Day 314

The Burning City. or Boston Skyline at Sunset taken through the window of a moving car.

My black dog and I ran 5.63 km (7.16 mins per km) through the still damp Wednesday morning.  We are all in great need of sunshine and blue sky!  Maybe tomorrow.  Running with my eyes mostly on the ground, because of the thick leaf cover now, which might hide stones, roots, and other things over which I can trip, I noticed that I could tell exactly which trees I was running under, according to the type of leaf.  My favourite old pin-oak, with its companion large-leafed vine, which I have not been able to identify, and which I hope is not a destructive parasite.  Then past a copse of birch trees.  Then sumac, ash, and many different types of maple.  Also beech, although I may be wrong about this one.  Molly is always disappointed when we turn for home, even though she has run all this way and chased the ball about 20 times!  And she is ten years old, she's supposed to start slowing down now, but doesn't seem to have any idea of that.

When I took her outside a little while ago, into the dark night of the forest, she stood and sniffed the wind, standing with her nose pointing in one direction for ages.  So I stood and tried to smell something too.  I smelt woodsmoke and rain, and that was about it, such poor noses we have compared to dogs.

I went to one of my favourite places today, the Museum of Fine Art, with my friend Mary.  I saw two of the exhibitions that I had been to alone a few weeks earlier.  While I love being by myself and thoroughly enjoyed the solitary imbibing of images, it was a much more pleasurable experience being together today.   You can spend hours going over the minutiae of an image with your friend, making connections to our different histories, finding common ground, laughing, turning pictures into conversations.

There is a large Richard Avedon exhibit, and it is interesting to trace the course of his fashion photography since 1945.  The older images are more elegant, very beautiful pictures of actresses and models in interesting street scenes of Paris, for example. Some of them actually have large breasts and bottoms.   Those from the 60's have a different kind of vibrancy, the models are suddenly much flatter and thinner, and there is a much more sexual quality to them, with several showing breasts and a couple of nudes.  Many of those from the 90's show a kind of descent into decadence with several images displaying a distinct quality of violence.

Avedon worked for years for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, magazines which I have always disdained amongst those which contribute to women's poor opinions of themselves.  The models are always too thin, too beautiful, too young, too airbrushed, too perfect altogether.  And the sisters of those magazines, like Cosmopolitan etc., are always urging one how to have better sex, how to give a better blow-job, twenty ways to please him in bed, 10 ways to look better, younger, thinner, sexier, etc. Good grief, use your imaginations!

But I did love the images, pored over the beautiful women, we all love beauty, after all, and Richard Avedon was a brilliant photographer of women.  He also had a social conscience and photographed ordinary people like oil-field workers, drifters, and the everyday people of the American mid-west.

My best friend Trish and I used to spend hours drawing fashion designs for a while when we were about 12 or 13, I remember we devised an easy and quite elegant way of drawing hands for these beauties, called chameleon hands, I think Trish invented them.  (She didn't really like chameleons, whereas I LOVED them.  Well, she loved them but she couldn't bring herself to touch them.  I, conversely, adored the little creatures so much (and still do) and could have happily lived all day with chameleons crawling all over me!)  So here is a drawing like the ones we used to make.