Just an update…

I have always loved the change of seasons.  Whether in the Hudson Valley where I grew up or the small island in the Aegean Sea where I now live.  I welcome each new season with joy and relief, only to say good riddance three months later after weariness sets in.  This autumn is no different and there are many changes to go along with the weather.  Clocks have been set back.  Tea time seems more meaningful as darkness falls.

I have been living in an apartment full of boxes for the past two months.  All of my books, shelving, camera gear, odds and ends…have been packed up and ready to be moved.  At first it was an exciting feeling, to come home to this pyramid of brown cardboard.  It has grown stale as the day approaches when I can finally begin to move from one side of town to the other.  As one friend remarked last night, moving house is inspiring and makes one reevaluate routines.  Like the change of seasons, this move will give me a new perspective.  I need it.

My small photo show was, on many levels, a superb success.  Many people came to the opening and I was struck by the wide variety of people I know here on Paros: people involved in the arts, those I know through the local biking community, others I have come to know over the years, students from a local art school…people who would ordinarily not mix.  They crammed into the space provided by a small Italian restaurant and had a good time.  I guess that was the point, really, to have a small gathering on a night in mid-October when there was ordinarily little to do.  Many compliments, many questions…alas, not a single sale so I am stuck with 22 framed and matted photos.  So I will choose one to put up in my new apartment.  There is a part of me that wants to just burn the rest.  But what to do with the frames and glass?  Eventually I will get around to scanning the photos so people can see them online, which suddenly feels like cheating.  Now I don’t want to do that.  If you missed the show, you missed it.  Is that so selfish?

I wasn’t asking a huge amount for these photos.  They were priced inexpensively.  If I had sold five I would have broken even on the costs.  I think many people have no idea of the work that goes into a single image.  Even had these been digital images, the work would have been substantial.  They are not, of course, so we are talking days of labor to get the picture right and that is before matting, framing, the overall cost for the exhibit opening…I guess I am taking page from Robert Fripp’s advice to artists–work for free–an expensive venture.

My list for today is as long as my arm and I must get it all done.

–JDCM

 

 

Temperate climate change…

There are only a few days left until the Autumnal Equinox and it feels like it here on Paros.  The crushing summer heat has fled, and in its wake the days have become clear and sunny, with cooler breezes.  The tourist crowds have thinned considerably and our island is slowly being returned to us.  There is nothing quite so lovely as the change of seasons.

So much has happened in the past 4 months.  After my father died things changed.  A re-assessment of my life, goals, raison d’etre…Once again I am looking into what makes me ‘happy’.  Life, for me at least, is no longer about hitting myself with a hammer while thinking that the next blow wouldn’t hurt.  Time to stop doing what I do not like, when at all possible.

I am also moving house.  I have everything boxed up and ready to go save for my clothes, some small amount of kitchen stuff and what art is hanging on my walls.  I move at the end of October and assume all of my own bills and rent.   That will be a relief and a freedom I have missed.

boxed up and ready to go...

boxed up and almost ready to go…

Here are some still lives from a friend’s back terrace…

Blue Vase, 2015

Blue Vase, 2015

Ladder and Anchor, 2015

Ladder and Anchor, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My header image is from a short bike trip I took to Antiparos recently.  It is a reminder of two of the things I love to do and have been neglecting the past few months.  It is also a reminder that William Henry Jackson may have had his mules but I have my mountain bike.

Yashica and Bike, Andiparos, September 2015

Yashica and Bike, Andiparos, September 2015

That’s it.

–JDCM

Asleep, then waking…

The streets of Athens feel empty at 04:00.  This ancient city is sleeping.

I have returned home from my father’s memorial service in Provincetown.  It was a lovely and moving weekend laughter and tears.  On Sunday we scattered his ashes in the bay.  We boarded the rented schooner and set sail on a foggy and grey afternoon, light winds from the south.  As the skipper cut the motor and the crew raised sail, I was struck by how calm and peaceful the air had become, silent but for the waves lapping at the hull.  Light mist settled upon us with caring hands. As we came about my sisters and I stood against the gunwale and poured him into the briny blue-green, the water turning momentarily milky as the ash melted into the deep.  And he was gone.  Afterwards we gathered with friends and told tales of the man.  We watched a moving short film prepared by his widow, and ate some food.  We all agreed he would have enjoyed  it.  He would have also exclaimed, at one point, “Enough already!”, his modesty finally outweighing his pride.  So long, weary traveler!  Kalo taxidhi!

I have been musing on happiness–again.  I have heard that it is an ‘inside job.’ If so then what are the external expressions?  I know that I am happy yet my world, to some, may look messy, chaotic, perhaps unsystematic.  There is nothing neat and orderly about it.  It is not sanitary or perfectly aligned.  Maybe a need for external neatness, a desk of neatly sharpened pencils and carefully arranged in/out boxes is actually a cry for help?  I know my father’s office, even when he was young and dementia had not taken its toll, was what would have been thought of as messy and disorganized. In fact, everything was exactly where it needed to be.  His internal life, his ethos, was ship-shape and trim.  His morality and sense of self were in alignment and he was happy.  And he left a desk of unfinished work–a sign of a life well-lived.

I celebrate the dust and disorder of the external and understand how it feeds my imagination.  It is a zen geometry, creating an oblique stack of books, random pieces of folded paper, a crumbling temple on a rock overlooking the noise and chaos–all precarious. It allows me to get lost, discovering the jewel in the mud that others will never discover.  I have permission to get muddy.  To find joy and laughter in the lack of right-angles, the subtle aspects of color and shades of grey…That is fun.  That is happiness.  Creation is messy work, full of uncertainty and risk.

Macmillan-Wharf-view-2015

–JDCM

A bit of dark backstory…

I have recently been examining some of the bits and bobs that make up my past.  Some are quite old–worn gears that skip teeth, and clank around rustily bent.  If I listen too close, I can hear them late at night.  They can keep me awake.  Most of the time I pay them little heed, but they are still there.  Here are a couple…

In 1975 my father began his first teaching position as Writer-in-Residence at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.  A year later he convinced my mother to move with me to be with him for a year.  We packed up the family car and moved from the idyllic, bucolic, verdant village of Ancramdale, NY to the suburbs of Des Moines.  There were few trees then, many plastic houses, minuscule back yards.  I was 11 years old.  I was pulled from the familiar and dumped into what I felt was a terrifying experience.  I was very unhappy.  my very cool bicycle was stolen from school and the school did nothing to help even thought they knew who had stolen it. I was beaten up outside my homeroom and the teachers did nothing then as well.   I acted out in all the ways that children do when they have been traumatised–I lied, stole, lied some more, failed at school, snuck around at night dressed in black.  But being the 1970s, I fell through the cracks. Our shitty suburban rental seethed with anger, fighting and disappointed expectations.  My parents were in the painful middle stages of a separation that 9 years later ended in divorce.  I became a latchkey kid.  I learned to be a ghost and disappeared into the background.  We left Iowa in the spring of 1977 and moved back home.  Thank God.

That summer my parents sent me to summer camp.  They needed some time alone, I think.  For me it was more terror, yet I was resigned to my fate.  Camp Berkshire was a horror.  The counselor who oversaw our little cabin was a drunk and when I alerted the head counselor that this guy had been drinking a lot while driving us all around, he was fired.  One night I was shaken awake by this guy.  He smelled of booze.  He whispered that he knew it was me that had snitched.  He held a knife to my throat and told me that if I ever did that again he would kill me.  So I kept my trap shut.  A few weeks later my parents came to visit me.  My father took this picture.  I have only recently seen this photograph.  It says a lot, I think.  Even back then I was white-knuckling it.

 

JDCM at Camp Berkshire, 1977.

JDCM at Camp Berkshire, 1977.

–JDCM

Happiness…

Gouna is a traditional Greek fish dish–sundried mackerel, seasoned and grilled.  Fasolakia are a type of green bean, like haricot vert, but much longer.  They make an excellent salad.  Together they make an excellent dinner with friends, family and loved ones.  Especially overlooking the bay of Paroikia at sunset.

Gouna, fasolakia and Paros at sunset...

Gouna, fasolakia and Paros at sunset…(photo  by Angelique Tsantanis)

 

 

I have so much on my mind…so many things to say that seem extremely important to pass along.  When I feel this way I become verbose and sophomoric.  Best to say nothing.  I will say, however,  that the inevitability of change has been on my mind for the past month or so.  I can let it go.

The close-up...

The close-up. (photo by Angelique Tsantanis)

One choice I have to is to try to stay ahead of the curve.  Although I have never surfed, I feel an apt metaphor lies in that activity.  I can either ride the wave or let the wave ride me.  I have let many waves ride me over the years.  Time to shoot the curl.

–JDCM

 

In Memorium, Hilary Thomas Masters (February 3, 1928-June 14, 2015)

It goes something like this…

Let me tell you a story of a man who went down to the sea in ships, of an imaginary knight who took to the sky, of the struggles and joys of a man possessed by love and all things worth living for…

I knew my father.  I knew him as only his son and friend can.  As father and son we attempted to fly, to join up.  But it was as comrades and friends that we finally earned our wings.  As an only child in what would today be called a “dysfunctional family” he came to us with whatever he had learned from his grandfather, an old 19th century cavalry soldier: deep morality, sense of duty and a set of standards to which perhaps even he could never rise.  Hard work was forever its own reward.  This was sometimes bitter and angry when mixed with his love for us, yet that never stopped us from loving each other, as only great and deep friendships can attest.  He was, after all, my father.

He was a sailor, a skier, a swimmer, a writer, a newspaper man, an historian, a photographer.  He learned how to build with wood, cement, paper, plastic, paint.  He drove his Morgan Plus-4 with joy and calm excitement.  His love of history and adventure drew him to the stories of the great aces of the First World War, an age of modern chivalry when derring-do flew hand-in-hand with honor and comradery.  He became Dilly O’Dally, the Irish ace of the skies over the Western Front in 1917.  He was, after all, my father and I knew him for 50 years.

Writing was his real work, although he taught for many years to pay the bills.  “One must always work,” he would say to me.   This ethos kept him laboring, pushing, grinding away at his desk every day, word by word, sentence by sentence.  I do this now, but in a different medium, as do my sisters.  He was, after all, my father and I knew him for 50 years as he taught me of these things.

When I saw him just a month or so ago, he said to me, “Tell your mother that I love her…”  Despite a painful and long separation and divorce, he asked about my mother often.  Maybe some regret plagued him, a guilt that only he could really ever know.  Or perhaps not.  I think it was just love bubbling up from below, or a memory of love, a memory of green trees in the Hudson Valley or a beach on Cape Cod, of three children and a home, a family unlike the family he had known as a child.  He was, after all, our father for well over 50 years and we loved him in the only way we had ever been taught.

Like Greek drama, there is no surprise finish.  At the end of the story the great ace of the skies, the sailor, the man who loved life ends the struggle and, running low on fuel and mortally wounded by the betrayals of age, banks his delicate spruce and canvas craft and heads west.  He was, after all, my father and I loved him and knew him for 50 years.

HTM, 2006

HTM, 2006

–JDCM

5th Circle of Paros bicycle race…

The Circle of Paros bicycle race has come and gone and I feel pretty good about it.  The course was the reverse of last year so the hills were more vertical and the downgrades less intense.  Still, I managed to ride it in about the same time as last year, coming in at 2:38:37 compared to last year’s 2:37+.  Like I said, I am alright with that. My Boardman cycle was an excellent ride.  About 6 kilometers from the finish my right hamstring cramped with a very painful charley horse.  It is bad enough when that happens and you are not moving at 30 km/h on a 8.6 kilo bicycle…no time to stop!  I had to stretch my leg while I was pedaling.  Then I had to get my foot back in the pedal.  There are loads of pictures of the whole race here but I gleaned a couple of good ones for you all…

The final kilometer...photo by Dimitris Chaniotis

The final kilometer…photo by Dimitris Chaniotis

The end...photo by Robert Van der Most

The end…photo by Robert Van der Most

The times are here…

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4PyrkQmGFMMVy1TYjlDVVR2aE51TEM4a1lBWGFVUnk4eWMw/view

 

–JDCM

The Dancing Bear of Change…

It has been a month since my last post and, like a friend wrote so well, it is not because nothing has happened, but rather because so much has occurred that is tough to sort it all out.  I’ll try.

I have finally delivered my new portfolio to the framers. I am only a few days off schedule, and I am alright with that.  There are 24 pieces of assorted images, things that caught my eye.  In fact I am considering of naming the portfolio just that–“Caught My Eye.”  It feels very good to have this off my desk.  Now I am thinking of what is next…

Summer is beginning here on Paros and the tourists and weekenders are ambling off of the ferries in larger numbers, with backpacks and rollies, hats and sunblock.  The roads are more busy with cars and other vehicles so when I bike I must be extra cautious, especially in Paroikia or any of the other towns.  Those are the most dangerous places to ride a bicycle here.

The Circle of Paros bicycle race is this weekend and I will happily participate.  I have been riding more this winter and spring but not so much in the past few weeks.  The weather, combined with a serious head cold, kept me off the saddle for almost a fortnight and I was also out of town for a bit.  I am racing against myself, so I will keep it light and fun.

I have sold my high-end Canon gear and invested in a smart, small Fuji FinePix X-T1.  The images are sharp and since it is a mirror-less camera, it makes almost no noise when the shutter fires.  It has some gimmicky gizmos that I am not keen on, but I do have to use them.  It also has an array of Fuji film simulations that are pretty good too.  I find myself doing more with less.  I purchased it with the kit 18-55 mm lens.  I love that I can use my Voigtlander/Leica M lenses when attached to an adaptor.

Hazy Sifnos

Hazy Sifnos

Change seems to be all around me these days.  The days change, and with them the seasons.  Beginnings and endings are macrocosmic reflections of larger shifts.  The best I can do is embrace the dancing bear of change and revel in its sometimes disconcerting waltz.  I can try to lead, but only when the beast allows.  I can do my work, help out when I can, and not worry about the tune.  Like a young boy standing on the feet of an elder, I let my ursine partner carry me along…

–JDCM