 Hannah and Chris tore down the garage in their backyard and built another one. It's almost ready. Chris began moving things into the upstairs studio. Backyard landscaping has commenced. It's going to be a really nice garage!
   In other real estate news, Erin's green mansion goes on the market today. 

The downstairs

The landscaping crew

the fam

Badumbadum. Badum. Badumbadumbadum...

Little red Corvette

 My sister-in-law Lynn is a music teacher, and she devised an elaborate video for her students about jazz. It opened with Lynn as Inspector Clousseau and bro Chris as the Pink Panther. Chris, being a set carpenter, can't work on the black cowboy series he was doing. It's been shut down for who knows how long. But he did get his Corvette repainted. Red, naturally.
  Meanwhile, we celebrated my brother and sister in law's 35th (?) wedding anniversary with breakfast last week. They had just sent their youngest off to college, when she had to come home, along with her brother and girlfriend who had been living in New York. There's a lot of full-nest syndrome going around, I understand. In face, my neices who were tired of their parents (and vice versa) have come out for a BI break

Still crazy after all these years

southland

The porch at Grandmother's house.My cousin lives there now

All of this white supremacist action—storming statehouses and demanding to "go back to work," not that I'm convinced many of them actually have worked, has me aghast and in a quandary, as I've said before here. As well as written about for years. But it's getting worse now, with the Klan and others in jackbooted lockstep with the-coronavirus-is-a hoaxters, not only in the South, but everywhere and gaining power. I have tried to parse my deeply conflicted feelings about the South.

Pulling into Walmart

My daddy was from Alabama, and so was his daddy and his mama, and their daddies and mamas and so on back to the circuit riding Methodist preacher Zachias Asbury Dowling and James Elizabeth Glenn, who tried to convert the Cherokee. Needless to say, they had very Christian households. During the Civil War, their prayer was said to be, “Dear Lord, please keep us safe from the Yankees and the Baptists.”

    My father busted out of Alabama in WWII, to Okinawa in the Marines, and then to get his PhD in herpetology in Michigan, where I was born Yankee.

   My childhood was spent in segregated Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the 1950s. There were no black faces in my schools—it wasn’t until 1957 that the 101^st Airborne Division escorted the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students, to Central High. But my white parents and their academic friends were fiercely anti-segregation. They were NAACP members and Quakers and they soon moved to the suburbs of New York City, where kids made fun of my accent. At least once a year, I visited my grandmother in Alabama. The only black faces I knew there were Beulah, Grandmother’s cook, Hattie, the ironing lady, and Richard, the yard man. But that was more than I ever saw in Westchester County.

    Southerners call me a Yankee. I may be an irredeemable atheist who married a Jew and left him for a woman, but I am forgiven because I am Blood. Family, church and football are the foundations of my relations.

   You are allowed to make fun of family. When I’m staying out in the Talladega forest with my father’s widow these days, my cousin says, “If you start to hear the opening bars of Dueling Banjos wafting up from the valley, give us a call, and we’ll drive you to the airport.”

   You’re allowed to make fun of church, too, like the story told of the preacher’s wife who called the police because her husband was late getting home. The cops found him banging the organist on a table in the parish hall.  Then there’s the one about the grande dame who, after Christmas Eve service, got into the back seat of her car and started yelling that someone had stolen her steering wheel. Bless her heart. (This is how, in the South, you say someone is a nutcase.)

    But for heaven’s sake don’t make fun of football. Football is serious. The fanaticism for college ball doesn’t exist in the North. Nor does anybody care who you’re related to or what church you go to. And my Yankee friends are just as terrified of the South as my southern ones are of the North. (With the possible exception of my northern black friends, many of whom also have family there. “Your people probably owned my people,” said one, pointing out my privilege, and guilt, on discovering that I had Alabama ties.) Racism and the South are entwined in the northern mind, despite the fact that lately we have been assaulted with the fact that racism is everywhere in this country—and all over the world. Fear of the “other” goes deep in humans.

    I get defensive when people dismiss the South as the land of rednecks. It is so much more varied and complicated. It is also the landscape of my childhood, and, with all its issues, it feels somehow right to me. I spend the summer within spitting distance of the Arkansas I grew up in. And when I see the red dirt and cotton fields of Alabama, Lynard Skynard plays in my head, and I think, Oh, Sweet Home.

My Yankee stepmother's house overlooks this field. You can go both ways.

Headed up the hill. Nowheresville, Alabama.

shad moon

 The shad is in bloom, and so is the moon—also known as the flower moon or, because his birthday is around now according to what calendar you use, the Buddha moon. The birds are perking up as well, though it's still too cold for my taste.
  The moon should be super tonight!

hula girls

 So my sister Erin brought a hula hoop to Camilla. And then she found a picture of Camilla's mother, Hannah hula-ing in Block Island. Pretty fun!

four dead in ohio

Four dead in Ohio. Fifty years ago today. College kids at Kent State were demonstrating against the Vietnam war when, at 12:24, National Guardsmen shot a burst of 60 rounds into the unarmed crowd. LIFE magazine rushed the incident into print. The cover lines read "Tragedy at Kent: The Crisis of Presidential Leadership." Neil Young saw the magazine and immediately wrote a song. He and Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded it and, within three weeks of the shooting, it was the anthem for that era of protest. You can read more about that and hear Young's moving solo rendition of the song here. You can read about the photographer's rush to print here and LIFE's rush to print here.
   At the time, I too was a college kid, and, as on campuses all over the country, the antiwar movement was galvanized by the Kent State shootings. We took over the administration building at Vassar in protest. Twenty years later—30 years ago now, for those who aren't good at math—I went to Kent State to write about what happened there for LIFE magazine. RIP Arlene Gottfried, who was the photog on the story. My guide was Alan Canfora, the protest leader waving the flag who was shot through the wrist. He continues to be a political activist and is the standardbearer for Kent State commemorations. You can read about him here and here, but you can't read my story, because I don't have a copy of it. He does, though.
   You can participate in a virtual commemoration here.


 This is the most famous image of the Kent State disaster, taken by John Filo, along with the most famous recording of the CSNY song. LIFE famously, pre photoshop, airbrushed out the fencepost coming out of Mary Ann Vecchio's head and caught some shit for it.

mayday!

To me, spring fever means maybe there is hope that it won't be so damn cold. And blustery. And rainy. To some it means getting frisky. People have a tendency to get in touch with long-lost lovers. But originally, when the phrase first appeared in the 1850s it meant, according to one dictionary, "the listless feeling caused by the first sudden increase of temperature in spring." Nowadays the dictionary definition is,"a feeling of restlessness and excitement felt at the beginning of spring."
   In these days of quarantine, People seem to be feeling both. Or I am, anyway. I am lazy and stay in bed til late, and go to bed early. Don't get much done.  And yet I'm restless. As, apparently, are others. One long-ago Tinder date called me to say why didn't I pick him and his dog up in NYC and road trip to Missouri. (   a) didn't want to spend that much time with him and his dog. b) didn't want to go to New York c) someone was already living at the Goose d) didn't want to sleep in the car on the way out. e) lots of other). I satisfied my restlessness by coming to Block Island. But I am still lazy.
    

when the waters subsided

Bear's house, across the street from me, was destroyed. It was taken down .

The street in front of my house, once the flood waters subsided.

 Three years ago today, a seven-foot wall of water swept through Thomasville, Mo., and my house. The town was wiped out, but no one was killed. One did have to be rescued from his second floor. Many lost their houses, trucks, campers, TVs, livestock and life savings, not only monetary. On the same day, a car t-boned Hannah and Chris and their car was overturned and spun around on its roof on a bridge. Was that some day?
   Well, we're all ok. And Thomasville was recovering until this latest setback. I mean, as much as a dying town of 50 people can recover.
  

The new and improved Goose

Mighty spiff, huh? But you should see the cafe across the street—if it ever reopens.

bath, bed and beyond

"Sleep, Sex, The Bed," my pal Ed proposes a story positing that everything changes in life on the inside. Almost everyone I know has altered sleep patterns. Dreaming is intense, for sure. I dreamt  that Ed and I time traveled back to Woodstock (have I ever mentioned that I was actually there??). When we got there, I immediately regretted not buying one of those portable chargers for my phone so I could take more pictures.
   "I don't think I can unironically throw the peace sign," I told Ed. Needless to say, we were the oldest people there—though I had tried to dress for the occasion in cutoff jeans. As I looked around, I wished I had refreshed my memory of the event by looking at Life magazine's special issue. And then it occurred to me that here was an opportunity to change the course of history. No, it didn't occur to me that by carrying the virus with us we could have eliminated the peace-and-love movement at one fell swoop. I wanted to jumpstart feminism. I woke up as I was trying to think of the words for a poster that would awaken women. If you can think of what they should have been, LMK. I still can't think of a headline that works.
   Anyway, here's the bed. More about the bath and beyond another time. But not on Facebook.

What a difference a sunny day makes.

wtf is in the truck?

On Saturday, I left Erin's at the ass crack and headed to Providence. Everybody was asleep, and I had to ring the doorbell. PS, that is their beautiful mother-in-law "garage and studio." Almost done! Hannah and Chris struggled the loveseat they had been babysitting all winter into the truck and tied it down.

We then had a brief in-person (but distanced) chat for the first time since Thanksgiving.

Johnny met me at the Block island ferry dock and (at a distance) offloaded the sofa onto the front lawn and unpacked it. The lawn mowing dudes brought it into the house before it started to blow and rain.

I didn't know how to put the legs on the sofa, but managed to with the help of a couple chairs and a post.

And there it is in situ, along with the puzzle from hell that Erin gave me. Home again!

and goodbye to all these

Leaving the north woods at the crack of morn for the island, hoping to evade the police. Will stop in Providence en route to attempt to fit yet more shit in my truck and head to the ferry. Can't be grateful enough that the Porter household was willing to take in yet another viral risk factor and feed and house me in luxury.

another guest blogger

Well, there is a wave of hope running through the family. My brother Ben is spreading love with his new song Universal Love and his grand nephew Isaac writes (in lieu of his homework) of a caterpillar saved—spoiler alert—from a terrible fate and decides to donate his allowance to WHO.

the aborted picture show

@JaneEvelynAtwood  Jane made this video for herself, as a record of the process and placement of her photographs. It is raw footage that she never meant to share. The retrospective show at the prestigious gallery in La Filature, a cultural center in the east of France, was to be the capstone of her career. But the cultural center in Mulhouse also proved to be the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in France. The following is her story, a mirror of that of all the actors and artists and athletes and all the rest of us who have had our lives interrupted.

The Story Of An Exhibition At The Filature, Mulhouse

 I arrive in Mulhouse February 25, where I stay in a large and comfortable hotel.

Every morning I have breakfast with a small crowd, and three times that week I have dinner in the same dining room, always with a lot of people. At the end of the week, buses arrive, filled with Carnival attendees. Thursday they're in the hotel lobby, already in disguise.

The next day I go to the Filature to unwrap the many packages of framed photos that make up my Retrospective, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Photographs: 1976 - 2010.

I lay the photos out on the floor, in their respective places, in the different sections that make up the enormous Gallery. Emmanuelle had sent me a floor plan and I'd already established an order on the floor of my office in Paris.

Marc and Andrej, the guys who will actually hang the pictures, arrive in the afternoon and we begin to work together.

The exhibition is the same one that showed at the Maison Européenne de la Photo in 2011, excluding the photos of Haiti and the landmine series. There isn't room for everything, and I want to add 36 photos from Pigalle People. It's easy to do, because I can use the same tiny work prints, each on a page of my little black notebooks, that were exhibited in Arles for the Rencontres de la Photographie in 2018 and then at the Maison de Robert Doisneau in the fall of 2019. A long wall, opposite the section I call Miscellaneous, can perfectly hold two rows of the framed pages, one right next to another.

The hanging takes five days. There are 190 pictures. The section on AIDS, with the photos of Jean-Louis, is hell to hang. Pigalle, too, takes an enormous amount of time.  But Marc and Andrej are great: meticulous, efficient and very kind. As we progress, they study the images more and more closely and they ask more and more questions.  We talk a lot about prison, AIDS and of course, prostitution--even the series on the blind evokes their curiosity. They are genuinely interested in what they're seeing.

The new Director, André Benoît, comes by and walks through the entire show. I photograph him as he stands dumbfounded in front of the photo of an inmate giving birth in handcuffs.

The hotel empties out on the weekend. The Carnival is cancelled--a first!

I spend Saturday and Sunday photographing the trans who Emmanuelle had introduced me to the year before.

On Monday, March 2, the wall texts arrive from the printer, Prevel Signalisation. Laurent and Emmanuelle have finished the captions and we place them where they belong, one under each photo. I arrange all the objects, drawings and gifts that the prisoners have given me in two glass cases in the prison section of the show. In the Jean-Louis case I put a selection of the most important publications--magazines and newspapers that ran the story--and the letter from Brigitte, a 17-year-old high school student who wrote and told me she finally understood what AIDS was all about after she saw our story in Paris Match. I go through the whole show with Dominique who, teetering at the top of his ladder, adjusts the lights for every image.

On Tuesday, March 3, a team from the television channel, ARTE, arrives. We spend the morning together, in the exhibition, to film and interview. I had already done many interviews for the press, but ARTE wants to film a sequence that they'll show as part of their evening news hour. At noon we all eat together, with others from the Filature, in the Museum café, where we'd often eaten during the week. The rest of the time we went to small restaurants in town, where there was always a crowd.

Sylvain arrives by train in the afternoon.

Everything is finally ready for the March 3rd opening that very evening. It touches me deeply when Marc and Andrej tell me that no exhibition at the Filature has ever moved them as much as the photos they've just hung for me.

Before the opening, there's a projection of the film, Jane Evelyn Atwood: Fragments d'Un Parcours, by Thomas Goupille and the production company, Cinq26. The auditorium is full: about 100 people. There are 200 at the opening. All the trans I'd photographed on the weekend are there. The Director makes a beautiful speech. Everybody kisses and hugs; it's a lot of fun.

I go back to the Filature the next morning, March 4, to make a quick video, as I often do when I exhibit--not to show to the public, but for me, as a record of the photo order on the walls of a beautiful space.

Later, when we leave the hotel to take our train, the day's newspapers are on a table in the reception area. "Look!" I call out to Sylvain, "I'm going to take a picture!"  It's the last picture I take in Mulhouse.

The Filature is closed on March 10.

Sylvain and I are quarantined in Quimper several days before President Macron quarantines the entire country. With the exception of those who attended the opening, no one has seen the exhibition.

The photos are still there, on the walls in the empty space, hanging in the silence.

Jane Evelyn Atwood

April 10, 2020

 @JaneEvelynAtwood     A prisoner gives birth in handcuffs. I met Jane on a story about women in prison for LIFE magazine. We spent the night in a cell together.

@JaneEvelynAtwood   Sylvain and Jane quarantined at home in the countryside.

what's going on

The fritillaria, which my sister calls "the Dr. Seuss plant," is blooming. The birds are going insane. And second homeowners like me are feeling restive. Despite the fact that, as has been made very clear in the NYT, islands don't want us. I cleaned out the truck, made a boat reservation for Saturday, and my brother-in-law says he'll meet me at the boat to protect me. I just have to wait and see whether the water company, the plumbers, the cleaners and the gas guy are able to get my place ready to receive by then.
   Meanwhile in Manhattan, Donna Ferrato has been putting on her mask and taking pictures around her neighborhood of Tribecca. She has put together a fascinating photographic timeline of this time. Along with other photographers and galleries, she is also contributing work to support charities.  
   And Chien-Chi Chang continues to produce pictures for Magnum and National Geographic from Graz, Austria.
    Tomorrow we will have a guest blogger, photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood, whose retrospective was shut down—along with all Paris—after the opening.