Three Faces of Cambridge
Monday 10/01/2007 10:44 PM
1. A Mini-Experiment in Form
So tonight I found this folder title "More Cambridge" on my hard drive. The photos were already sized to post, but I actually never posted them. And then I vaguely remembered having posted a "More Traditional Cambridge Photos" entry, but running out of time to post what I'd had in mind as the "Less Traditional Cambridge Photos" entry. So here it is, though now that I look at these again, I think they might be more typical than I'd imagined at the time.
The sidewalk outside City Centre of Cambridge is peppered with these flowers. In my ideal world, every single US tourist would take at least one photo of this and upon their return to the States, immediately appeal to their neighborhood association or city council to invest in such subtle aesthetic details.
I mean, really. How could one not start drafting a petition on the plane?
[I feel compelled to note that I'm bothered by how irrationally inconsistent my positioning of photo captions has been on this blog. One never knows whether the captions will come before or after the photo. I could pretend that these are formal choices specific to each entry: that sometimes it's necessary to set you up a little for your viewing of the photo while other times my comments are more of an afterthought, but that theory wouldn't hold up too well under close examination, and then it would appear that I was just being sloppy about the way I put my formal ideas into play. Better to just admit that I didn't put any conscious thought into it at all. Until now.]
Remember punting? Directions chalked on college walls and the ever present youth asking if you'll go punting today seem to be the primary advertising tactics.
[Another option would be to put the caption alongside the photo, which means dealing with tables, which isn't that difficult, but requires a different type of mind than the one riffing on photos from summer while avoiding the grading she needs to finish for Wednesday's class. Could be worth the effort, though. As if I'm talking to you while handing you the photo, as you're starting to make out what the image in my hand moving toward you is.]
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While this photo is hardly atypical (I might have taken it because I was too cheap to by a $3 postcard of the same scene), it may help to remind you of what punting actually is:
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[Would be better if the text started at the top of the photo instead of being centered vertically, but I can't figure out how to fix that ... maybe Peter will see this and doctor it up for me. We won't try that again in this post.]
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2. Another Reason to Hate Starbucks (& Borders, While We're At It)
I've mentioned the Starbucks aversion in an earlier post. I am also predisposed to unsatisfactory experiences at Borders ever since I learned that they don't include a nonfiction section, let alone memoir or personal essay sections, in their floorplans. Nonfiction of that sort is found, of course, in the FICTION section. When I asked a store employee about this, he said, "Well you know, all literature's the same." And he didn't say it in a way that implied a shred of awareness of his response's absurdity.
These were taken in the Starbucks inside the Borders in Cambridge. I only went to the coffee shop because I was told by an employee that they had wireless internet access. Turns out they didn't have their own access but were mooching off some other business' signal, which was too weak for me to be able to connect to anyway. So I downed my small latte and tried to use the bathroom before I looked for a more legitimate connection. This is what I encountered:
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So I trudged back up to the counter, waited for an employee to become available, and then got the Secret Code. Once I was inside, I encountered this:
Is it a literacy thing? A control thing? I, of course, tried to open the door before pushing the green button. And it really wouldn't open.
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3. The Woman in the Church
Later, I found St. Peter's Church in its nearly overgrown yard, with a slightly trampled path from the sidewalk to its doorway. It's a 13th-century abandoned church about 1/2 mile (if that) from City Centre.
I found that it was open, and a woman had stretched extension cords from a neighboring building to power a few projectors. Loops of video footage of a woman whose long hair was blowing in the wind appeared on a blank shadowed wall, and the woman in the church was taking photos of the video playing. She was also projecting slides of women's faces into something close to 3" x 3" squares on different walls.
When I asked if it was okay to come inside and take some pictures of the church, she said "Of course, it's always open." We didn't say anything else to each other for the twenty minutes or so I was inside. She spent several minutes pressing buttons on her camera and carefully positioning herself before taking each photo. I watched her video for a few minutes until I became a little unsettled by how hypnotic it was, but once I averted my eyes, I just took in the stillness of the place (even with her projectors humming and her prowling around in the background). And in the most cliched way possible, it was becoming a gray, wet, windy day.
I didn't take any pictures of the woman or her projections. I didn't photograph the end of the room because opposite that stained glass window because it's where she was. We each seemed to inhabit our own spaces in there, even though it was a tiny one-room church, and I somehow felt as if I might break the calmness by intruding on the work she was doing that way. Looking at the images I have now, I realize there isn't a single piece of evidence that she existed at all.
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