Life in My Years

There are three postcards sitting in my room right now that I have kept around me for the past several years for no more special reason but that I like them and they remind me of a pleasant evening I had in Berkeley with friends. I found them (the postcards, not my friends) in a bookstore next to Zachery’s on Solano selling for only 50 cents each. A definite bargain, for the curiously long company they’ve kept me. (I usually buy, then promptly lose, most of these types of purchases.)

They all have slightly odd illustrations –  two of them which are a little disturbing and ominous, which I love, and one that’s silly, which makes me happy.

My favorite of the postcards is entitled “Haie Der Vorstadt”, which roughly translated means “Sharks of the Suburbs.” It’s a dark and stormy night – a bald man with a moustache (can you spot him?) peeps his head out a window overlooking his small provincial-looking neighborhood, dimly lit by a lone streetlamp, and he finds that his entire street has been flooded like an ocean, and within the teaming, frothy, black waters lurk sharks with sharp, gleaming white teeth and wide, vacant eyes. It’s a deliciously unsettling situation to imagine, isn’t it? And I love the way it’s drawn, the way there’s a touch of the absurd mixed in with the comical menace:

The second is titled “Schaufensterhase”, which means “Showcase Hare”, and it is exactly that: a small hare – looking more rabbit than hare – performs for a small crowd of people by standing on the tips of his little ears. There’s something unsettling about this illustration as well, although I don’t quite know why. Maybe it’s the way the clouds look in the slightly overcast sky, just a little too puffy and grey. It could also be the crowd. There’s a woman who’s on stage with the hare – the hare’s trainer or keeper, I suppose – and she’s probably the main source for uneasiness: her skin is stone white, and what little face we see that is unobscured by a droopy brown hat is androgynous at best – more the face of a man than a woman, apart from the red, pouty lips:

The third postcard is called “Hot Dog”, and it shows a small black dog with a white stomach and a blue color standing up on its hind legs in front of a hot dot cart in New York City, looking through some kind of one-eyed binocular at the angry-looking hot dog vendor:

Aside from the three postcards, two other pictures decorate my room. I haven’t hung them up yet, and I don’t know if I will, because they look quite nice just resting on pieces of furniture against the wall. (Also, the frames are crappy, and hanging them would only make them fall apart faster. I mean that quite literally). My favorite of the two is called “The Birthday”, and it also happens to be my favorite painting by Marc Chagall. Like so many of his other paintings, it features his wife, Bella, with whom he was passionately in love with his whole life. In a journal entry, he describes the event that inspired this particular painting: it is Bella’s birthday, and it’s early morning – Chagall is working in his studio, when suddenly, she walks in, carrying a bouquet of flowers, and as he watches her, he falls into reverie and imagines his body leaving his seat, floating up into the air and to her, finally kissing her, as she’s going to set the flowers on the table. I think the painting captures all the whimsy and love of his daydream, and the love he feels for Bella:

The second picture I have in my room is a painting by Matisse, called “Gold Fish”. There’s not much I have to say about it, except that I like the colors, particularly the bright red-orange of the fish.

Cute, aren’t they?