Has taken me to the South corner. It's raining just a little, the air is darker. Still quiet. Spent about an hour. Gave Nah-Shon a few pix, "you made me look like a star".
Talk with the player at the next table, also 20 years teaching and playing here. He's from Casablanca, we talk of Ramadan (after 8pm tonight, he spends the Ramadan nights at the chess shop of Thompson St.), of languages, of serial killers. People come up to play with him, a little knot of visitors with a client, $5 a game, pictures taken by several. I put up my camera when he first came to sit down, with a question on my face, "I don't know you". Later he walks past me in the park, "is that what you do? you take pictures?", I tell him I'll take some portraits of him if he likes, he says he needs a shave. We make a vague tentative plan that he will shave for tomorrow and I will come by to show him today's pictures in any case. A pleasant chat, going nowhere really, chilling out, time seems to be made of, among other things, such thin, loose, haphazard moments, here.
Unhappy and mixed feelings and incomplete tonight. Tomorrow I would like to talk of the photo work again. I wasn't quite sure what I was coming with today. Let things pass. Had a few refusals. Tentative, useless shots of the tree, stalling. (Not sure what there is to see with it. Its effect is not in itself.)
Sour with not saying goodbye properly to Nah-Shon, or properly hello to D. also met. Lacking in concentration. Losing the person-person connection there, which I feel sorry about - wonder why. Amount of emotion, overshadowing, possibly: distracting.
There'll be these déprises, these letting go of the thread, necessarily. Which will fuel determination and acuity of listening, likely.
Matter of keeping at it, through the fallow.
Talk with the player at the next table, also 20 years teaching and playing here. He's from Casablanca, we talk of Ramadan (after 8pm tonight, he spends the Ramadan nights at the chess shop of Thompson St.), of languages, of serial killers. People come up to play with him, a little knot of visitors with a client, $5 a game, pictures taken by several. I put up my camera when he first came to sit down, with a question on my face, "I don't know you". Later he walks past me in the park, "is that what you do? you take pictures?", I tell him I'll take some portraits of him if he likes, he says he needs a shave. We make a vague tentative plan that he will shave for tomorrow and I will come by to show him today's pictures in any case. A pleasant chat, going nowhere really, chilling out, time seems to be made of, among other things, such thin, loose, haphazard moments, here.
Unhappy and mixed feelings and incomplete tonight. Tomorrow I would like to talk of the photo work again. I wasn't quite sure what I was coming with today. Let things pass. Had a few refusals. Tentative, useless shots of the tree, stalling. (Not sure what there is to see with it. Its effect is not in itself.)
Sour with not saying goodbye properly to Nah-Shon, or properly hello to D. also met. Lacking in concentration. Losing the person-person connection there, which I feel sorry about - wonder why. Amount of emotion, overshadowing, possibly: distracting.
There'll be these déprises, these letting go of the thread, necessarily. Which will fuel determination and acuity of listening, likely.
Matter of keeping at it, through the fallow.
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