Between Two Buildings

“A photo essay.” Or just a bunch of semi-related shots.

Welcome, new subscribers! Thank you for joining. If you haven’t yet subscribed, I have free and paid options available. And we’re almost to 100!

Now, to the post.

I have a lot of photo albums on my phone — extremely specific ones, most of which I have yet to share online.

“Trees and Moon” is one I forgot about until just now, when I just went to check what albums I’ve made. You might guess the type of pictures that are in it. They are all of the moon, and various trees.

There’s “Nostalgic Fashion,” which is mostly nineties fashion I see on Friends and Sex and the City, and pause to snap a photo of, for nostalgic reasons. I have about 70 pictures.

There’s the album “Kate Bush Playing in Unlikely Places,” which currently houses two videos of unlikely places where Kate Bush was playing on the overhead speakers.

One of them was a kind of sad-looking taco stand.

There’s apparently an album called “Migration and Identity,” which only houses the following picture:

I wonder what else I was going to put in that album.

I didn’t put up a Substack last week. I’ve been writing and documenting the past couple of weeks, but I find it much easier to write and document things than do the organizing-for-publication part, the dissemination part. Which, of course, is why I started this Substack in the first place…

Often I wish that I had a Vera Nabokov. If you don’t know the story: Vladimir Nabokov was able to do what he did not least because he had someone typing up his pages every day, organizing them, editing them, sending replies to publishers, handling his correspondence, and cooking his meals.

Seriously.

And almost no one knows that she existed. They just know about his work.

As far as I know, it is virtually unheard of for a female creator of any kind, or just a woman generally, to have a spouse who handles all of her day-to-day business so she can focus on her real, serious work.

But for the record, I’m taking applications!

I mean, sometimes couples like this exist. I went to a talk by Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis and one of the smartest people I’ve ever listened to, at the New York Public Library about a decade ago. Her dear, Swiss, quiet husband was watching admiringly from the wings, and patiently waited for her to sign books afterward. He didn’t show the slightest sign of annoyance or impatience.

I never forgot that. He just adored her and supported her and didn’t seem hung up in the least on the fact that she was getting attention.

He probably takes good care of her. Don’t know if he handles the business side of things.

But besides Marjane and her sweet Swiss husband, it’s not generally done for [creative] women to be so supported, without question.

So, I write all the time, but as an organizer and publisher, I’m pretty shite. And I don’t have a secretary or a Vera. Maybe I should hire an assistant to send out what I create every day.

Anyway, the point of the post! One of my albums is called Between Two Buildings. I started it when I moved to Astoria, maybe.

Or, no — my album is telling me I started it in 2018, in Ishikawa prefecture, in Japan:

This was taken just after my friend and I had gone to have an enzyme bath, which was a fascinating time.

I probably started taking “Between Two Buildings” photos much earlier than that, though. I don’t have almost any extant photos from before about 2016, when I lost my last hard drive. I just searched the word “buildings” in my iPhoto to see if I could find any older specimens, and I have 12,000 pictures of buildings. I really like taking photos.

Anyway. Here is the rest of the album, Between Two Buildings. I hope you enjoy it. Most of these photos were taken in my neighborhood.

And this is my addition from an hour ago, between downpours:

Curiously, as I was angling my phone to get the right shot, a woman saw me doing so and did not show any interest in either waiting a second, going around me, or doing that cute thing where people exaggeratedly duck so they don’t mess up your shot. She made eye contact with me, looked at what I was doing, and didn’t change her pace as she walked in front of me. Fascinating behavior!

Okay, I hope to amass the recent writing and photo-taking I’ve done for a post soon…

In the meantime, I hope you are enjoying the rain we seem to have everywhere, or whatever weather system is coming through your particular location at this moment.

Thank you for reading! And we are almost at 100 subscribers…