My Genovese Workspace

It's raining this morning and so I've stayed at the apartment, with plans to meet friends later.  But even when it rains, I find this city beautiful. Reflections appear in puddles on footpaths all over the city.

I have developed a new and terrible habit.  I wake about 8am, open the door to the small balcony, climb back into bed and sleep again ... as late as 11am that first time.  It's bliss.  I'm an early-rising creature and find it easy to wake and begin a day.

Not so here.  I have become a sloth. Quite the delighted sloth.  It won't last. It's only that I'm walking all over the place and talking to so many interesting people.  And I have Donatella and Luciano's cd playing.

But staying in on a Saturday morning in Genova ... you can see why in the photograph below.  The space where I work is an easy place to be.

Thank you, Air B&B.  I can't recommend them highly enough.  My cousin, Julie, introduced me to them and we stayed in them in Verona, Croatia, Budapest, Austria, and Lake Como last summer.  You get to meet interesting locals and live in local homes. 

My bedroom/office space in this beautiful apartment, downtown Genova.

Coincidences ... lovely ones.

A few years ago, I noticed this lovely woman at her window.  Her house is out on the Ligurian coast, in a small fishing village that I love to visit. I raised my camera and asked if I might photograph her there.

She agreed, with a nod.  Then she came downstairs and we talked for a while, and I took some more photographs of her, with her permission.  She was lovely.

Last night, Barbara and I sat down at one of my favourite cafes, in Piazza Matteoti, and there was that woman ... sitting reading a newspaper at the table next door to ours.

I didn't expect her to remember me and I didn't like to interrupt her but as we were leaving, I couldn't resist.  I said Ciao, and asked if she remembered me taking her photograph.

She smiled.  She did!

It was so lovely to see her again.  So very lovely.

Genova, of course ... and my playlist.

Hmmm, which order shall I post them in ... the photograph or my favourite music playlist?

The playlist:

Alexi Murdoch - Breathe (it reminds me I must)

Fabrizio De Andre - Creuza di Ma (because it takes me back to Genova, everysingle time)

Amos Lee - Arms of a Woman (love the sound)

Ben Howard - Old Pine (just love, so much)

Brian Eno - By this River (from a movie, it haunted me)

Counting Crows - Sullivan Street (there has to be at least one, of these guys or REM)

David Gray - The One I Love (somehow this one slipped in.  It wakes me up if I'm concentrating too deeply.

LP - Into the Wild (just simply love and adore)

Marc Cohen - Ellis Island (an old favourite)

Missy Higgins - Everyone's Waiting (love and adore)

Passenger - Let Her Go (new big love)

Sarah McLachlan - Angel (old love, and it reminds me of Pippa singing it beautifully)

Van Morrison - Into the Mystic  (hunted this song down and fell for Van Morrison as a result. Loved 'The Newsroom' too)

Yo La Tengo - Green Arrow (brilliant beautiful exquisite)

Zucchero - Dune Mosse (i enjoy Zucchero)

Paul Kelly - Midnight Rain (possibly my most favourite song ever but on his cd, it opens with heavy rain.  I love songs that include heavy rain, like we used to have back in Fiordland, NZ)

So this is it for now.  There are more I need to add but it meets my needs for now.

And the photograph ... Genova, of course.

Here I am ...

Curled up on my borrowed bed in this magnificent Genovese apartment, top floor, listening to my small music playlist of absolute favourite songs ... the ones that I always play.  I should post that list one day, so you can throw your hands up in horror perhaps, but these are the ones that I listen to, over and over, making sharing an office space with me all but impossible.

Or  so I've been told.

I have lived more quietly today.  The result of one of my allergy/anxiety attacks last night - 4am before I slept.  It seems that I am one of those creatures who 'feel the fear and do it anyway'.  It's always been like that.  The desire to go versus my chicken-hearted fears.

Most amusing, probably, was flying to Istanbul when flying wasn't my favourite thing.  Moving to Istanbul alone wasn't the best thing for a chicken-hearted soul to do either, actually.  But there are many things I have done that left me wondering what I was thinking?!

Cairo was both so beautiful and so terrifying for this girl from small-town New Zealand.

Anyway ... it seems, despite being as much in denial as is possible, I have some allergy/food intolerance issues.  Some things affect my mouth, others my throat, a few my stomach and etc.  I'm thinking, after last night, that I might finally get tested because the allergies are definitely increasing and I have say, they're just not fun at 1, 2 and 3am, in a country not your own when you're alone.

And today ... I'm laughing as I write this blog post, it didn't go well at the pharmacies.  They didn't really have English, and I'm famous for not being good at other languages.  Ohdeargod ... so, I have some antihistamine drops (I think), and I'm meant to take 20 drops once a day, (I think) and some asprin too (which I'm pretty sure I don't like). Not really what I was looking for but they're in the building. 

I'm someone who thinks if the medicine is in the building it's enough.  It makes Gert crazy.

But this isn't what I meant to write of ... really.  I had a nice invitation today, to supply photographs of Genova to a Ligurian magazine here.  I love Liguria, there's no hiding that, and so I said sure. 

The bonus was getting a copy of their latest and it contained an interview (and an A4 photograph) of my first football hero.  Well, technically he's my second but as Milito left, I don't talk of him anymore. 

Oh the fickle world of Series A football.  I don't recall New Zealand rugby players doing these things, these transfers, however ... he has promised he will stay with my team next year.

How many readers will I lose for revealing the truth about who I follow in football ...

Last night, after eating pizza at my favourite pizzeria, I was wandering along Via XX Settembre and found the image that follows this post.  I had to move quickly because there were others around and I'm not sure they all saw what I saw.

But this visit to Genova, I have to  say, there has been just so much ... so many good people, so much divine food, and superb wine.  Great music.  Brilliant conversations. 

Genova has been like that ... and so much more.

It was an extraordinary day ... yesterday

I don't even know where to begin ... last night perhaps, when Alessandra organised a dinner for a few of her friends and I was invited along.  It was outstanding.  

Donatella Soranzio sang, with Luciano Susto on bass guitar, and they were sublime.  I felt so very fortunate to be there listening.  Video by Federico will follow, as it was he who packed his camera and filmed events as they unfolded but they are on youtube as Susto e Soranzo.  And you will see, it was one of those 'pinch me, I'm dreaming' moments, there at Stefano Di Bert's exquisite restaurant called Pacetti Antica Ostaria.

And Stefano ... what a host.  He brought out plate after plate of truly divine food, accompanied by the loveliest of wines ... so many divine wines that came along on that gastronomic journey.  Food and wines from both Friuli and Liguria.  Stefano, Alessandra, Federico, and Donatella are all from the Friuli region. 

1.30am saw Stefano, Barbara, and Alessandra walking me back through quiet city streets to my apartment. This morning, I have to admit that I woke, and lay very still ... checking for hangover damage.  It turns out, the story is true, there is no hangover with good wine and believe me, we had had a lot of very very good wine.

It was one of the most enjoyable evening's I've had in a long time.

Today I had appointments all over the city, ending with a Napoli pizza at my favourite pizzeria on Via Ravecca.

Actually, yesterday I also had lunch with Francesca.  'The' Francesca from Le Gramole.  We laughed often but the dish below, the Troccoli, that made us laugh most of all because I told her of New Zealand's Huhu Grubs ...

I have eaten a Huhu Grub and if you clicked on the link you will have seen why I might have found my Troccoli slightly disconcerting.

I'm too tired to write of everything, although I must add that I also had the pleasure of meeting Sibilla Iacopini.  And I'm enjoying this new apartment in another part of the city.  I'm top floor, with a small balcony and french doors that I open each morning as a way of beginning the day.

I'll take some photographs when my days stop spinning but really ... I love the spinning.

Magical Events ...

Genova is this magical place ... and already I imagine the Genovese doubting me but it happened like this.  My lovely friend, Barbara, invited me to attend Teatro Carlo Felice's ballet - Biancaneve (Snow White in English).

I went along, no idea what to expect and honestly, after the show my mind was completely blown.  I have borrowed one of the photographs from the Teatro Carlo Felice website here in Genova, hoping that nobody minds, giving full credit to the photographer Marcello Orselli.  You can see more of his work here.

The photograph I'm posting was just one of many spectacular scenes.  In it you see the Seven Dwarves leaving work.  They dance on that 'rockface' using ropes  they simply took our breath away.

Other breath-stealing scenes included the wicked witch forcing the apple into Snow White's mouth. It was brutal and yet it was dance and somehow that made it beautiful.  And the scene where the prince danced with his dead princess. 

We were all 5 years old again ... believing all that we saw.  Aching for all of the characters.

I left the theatre both exhausted and exhilarated, feeling so fortunate that I had witnessed so much beauty.  I have no more words besides telling you ... it was sublime.

And I Arrived ...

It was an epic journey to Genova this time ... 2 hours of sleep, up at 4.45am for the 5.27am tram.  There was the airport-bus, the plane, another bus and a train.  Then arriving, and shopping for essentials and aperitivo with one of my lovely friends here.

I slept so deeply last night.

Today was about drinking that first extraordinarily good cup of espresso, and wandering the streets that I love so well.  It was about catching up with Francesca .  Lunch, and perhaps a siesta and tonight, a ballet at the theatre I've wanted to visit for so long.

Tomorrow is a dinner with new friends. 

Meanwhile the sun has been shining and all around me and, without people realising, I am quietly enjoying the Genovese way of talking and greeting one another out there on the streets.

I have arrived.  Photographs to follow.

In These Days ...

I sit at my typewriter
remembering my grandmother
& all my mothers,
& the minutes they lost
loving houses better than themselves

Erica Jong, extract from Women Enough.

I've been busy ... a project, of course.  A new website specifically for the project, and all kinds of other things too.

At night, I shift my aching body from my ergonomically-disasterous desk and creak to my bed ... tired from sitting rather than anything deliciously active.

But the website is almost done.  I'll launch soon, via a newsletter that shall become regular.  I'm eyeing Instagram too ... I'm in Genova next week, it seems like a good time to work out all this social media stuff that I've mostly ignored, as the new project is all about Genova.

I've been cooking and cleaning, imagining myself quite marvelously productive there too, although wanting more applause than I get for fitting everything into my day.  I've always been dubious about this housewife stuff.  It seems to run along the lines of 'if a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to see it ...'  Same with housework.  A clean house is the result of many lost minutes and hours.  Many.

Erica Jong wrote the perfect poem when she wrote Women Enough. 

So precisely, yes.

But I must work.  I have one more in the elderberry series to post.  It's been up to 28 celsius, thunderstormy, calm and cool too.  It's Spring.  I'm loving it.

Jared Moossy, Photographer

Jared Moossy is an American photographer who filmed all four episodes of the documentary series Witness. He specializes in conflict photography and is a founding member of the photo-collective Razon. For the Witness series, he travelled to Juarez, Libya, Sudan, and Brazil. Witness shows what life is like for photojournalists working in conflict zones; how they utilize fixers and contacts, search out a story, and make their photographs. The series also touches on the dangers that the photographers, their colleagues, and subjects face, while pursing this work.

An Interview with Jared Moossy, in Nowhere Magazine.

Anyone who knows me knows that war photographers and journalists fascinate me.  I read a lot of their literature simply because I have this idea that they take the reader beyond the gloss and spin that is everyday news, beyond everyday life, to a place where agendas don't really play out in reporting the news and the truth can't be bought and repackaged. 

They go out into the world and attempt to tell the story ... a story with words and/or photographs.  Camille Lepage was one of those people.  She was a 26-year-old French photojournalist who died on Tuesday May 14th, 2014 in Central African Republic.

She said, “You, as a photojournalist, are the messenger, you’re not the one who will implement new laws on Human Rights in Russia or Chechen, you’re not the one who will put rapists in jail, you will not cure Aids and won’t give food to all of those who are malnourished, but you’re the one, and that’s essential, who is going to denounce those things. Your job, or at least that’s how I see my role, is to make it as appealing as possible so people can relate to it and ideally put pressure on those in charge and whose role is to make things change!” 

Camille Lepage, December 1, 2011, via the blog of Christine Dowsett.

Jared Moossy for Nowhere Magazine: Syria from Nowhere Magazine on Vimeo.

Nina Coolsaet, Wine-maker

I have a new interview up in my Interviews section.

Nina Coolsaet is the loveliest Spanish-based Belgian who, together with her Spanish husband, Alfredo, is breathing new life into the old family bodega and creating some head-turning wines.

I had the pleasure of interviewing her a while ago.  I was curious to know more about this couple who were all about creating wine with their family in mind.  I imagined how that might affect the way you would produce a wine. 

And so we chatted awhile ...

The photographs were provided by Rafael Bellver and I have created a slideshow of his images over here.

 

 

Out in the Garden ...

This morning my camera and I wandered out to the garden but it's not really my garden at all.  The Jasmine ... okay, I carried that home from the Amsterdam Flower Market one year, on the train, traveling with my favourite Australian, Clare.

And I pushed for the lavender plants and the honeysuckle too, bought one of the raspberry canes, and asked if we might have a fern.  I was rapt when Gert's parents gave him a part of their rhubarb plant ... while wishing I could have had a slice from the root of the mythical rhubarb plant back home in New Zealand.

Nana and Grandad grew the best rhubarb in the world, or that's how we told it.  Mum and Dad were given a section with roots and voila, we had some of that Invercargill perfection growing out back in our Mosgiel garden.

But I'm more of an admirer of gardens ... as opposed to being an actual gardener.  My mother would have told you that I was a bit of a lazy wench when it came to gardening.  I preferred reading or walking my dog, or just simply watching.  I should have been ashamed, as I come from a long line of hardworking, dedicated gardeners but I wasn't.

Then  I met Gert, who didn't garden but does now ... just like the New Zealanders I grew up around and so our garden is all thanks to him.  The big fat toads living out there simply amuse him.  He brushes off spiders, and goes into battle with the Ivy when it threatens to overwhelm all.

He BBQ's too, and this time I don't have a dog to get rid of the evidence about totally not being a Kiwi when it comes to BBQ food.

So these photographs taken by me mostly capture the result of his hard work and dedication ...

It was a Sunday morning impulse to attempt to capture a sense of how this beautiful day is playing out in our tiny pocket-sized Belgian garden.

A Lightness of Being ...

For me, there is this feeling of an incredible lightness of being that comes with that first really summery Sunday morning of the year.

We can finally open the door to the garden and enjoy the scent of the Jasmine I'm growing not far away.  But better than anything else, in those early morning hours, Nature often wins out as the dominant scent in the air ... especially on a Sunday when the roar of that massively busy highway nearby becomes so much less.

I wandered outside with my camera just now, startled a thrush, then watched a pigeon fly clumsily away.  The lawns will be mown today, there is a BBQ planned for our evening.  It's the first of this summery season. 

And the rhubarb is going crazy out there, so are the raspberry plants.  The fern has experienced new hope and is growing accordingly, and my beloved New Zealand Lupins are finally making an appearance too.  The yellow ones, the kind found growing at beaches back home.  Those ones that have a scent I love like nothing else.

Somehow they manage to contain both this huge celebration of summer and the promise of the sea.  I would fill my garden with these if I could.  But they're not in flower yet so I still don't know if they will grow and smell as they do on the other side of the world.

But it was the Elderberry blossom that turned my head this morning.  Perhaps more photos will follow.  The elderberry berrries are usually gobbled up by the pigeons but the birds were here first and do so little to harm the environment that it feels okay to let that situation be.

A good morning to you out there in the world.  I hope your Sunday is lovely in that way you need it to be.

Found ... as I wandered, reading.

Did you know, the British Library has put 1,200 literary treasures from great Romantic and Victorian writers online?  It's true.

This TED talk, Does Money Make You Mean?  was interesting.  There's some lovely stories of good things that people with money are doing ... at the end.

Glen Greenwald, fearless journalist & scrappy fighter, has turned up again, thank goodness.  He's now the editor of a 'news website describing itself as being committed to “fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues'.  You can find The Intercept here.

New Zealand takes 3rd position in the Global Peace Ranking.

A Sherpa and a native Nepali paraglided off of Mount Everest in 2011, they flew into history, and I read nothing about it.  There's a new book ...   Western-orientated media, you break my heart sometimes.

And perhaps that's enough.  Maybe 'more' than enough ...

Another peony.

In Celebration ...

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anais Nin, Writer.

 

There's a new project ...

Or perhaps it's a new way of seeing a project that has shape-shifted, changed, and developed so much since I first imagined it.

And it keeps getting better.  Maybe that's because it continues to move closer to my original idea ... that orginal intention.

I'm so excited.  There will be a newsletter from me next week.  And I'll be giving away copies of my favourite photograph too.  To celebrate.

And ... there's so much more to tell but not today.  It's 5pm Friday as I write this and I need to rest for a little bit before beginning again.

Meanwhile the peonies I bought from Dieter are exploding in soft pink lushness.

Processing ...

I've been trapped in chair here, processing a series after series of photographs over weeks ... or that's how I'm telling it. 

I finished the latest series tonight.  170 ... a most beautiful Irish/English family.  I am pleased.  I hope they are too.

Etel Adnan's book, Sitt Marie Rose, arrived in the mail today.  I photographed her while working in Berlin and wish I had read this before meeting her.  It shall be read, over days, on those trams that I ride here.

I'm off to Genova soon.  I am very much looking forward to that. 

This photograph was taken there, in Piazza De Ferrari one day ...

'The House Protects the Dreamer' ...

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Gaston Bachelard, Philosopher.

I needed to try and capture that place where I spend most of my hours for a project I discovered recently.  I'll write more on that when it happens.

Today the sun came out for a while and this is what I saw ...

Climbing That Gate Again ...

There are mornings when I wander back through the city, feeling something like happiness.  It's not that the pollution has disappeared, it rarely disappears.  And it doesn't seem to be weather-dependent, as I've noted this 'feeling' on drizzly misty mornings too ... no, it must be some random thing, like the stars aligning someplace else. 

Perhaps it's partially about whatever I'm reading.  At the moment I'm moving between C.K. Stead's novel Mansfield, and Piers Moore Ede's All Kinds of Magic.  Both are rereads ... old favourites that live on the red shelves next to my desk here.

I also have Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup underway ...

All these books probably say something about my state of being at the moment.  I'm a little restless perhaps.

This month and the previous, I have spent time with the loveliest families, attempting to capture something of what I see when each of them  come together. 

Then Sunday evening I slipped into the abyss that is a Monday, 9am dental appointment.  A broken tooth was involved and I was a bit nervous but my dentist ... she's the best that I've ever had and so there's always the confusion of catching up with someone I very much enjoy seeing.

It went well.

I'm transcribing interviews from those days spent in Italy.  And processing photographs too.  I'm cleaning and cooking ... and failing to cook and clean too.  I'm losing and finding myself via books and good movies.  I'm waiting to fly. 

I'm back in Genova at the end of this month ...

Climbing that gate again.