Okay, here I am again sorting out the never ending question of how to sell my photos fairly and how much to charge. Next Monday, February 10, George Forss and I will hold our first photo show together at the Round House Cafe – “Looking At Our World” – we’re each offering about a dozen photos for sale. My will all be matted and framed – alpha mats – and the photos are printed on high fiber archival paper. At that, I will just about break even, this is the drama of selling photos, it is not cheap to present them well.
Several people have seen some of the show photos on the blog and called the Round House to purchase them, I appreciate that. One person wants to buy a New York City photo and two want a photo of Simon On The Fence, which I showed on the blog. The Round House agreed to sell them. We will honor those requests, although shipping framed photos with glass is tricky. But I’ve decided to only sell the remaining photos – the Yellow Barn above is one of them – at the Round House Cafe, 1 Washington Street, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or at the reception on February 20 at the Round House, 7-8:30 p.m.
I think it’s only fair to give people who come to the show first crack, and I don’t want there to be no photos available for sale during the show, so I’m not calling them limited editions but will only sell the ones that are physically in the show. Later on, we may offer some of these photos for sale on my blog or Maria’s, or some might be sold at the Open Houses.
If the photos are sold at the show, they will not be available for now.
The truth is, I don’t really want to get too deeply into the photo-selling business (or calendars either), I’ve never quite figured out how to do it, I don’t have time to really deal with it, Maria is very busy with her own work, and they are all available free for downloading or screen-saving or whatever people want to use them for. I do like the way Maria does it, she chooses one or two, offers them for sale at the lowest possible price, and all of those have sold quickly. Just a few, very limited quantities, once in awhile. We’ll see how this photo show goes. George Forss will be at our Open Houses doing individual portraits of people, couples, or families. His prices are very reasonable, and he is excited about coming to the Open Houses. You can see some of the photos he is offering at our show here. I am excited about doing this with him, he is a joy to work with and a gift to the world.
Super Bowl Sunday is always a challenge for me, I think it is my annual opportunity to grasp the nature of outsiderness, the permanent sense of not really belonging to any group anywhere. I don’t sneer at the Super Bowl or belittle the people who love it – there are many. The day is much more than a game, it is a celebration of friendship and family, it is a new and deeply entrenched American ritual, and I have seen it grow over my lifetime and weave itself into the national consciousness.
Every my good friend George Forss is into it, he is throwing a Super Bowl party at the George Forss Theater of the Arts offering pizza and popcorn and the Super Bowl in two screens and Surround Sound. He invited me, but I just couldn’t go, I would have brought them all down, I can’t quite focus on the Denver Broncos or the Seattle Seahawks, I don’t understand the difference between the two, my mind cannot grasp the many complexities of the game, being outlined day and night by large genial and handsome men and beautiful and smart women who exude the kind of cameraderie and insiderness that has always eluded me. I will, as I always do, watch the beginning of the game, until I just can’t watch it anymore. I imagine it would be great fun to know about all of the plays and strategies, I’ll give it a shot, I do love the ads (although I’ve seen most of them online already.)
I am happy to think of my many friends who are gathered with other friends eating wings and soup and popcorn, the Super Bowl seems to be one of those things that is so uniquely American, that unites the country. I am heating up a bowl of pea coup and a multi-grain baguette from the Round House. Good luck with the game, Maria is off spending the afternoon with her sister, Red is at my feet, Flo is in my lap. Somebody asked me who I am rooting for, I can’t say I am rooting for anyone. I wish everyone watching and loving it good luck, I have come to accept it is sometimes better to accept life outside of the tent than in.
Horses are Christina Hansen’s life, she drives for two stables (she taught history and drove carriages in Philadelphia), it is difficult to process the intensity and frequency of the abuse the carriage drivers say they receive when they take their horses to the park. People demonstrate, scream insults, wave placards in front of the horses to frighten them, and sing all kinds of chants.
Now, she is working to help the Carriage Horse owners and drivers fight back against the very powerful forces in New York seeking to eliminate their work.
One is: “Heartless tourists! LEAVE TOWN!”
“Greedy tourists! LEAVE TOWN!”
“Heartless drivers! LEAVE TOWN!
“Animal abusers! LEAVE TOWN”
The drivers all have horror stories of being yelled at followed, called names, been sent threatening e-mails.
One can honestly and earnestly debate and disagree about whether the horses should be in Central Park or whether their safety or working conditions could be improved, but there is something that feels very wrong about the cruelty and hysteria surrounding this issue, it feels so much more like a mob than a reasoned discussion. And this mob has real estate developers, screaming and angry people acting in the name of loving animals, and a mayor and City Council President. That alone is enough for me to side with the carriage drivers, I have never seen a mob on the right side of anything.
If you see the pain in these people’s eyes as they relate these horror stories of human abuse and cruelty, it reminds me that animal rights are important, animals desperately need advocates to call attention to their plight and fight for their rightful place in the world, it is theirs as well as ours. Yet I have to be honest, I have never seen a happy animal in the care of an angry person, and the people screaming at the carriage riders are not advancing the cause of animals, they are making the very idea of animal rights synonymous with rage, rigidity and intimidation. That does not help animals.
I believe it is not possible to love animals and hate people, one leads to the other, is part and parcel of the other. We are connected, if you can abuse people, you can abuse animals, and vice versa. They are the same thing, one flows from the other, if one is wrong, the other is wrong. Animals have helped me learn how to love people, to open up to them. By learning how to love them, they have helped me to love human beings. Watching Christina with the horses in the stable, I can say to animal lovers, we all know what another one looks like, she might be right or wrong in her views – I have to say I like her views – but she loves her horses very much, it is simply wrong to scream insults at her and others in the street for standing up for what they believe in, and anyone who loves animals has a stake in arguing against that kind of brute reasoning.
Animals deserve better, so do their rights, somehow we have to take the idea of animal rights back and give them to the people who truly believe in them..
Maria loved the big horses at the livery stables in New York some of them were huge, and all were amiable. Many are Percherons and Percheron crosses, some are retired racehorses. As if often the case, they seemed fond of her as well.
– One of the chants of the people who the media call animal rights protesters, gathered weekly in Central Park. If they know the names of the drivers, they substitute them for “carriage drivers.”
It was the author and natural Henry Beston who wrote that we need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals, that was true 30 years ago, it is even more so today. We need a wiser view of animals than the politicians in City Halls and arrogant people chanting in the streets about animal rights seem to possess.
Standing in the livery stables of the carriage horses in New York yesterday, I realized instantly that the embattled horse owners and carriage drivers in New York know their horses better than anyone outside possibly could, simply because they and their fathers and families have lived and worked with them so long. It was not, I realized for me to tell them a thing about their horses, it was for them to tell me. There seems nothing for them to apologize for, they work hard to make a living, they provide working animals one of the last opportunities to work in one of the greatest cities in the world. Living the life of the individual has become painfully difficult in the country that practically invented the idea.
I could hear it and see it and feel this knowledge in the way these men and women moved with the horses, talked to them, were with them. Increasingly, the idea of animal rights has been co-opted and polluted by people who see animals only through the selfish prism of their being piteous, abused and dependent. They cannot survive without us, only we can save them, only we know what is best, this is how we get to feel good about ourselves. The carriage horses in New York need rescuing from their rescuers. This patronizing view of animals fails them in the most elemental way, as Beston saw so clearly many years ago and as I saw again in New York. It fails to chart a path for their survival in the modern world, it only ghettoizes them and takes the rest of us off the hook.
Animals are not our children, dependents or siblings, they are caught with us in the net of time and life, fellow citizens and prisoners of the earth for all it’s joys and sorrows. As they fare, so do we, we cannot live without one another in a healthy way, see how we are fragmented and unmoored without them, how we desperately need them and cram them into our lives, even if we have to stuff them into small apartments and live their lives on concrete walkways. How dare we chase away the ones who know best how to live with us.
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In the next few days I’ll write more about the stables I visited and the people I saw in New York. But first, I had this dream and it wouldn’t go out of my head. I have to share it.
Riding on the train home from New York City, thinking about my day, this fantasy came to me as I sank into the deep and peaceful rhythms of the train. What, I thought, would be best for these beautiful animals in a perfect world, in the midst of all this talking and arguing about them, what would really be best for them, not just for us? What if there were a common goal, a common purpose in keeping them in the lives of people. What a statement to the world, to ourselves, I thought, if New York City was to commit to putting even a few animals first. What if the world’s most important city debated not throwing horses out, but argued had a meaningful debate about what their rights truly are. What if they resolved to sustain the most glorious heritage of working animals – the opportunity to survive in our urban world and continue to live and work among the people they have served in so many ways for so many years.
What a lost opportunity that seems to be. With the horses sent into exile, to mythical vast rescue preserves and farms, it may never come again. We will surely never see them again.
If you read through the history of New York City, it is clear right away that working horses have been there as long as people, some of them in the very same stables they live in now. They helped build the city, transported people before subways, supported commerce, rushed to fires and emergencies, were killed and injured in wars, provided sport and entertainment, carted food and milk. It seems a travesty to me that they should be driven from the city to make room for more trucks, bigger buildings and developments and banished from our consciousness in such a thoughtless and ill-considered way. They are citizens of the city, just as much as we are.
In my fantasy, the city and the public might raise funds to build a modern new stable, perhaps in or near Central Park, stables on one floor, with plenty of light, easy access to hay, examining rooms, space to get outside in good weather. There would be no old and crowded stables to protest. In this dream of animal rights, I imagined the mayor and City Council President of New York – the mayor has never had a pet, the City Council President has a cat, from a shelter, she is quick to point out – banning trucks from Central Park, establishing a vehicle-free access lane from the park to the horse’s stables. I imagine them working with the city’s Board of Education to help teach children in the city to ride, to introduce them to the real animals of the real world, not emotional and human projections of what an animal’s life ought to be like. Perhaps some of the children would want to ride or own – or drive – horses of their own, beautiful work outdoors, adding beauty and romance to a city, pleasing people from all over the world. Maybe there could be horses in other boroughs, other parts of the city.
In this dream, the mayor would eagerly come to the stables – he has so far refused – and see the horses, talk to the drivers and owners, ask what he, as their mayor, could do to resolve this increasingly bitter and troubling controversy, as the elected representative of all the people, not just a few, listening to all points of view, not just one. Perhaps he could bring the city’s City Council President, who has condemned the “cruel” treatment of the animals, and she could offer some specific ideas on how she feels their lives might be improved. In this dream, the mayor and the City Council President – and the people who call themselves supporters of animals rights would first of all commit to recognizing the horses right to live here and survive, their historic and emotional place in the hearts of so many people, the enduring traditions and commitment – and investment – of the drivers and carriage horse owners. Perhaps he might acknowledge that the horses have a right not to perish or be killed in the name of helping them.
There need not be a controversy about whether they can stay, rather about how to better their lives. It is hard for me to imagine anyone who loves animals wanting anything else. In my fantasy, the people who say they are for animals rights stopped shouting cruel and false insults at good and honest people in the streets and work instead to raise money and pass laws for the betterment of the horses, for their survival. Perhaps they finally came to see that people who live and work with animals are not their enemies, but potentially, their strongest allies if they really wish to help animals. They might forge a common purpose with the drivers and owners of the horses. They could both seek to help animals remain in the lives of people who live in cities, as most people now do and have work to do, as working horses need. Why aren’t those things the rights of animals? Cities are the true battleground for animals rights, as the horses plight suggests, if animals cannot survive in New York, where they have lived for hundreds of years, they are doomed on our planet and we may also be doomed to be without them.
I would hate to take a child to Central Park next year and show him a vintage electric cart and tell him or her that horses used to live and work here, children used to ride in their carriages, but they were sent away. I wonder which he might choose to ride on? Does he have a voice?
Imagine making this kind of history, the first American city to declare that animals have rights in our urbanized world, if they are unsafe, we will make them safer, if they need better treatment and safer circumstances, we will offer it to them. In a city that embraces progressive thinking, what could be more progressive?
In my fantasy, there would be proposals to bring more animals into the city, get more dogs into offices, have horses and donkeys replace some trucks, pull some carts, deliver some fast food and groceries, maybe even have sheep grazing in some parks and meadows, chickens laying eggs at the mayor’s mansion.
The spirits of animals, the countless ghosts and victims of our cruelty, sacrifices to our callousness. For me, the carriage horses are their witnesses and angels, they cry out for real love and understanding, they are among our last chances. Without animals, we are broken, disconnected, cut off from our own history and the natural world. The horses in New York do great good and no harm, they lift the spirits and touch and heal the hearts of our disconnected world.
In my dream I ask the mayor respectfully, sir, “don’t we owe them the slightest effort to make them safe and comfortable and keep them here?, isn’t there a single piece of real estate that can be saved from the condo-and office tower builders, is there no obligation at all to honor the deep feelings of so many people all over the world that these animals be preserved in this beautiful park? Is there no place they can be safe in New York? Is there no respect the people – family after family – who have lived the life of individuals, working with animals for generations, father to daughter to son?”
And then, in the dream, the mayor says, well, I never thought about it that way, I’m not sure I agree with you, let me talk to people and consider it before we ban the animals from the city and destroy a way of life that has existed in the midst of turmoil and change for more than a century, and touched the romance and imagination of countless people. Yes, they ought to have a voice, too.
But this fantasy has a critical flaw, it supposes that all of the people talking about the animals are concerned about the animals, not themselves. That seems to be where it falls apart, why it doesn’t work.
So that was my dream, really. I pictured this fantasy against the clack-clack of the trains passing the beautiful Hudson River on the way upstate. The people of New York and their representatives will have to decide the fate of these horses – I found them quite beautiful, spiritual creatures, I was very touched by them, they were so calm, at ease. The decision about their future is not up to me, I believe in democracy most of the time, this is not for me to decide. These animals are encircled by some very powerful forces – millionnaire developers, enraged animal rights “activists,” real estate investors, a manipulable media, the most powerful officials in city government. Hard to imagine they or their horses stand much of a chance against that kind of onslaught, in America, individuals rarely win against big money and power. Animals never do.
I also want to be honest, to frame this issue as a simple matter of abuse – of cruel and evil people wantonly torturing their animals – setting out to harm, maim and kill their horses – is a ludicrous stereotype, it is simply an affront to anyone paying the slightest attention or thinking about animals in anything but the most superficial way. Whatever one thinks about horses and work, you don’t have to be in the stables for five minutes to see that these animals are not being mistreated or abused.
Abuse is not the real issue, it seems to be power, self-righteousness and ignorance. For people to evoke the mantle of animal rights in order to get rid of the very few animals that exist in our cities is utterly irrational and profoundly arrogant. It makes no sense to hardly anyone who loves or lives with animals. It demeans the very idea of rights for animals. It is not a right to be driven into exile to an uncertain, disruptive and perhaps fatal fate from which there can be no return. It is simply another kind of abuse.
Perhaps the carriage drivers – they have no reason to be ashamed – will one day awaken from their defensive stupor and go on the offensive, maybe gather in Central Park on Sunday afternoons and do some of their own screaming, chant their own chant. In America, that seems to work much of the time:
“1-2-3-4
“We would love new doors and floors
5-6-7-8
Ban The Trucks And Liberate
9-10-11-12
When You Lie We’ll Ring A Bell”
–
Nature is an essential part of our humanity, without a continuing awareness and experience of that wonder and mystery, we are broken and can never be healed.
