Annie, Sandy, Chloe

Annie Liebovitz’s exhibition of her Master Set opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts in September.  Hordes of beautiful and not-so-beautiful people showed up for the opening night to view the beautiful and not-so-beautiful people, the made-immortal icons of Annie’s art.  The Cashes and Carters, the Obamas, the Neville Brothers.  Meryl, Nicole, Whoopi.  Emmylou, Lucinda, Roseanne, Patti.  John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Billy Carter and Margaux Hemingway, Meg and Jack White.  Soldiers, heads of state, longhorn steers, poets, politicians and their brothers, singers, dancers, cyclists, weightlifters, actors, artists.  Indeed, Annie has described hers as “a life through a lens.”

Then came October, which ended in a storm of the century, though we seem to be having a lot of those lately.  Katrina, Ike, Isaac, others in between.  And then, like a sister that no one paid enough attention to, that sat around and fed off too many wrong-headed ideas about hurricanes, who loaded up on fistfuls of salted fish and seaweed, Sandy punched her way through the Caribbean and past the Carolina coast to fall hard on the Northeast, slapping Virginia and D.C. on her way up to New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.  Not a nice girl. 

Chloe is complicated, but November seems to have given her enough room to settle in.  Not that she wasn’t already settled in.  A tuxedo cat of large proportion and larger personality, Chloe seems to have decided that biting is indeed her preferred form of communication, the food bowl can never be full enough, and reaching through the open back of a chair to swat at fine-spun sweaters or corduroy trousers or whatever passes by is terribly pleasing.  Much more pleasing than chasing the field mouse up the serviceberry tree and hours later giving up the pursuit to boredom.

Three autumn months gone, gone, going.  Three names.  Annie, Sandy, Chloe.  Artist, storm, feline.  Each has owned the world in her exceptional way.  Vision, destruction, insistence.  Focus, deluge, seduction.  Film, surge, teeth.

An Observed Moment - Out There in the World - Reverie 2011 - Day 2

An observed moment in 2011 that we were all witness to, one that affected so many of us: the earthquake in Sendai, Japan.

Here are my thoughts from an earlier post on this moment.

Out there in the world

It’s spring, but the temperatures outside are those of winter.  One stays inside and reads the news, but the world’s events are too staggering to take in completely.  Foreign governments firing upon their own people, U.S. and NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan and Libya, natural and nuclear disaster in Japan, the loss of Elizabeth Taylor, the weeks of protests outside capitol buildings where governors and state senators propose slashing the rights of public workers in Wisconsin and Ohio and throughout the nation.

It’s difficult to see it all.  There’s too much at once.  And so one focuses in on one event at a time, at each day, as more events are unveiled.  Thoughts direct themselves outward, across the Pacific toward Japan, to the people of Sendai and surrounding cities that experienced the fatal throes and devastation of earthquake and tsunami and that now face the threat of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  Overwhelmed and without words, I look to others who more readily contemplate the realities of life there—the friend, the writer, the Katrina survivor, and The New Yorker.

A letter from Sendai, Japan - from Anne

March 15, 2011

Anne writes: "Things here in Sendai have been rather surreal. But I am 

very blessed to have wonderful friends who are helping me a lot. Since 

my shack is even more worthy of that name, I am now staying at a 

friend's home. We share supplies like water, food and a kerosene heater. 

We sleep lined up in one room, eat by candlelight, share stories. It is 

warm, friendly, and beautiful. During the day we help each other clean 

up the mess in our homes. People sit in their cars, looking at news on 

their navigation screens, or line up to get drinking water when a source 

is open. If someone has water running in their home, they put out a sign 

so people can come to fill up their jugs and buckets. It's utterly 

amazing that where I am there has been no looting, no pushing in 

lines. People leave their front door open, as it is safer when an 

earthquake strikes. People keep saying, "Oh, this is how it used to be 

in the old days when everyone helped one another." Quakes keep coming. 

Last night they struck about every 15 minutes. Sirens are constant and 

helicopters pass overhead often. We got water for a few hours in our 

homes last night, and now it is for half a day. Electricity came on this 

afternoon. Gas has not yet come on. But all of this is by area. Some

people have these things, others do not. No one has washed for several 

days. We feel grubby, but there are so much more important concerns than 

that for us now. I love this peeling away of non-essentials. Living 

fully on the level of instinct, of intuition, of caring, of what is 

needed for survival, not just of me, but of the entire group. There are 

strange parallel universes happening. Houses a mess in some places, yet 

then a house with futons or laundry out drying in the sun. People lining 

up for water and food, and yet a few people out walking their dogs. All 

happening at the same time. Other unexpected touches of beauty are 

first, the silence at night. No cars. No one out on the streets. And the 

heavens at night are scattered with stars. I usually can see about two, 

but now the whole sky is filled. The mountains are Sendai are solid and 

with the crisp air we can see them silhouetted against the sky 

magnificently. And the Japanese themselves are so wonderful. I come back 

to my shack to check on it each day, now to send this e-mail since the 

electricity is on, and I find food and water left in my entranceway. I 

have no idea from whom, but it is there. Old men in green hats go from 

door to door checking to see if everyone is OK. People talk to complete 

strangers asking if they need help. I see no signs of fear. Resignation, 

yes, but fear or panic, no. They tell us we can expect aftershocks, and 

even other major quakes, for another month or more. And we are getting 

constant tremors, rolls, shaking, rumbling. I am blessed in that I live 

in a part of Sendai that is a bit elevated, a bit more solid than other 

parts. So, so far this area is better off than others. Last night my 

friend's husband came in from the country, bringing food and water. 

Blessed again. Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience 

that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is 

occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I 

experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart 

opening very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all 

that is happening. I don't. Rather, I feel as part of something 

happening that much larger than myself. This wave of birthing 

(worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent. Thank you again for your care 

and Love of me, With Love in return, to you all, Anne"

TOKYO POSTCARD

HISTORY REPEATS

by

Kenzaburo Oe

By chance, the day before the earthquake, I wrote an article, which was published a few days later, in the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun. The article was about a fisherman of my generation who had been exposed to radiation in 1954, during the hydrogen-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. I first heard about him when I was nineteen. Later, he devoted his life to denouncing the myth of nuclear deterrence and the arrogance of those who advocated it. Was it a kind of sombre foreboding that led me to evoke that fisherman on the eve of the catastrophe?

Read more:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_oe

Email from New Orleans

Now should be the time of Japanese cherry blossoms rather than surreal remembrances of the film "On the Beach.”  Nuclear fears.  I’m reminded of the time after Katrina, when everything everywhere was grey and brown for months, with no lights over great stretches of the city, especially the suburbs; and the garbage pickup and mail were only now and then, fridges were a thing of the past, insulation blew into the kitchen from the hole in the roof, and very few stores were open.  But people were gathering and hugging (and eating) all over town, and Savvy Gourmet had soups and sandwiches to go and internet available - in the same pioneer spirit described in [Anne’s] loving letter.  Katrina was a tiny microcosm of the multi-tragedy in Japan, but in a more Western way that same spirit prevailed.  The Japanese people really are incredible in their stalwart dignity - models for us all.

Mary Bradley Virre – New Orleans, LA

LETTER FROM JAPAN

Aftershocks

A nation bears the unbearable.

by

Evan Osnos

The afternoon of Friday, March 11th, was cool and partly cloudy on the northeast coast of Japan’s main island, a serene stretch once known as the nation’s “back roads.” At 2:46 P.M., as schools were beginning to let out, the ground began to shake. It was violent even by Japan’s standards—the thundering went on for five minutes—and before long Japanese television was warning of a wave charging west across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jet. Kicked up from the seabed, the tsunami amplified in size and slowed in speed as it moved into the shallows beside the Japanese coastline, and by the time it touched land it was a wall of water, black and smooth. It was as tall in places as a three-story building, moving at fifty miles per hour. It flicked fishing trawlers over seawalls, crunched them against bridges. It sent fleets of cars and trucks hurtling from parking lots, and turned homes into chips of wood and tile, before heading deeper into Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures across a span of six miles. Rampaging through former farming and fishing villages, and the cosmopolitan city of Sendai, the wave slowed, but remained too fast for most people to outrun on foot.

Read more:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/28/110328fa_fact_osnos

Discards

post-Katrina painting by Tuni Bose, from a photograph by Mary Bradley Virre

Old sweaters, sneakers, beach towels and blankets, 

college texts, ill intentions, forgotten dreams, 

odd bits of poetry we once thought pretty but really were pretty bad, 

passages torn out of notebooks that were meant to define 

and ended up 

misrepresentative and misanthropic, even maudlin.  

Better to pass them on, throw them out, no reason to rinse or even refurbish them.  

Just put them in the big, heaping dustbin, 

or straight into that corner of the basement, 

into the boxes with the rest of the discards.  

Only the weather can remind of things we meant to save.

Louisiana and the Gulf Coast

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig went up in flames, a friend in New Orleans wrote that you could smell the fire all the way in the city, describing it as the sweet, acrid smell of burning crayons.  And then he added a few words, which called up the five years spent in recovering from Katrina: “Here we go again."

The Gulf Coast is plain tired of recovering.  Would it be out of the ordinary if the region could thrive and enrich the nation with seafood, commerce, energy sources, music, and culture that no other city in the United States can match?  Without all the disaster drama?  Well, darlin, life just ain’t that simple.

1999 BP advertisement

According to some of our Gulf coast representatives, the BP oil spill is a “statistical anomaly,” whereby the deepwater drilling moratorium is unfounded.  Really?  British Petroleum has such a good record?  Well, let’s see: the 2005 BP oil refinery explosion in Texas City, TX, which killed 15 workers and injured 170; the 2006 BP pipeline leak in Prudhoe Bay, AK; several more spills in Alaska; and add to all this charges of manipulating propane prices.  Yeah, sure they’re clean: as clean as the waters their pipes in the Gulf of Mexico are spewing crude oil at – what is it now, 100,000 gallons a day?  According to the radio program, Democracy Now, it is now apparent that the “BP Oil Spill  Confirmed as Worst in US History.”  So much for that anomaly idea.

And then there’s the fact of the many oil rigs that continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, despite the moratorium, and the 49 offshore drilling plans approved without complete environmental assessments.  Hold on though: it’s even more complicated than that.  On the Gulf coast the fishing and oil industries have worked side by side for decades, each providing a wide base of support for the economies of Texas and Louisiana.  So when the companies running a rig don’t have a backup plan for emergencies – yes, like this one – everyone gets hurt.  That workers die is unforgiveable.  That the coast, along with its fragile wetlands and wildlife, is mired in an ongoing deluge of oil is unbelievable.  That the billions of dollars BP has accumulated over the decades were never invested in research on “how to cap a leak immediately if one should occur” is unthinkable.

Louisiana shouldn’t have to feel forgotten, a lost cause, “Lose-iana.”  The depth of culture in New Orleans and the delta lands is immeasurable.  And by culture I mean, the people, all of them: musicians, culinary chefs, Krewes, waitresses and waiters, writers, fishermen and fisherwomen, oyster shuckers, artists, mechanics, Saints, preachers, singers, deck hands, therapists and teachers.  From all this humanity, surely new ideas will grow from old ones, and oil will sink back below the surface and new sources of energy will grow.  It’s the Gulf, after all, where the sun shines and the wind does indeed bend marsh grasses against its shores.