Yeah, maybe:

All of them!!!!:

Among the wonderful bands that were playing yesterday, I heard them playing Big Love by the Lounge Lizards yesterday.  I couldn’t believe it!!!!  I love the Lounge Lizards and Big Love is a wonderful piece of jazz that I first heard in the Bill Cunningham movie.  It is an energetic wonderful piece of music.  Hearing that live capped off a perfect day:

If only a giant foot had been integrated into all of this.

This parade was so much fun with the costumes and all the rest of it.  The costumes were so filled with wit and originality.  It all hand this hilarious homemade feeling to it, but that makes it yet more lovable:

I guess once you’ve been taking pictures for a while, you choose what you really like.  You start out with scenics, macros, portraits, whatever, but eventually you choose what you want to focus on.  I love movement.  I always look for the ultimate moment that will make you feel like you are in the photo, when the subject is at its most interesting.

I see a lot of pieces out there in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair about inspiration and inspiration boards, etc.  I don’t have one of those, but I use one thing as an interesting means of inspiration.  I watch old gymnastics competitions from the 1970s and 1980s on YouTube.  I wondered for a while why I watched this.  I’ve always loved gymnastics and did it for while as a kid.  I realized recently that I am watching the videos to pick out exact moments when the photo of the event would be perfect.  I choose the 1970s and 1980s because that is when gymnastics was more elegant and balletic, rather than powerful like it now.  Somehow, and I don’t know why, it is harder to get inspired from the competitions now.  They are all about power, rather than grace.  In my subject, I’m looking for grace over power.

Yesterday I went to an event called Honkfest, that in my book should be held every weekend year round and alternating Wednesday.  It was so much fun, full of beer, marching bands and singing.  There will be a longer post about that forthcoming, but in this entry, I am going to post photos of a guy I saw singing reggae yesterday.  The way he moved was something special, that I hope I captured in this photos:

Some people are armchair sports fans.  They imagine that on game day, they could have done it better than the people on the field.  I love sports, but when fish person Michael Phelps swims, I imagine too that I could swim next to him in the pool.  Actually, far behind him with him going extra slow.

I’m more an armchair cooking and crafts person.  I always imagine that given the opportunity, I could have a better idea for a garment on a show like Project Runway.  In reality, I can barely sew a button onto any sort of garment.  I may have only attempted this maneuver once in my life.

So, wherefore the discussion of sewing?  Well, a couple of days ago, I went to the thoroughly delightful Boston Fashion Week fashion show in Copley Place.  New York has its exclusive fashion week, with impossible to get front row invitations.  Boston Fashion Week is more open and I really like that.  Everyone should get the chance to see a runway show.  They are exceptionally fun and you usually come how with a bag of free stuff.  Mine included bottles of shampoo, which I needed and a romance novel, which I perhaps didn’t need.

And there were the clothes.  The fashion show always features some hits from the mall brands and creations from local fashion school students.  Now it is the fashion school garments that I will comment on.  I stood by and watched the fashion school creations go by and I suddenly turned into Tim Gunn.  On a couple of the garments, the seams were puckering and I knew that they had been badly sewn.  For other garments, the students had simply picked fabrics that were out of their depth, too difficult to work with and they had been worked over too much.

And then I remembered.  I can’t sew and couldn’t make a garment like that in a million years.

So, good luck dear fashion students.  The show is still a really fun occasion that is made even more fun by the fact that the whole thing is free and available to the public.

The clothes, The clothes!!!!!!:

Yeah, so I usually post things up here that are humorous or just generally document life.  Lots of people in costumes, flying dogs, etc.  No, that isn’t going to change any time soon, but today I am going to write on language.  Specifically, how people use language.

In my real life, away from this blog that seems to conjure up an idealized world, I am a student of applied linguistics.  A teacher and a student of linguistics.  On a lot of weekends, like this one, I spent time doing homework, in a network of local cafes.  I try out their coffee, use their internet and on occasion observe the people around me.

Today I was sitting in the Thinking Cup cafe on Newbury street and I was reading about bilingual education policy.  The reading was tough, all about how different countries use language policy for political means and how to tailor language policy to best fit the needs of a country.  During all of this, I was kind of sleepy.  I had a big lunch and had spent half the day with friends and was perhaps a little exhausted, so I kind of started to listen to what the people around me were saying.

Suddenly it hit me, how they were all using language.  I was so struck by it that I actually wrote notes about it.  I have never done that before in any study environment.  At one point, there was an Arabic family sitting next to me.  The son was using an iPad, while the mother and father chatted on and on in Arabic with each other, also speaking to the son in Arabic.  The son kept responding to his parents in English.  I kept thinking “the son obviously knows English and the mother must too, but they are talking in Arabic.”  The mother must be trying to preserve the Arabic in her son’s mind, using Arabic as a sort of an interior language.

Next, a man and a woman sat down next to me.  I’ve been studying class markers as well in the applied linguistics program.  The man was obviously from the upper classes.  He was wearing a very tailored suit made of expensive looking fabric.  The woman was equally well dressed.  It soon became apparent that the man was Italian or Spanish but also spoke very good English.  The pair talked very deeply about art, about lectures being given on El Greco and confirming the authenticity of certain paintings by El Greco.  It was a very deep conversation that a person who doesn’t know about art would not understand.  First, I was struck by how the man spoke, with deep authority on his subject in English.  He had obviously had to learn English to be able to operate in the art world.  The man was not trying to impress the woman, but the woman was trying to impress the man.  After a while, he let her impress him a little bit.  I wrote down part of their conversation because it was so interesting and it showed a lot about how people use language.  The man was using English because it is an international academic language that he had to learn to work in the world of art.  The woman was using her language to try to impress the man.  It was obvious as well that the man was of a higher stature than the woman.  Or maybe he wasn’t, but the language he was using (not the language itself) made it seem that way.

When I started applied linguistics a year ago, I heard a lot of people talking about “how people use language.”  I thought, well, how do people use language?  To communicate.  But somehow after a year, I’m starting to realize that it is so much more than that.

Let’s have a cup of joe to that:

Now is this kind of in between time of year.  It isn’t quite winter yet, not quite fall either, but not summer anymore.  I don’t consider fall starting until the leaves change.  Its a funny time of year because the days grow shorter, but you can still wear a long sleeved shirt outside and not be cold at all.  Sometimes I look at people out on the street and think that they could be dressed for summer because the temperature isn’t that cold, but they aren’t.

I guess the best name for this time of year might be evening.  The evening of summer or the morning of fall:

I know that Thomas Jefferson left out the pursuit of cheese fries out of the constitution.  But I bet he would have included them if he got the chance.

Here is a young man exercising his rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of cheese fries: