#139: Via Tomacelli

#139, Rome

#88: Shark Week for Type Geeks

#88, Rome

I'll admit it. I'm a little jealous of the Discovery Channel. Television isn't really my thing, but I have to stand back in awe of such thematic masterpieces as Shark Week. Non-stop blood-curdling shark action, seemingly endless footage of fearsome sea creatures thrashing about in the deep, and the ever-present promise of a sudden and unapologetic gore fest -- all this for seven days in a row. And what, on the other hand, do you get on a site that geeks out on typography and design? Why, you get Frame Week, of course.

Here's the deal. I don't know about you, but there are days when living in the city feels like Shark Week -- all that's missing is the ominous grinding two-note cello music of the Jaws theme song -- so I get sort of excited when I can take all of the mayhem and find some quiet, calm order to it all. If the sight of an 88 inside an octagon brings even the smallest smile to your face, then here's your moment of zen.

Those even slightly familiar with my obsessive tendencies will know it's making me all flinchy to follow up a #1 with a #88. But once these frames start lining up, it'll all make sense. It feels anarchic after a year of slavish devotion to sequential order to deviate from the number line. But here's the new challenge: to look for new visual patterns in the cluttered urban environment. New order. Joy Division. Bad music puns. (Some are easier to spot than others.) So here's this week's assignment: to focus not on the numbers themselves but on the frames that surround them. Rectangles? Meh. Right angles? Occasionally. This week, I'm after the stunning and unusual.

Maybe you'll start to notice them in your environment, too -- an oddly-shaped sign or an unusual frame around an ordinary bit of text. There are rare charmers out there, and if you look hard enough, you might see something you would have ordinarily missed.

In the meantime, batten down the hatches and get ready to sink your teeth into some mean material. Frame Week's gonna be killer.

#1: Medieval Times, Medieval Places

#1,  Piazzo del Campo, Siena, Italy

Having done my stint as a Medieval Times cocktail wench, medieval pageantry is nothing new to me. Wending my way through a roaring stadium of waving flags and chanting crowds, I balanced my tray packed tightly with bottles of mead, taking down drink orders as they were barked out from inebriated customers. The lords and ladies I waited upon wore the colors of the knights they supported -- from the grimly devoted followers of the dread black knight to the over-enthusiastic pep squad cheering on the underdog green knight. They donned paper crowns, their fingertips damp with turkey gravy. From the kingly dais, trumpets blared. In the sand-covered pit, knights on horseback jousted. Sure, it was the end of the twentieth century and I was punching a clock in a hallway in Schaumburg, Illinois. (My paychecks were, amusingly, distributed from Schaumburg Castle, Inc.) But that was an honest-to-God falcon flying around the perimeter of that stadium, and you'd better believe that bird scared the crap out of me when I gingerly descended those steps, doing my best to keep the roaring masses happily full of drink and avoiding the bad scene of seeing hundreds of dollars of liquor toppled over in one fell swoop and my left eye taken out by a wayward talon.

Yes, the life of a cocktail wench was never an easy one. And while such nonsense does little more than make me cringe at the memory of the rust-colored peasant top and blue felt corset I wore, not to mention my silly Monty Python-inspired accent, the fanfare does come to mind when considering the city of Siena.

Siena, a beautiful medieval city nestled in the rolling hills of Tuscany, is maybe most well known for its beautiful and sprawling town square -- the Piazza del Campo -- and also for its annual horse race -- the Palio -- that goes down twice a year, once in July and again in August. The city's seventeen districts, also known as the contrade, compete for the coveted prize, which is basically just a big old flag and, more importantly, bragging rights for days, weeks, and months to come. Each contrada has a special mascot and colors (there's the Lupa, or she-wolf, and the Tartuca, or tortoise, and so on) that you can see displayed all throughout the streets and homes of Siena. There are rivalries among the contrade, some more contentious than others, and it all comes to a fever pitch on the days leading up to the Palio.

The Palio fills the city's main square, where anywhere from 30,000 to (fill in a more ghastly number here) spectators gather to cheer on their heroic horse and jockey. The race itself lasts for three laps around the piazza and is over in a matter of maybe forty-five seconds. But the fanfare -- parades, feasts, and general merrymaking -- goes on for far longer. I've never been there for the horse race, and for someone who gets irritated at one person brushing against her on a subway platform, I hope to never be. But it's a fantastic ritual and one that I'm glad exists, if for no other reason than it convinces me there was maybe a glimmer of real life behind the Medieval Times dinner theatre fiasco I participated in so very long ago.

But let's not take the verisimilitude too far. I'm reminded of the tattooed, nose-ringed character (played by an eye-rolling Janeane Garofalo) in the movie The Cable Guy, my own döppleganger brought to life on film. When Jim Carrey's obnoxious character summons the wench and asks her for a knife and fork, she replies impatiently: "There was no silverware in medieval times; hence there is no silverware at Medieval Times. Do you want Coke or Pepsi?"

I'll take the mead, thanks very much.

The Waiter

Car park mural, Dublin

Good things come to those who wait. But better things come to those who don't, which is why I'm ready to put an end to all this hibernation and launch Ampersand Seven into the new year. There's something to be said for taking time off, but the longer I let my brain fly south for the winter, the more afraid I am that it won't come back. So I'm happy to announce that as of next Monday, I will officially have the blog up and running again.

After much heavy drinking contemplation, I've decided to keep the basic theme intact, which means you can continue to expect cool numbers presented in pleasant sequential order. However, the format is loosening up a bit, as you'll soon see, allowing for more freedom as I pick the images I choose to share. The number-a-day format was reliable, but she was also a cruel mistress, as A. Mesh proved to us all. So every Monday I will post a new number, starting with #1, continuing on Mondays throughout the year. Tuesday through Friday will present visual treats related to Monday's number, and weekends will host occasional musings and curiosities related to stuff I like and want to share: typography, city stories, books, notebooks, music, and so on. I'll do my best to faithfully post daily, but there will be occasional days off as I need them. I've decided that my brain likes to fly south every now and then.

In short, the new &7: a cool picture a day, every day, from buildings, street signs, murals, clocks, clapboard shacks and more, with a focus on interesting typography, odd details, and delicious, mouth-watering design. Stories, essays, and digressions as per usual. Comments and visitors warmly welcomed. Wander. Hunt and gather. Keep calm and carry on.

#365

#365, Chelsea, NYC

In the summer of 2006, while on a two-week holiday in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, I came up with an idea for a project. I've always been into projects -- it's why writing a novel will always be more satisfying to me than short stories -- because life's too damn vast without them and sometimes you just need some creative structure to keep you occupied from day to day. It was on my first day exploring the streets of Prague that I began to notice an assortment of beautiful and peculiar numbers on the buildings, walls, and streets of Mala Strana. I took a photograph of one, and then found another, and very quickly the idea came to me: I would try to photograph numbers 1-99 throughout the three cities I visited. I had no clear plan of what to do with the photos once I took them. That would come later. For now, I had a project -- an urban scavenger hunt -- and I hit the ground running.

The numbers cooled off for some time. (Yes, I got them all.) Then in the fall of 2007, I had an installation of my photographs at the Fall Café in Brooklyn: eleven panels of nine numbers each, stretched across one wall in a display of symmetry that made my order-craving heart unspeakably happy. After six weeks and many excited friends offering compliments, I took the photos down and propped them up against the wall in the hallway of my apartment where they remain to this day. That project was done, but there was only one problem. I kept paying attention to numbers. I saw cool numbers everywhere: in architecture, on apartments, painted on peeling walls. They wouldn't let me alone. So I kept collecting them. Again, I didn't know what to do with them. I was just a collector like any other. I gathered them because it gave me pleasure to do so.

Ampersand Seven -- the next stage of the project -- came about because I didn't just want to look at numbers. I wanted to write about them. I wanted to share them. Each number had a story, and the more places I visited, the more stories I gathered. Writing a novel is very rewarding, but mostly it's a lonely slog through the fields. You toil for months, then years without any feedback (I don't share my fiction till it's "ready," which usually means that I horde it). I was hungry to share some of my writing. I was tired of feeling like a mad scientist. ("What's Therese doing there behind her laptop?" "Oh, she says she's writing a novel." "A novel! How interesting! Does she ever share any of it?" "No, she just sits there looking concerned for hours and then begins cackling maniacally. Then she leaves after a few hours, comes back the next day, and does the same thing.") I was, in short, kind of losing my mind. A blog, with its freeform layout and chance for opening dialogue with readers, seemed like the perfect antidote.

On January 1st, 2009, I posted a photograph of a tiny #1 from Prague -- the city where the number collecting madness began. The next day, I posted a handsome Italian #2. And I kept posting. One picture a day. Every day. In sequential order, all the way up to the end. Sometimes with commentary, other times with none. Some days I geeked out on typography and others I rattled on about the pleasure of wandering in alleys or vision quests in Tucson . There were sad-luck dames and soul burgers in Memphis and poetry-writing security guards in Dublin. I had wonderful readers who shared their thoughts, either about the image or about the story that went along with it. Every day I looked forward to posting a new number and seeing what thoughts or reactions it prompted in my readers. Some days the comments were quiet and others we rattled on about David Lynch or waffles or fish or fonts. And today, after a fruitful year and many, many numbers, the "365 Numbers in 365 Days" experiment comes to its quiet conclusion.

It wouldn't be properly concluded if I didn't emphasize what enormous satisfaction I have gained from the feedback of my readers. Y'all have been what makes &7 what it is. Clicking on the comments was far more fun than I ever imagined it could be, and over time, I realized that the dialogue here has been what sustained me through the days when the number-a-day demands threatened to feel at all difficult or tiresome. It never really did get tiresome at all, thanks to you. I've found friends and other bloggers whose sites have become daily or weekly pit stops for me, and I will continue to make those pit stops. Thank you for making this so much fun.

As for what's next for Ampersand Seven, I can tell you this: yes, the number line is ending for this year, but the blog will most definitely go on. I'm going to take a much-needed break from the grueling pace, so it may be quiet here for awhile as I try to enjoy a little aftermath and let the dust settle. I'll be taking January off, but I plan to be back shortly thereafter with all the curious pictures, bursts of snark, and digressions you've come to know so well. In the meantime, I hope you will feel free to let me know what you've enjoyed or if there's anything you'd like to see in the new year. Thank you to everyone for the kind words and the inspiration, and I hope you'll continue to stop by to see what's new. And if you're pining for your daily number fix -- sorry, addicts -- the Random Number Generator on the sidebar is there to help tide you over.

Obsessively yours,

Therese

#364

#364, Chicago

"Performance is about the urgency of vanishing."

I remember hearing these words spoken in a dusty black box theatre in Evanston my senior year at Northwestern University. It was the week before our final performances for our Non-fiction Studies class and we were gathered around the stage with our scripts and our props (I was probably packing a pince-nez and anguished letter to Maud Gonne as part of my transformation into the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats), listening to a pep talk from our professor, Dr. Dwight Conquergood.

He was the consummate enthusiast though that term -- "pep talk" -- doesn't quite capture all that went into one of Dwight's addresses. Dwight (he wanted us to call him Dwight; no one ever called him anything else) could go from the quotidian ("Eat lots of yogurt! Complex carbohydrates are good for boosting energy!") to the pedagogical ("Performance is about the urgency of vanishing") to the encouraging (just about anything else the man ever said) in the span of one spirited burst.

Though I remember him saying many things that were wise, this phrase is the one I remember most: "Performance is about the urgency of vanishing."

Even before that day, it had been an intense semester. The point of the Non-fiction Studies class was to research a historical figure we were interested in, arrange the research -- all primary source material -- into a script, then put it together into a one-person show. I was armed to the teeth with Yeats books and would spend long hours at the Pita Inn consorting with Emily, Jill, and Sarah -- Toshi Maruki, Bette Davis, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, respectively -- over jasmine tea and falafel, talking about our projects. Dwight liked to call the class "a caravan." It was a fitting metaphor. There we all were, piling things into our separate cars, carting our own baggage and tricks, but we were all on the same journey. We were all headed for the same scary but rewarding place: the stage. Other students took a class with Professor So-and-So. We rode on a caravan with Dwight.

But as for the show itself, what did I know of the seriousness of such an endeavor? I was twenty-one years old. I was just a bundle of energy and coffee. I grew very interested very quickly in the nuts and bolts of the script: what aspect of Yeats' life to focus on, what "lens" to put on it, and wouldn't it be cool if I threw in some ancient Rosicrucian ritual stuff to the blocking? It was Dwight who gently guided us to the idea that we were not just putting on a show. We were performing somebody's life, and to do that well required much more from us than the simple audacity -- "Hey look, I'm this dead poet/ movie star/ important religious figurehead!" -- we all vaguely felt. It wasn't enough to just slap together a script and say a couple of lines and hope it all held water. What we were doing required empathy. We had to try to see a life from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

When we first walked into his course one blustery fall Chicago day, we'd all heard great things about Dwight Conquergood's class. He was academically respected and the chair of the Performance Studies department. We immediately liked him: a positive, smiling, sharply intelligent man with little wire-framed glasses, slim build, and fair skin and hair. His friendly appearance gave the impression of a lovable uncle, or -- if not for all that vast intelligence underneath the cheery demeanor -- even a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Weeks before he uttered those lines about performance and vanishing in the black box theatre, there was one day in class -- maybe to give us a break from our own projects, maybe because some of us had asked -- Dwight presented some of his research on gangs. He showed us slides of Latin Kings' graffiti and spoke of the semiotics of gang symbols. His area of interest was working with disadvantaged or marginalized communities: Hmong refugees in Laos, gang members in Chicago. What we hadn't known was that in the eighties, he moved into a housing project in Albany Park called Big Red, a part of Chicago so rife with crime it was known as "Little Beirut." Gangs, crime, graffiti, and disorder -- that was what he faced on a day to day basis. No one told him to do it. It was his idea. He was studying a community, Dwight reasoned, so there was no better way to do that than to live among the people he was trying to get to know.

Little by little -- and often at great risk to his personal safety -- Dwight became part of the community. He gained the trust of gang members. He learned about them because he had a profound desire to understand and wanted help give them a voice in a society that thought they had nothing worthy to say. He didn't see them as academic subjects. He tutored and mentored them. He attended their funerals. He thought their stories were important and deserved to be heard. Even after he suffered an assault while living alone in Albany Park, he stayed in Big Red. When he said that to represent someone's life was a great responsibility, it was because he knew it firsthand.

Did my performance about Yeats and the occult change lives? No. Did it give voice to someone marginalized and misunderstood? Depends, I suppose, on your definition of marginalized and misunderstood. But I did learn a great lesson in the process of putting on my dusty old cape and pince-nez and reciting "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead." If we are lucky enough to have a written document of a person's life -- what they saw, thought, and experienced -- we are left with a great gift and a great responsibility. And the fragile quality of that gift is what can make a performance so poignant, or an untouched drift of snow beautiful, or a wonderful holiday somehow painful: because we are aware that as it is happening, it is also leaving us.

One day a few years after graduation, I heard from a former classmate that Dwight had been diagnosed with cancer. He was no longer teaching, and the cancer, I was told, was gradually worsening. The next day, I sat down with a big pad of stationery to write Dwight a letter.

It was a difficult letter to begin. Of course it was. But there was no choice. I had to start. I told him how much I had learned from him. I recounted my memories of "the caravan" and tried to put into words my gratitude. I tried, already grieving, to still be present in the moment, to simply say what I was able and hope it would be enough, even as I knew it could not be. I signed my name with love and enclosed a photograph of me, Emily, Jill, and Sarah -- friendships I forged in Dwight's Non-fiction Studies class, fellow passengers on that mad, wonderful caravan, friendships that remain strong to this day. I sealed the envelope. I put on a stamp and walked down the four flights of stairs of my Brooklyn apartment and out to the nearest mailbox. I took a deep breath, then slipped the letter in the mailbox.

As I walked back home from the street corner -- no tears yet, only a lump in my throat -- I thought back to that enthusiastic, gesticulating professor giving us a pep talk in the black box theatre, speaking excitedly of yogurt and empathy. I thought, again, of that day when he talked to us about the urgency of vanishing.

When I received word a few months later that Dwight had passed away, I returned, after hanging up the phone, to some of my old notebooks. In them, I had placed important papers from college (I threw away nearly all my notes), and I found some hand-written notes from Dwight. He would watch our rehearsals and give us feedback while we stumbled through our lines or tripped over our props, and his notes were always written in his elegant, scrupulous script. Everything he wrote was positive: not a mindless optimism, but a deeply grounded, intelligent reflection on what we were attempting. Any small feats of empathy we achieved -- we captured someone's true voice, we were sensitive to the difficulties of cross-cultural or cross-gendered representation, we had done our research well -- Dwight treated like a great victory. It gave us courage to attempt what felt like the unattemptable. I can think of no greater gift a teacher can give his students than that.

Dwight saw performance in everything around him. It was interchangeable with life. It was, in his own words, both "a contest and struggle." The urgency he described to the whole endeavor, well, I feel that a lot, whether or not there's a curtain rising or falling. That's part, I guess, of what makes life so precious. Vanishing is not just a fact of performance, it's a fact of life. But what a shame it is when the vanishing comes so soon.

#363

#363, Chelsea, NYC

That's one way to cover an air conditioner. One thing I appreciate about my fellow city-dwellers in this great metropolis: we may rattle on and on, and there may be mold spores of incomprehensible ugliness clinging to our insides, but you can't say we don't make the effort to turn something everyday and forgettable into something beautiful.

#362

#362, Upper East Side, NYC

"Glamorous" is not the first word that springs to mind when describing a typical day on the &7 beat. It can be physically rigorous or leisurely and meandering -- depending on if there's a deadline looming -- but taking pictures of buildings and numbers is a pretty straightforward activity. No vapid fashion models. No flying bullets. No rubbernecking for candid shots of humanity at its best or worst. Take people out of the equation and you can generally get away with photographing anything -- provided you're not speeding into the Lincoln Tunnel.

I do get the odd suspicious bystander every now and then who will accost me and ask why I'm taking a picture of their neighbor's mailbox, but all in all, it's a drama-free endeavor. So it was strange to find myself one day on the Upper East Side in a paparazzi moment, tiptoeing through the affluent blocks of apartments, peering through locked gates at hidden numbers, crouching down to get just the right angle. This one emanated a bit of the Greta Garbo "vanting to be alone" aloofness, so I trod as gently as I could.

#361

#361, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

#360

#360, Fort Greene, Brooklyn