Holly Northrop Blog

It took me all last week to scan the remaining Holga beach photos and because of that, and the sexy new pink chair Miss Simon gave me, my office is the place to be. Martha has a nice little set up and Zoë even naps in the chair when not in use by Mom.

Aside from feeling all itchy and weird, the days seem to be flying by. I have so many things I want to work on. I did manage to finish a 2006 Holga Wall Calendar. It's pretty awesome and if all four of you could buy one, I could make a few bucks and besides, everyone needs a calendar somewhere in their life. I make a dollar (seriously) per calendar, so collectively you will have paid my morning commute to work. Think of it as helping me out on a Monday. Or not.

The new, well actually it is 25-years-old but to me it is new, Russian Lubitel 166B camera came! After about thirty-minutes of fucking around with it I figured out how to use it —in theory. Now we'll see if I can actually create anything with it. I downloaded the English version of the manual because there was a button that, for the life of me, I could not figure out what it is for. I'm still not really sure because the translation is a little too exact. It says stuff like:

"It is enough to raise a little reflex viewfinder cover to see deep between the light protective hoods large and for any illumination distinct clear image according to which it is easy to fit frame limits when the object is already found or to find a new scene."

Right. And that my friends is a down and dirty Russian to English translation. Not for the basic stoner head reader. Put down the bong and focus.

I can figure out how to use the basic parts of the camera because, thank god, photography is a global thing. F8 is f8 in any language and be there is where you are. This little button in question is called a Reminder Dial. What the fuck? I have no idea. We'll see if it's important later on I suppose. If only it could REMIND me of what it is supposed to do.

I'M NEVER GONNA STOP THE RAIN BY COMPLAININ'
Martha and I drove 6 hours on Saturday to spend 5 hours with Jasmine and her roommate Patrick. Seems odd and silly to the average viewer but well worth it and generally normal in this here family. I would crawl the earth to see that kid and she knows it. Jasmine has the loveliest first apartment I have ever seen. She has learned the fine art of fabric draping, curbside furniture finds and the ever so complicated Salon Style exhibit living.

I love her apartment! The building is ghetto but her and Patrick have made a beautiful home. It was like time traveling back to 1978. Jasmine is a hippie—period. One would never have known it was 2:00 on a sunny afternoon while sitting in her living room. My baby vampire has learned mood lighting well beyond my highest expectations. Martha and I hung out in her incense-filled lair for about an hour, taking an abundance of photos and talking non-stop about everything. Patrick hit the big score when we invited him to tag along with us to lunch at Eat'n Park, the thrift store, Spencer Gifts, (two days before Halloween) a costume shop, (again, two days before Halloween) and so help me god - Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is the only game in that one-horse town and Jasmine needed stuff, that why yes, we could have driven further on down the road, in our gas-guzzling SUV, to a locally owned store an hour away that doesn't spend an enormous amount of its profits not only supporting "The Bush Agenda", but also obsessively importing products from China. Things are now so out of whack that I can't even live politically left if I wanted to. Keep killing the planet, support the president of the 'Kill the Planet' Club, or not buy Jasmine food. Those were my choices.

Sometimes I feel as if the only thing left for me to do is to move us out to the middle of the woods with no running ANYTHING. Just take it way back to the shitting in the woods, growing your own food, collecting rainwater and learning how to weave, stage of life.

Good Lord, Holly, land the plane, land the fucking plane.

Jasmine had a huge Halloween party to go to and all she really wanted was a Bat Girl costume, hair care products and a bunch of spaghetti sauce. But by God it was good to see her. She looks good. She looks happy and I tried not to tear up when it came time to go.

Martha and I spent the night in Punxsutawney. You know, the place with the groundhog. We had reservations at the 107-year-old hotel in the center of town with a lovely view of the park where, every spring, they yank the little guy out of his nest and see if he freaks out or not. While we did see PLENTY of groundhog road-kill on the way to Punxsutawney, we however didn't see any live ones while we were there. We did meet a fluffy West Highland White Terrier named Samantha from New Jersey on Sunday morning in the park but that was about it.

A truly bizarre thing happened at 8:00pm on Saturday night as the town clock chimed the familiar ...ding, ding, ding, ding, pause ...ding, ding, ding, ding and then gonged eight times. As soon as it finished with the last gong, it did something I have never heard before. It proceeded to ding out Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head in its entirety. I shit you not. It went on the full-length of the song, for like three minutes. At first, we could not stop laughing but then it became like crazy land. Martha turned on the TV to drown it out and a 30-year-old Laurence Welk Show came blasting on at full volume just as Myron Floren, the show's star accordion player, was working his way through his rendition of a Mauler symphony, a Welk original for sure. All of this was most certainly a glitch in the Matrix.

I was terrified at the thought of 9:00, and oh my god what if they do that every hour? We will never sleep! Not to mention ever get that fucking song out of our heads. But that was all for the big clock and it didn't even gong out the time the rest of the evening. Man, I didn't even know that you could make a clock to that. Or even think that you would want to. Just what kind of crack are they smoking out there in the middle of PA?

Ah yes Middle American strangeness is always welcome and the fall leaves were amazing to boot. I shot a few Holga and by a few, I limited myself to only bringing two rolls of 120 with me. I brought the little Russian camera too but intentionally loaded it with 3200 black and white film so I could focus on composition and tiny little knobs, F-Stops and shutter speeds. It took me minutes to set up a shot. Yeah, f8 and be there for the next few weeks, I'm afraid.

After completely dropping out for eight days, I now have 11 messages on the answering machine, over 200 personal emails, 2 feet of postal mail and 300 work emails. This is just one weeks buildup of crap. Nothing of any real importance lives within these messages; this is the information overload that I have somehow grown accustomed to. No wonder I constantly feel drained at the end of any given day. I should just erase all of it and start over. Reboot.

But, for eight wonderful days I managed to stay as wasted as possible and take a zillion photos. Many, many, many photos of the beach, sand dunes, birds, deadwood, beach bungalows and of course, Martha and Sheri.

Apparently, it rained in New York the entire time I was gone. Martha and I drove out of our New Jersey parking garage and into a monsoon at 6:00am on October 8th. It rained hammers almost the entire way down I-95 and by 7:30am, I had to take a Xanix just to be able to sit in the passengers' seat without repeatedly slamming by head against the window. Four and a half hours later, when we arrived in DC it was still pouring as I packed up Sheri's beach stuff into the back of the Jeep. Somewhere around Richmond, Virginia, it stopped being so fucking torrential and just drizzled. By nightfall, the rains had moved north but the flooding was apparent. Martha and I had been in the car for 12 hours and we were just a little loopy. I became twisted around with the directions the last leg of the drive and couldn't find the beach house. But after a little bit of yelling and a couple of U-Turns we finally pulled into the driveway of our new, blue bungalow. Another problem came with the front door. The combination lock wasn't working and Martha, crazy-eyed and pumped full of adrenaline, combined with Sheri's determination, pushed open the door. I don't want to say they broke the door because technically they didn't. It still worked; we just couldn't lock it anymore. This speaks to just how small of a town we were in. We would go to the store and NOT LOCK THE FRONT DOOR.

Although we were isolated on a non-tourist beach town, Sheri had a shinny new PowerBook with wireless internet, so certain parts of life could move forward if one chose to move them. Martha was able to test drive a MAC and I think she is possibly sold. There are some things that she isn't too crazy about but who isn't? So Martha and Sheri were posting photos of beach stuff and running slideshows for all to enjoy at the end of each day. I think I checked email twice but became despondent almost the second I logged on. One time I actually felt nauseous while hold the laptop. The nightly news had the same effect and by mid-week, I stopped all attempts to stay informed.

But with an active internet connection online shopping took place. Martha bought me a LUBITEL Russian 6x6 camera. It is coming from the Russian Federation and will be here in roughly three-weeks. All it really is is a cheap Russian toy camera but it does look fun to play with. The shipping costs just as much as the camera for a grand total, in US Dollars, of $40 bucks.

One thing that I did at the beach house was I turned the half-bathroom into a darkroom. I've had this pinhole camera kit forever and I thought it might be fun to mess around with it in a low-to-no pressure situation. At home, I can't get any room totally dark without altering something, (hell, we can't even see the stars at night) but at the beach house it was so simple. So for several days I took pinholes, made paper negs and printed contact prints using a light bulb and my arm as an enlarger.

On the nature front, two different crabs bit me on my foot within five minutes of walking along the waterline, completely freaking me out. Those little fuckers hurt and they weren't the cute sand crabs either. These were the crab, crabs. It was then that I made the decision not to swim in the ocean and to wear flip-flops while walking on the sand. But I was able to frolic at will in a hot tub overlooking the ocean under the moonlight, so that more than made up for the lack of oceanic action.

Biggest lesson learned is no real surprise; laughter is the best sound and medicine in the world. Well, almost. Drugs are good too and the sound of our cats purring as they ram their heads into me is pretty fantastic.

Well this week my head is filled with nothing but the Vacation Beach Crazies. I don't see how I can possibly concentrate on one damn thing except the weather reports off the coast of North Carolina.

I fear that my Dylan problem is about to reach epic proportions. Undoubtedly, it will follow me to the beach in seeing as how we leave this Saturday and I see no end in sight. I am actually contemplating only bringing Dylan with me but that means that I would be subjecting Martha and Sheri to excruciatingly long car rides. But after watching No Direction Home forget it. I can't stop playing all the different versions of Visions of Johanna and Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues that I have. The soundtrack is so good that I'm almost unable to do anything else while I'm listening to it, except think about walking on the beach and getting lost in the rhythm of the ocean waves rolling up on the shore.

HIGHER EDUCATION
Jasmine called me last week for a variety of reasons but the big one, Monday morning right out of the gate, was that she'd lost her cell phone somewhere on the way to class and she was totally freaked out about it. I called Martha who, after bitching at me for about a minute, called At&T, cancelled Jasmine's phone and ordered a new, free upgrade. Six hours later Jazz called me from Patrick's phone to let me know that someone had found her phone. Even though it had been outside in the rain all day, it appeared to still work. "Too bad" I sighed, "Martha has already ordered you a new one. You should have it by Friday." I told her not to waste Patrick's minutes and only call me in an emergency. "Just go to a payphone and call my cell if there is a crisis." I said.

Four days later, she called me from Patrick's phone to ask if I knew how to fix a crack in a glass bong.

DAYDREAMING IN BROOKLYN
The differences between the Bronx and Boerum Hill are many but the real bottom line is that I can afford to live in the Bronx but Boerum Hill would require Martha and me to earn at least double a year more so we could both feel like yuppies and loath what we are feeling. Sure is nice to have money, eh? Ah yes, Boerum Hill, where the only tension in the air on a Sunday afternoon was when I got cranky after Martha walked into a shot.

As we floated down Atlantic Avenue shooting various snaps of Antique stores and gallery spaces, the talk turned to puppies and a better, gay friendly lifestyle. What the hell, we can dream. And we do. We even have names for the dog(s) we want to get. Little Bamboo for the Chihuahua and Fettuccini for a yet to be determined small dog.

A friend of ours is going to have to put down her 19-year-old cat soon and we were discussing how god-awful it is to do just that. The memory of Mona is very near and this Halloween it will be two years since we had to put her to sleep. Anyway, we started talking about how fucked up it would be to put down a dog, 'cause they are like a little person, and we started getting teary-eyed. Actual tears about putting to sleep a dog that we don't even have yet. As if having names already isn't wacky enough. God, we are pathetic.

We finished up the neighborhood shoot at a snotty French restaurant eating Eggs Benedict with a side of freedom fries, coffee and for desert; half a Xanax and some kind of sugar explosion involving pastry, ice-cream and a warm chocolate drizzle.

SCREW ON HEAD
While cleaning up my office the other day, I found some old lists that I made from when I was on blood pressure medicine. That shit used to make me forget just about everything, so I had to write down stuff that I wanted to do or stuff that I needed to do within the day. I still have the post-it note that Jazz stuck on the dial to the oven reminding me to "Please TURN ME OFF". While shuffling through tiny pieces of paper one list made me laugh.

-Bring Camera (I actually had to write this down?)
-Call Dr. Witt/pick up pre cert.
-Baby Oil
-Drano
-Nose Spray
-rethink the ovarian cancer thing (Nice, what the hell does THAT mean?)
-Blood Work