Being Remembered and Remembering

Couldn't sleep last night.  I could.  I did, but only for an hour at a time.  Gave up at five-thirty.  Now I sit in the dark with a muzzy mind running through the catalog of ideas I had yesterday.  I don't think I can make a sensible narrative out of them, so this will be more of what I called yesterday, "The Jumble."  Not a stream of consciousness, but more a stream of unconsciousness, a somnambulistic guide to the universe.  Mine.  It's the only one I know.  

First off, the photo.  I was shooting reflections much of Saturday.  Ain't no New York City, of course, but it was what I had.  Or, in the common parlance, what I got.  Cloudy days are good for shooting windows, I found.  I may make a practice of it.  

You know who did?  Saul Leiter.  His photos. . . but we'll come back to him.  I may find a chronology if not a narrative after all.  

The mundane.  Got up, read and wrote and drank coffee.  Skipped breakfast since my mother didn't want any.  Went to the gym and skipped a lot of my workout.  Felt good to skip it.  I wanted to take myself to lunch, so I went home and showered without any intervening things.  I was at the good Spanish restaurant by one.  

Rain Man.  I haven't been there more than two or three times in the last year, but the barmaid remembers me, remembers what I order.  It's amazing.  So, 

It had been so long, two years or more, since I had gone in with my friend now living in the midwest during one of my Dry Januarys and had the bartender make me a faux-Sangria that we could not yesterday  for the life of us remember the code name we used so that I wouldn't have to call it a lemonade.  But she remembered how to make it.  And she remembered that I usually order ceviche and gazpacho.  

The place was empty, so we had plenty of time to catch up.  

"How's your mother doing?"

Yup.  Always the conversation starter.  Crazy, though, that she remembers.  It felt good to be eating lunch out again, sitting on my own, chatting with the barmaid.  I remember her life, too.  She is a real peach.  I'm glad she is still working there.  

Lunch didn't last long, though, eating alone and not drinking.  What to do with the rest of the afternoon?  Maybe I'd go to the museum at Country Club College, I thought.  Or maybe I'd wander around on the edge of Gotham with a camera.  Or. . . . 

I went to the cafe.  I wanted a coffee.  It was a coward's way out.  It was familiar.  When I walked in, the counter lady saw me and smiled, and when it was my turn, she asked, "Do you want a French soda?" I felt a little bad.  

"No.  I'm going to have a cafe con leche.  I'll tell you why.  I just ate lunch at the good Spanish restaurant and the bartender made me a faux-sangria that was delicious and refreshing.  I told her, though, about the French soda you made for me, and she got her phone and looked it up and was excited to make one for herself.  We said that's what I'd have next time I came in."

"There's a girl who comes in here and gets the French soda.  She knew what an egg cream was and I said well where were you the other day?"

Big smile.  I like going to the same places.  I guess I like being remembered.  Call me Rain Man.  Call me Norm.  

After coffee and handwriting in my journal, I thought I might go for the camera thing, but when I stepped out, the heat and humidity were pre-tropical rain heavy.  No.  I was tired.  I would go home, take off my clothes, lie on my own bed, and take a nap.  

When I got up, I decided to look through some of my photo books.  I picked up Saul Leiter's "Early Black and White: Interiors."  I bought the book when it came out in 2015, looked at it, and wondered about something that I wanted to research, but way leads to way and I forgot about it.  Looking through the book yesterday, I was seeing that in his early black and white, he was playing with reflections and honing the technique that worked so well in his color photography.  O.K. I was appreciating the book a bit more now.  Then I came across the photos that I had wondered about before.  He photographs a young girl in 1950.  Several of the photos were labelled "Jay."  That is as descriptive as any of his photo titles get.  There was one, "Barbara and Jay, 1950."  

Barbara served as one of his nude subjects in a number of other photos.  But so did Jay.  The internet is fickle about such things, and I can't find the photos from the book there.  But there are three or four of them . 

Skip ahead.  There are photos from 1957-8 titled "Jay."  Several.

Is this the same girl?  Those years are referred to as Leiter's "Bohemian Years."  He shot with a close group of friends.  Many of the interior shots are nudes.  I have been intrigued.  

I went to the computer and opened ChatGPT and asked the question.  Chat and I researched for quite awhile.  It searches the internet quickly.  It had data on a lot of what I asked, but it ran into a wall.  There was no information it could find on the relationship between the two Jays.  Or one.  Chat did a bit of sleuthing, though, sort of facial recognition stuff, and said it was about 75% likely that this was the same Jay.  It told me where to contact Leiter's curator who, in 2015, I had contacted before.  She is the one who "discovered" Saulter not long before he died and began organizing his huge library of works.  She brought him to the attention of the world, got his books published.  

Margit Erb first met Saul Leiter while working at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in 1995, and became his close friend and representative. Following Leiter's death in 2013, Erb founded the Saul Leiter Foundation in 2014 to archive, organize, and exhibit his tremendous body of work.

Chat was very good at suggesting what sort of information I should ask for and what probably would not be good starting points.  It seems likely that no one has investigated this query.  There are over 80,000 pictures in the archive, so the years between 1950 and 1957 might contain more "Jay" photographs.  

Then, as always, the clock ticking, ticking. . . I had to leave to go back to mother's.  I decided to bring the Leiter book back with me so I could do some more work that night. 

Then I forgot to bring it to the car.  Drats!

You know how I feel about A.I.  It is a calculator and a data bank.   You must be careful, though, as you do not always know from where it draws the data.  The data could be bad.  Chat is good about giving you sources, though, and using those, I have found information that Chat has not given me.  I only look at sources that are reliable.  

The thing is, Chat will sometimes opine.  I guess that is why people feel it to be more sentient than it is.  Sometimes the opinions can be provocative in a good way, though.  If you are careful, it can lead you into some good brainstorming on your own.  But you are better off, I find, not engaging with Chat when it does this.  You can go down some bad rabbit holes.  But for information, brothers and sisters, it is quick.  In microseconds it will find you sources that would have taken days and maybe weeks to find on your own.  And the more information you feed it, the more you will get back.  It is good for that.  

So, I am thinking about contacting Erb to see what she knows and is willing to tell.  I can see a good article in this.  I have written academic papers for most of my life, and I used to know how to do it.  It has been awhile, but maybe I still do.  A short article to some publication on this might be fun.  I'd almost feel like I was doing something again.  

But don't count on me.  I'm really good with ideas, but I can be terrible at bringing them to fruition.  I've confessed that here many, many times before.  But I HAVE done so on occasion, so I allow myself to hope and dream.  

I looked up my buddy's old girlfriend that appeared to him in his fever dream.  She is a girl I knew as well, what was once called a "Cover Girl" before the use of the term "Super Model" that became popular in the '90s.  As you can see, she was big in the Farah Fawcett era. 

Before I knew her,  I knew her sister.  She was in a class I taught.  At the time, she told me she had a famous sister, a model who was dating Tommy Chong.  Her sister had a big crush on me, but didn't everyone?  A few years later, when I met the model, she said, "My sister was in love with you."  Holy shit!  The connection was made.  

"So YOU are the famous model."

"I was big in Japan," she laughed.  

It was at her house that I had my first taste of Rothschild 1968.  She was a swell gal, and I can see why her memory would come back to haunt my buddy.  Memory is the floodgate to hell, though.  Or it can be.  

Last night, his memories spurred mine, and I was running through the catalog of women I had loved or liked or with whom I had been fascinated.  Then I thought of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Why, you ask?  Had he been in love with me or I with him?  

No.  I was thinking of two things, though, that he is constantly criticized for--having a Dad Bod and dating younger women.  He seems to laugh it off ok in public, or so it would seem.  But having one and having done the other, I thought about how demeaning people can be.  The Dad Bod thing, of course, the body shaming, is hurtful, but at least it is observationally true.  It is a thing that is beyond denying.  But the other thing makes some horrible assumptions and demeans not DiCaprio but whomever he is seeing at the time.  It assumes that a) DiCaprio is not interesting or intriguing or sweet and kind and wonderful enough for a younger woman to find attractive if not more, and b) that she is simply a bimbo gold digger who is only about him for the. . . whatever, fill in the blank.  Now I know it is an old joke, terribly apocryphal, older than Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" (link), but it is no more apocryphal or true than 50% of marriages where the age difference is minimal.  To assume that anyone is a trophy girlfriend or trophy wife--or in many cases now, boyfriend or husband--is unthoughtful.  

But yea. . . it makes people feel they have a leg up on things, that their pathetic lives have a pinch of something superior.  

"Oh, sure, you fucker, I know you'd be screwing that if you could, you creep!"

"No, no, baby. . . I only have eyes for you!"

Don't even let me get started on the Epstein mania.  

And so it was at evening's end as I shut down the house and got ready for bed.  I'll forget all about the Leiter article, I'm sure, but I think I will write the query to Erb to see if I get a response.  I would love to get a chance to see the archives.  

Hey, now--that did turn into something of an organized tale after all, didn't it?  I guess I've learned something after a few hundred million words.  

I was struggling to come up with a song to end this with, and then. . . oh, yea--"My Heart Belongs to Daddy"!