njdonofrio

Natalia here, I’ve been a daily MTA user for the past 7 years. Now I am not one to complain normally…

I’ve put up with a great deal these past. I mean, I took the L to 6th Avenue for years where the stalactites grew to the length of my palm, the tile are stained with what I HOPE is mud…and the rats frolic like the deer and the antelopes in the Wild West.

I’ve walked the connecting tunnel to the 1,2,3 and (in those days) 9 trains, chased by dust bunnies the size of my fist, dodging pools of urine and other unidentified puddles, and holding back my gag reflex at the smells.

For the past three years, I’ve ridden the G train…that alone is enough to warrant some sort of laurel leaves or at least a sympathetic pat on the back. I’ve done my best to ignore these and other disturbances. I don’t really ask much from you, despite my frustrated groans when I have to face the G train in the morning….

All I ask is that you get me from point A to point B quickly and safely, and that you don’t leave me (and another 100 people) waiting for the bus for 25 minutes when its -14°C (and that’s without windchill factor, buddy).

I am tired of your track fires, your delays and excuses. I am tired of your fare increases and garbled announcements. I don’t speak MTA: I barely catch one word out of every ten.

Please get your act together.

Hugs and kisses,

-Natalia

“Playing by ear on a C major single-octave kiddie glockenspiel is tremendous fun, but it is also incredibly (and illogically) frustrating.”

This evening we went to my grandmother’s house for dinner. After we ate, I sat down with my books with the intention of continuing the arduous process of studying for my midterm, but after studying for several hours today, I couldn’t bring myself to focus.

I scanned the familiar room with my tired eyes, trying to give them a break from the endless sea of text. My eyes were suddenly drawn to a brightly colored thing sticking out of a brightly colored box. It was on a shelf, covered by a few old magazines and my grandfather’s collection of cassette tapes. I reached for it, and unearthed our old glockenspiel…the one my sisters and I spent hours playing and singing…the one that was confiscated a few times for the high-pitched “DING DING DING” sound that drove the adults crazy.

It was (and still is) magnificent for a child’s toy. The boy proudly proclaimed that it was mechanically tuned to a perfect pitch: 8 brightly colored pieces of metal labeled with their corresponding notes…the box went so far as to inform me that it was tuned to the C3-C4 octave. Amazing…something that probably made no sense to little old pre-eight-years-of-piano me.

It is nothing like the cheap plastic that aren’t in tune…nor is it like the wooden kiddie ones that don’t resonate.

Maybe it was the stress from the midterms…maybe it was the euphoria of finding this wonderful time capsule of my childhood…but I sat down with it and played. I started of with a simple scale, and then ran through the songs I had figured out by ear (and then learned on the piano) about 11 years before. It was a delightful sound, crisp, high pitched and refreshing…it sounded like a cold sunny winter’s day.

I quickly ran through all the songs I could remember in a single c-major octave…mostly nursery rhymes and Ode To Joy. I started experimenting with other songs…the lovely little Brahms’s Lullaby. I then began to really really improvise…The Rugrats Theme…”With A Little Help From My Friends”….It was so much fun! So rewarding and satisfying to limit yourself to 8 notes and be able to make wonderful music!

Playing by ear on a C major single-octave kiddie glockenspiel is tremendous fun, but it is also incredibly (and illogically) frustrating. I got so into it that I would hit the table with the blue hard plastic sticks(?) in the place where the note should have been…and every time I hit an accidental, I wanted to scream in agony and frustration, and I desperately hit the small space between the two metal pieces in the hopes that maybe just maybe the thin air and the rims of bars would join forces and sound like the note I needed.

Looking back, it made me smile and I hope it does the same for you. I’ll have to steal back that glockenspiel the next time I’m there and keep it home with me to play the next time I need a sanity break but don’t feel up to playing the piano.

Love luck and lollipops

In case you didn't know what I was talking about while I rambled through the entire post...this is a glockenspiel...and it's sort of similar to my old one!

Dear Rite Aid on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (No. 2),

We met today. I usually go to the other Rite Aid on Manhattan Ave, the one that used to be a roller rink. The cooler one with more personality, but I came to you today for for a reason.

To be more specific, for the big plastic red block letters that proudly read “1 Hour Photo” on your front. I wandered about Greenpoint and Williamsburg today with a purpose in the heat: to find the last stronghold of film developing labs in the neighborhood I had managed to convince myself would still have them. In the land of vintage clothing stores, record shops and organic vegan food, gourmet soy icecream and the Endless Summer Taco Truck, and with all the photographers and artists in the area, you’d think there would be ONE shop that still develops black and white film? Well, you’d think wrong.

I was heartbroken, I admit. Despite my admiration for technology, there is a nostalgic love I have for black and white photography. The smell of chemicals in the darkroom. The satisfaction that the photograph is yours, from the moment you put the roll of film into your manual zoom, manual focus, manual aperture and shutter speed adjustment camera, through the minutes locked in the dark where you blindly roll the film onto reels, to the good half hour or more of chemical mixing, measuring, developing, the hour of drying and quick run for coffee, the snipping of film strips into convenient easy-to-carry strips; (and boy, this is a run on sentence) the contact sheets; the test strips; the loving focus and timing adjustments of the enlargers; the chemical baths of each glorious print you make; the washing, drying; mounting and final print. It is a laborious process, but who ever said that love is easy? I love photoshop and digital photography, don’t get me wrong…I’m not some sort of purist…but there is something so amazing about film photography that can’t be replaced. It is something about the silver halite grain, or the hours spend in the dark room, alone with these images. There is something in the magic of the image appearing on a white sheet of paper when it hits the chemicals. There is something magical about light when you spend several hours in darkness looking at how it works and how it can be harnessed for art. There is something akin to love that comes about in this process, in which every shot, every print is like a child. I love photography. I love everything about it…so you can imagine how very sad I was to discover on a beautiful romantic, summery Saturday afternoon that film photography is on its way out in Greenpoint/Williamsburg.

Never before has my beloved film photography felt like such an albatross around my neck.

Perhaps this is why I was so irked when I came to your doors, Rite Aid. Now, I’m not blaming you for the changing technological trends in photography. Perhaps it is unfair for me to address this letter solely to you. Perhaps I should be angry with “Greenpoint Photography”, Enla’s Photo, or any of the other numerous places that no longer develop black and white film. You may say that perhaps I should be angry with myself for running out of printing time before finals, or with Queens College’s photography lab or B&H and Adorama for being closed on Saturdays and perhaps you are right…but I think it’s time we talked you and I.

It’s time we talked about this mysterious concept of “one hour photo”. Let me go first, as you have been utterly silent in my tirade thus far. In my understanding, “1 hour photo” implies that a service is provided in which one person, or the photographer, drops off whatever he or she recorded his or her images on, and you, the “1 hour photo” service provider, would develop and/or print these photographs in an hour.
Clearly I’m wrong. Clearly your definition of “1 hour photo” is more correct: a well-hidden, extremely messy counter in the far corner of the store, with confusing signage, broken registers, and no one working the registers. Maybe by “1 hour photo” you meant “1 hour wait for someone to come out and talk to you”, but even this I’d believe. What I would never have dreamed in my wildest imaginations is that “1 hour photo” is a service in which you ship out film to be developed off site and returned in 1 to 3 business days.

Rite Aide, the only thing “1 hour” about your photo service is the amount of time after returning home after our encounter that I wanted to curl up into a ball, clutch my rolls of films to myself and cry. It’s the time it took me to walk home stopping at any establishment that looked like it had anything to do with photography. It is less than the amount of time it would have taken me to develop the film myself with 1billion times the love.

Maybe I’m living in the wrong time period. Maybe my photography is outdated. Maybe I am too much a product of my childhood in the 90s (gasp! so long ago) where film developing places were located on every block. Maybe I’m the ridiculous one in this situation, and you are pioneering the future with you merchandise-strewn aisle floors, “shut on my while I’m still walking” automatic doors and depressing supermarket music, but I will not have you make these outlandish claims to my face, nor will I ever trust you with either my film or my digital photography.

I am extremely disappointed in you. Perhaps someday you will change: either improve your film developing, or remove the yard-tall lettering on your facade, but I didn’t need you “someday” I needed you this Saturday, and you let me (and my photography) down.

Sincerely,
-Natalia Donofrio

I haven’t posted in a while. School resumed with a bang, and I’ve been swamped with a lot of work. This evening though, while doing my poetry homework, I came across this wonderful poem of William Carlos Williams, and I felt I had to share:

William Carlos Williams

“The Dance”

In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.

(scroll down to see the painting)

(And the art major and music geek inside of me smiled)

Here I’ve included the response I wrote for class:

I thoroughly enjoyed William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Dance”. As an art major, I immediately pictured the painting, Breughel’s The Kermess and the poem is such an incredible likeness of the “feel” of the painting.
As I read the poem aloud, I heard the waltzing music in the rhythm of the poem. The stresses on the syllables give the impression of a great swaying waltz: “the DANcers go ROUND, they go ROUND and/aROUND” (2-3). In music, the “waltz tempo” is ¾, or three quarter notes per bar (ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three). This poem follows the same meter as a traditional waltz. The repetition (and accentuation) of the word round emphasized this swaying music.
Although the poem itself doesn’t have a fixed rhyme scheme there is a repetition of sounds in the poem. An example of this is in lines nine and ten: “the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those/ shanks must be sound to bear up under such.” Although not a direct rhyme, butts and such has a distinct echo, and grounds and sound is a much closer rhyme, feeding the feel of the poem, the constant twirling and swaying of the words and the rhythm. This repetition of sound is also apparent in line 4: tweedle and fiddle. Again in line 11: “prance as they dance”.
The words “round” and “around” are mentioned in the second and third lines and the “ound” sound is repeated so often in the poem that the reader connects the entire poem as if it were one big sentence: a description of the even in a single breath. In line 2: round, round, in line 3, around, in line 5, round, in 6, impound, and in 10, sound. The poem is also sandwiched between the repetition of the line that states the title of the painting. Line 1: “In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess”, and line 10: “in Breughels great picture, The Kermess.” This repetition seems to turn the poem into an endlessly cycling repetition, much like the song from our childhood: “The Song That Doesn’t End.”

My grandmother passed away last September. My grandfather, the April before.

I don’t know if it ever really hit me. It was mostly shock and then numbness. They lived in Argentina, where my dad was born. It’s hard to remember most days, that they are no longer there.

They had a small cement house in Villa Madero in Buenos Aires. Lovingly built block by block by my grandfather, with the help of his family.

It was a sunny home. The little balcony had bright yellow Plexiglas squared in the railing. The cool patio with the red ceramic tiles, where the clothesline crisscrossed, and bright green plants grew out of a rainbow assortment of pots, some ceramic, some terra cotta, some cement with bits of glass and tile. All lovingly planted and cared for. The old couches and furniture worn and comforting. That old rotary telephone. Oh, that old rotary telephone! It was old. My grandfather had fixed it, splicing the faulty wire with a new one…that phone that almost electrocuted my dad. We brought them a new phone. It sat in the box. It wasn’t loud enough to hear…that old phone could be heard ringing from the street outside. It had so much character.

My grandparents lived a tough life. My grandmother, Fortunata, was a strong woman. Her smile would light up the room. Her hugs were plentiful. So warm and full of love. She was always cooking. Always caring, feeding, thinking, worrying. Cooking, knitting…She made me a warm wool sweater when I was younger…it was light green, and it had buttons shaped like ducks. I still have it somewhere as a memory. My grandfather, Giuseppe, was the sweetest man. He was so calm and loving. Taking me by the hand. He hummed to himself as he worked with his tools…constructing, building, figuring, fixing. Humming opera, curiously enough. He had an assortment of cassette tapes of various operas. I remember him whistling “Brindisi” from La Traviata. He would make flutes out of reeds. He would carve them, and decorate them, and give them to my sisters and myself. He had an ear for music.

They were both so full of love.

They were born in Sanza, Italy. The same town (coincidentally) that my mom’s family is from. It’s a small town in the mountains, in the Campania region of Italy. It’s in the province of Salerno. The buildings date back to medieval times. The population is less than 4,000 people. My grandparents had to leave Italy. There was no work to be had. They wanted to immigrate to America, but at the time (around the 50s) there were drastic restrictions in immigration to the US, so my grandparents left for Argentina.

The town was poverty-stricken at the time.  The people in our town were mostly farmers who worked the fields in the valley, and shepherds, who roamed the mountains.

The mountains are filled with wild lavender plants. My grandmother loved lavender. It was her favorite flower. She had a beautiful lavender plant in their garden. She would make sachets and perfumes from the lavender. In my mind, the flowers always reminded me of my grandparents in Argentina. The strong spicy-yet-sweet scent reminds me of them, perfectly reflecting their characters.

It had the same association to my dad. He planted lavender in our back yard in Brooklyn in their honor. It thrived. This winter, the plant suffered. Through this crummy cold spring, the lavender plant looked like a dead stump. It was a chilling reminder of my grandparents’ death.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————

Today I was followed by lavender. I hadn’t realized its persistence until I stopped to consider the coincidences that became ever more obvious as the day progressed.

My cousin spread out lavender-colored tablecloths today. My aunt was wearing a lavender shirt, with a pair of earring with small lavender flowers. There were lavender colored flowers everywhere I looked.

I took a shower only to find that my shampoo was missing, and a new bottle of lavender scented shampoo in its place. That was the first thing that struck me. As I smelled the shampoo, I began to think about the flowers I saw, the color was everywhere. I thought of my grandparents.

I went out into our garden. I noticed our lavender plant was in full bloom. The few weeks of summer weather revived the plant. It has grown bigger and looks healthier than it did before the winter. The strong, spicy- yet-sweet smell of the bright purple blossoms filled the entire garden.

My grandmother, Pina, (my mom’s mom) returned from a trip to Sanza. This evening she came to visit us. She brought me sachets filled with wild lavender. I can smell the lavender now, while I type. It’s like a warm hug.

This morning (August 14, 2009) I opened my front door, my dog leashed and ready to take a long walk in the humid semi-sunny summer morning. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a huge cloud of dust down the street. I had heard the jackhammers…they started about 8:30, and had been going on for an hour since.

(Bear with me, there’s a story here)

When I was a little kid, and my Brooklyn neighborhood was a very different place, summer evenings were spent outdoors in the street. I was friends with a girl a few years younger named Ashley. She lived down the block, in a house with blue siding, and a weather-worn wooden door with three circular glass windows. I remember that I used to explore and play on our block with her and her little brother, Tom. Different games of imagination and wonder. We would play “castle” on my brick stoop, and “mouse game” where we would race our bicycles as fast as we could down the sidewalk…I’m not sure where we got the name from. Our favorite game was exploring. We would examine every square inch of our block, looking for treasures: leaves of interesting shape and color, twigs, those spiky ball things that come off of the trees, and if we were very lucky, interesting pebbles and pennies.

One evening, we found a fragment of ceramic buried in the cement sidewalk. It couldn’t have been bigger than an inch wide. It was beautiful, bright blue and white. Possible from the rim of a teacup or a plate of some sort, it had a ring of little white flowers along its edge. This piece of ceramic was magical and mysterious to us. From the day we found it, we would walk over to it, and stare at it, point to it, and touch it for good luck before beginning our games. We would make up stories about how it came to be there…what it was, and what sort of magic it held.

We tried to dig it out of the cement with sticks and pebbles to see if there was an entire cup buried there. No luck. We then began searching the sidewalks of our block carefully, looking for more pieces of the ceramic cup. We would look through the chain-link fence into the empty lot. It was full of gravel, and bright shiny pebbles…we were sure we would find a piece in there…and we kept trying to figure out ways to get over the fence and into the lot. No luck.

Ashley and Tom moved away moved away when I was about 8 years old. The neighborhood was getting steadily worse. We were in one of the only safe pockets of Williamsburg. This was right before it began to turn around and become one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city.

Things changed. My sisters and I didn’t play outside as much…the old Italian people who would sit outside moved away, or died.

Whenever I would pass the ceramic in the sidewalk, I would stop and look at it for a bit. Remembering. Imagining.

The neighborhood changed. I grew up, slowly but surely. I didn’t walk down Withers Street in that direction very often…and when I did, I was hurrying to get somewhere.

When I started high school, I passed the ceramic in the sidewalk every day on my way to the train station. Usually I was rushing to school, but sometimes I would stop and remember the summer evenings spent exploring.

That piece of cement came to symbolize part of my childhood. The magic of firefly filled summer nights of my childhood. (I have yet to figure out what the fireflies are doing in the streets of Brooklyn). A more innocent time.

This morning, that piece of cement holding that fragment of my childhood was attacked by a team of jack-hammer-wielding construction workers. The sidewalk is nothing more that a shallow pit, a pile of cement rubble, and a cloud of cement-dust. A “sidewalk closed, pedestrians use other sidewalk” sign stopped my way. The noise hurt my ears.

It was found on a summer’s day, and it’s gone on summer’s day, about 10 years later.

I’ll be 19 in October. Things change. I’ve changed. My neighborhood has changed. It was naïve of me to think that that slab of concrete would remain unchanged, but I still feel like I’ve lost something important, something magical.

It was like finding out there’s no Santa Claus, or Tooth Fairy all over again. It’s like realizing that the movies you loved as a child are kind of cheesy, the jokes you thought were brilliantly hilarious were rather dopey (Knock Knock, who’s there? Banana…) It’s when you look at the photos of yourself as a child, and see your (then) favorite shirt/skirt/shoes/shorts/hat/pajamas/etc. was horrible. When you see someone that you remembered as tall and strong barely reaches your shoulders.

It’s that part of growing up that kind of hurts. Things that you wish you could hold on to and keep forever unchanged as a reminder, as a sanctuary or haven from the pressures of life, slip away. Memories and photographs fade.

So this reflection was inspired by nostalgia…a cry for a lost childhood monument (if you will). Wouldn’t it be nice if we can make all those things historical landmarks? Keep them unchanged for eternity?

But life doesn’t work that way.

In the end, it’s a sidewalk. A sidewalk with memories, love, mystery, whimsy and magic imbedded in its particles, but it’s still just a sidewalk all the same…

In the poignant words of John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels:

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go

I just have to let it go.

Love,

Natalia

Dirty putrid puddle,
you sit there, stagnant
ruffled by the breeze from the
WHOOSH
of the cars and trucks going by

Iridescent swirls of oil top your
undisturbed surface
gray-brown filth contaminates you,
wrappers and trash from
thousands of unidentified people
paper your bottom.

The cracked asphalt and cement
below you
create an alien landscape;
below your surface
the sewer drain
ironically plugged with caked
dirt and grime
creates deep craters and trenches
in the alien landscape.

Oh mini-wasteland,
you weren’t meant to be such,
consider well…
you were not meant to live your life
as a squalid pit!

The same water that feeds the
oceans, rivers and streams
The same water that gives life to
all the animals and plants
gave you life.

I feel for your sorry lot;
Poor little puddle,
bravely resisting.
wetting the uncaring feet,
the rubber soles
of the walkers,
splashing the tires of the cars,
trucks and bikes
that run you through.

And yet,
when the traffic light changes,
A thirsty city pigeon,
(so unlike the elegant
swans and laughing ducks
that float on your kin)
looks about himself twice
and gratefully lowers his
parched beak to your
surface
and finds nourishment;
enters your waters
and bathes, splashing about

And though your stench fills
the noses of the passer-bys
disturbing the senses
and your dirty waters
stain the filthy ground,
you exist

For a reason.

You care for the other
rag tag band of
neglected urban nature

You are yourself
for our faults
and our fallings
and our failings
and our mistreatment
of nature and of the world

You have no fault,
you cannot help your sorry state
It is us who made you as you are;
It is us and our wrongs
that are reflected in your filthy state

You remind us of how we are
and what we have done
you are unliked and ignored
for the simple fact that

we see ourselves in you

You remind us of our fault
the fault we would
most like to ignore

and for all this, I thank you
I respect you
and I love you

Hello world,

Welcome to the new and improved blog. I’ve been trying to personalize the theme a bit more. The header banner is actually from my black and white photography. I will also be adding some more of my artwork to my portfolio/photography section.

Today was our class’s presentation…it was actually at the Macaulay Building, not the grad center, my mistake. It went well! Props to Yocheved and Haroon! The semester seems to be winding down, yet intensifying at the same time. It feels really strange.

I’ve been talking to some other Macaulay at Queens students, and I’ve found that many of us are interested in really starting the Macaulay Theater Club that has been suggested/hinted at in the past. If anyone is interested, please let me know.

In the mean time, best of luck on your studies and preparations for your finals.

If you are looking for a procrastination tool, and/or are very interested in the neighborhoods of Queens, I would be honored if you would check out our Final Website Project for the Peopling of New York Seminar. We all worked really hard on our neighborhood profiles and studies, and we were bummed that we couldn’t all present our findings and the solutions we devised for our neighborhoods’ issues. Here is the link, in case you are interested: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/vesselinov09/index.php/Main_Page.

All the best,

Natalia Julia Donofrio

-When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

-Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two Wrights make an airplane.

:edit: I added some more photography to my photography section. I hope to  continue to expand this section.

Since the opening of the Macaulay Social Networking thing, I figured I should keep this blog more regular. I’ve been meaning to update this more, but between schoolwork and life, I’ve been neglecting this.

It’s almost the close of my first year of college. It’s a strange feeling, because part of me feels like I’ve been here forever (the other part of me feels like I’ve been on the G and E trains forever, but that’s cause I have been), orientation feels like a billion years ago, and I know everyone so well, that it’s almost as if I’ve known them all my whole life. The other part of me feels that the year just flew by. I guess it’s a bit of both.

Tuesday is our class’s presentation at the Grad. Center. Meantime, I’m just trying to survive my finals and final projects. Speaking of which, I just finished my sculpture final. project: an almost five-foot tall hanging lantern. The problem is going to be schlepping it on the G, E and Q64. Ah well, that’s life…especially that of an art major.

All the best,

-njd

Hello

Macaulay Arts Night was a huge success. You can find photos of the event here:

macaulayartsnight.wordpress.com

It was wonderful. We hope to make this a yearly event. Thanks to all those who participated.