Demise

Just so you'll know--the Polaroid is gone.  I can't buy any more from "the source."  Excruciating. All things come to an end, or must, I know, but I keep learning and thinking about what I am doing and want to go further.  "Give me more time," I sing to the dark night.  But now I must think of something.

Polaroid should be forced to give up their formulas for film if they are not going to produce it any longer.  They should let someone else do it if they won't.  Some of their films like types 665 and 55 and 59 and 669 are important parts of art history.  They certainly shouldn't be allowed to put that away in a vault and say "no" to artists hungry for the medium.  They ran a bad business in the end and could not afford to go on, but it was bad business by all accounts, bad management, not bad product.

No need to tell you more.  I have a little left and will finish up with it, but the next series of carnival images, was intended for Polaroid.  There is not enough left for that.

And so what you have seen and will see here is all there will be in the history of this process.  I think.  I keep my fingers crossed that something miraculous will happen.  But the price of my prints just went up. Sky rocketed.  I will make a few available to Christie's and test the market.  I have made some very large prints, 32"x26", and they thrill me.  Framed.  In truth, I have never sold a print.  I've given plenty away, but I am not much for commerce.  It would be both an agony and a thrill to sell one.  No, no, that is not it.  Another emotion.  I do think I would be embarrassed.

As an aside, though, the woman in this photo is an artist who works with many alternative processes.  She works with a lith printing process that sounds intriguing.  I'll let you know.

Amiss

Jesus, did I do that?  I'm looking across the room where the sun shines brightly on the floor as it rises over my neighbor's house (the sun, not the floor).  There are crumbs of chocolate everywhere.  I follow the trail up to the table top.  It is littered, too.  I vaguely remember opening the brick of dark chocolate last night while sitting at the table writing an email on my laptop.  What a mess.  It looks like a pack of rats have been here.  How could that have happened?

It is simply the litter of a certain type of life, I guess, detritus of late nights that would be better spent in bed.

Christ, it is worse than I thought.  There are crumbs of chocolate trailing into the living room.  Somebody must have come in last night while I slept, some maniacal chocolate freak, a bandit or voyeur or miscreant of another sort.

Other strange things are happening, too.  My computer glasses are gone.  Yes, computer glasses.  They are not as strong as the reading glasses.  If you are working on your computer with your reading glasses, you are making a mistake.  They are too strong for that and you will keep leaning forward and hurt your neck.  Anyway, I wrote piece for the morning and had just finished when the house repairman showed up.  I got up and talked to him for awhile, then came back to the computer and couldn't find my glasses.  Odd, I thought.  I must have set them down elsewhere.  I have turned the house upside down looking for them.  Gone.  You tell me.

I know.  I'll quit.  Tonight.

Now I have to clean up the chocolate crumbs.  But I don't think I did that.  I don't think it could be done in a casual manner.  No, no, something is amiss.  There is a mystery here.

Drawn from Fancy

Much interest in the midnight whiskey emails, it seems.  I can see why.  I want to read your mail, too.  I want to rummage through your drawers and talk to people you know, ex-husbands and wives and lovers.  I want to construct a version of you.  And then I want to photograph you.  We are all drawn to these peeps behind the curtain, glimpses through a window on a darkened night, sneaked glances through the crack of some barely opened door.  That is what art gives us, or hopes to.  Send me a note.  Give me permission.  We will conspire.

So the girl, the five-foot pixie and consort of gypsies, wrote back telling me she enjoyed my message.  Said I seemed an interesting sort.  I must write back and tell her that I am.

But for now, I am interrupted.  The workman who is doing repairs to the house is here.  I am drawn from fancy to the world where time and weather takes a toll, where ignored things fall apart.  I will not tell the pixie that I am one of those things.  Let's let her believe the other.  It is good for her.

First Redact, Then Delete

Some days I have a modicum of sense.  I almost posted/just deleted one of the emails I wrote on the Full Buck Moon.  It was to a model from Cincinnati who was going to be in town and wanted to know if we could shoot together.  Claimed to be five feet tall and eighty-eight pounds.  A pixie.  Sure, I had told her, how many chances does one have to photograph such a thing.  Way led to way, though, and she wrote a day later saying that the people she was going to stay with were going to be out of town, so her plans had changed.  Gypsies, I assumed.  I am lucky to have escaped that.  But my email response was full of whimsy and moonlight.  Better left alone.

I think I will begin sending hand written letters instead.  I know I've said that before.  But who wouldn't like getting something other than bills and junk mail falling through the mail slot (I still have a mail slot, though I know they are becoming rare).  As photography becomes easier, I am trying to make it harder.  I should do the same with writing as well.

Pissed Off, Fucked Up

This written last night before I began sending so many of you those rotten, outrageous emails.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Pissed off.  Fucked up.  Two things I have looked forward to, now gone without my attention or presence. Sunday night's first episode of Mad Men.  It is the only television show I have watched over.  Got more out of it the second viewing than I did the first like a good piece of literature.  I'd marked it.  Sunday, July 25, Season 4 Premiere.  Forgot about it.  Missed it.  I woke up at 12:30 last night with my head on the computer keyboard.  Too much whiskey, maybe.  Too much life.  No, too little.  Despondency and despair, etc.  But last night coming home from "dinner with mother," driving on the big curve of a brick road that borders the swooping shore of the big lake with its beautiful sweeping view of sky and shore, my lake, my sky, my shore,  I saw the almost full moon rise mythic and mysterious, and I said in hushed tones to myself, "you will go tomorrow at sundown with your camera and you will photograph this big, sweeping, beautiful event."  The Full Buck Moon.  And I forgot.  And by the time I remembered, the cloudiness had come to block the view.  Obscure it.  Despondency and despair, etc.

I will go out and look for it in a little while, but I did not see it rising majestic over that big old lake and did not feel its pull.  I worry much about missing out on life, such as it is now, worry that I have had the best of it and can only look forward to less and worse.  Was.  And then, like a feeb and a fool. . . .

How old was Shakespeare when he died?  Don't worry.  I can Google it.  But he was young.  He was young yet left so much for us to ponder and admire.  And that is when it is done, I guess, though I feel a greater creative power now that I am half-lame, half-blind, than when I was virile and, of course, distracted, when I only wanted to create in order to impress women and piss off men.  Well, it is still the same, and I feel it now in the darkness of a clouded sky before a full moon, the Full Buck Moon, and with the whiskey again patting me on the back and telling me what a swell fellow I am.  I feel it now and wish to march into a small town and ravish it with my tales and beauty and charm.

But it is time for bed, for there is work tomorrow, and a man must make his living.  There are people somewhere having fun tonight, people who did not miss the season premiere of Mad Men, who watched the full moon rise, and who are now just in their cups and howling about lines from the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World" commercials.  I know it's true.

One more whiskey for a nightcap and then to bed.  To sleep and not to dream, I hope, for those dreams have gotten pretty dreary.  But maybe tonight, with the help of old Buck. . . .  And I bet I'll let you know.

"Nobody's Leaving. . .

. . .but I still feel left behind."

("Seems to Want to Hurt This Time," Donna the Buffalo)

I wish the girl had a cat tail.    And cat ears.  And maybe stripes, too.  Just today.  Seems to me right now  you are all on vacation, frolicking at the beach or breathing fresh mountain air while I go to work.  Homemade ice cream on sunny porches overlooking the mighty Atlantic.  Crepes on a veranda overlooking the mighty Pacific.  Laughter and ease.  All of this is happening.  All of this is possible.  And yet. . . .

If only I could paint.  She'd look like a cat.  Under the sickle of a moon.

Signs and Things

Heads Up.  Tomorrow is the Full Buck Moon.  Hell of a name.  There is also a partial eclipse, though you won't see it here.  Birds, frogs, crickets.  I heard from a friend in a campground in Malibu that the coyotes are going mad.  But maybe they always do.  I will keep my eyes open for signs and things.  Looking for change.

To Sleep and Not to Dream

And with the dawn, back to bed.  To sleep and not to dream.  It was those dreams that woke me at four.  Now, perhaps, the peaceful slumber of the weary and not the awful terrors of the wicked.  The Wicked and The Weary.  Another time.

I've Seen Things

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

(Roy Batty, Blade Runner)

It is something we all want to say.  But you can't say it any more.  You just can't.

No, I think I am probably wrong.  I don't know what people want to say.  I am usually mistaken.

*     *     *     *     *    *

UPDATE

*     *     *     *     *     *

I just found out that yesterday was Edward Hopper's birthday, born in 1882.  Here is Roger Ebert's favorite Hopper painting.  

Of his impending death, Ebert has said: 

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home fromParis.^[70]

^{All lost like tears in the rain.}  

Despair and Circumstance, or The Dance of the Sabine Women

The smart thing to do, of course, when everything is rotten is not to post.  Distress leads to error.  Mistakes of all sort.  Weather the storm, they say.  Wait until you come out the other side.  You'll make sense of it when you gain some distance.  But really, I think, that is the easy thing to do.  And I know way leads to way, and the next thing you know. . . . So we beat on, enduring disappointments and hardships and trying to be British about it all, understated. . . stiff upper lip. . . trying to forget that we are more related to Young Werther and the genetics of romantic doom. . . (see--even in distress there might be the well-formed phrase).  But I'd rather have been the Poet of Despair than The Despairing Poet.  Quite a difference there.  So I will try to wrestle with the disorder and give it shape and sense (or sensibility).

And suddenly. . . I feel better.  A bit.  There is something in that brief paragraph, several things, that serve.

Bubble, Bubble, Gender Trouble

A woman working on her Ph.D. asked me yesterday if I wanted to read a paper she had just published on the social construction of maleness.  I said sure.  I haven't read it yet, but I think I can predict what it will say.  She has studied Judith Butler closely, she tells me.  I won't try to make a summary here.  I will only tell you I'm all for it.  I'm against it.  Both.  I enjoy the inventiveness of it, of watching a truly good mind at work.  And after that, I enjoy the uncertainty.  I enjoy the argument.

How many forms of maleness exist in the United States, I wonder?  It probably depends on how thin you want to slice the onion.  The struggle is for who gets to say.  I'm trying to keep up.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Chapter 1

"Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire"

One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.
          --Simone De Beauvoir

Strictly speaking, "women" cannot be said to exist.
          --Julia Kristeva

Woman does not have a sex.
          --Luce Irigaray

The deployment of sexuality. . . established this notion of sex.
          --Michel Foucault

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.
          --Monique Wittig

Frances

Frances had once been a beauty queen, they said.  She wasn't anything to look at now.  Alcohol and bad living had taken their toll.  But she had had four kids by the time I met her, and had been divorced and had gotten married to Chet.  Now they lived in a ten-foot wide trailer with three of her kids.

She loved to get drunk.  For most of the year, she and Chet limited it to weekends, but during the summer, Chet wasn't working and the trailer had no air conditioning and it was miserable hot inside.  So summer nights, they ended up drinking cold beers.  Not to the extent that they did on weekends when they really let themselves go, but sometimes a little too much.  It could get dangerous.

Frances liked to sing when she was drinking, but only one song: "Since You Left Me, Baby."  That's how she sang it, anyway.  Her version was a little off.  And when Tommy and I were playing guitars, she'd stagger over and say, "Play it for me, honey.  Play 'Since You Left Me, Baby.'" And so we'd strum the opening chord, and Frances would sit down and screw up her face in twisted, painful passion, tilt her head upward and to the right, then shake it a little.  On summer nights, she'd always be wearing these gypsy-looking low cut blouses, and when she bent over, you could see the wrinkled tops of her breasts push together, and you'd have to look away.  After a few minutes of us strumming the chord, she'd begin to sing.  The song was simple, a three chord progression, but I don't remember ever making it through the entire song.  I guess Tommy and I were evil little shits, and after awhile, we began to play the third chord shift as a minor to mess with her.  She'd furrow her brow and try to bend the note downward painfully, getting pissed off, saying, "No, no, no, that's not right."  For me, it was funny every time.  And it dissuaded her from singing along with us which was the point.  Maybe we shouldn't have done it.  Maybe it ruined things for her, some bittersweet memory.  Whether it was that or the drinking, though, she'd usually end up in a fight with Chet and finish by saying, "I don't care, fuck all of you, you hear me?"  And then she'd walk the forty feet to the end of the trailer where she would close the tiny bedroom door and pass out in bed.

She was different when she was sober, of course, but I don't remember as much of that.  It was those summer nights when it was hot and everyone was drinking that things would go wrong and everything became vivid.  Those are the nights that were branded into my memory.

Old Chet

Old Chet worked in the canning plant.  I don't know what he did because I don't know what went on in there.  But he did what all of them did, I guess, in one way or another.  I don't think it was too specialized, though he'd been there for years, so he probably had one of the better positions for a guy who wasn't a foreman.  The work was seasonal, and he was always off in the summer.  He didn't mind.  He got unemployment and some other government subsidies.  It was like summer vacation.  I remember, though, that they'd start watching their money then, mixing powdered milk half and half with the real milk and such.  Cigarettes and beer were priorities.  They'd begin to worry when those were getting low.  Toward the end of summer, Chet would try to pick up odd jobs, working here and there for a week or a few days, and when that money would come in, everything eased up.  Beer and cigarettes.

Chet had a mouth full of rotten teeth, so he kept his lips together most the time.  Tight-lipped, they'd say. And I thought that was why he didn't say much.  But one day his stepson was cutting the fool and Old Chet told him, "If you're stupid, keep your mouth shut and people won't know it."  I always thought Old Chet was pretty smart.

Me, Not Me

I read in the New York Times that we have more cells in our body that are microbes than we have with our own genetic material.  More than half of the living material.  It is somehow unnerving.  And the variety of microbes is truly remarkable.  They will be the new medicine.  A study the article reported showed that kids who live in rural areas are healthier because of dirt.  Urban and suburban kids are missing many beneficial microbes.  Patagonia founder, Yvone Chouinard, the original "Fun Hog," never let his children wash their hands.  He said that it was important for them to adapt to the environment.  He must have happily applauded when he read the report.

I know more germaphobic people than ever before, and they have had their effect on me.  They see germs everywhere.  They are right, I know.  Germs are growing overnight on the damp toothbrush standing in your bathroom.  The dog or cat that goes outside brings in a billion more.  Half the people I work with won't eat in public and they use hand sanitizers incessantly, big pump bottles sitting proudly on their desks.  They all have big spray cans of Lysol, too.

When I was a kid, we used to share soda pop taking turns drinking from the bottle.  We ate off the same popsicle.  Everyone put their dirty hands into the peanut jar.  I guess we got sick.  But my friend's child who is kept germ-free is sick all the time, too.  He gets everything I got and always has some ailment--bad bowels or a runny nose.

Worst of all, I guess, is we really used to kiss.  I'm not sure if kissing is as big as it used to be now that kids begin having sex in elementary school, but for us, kissing was a major thing.  Couples used to sit in corners and just kiss.  It seems weird now.  And I do remember epidemics of mononucleosis running through our junior high school campus.  I feel lucky that I never got a "cold sore."

I have never been a big hand washer, but in the last few years with the outbreak of so many contagious diseases, I have seen the logic in it.  Now. . . I don't know.  Nature hasn't planned itself for my benefit.  I am just a tool.

Nature.  I'm less and less certain what that even means.

Going, Going. . . .

"Everything you do can come undone, but try to undo something you've done sometime.  You just can't?"

Another extinct film, but new for me.  Polaroid Chocolate.  The final reserve is going, going. . . . Of course, I like it.  Everything I like seems to be disappearing, though, or is gone.  Clean air, clean water, unspoiled deserts and mountains and mangroves and the thermosphere.  A lot of what I don't like, though, seems to endure.  Greed, hate, violence, cynicism.

I like the girl in this picture.  You would, too.  I asked her if she had ever taken an I.Q. test.  I didn't have to ask to know, though, that it is embarrassingly high.  She has enlisted in the army and will be gone in less than a month.  It fairly baffles me, but what do I know?  Many things do.

I keep looking at this photograph and wondering what it will look like in twenty years.  No matter how hard I try, though. . . .  I'll just have to wait.

You Come Too

Whew!  I tried to write the third part to the new narrative this morning.  And that is what it sounded like--somebody trying to write the third installment of a narrative.  Oh, I was telling everything.  It was awful.  It is how we are taught to write somewhere, explaining things in detail until the writing sounds like a police report or the instruction booklet that will prevent you from ever assembling the aggregation of parts held by the cardboard box into a working grill. There is only one thing to do with that kind of writing.  It has been done.

I'll try again, though, thinking to bring you there rather than telling you what it was like.  I will not strive for clarity or verisimilitude.  I will try to simply let you remember being there.  That is the thing, isn't it?  For we've all been there.  That is why any narrative rings true.  We've all been heroes somewhere, sometime, on some sunny, blue sky day.  It is the trick to all things, like a good cafe where you love to sit.  It is mythical because the people who work there are so beautiful and smart and wonderful and clever, and they make you feel that way, too.  They are not more beautiful nor more clever than you, just as much.  That is the way they look at you.  That is the way it should seem.  To accentuate that grandeur of the lives that others have led through your own telling--that's what a good story or cafe should do.

But of course, you must be included in the dark side, for you have been there, too.  That, however, is for another time.  Today is Friday and the sun is up and the whole day lies before me like an open bank.  I think to make a withdrawal and spend some cash.

And as Frost says in "The Pasture," his opening poem to the marvelous North of Boston:

"You come too."

More

No time to sit and think today, no time to compose, so I must make this brief.  This photo is a prize to me, a peach.  It has the elements of what I think I'm trying to do with part of this series.  With a few alterations, don't you think it could make a good book cover?

I've been noticed by a couple of other sites and the number of visitors has gone up.  But they don't all stay, and it goes down.  And I get sad.  But then another, then another.  And the sum total of all that is the number of people who return to the site again and again has grown.  I am grateful to the people who have noticed and helped me.  I'm glad.  And I feel the pressure.

But I can't produce today.  Not more than this.  And so I offer up an image I savor.  

The Horrors

"The traditional practice of social documentary photography as a means of helping underprivileged, dispossessed or marginalised groups has become deeply problematic for a number of reasons. Chief among these is that photography’s status as a unique medium for offering direct insight into truthful reality has been destroyed – by the widespread use of digital manipulation on the one hand, and by the postmodern tendency to question and analyse the motives of the photographer (and dissect the possible multiple meanings of the work they produce) on the other."

"Post-Documentary, Post-Photography," Martha Rosler (2003)


Sorry, my internal mechanisms are on the fritz.  I have not been sleeping.  Last night, dead tired, I went to bed before ten.  Woke up like I'd had a night's sleep at one.  Rolled around until four and got up.  Drank a pot of coffee and surfed the net until six.  Went back to bed until 8:30.  Now I can't clear my head.  It's the Horrors.  The Terror.  I can't shake them.  They are haunting my waking and sleeping hours.  I must find a cure. 

Book Club

It had been coming.  I guessed I thought I knew.  I guessed I thought I knew it when she started going to book club.  It was the first thing.  Before that, we had done almost everything together.  We travelled together, we exercised together, we cooked together in the evenings over a glass of wine and talked about the day.  Then book club.  That was preceded by her reestablishing a relationship with her best friend from high school whom she had not bee friends with since I'd known her.  Her name was Molly.  Molly had gotten married to and had a child with a man from a good family who worked hard and made plenty of money. But he was not exciting.  You could see that in her eyes.  One night my wife and I went to dinner at the home of a couple we knew, and there they were.  Molly was drinking too much, he just looking embarrassed and miserable.  It was obvious that they were having trouble.  

After that evening, though, she began calling my wife almost every day.  In a few weeks, went to dinner at the unhappy couple's house.  After that,  Molly and my wife began the book club.  I knew it was bad, but what could I say?  No, you can't go to book club?  In retrospect, I think, that is when the trouble began.

Within a couple months, Molly had filed for a divorced.  I saw the husband out somewhere, and he was sick with misery.  He wasn't a big guy, but he had gotten smaller.  I wanted to tell him he had been released early and was better off, but they had a daughter.  That was what made it so bad.

Molly and the fucking book club.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

"Familiarity breeds contempt, they say."  I was responding.  With dread.  There is no saving anything, I thought.  Everything is different now.  It always comes to this.

"I'm just not happy."

"Well, there's one way to think about it," I said.  No use in arguing.  You can't argue someone into doing something once their mind is made up.  I was stinging, but I knew the numbness would come, and then the long depression.  For some reason, I noticed that the paint was chipped on the baseboard near the doorway.  How did that happen?

I was sitting on the couch, looking at her standing in the archway between rooms.   I didn't want this to happen, but I knew I couldn't stop it.  We said nothing.  I could hear the ticking of the second hand of the clock in the kitchen.  It was one of those cheap, battery run clocks with the big, round white face and black numerals.  It kept really good time.  I liked that clock.

We were both looking at the big toe on my right foot now.  I'd dropped a giant glass table top I was moving just before she left, just before the hurricane that didn't come.  It was round and thick, and very heavy.  I could just spread my arms enough to hold it, could just barely lift it.  It was slick from the rain, and I was wearing flip-flops.  Stupid.   I had to carry it across the property to the old garage, stopping several times to rest.  Then in the garage, I could not find a place to lean it, and while standing, looking, I felt it slipping from my hands. The full weight of it, multiplied by its roundness, the impact bearing completely upon those few millimeters of thick, curving glass, came down onto my big toe just before the joint.  There was no pain at first, just a dead numbness, and I dared to hope that perhaps it was O.K., that miraculously it would be bruised and not broken, but as soon as I tried to step, I knew everything that had supported me before was gone.  I limped outside into the rain and collapsed, sick, weak, the world spinning around me.  I knew, sitting there in the wet grass with the gray rain falling that I was in trouble.

It was just beginning.

The tenant who lived in the apartment above the garage opened her door.

"You O.K.?"

The look on her face let me know I was not O.K.

"Yea, I just dropped that big table top on my toe.  I think I need to go to the hospital."

"Let me get my keys," she said.

"No, I think I can drive myself."  I tried to stand up, but the ground surged then fell away.  I was on my back."

"O.K.  You'd better take me."

Half an hour before, I was driving my wife to the airport.  She was going to work an outdoor show in Wyoming.  It was early, a gray dawn.  We drove in silence.  The hissing of the tires on the wet road, the dull thump thump thump of the windshield wipers.  A hurricane was coming and she would just get out before they grounded all the airplanes.

It had been a week.  Now she was back.  Sort of.  Goddamn it, I thought.  Goddamn it.

The Shadow

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of men?  The Shadow knows."

O.K.  I've added "minds."

'In Jungian psychology, the shadow or "shadow aspect" is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes, the others being the anima and animus and the persona. "Everyone carries a shadow," Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."^[1] It may be (in part) one's link to more primitive animal instincts,^[2] which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.

According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to project: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object--if it has one--or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." ^[3]These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world.

Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity."^{[4]'  (Wikipedia)}

Writing (Through) The Body

"The effort to define a feminist art, a major emphasis in contemporary feminist theory, begins with Virginia Woolf's assertion, in A Room of One's Own, that the common sentence of male-dominant literary tradition is "unsuited to a woman's use" and that, in the future, the woman writer's "book has somehow to be adapted to the body."  The French feminist critic, Helene Cixous, makes a contrapuntal extension of Woolf in "The Laugh of the Medusa": "Women must write through their bodies. . . .  They must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics."

"The question is: what does it mean to "write through the body?"  The body one is born with shapes one's identity, and patriarchy perpetuates a false dichotomy between body and mind, equating 'man' with 'mind' and 'woman' with 'body.'"

("Bisexuality in Helene Cixous, Virginia Woolf, and H.D.: An Aspect of L'ecriture Feminine," Jane Augustine)


"What is wild goes its own way, neither domesticated nor controlled.  Thus the phrase "the female wild zone" blazes images of female freedom and self-determination.  First used in feminist literary critical discourse by Elaine Showalter. . . . Showalter defines the female wild zone 'as the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men' and as the source for creating genuinely female symbols and metaphors."

(The Witch's Garden" The Feminist Grotesque," Susan R. Bowers)

"How Can Men Express Sexual Interest in a Feminist Way?"

"It’s a question a lot of men have – they see themselves as feminist allies, they don’t want to be objectifying or creepy, but they still want to be able to express their sexual attraction to women whom they find appealing and ask them out on dates with a view to an eventual sexual relationship. And so they should – men and women enjoying sex together is a good thing! But I can understand why some of the things one learns as a feminist ally could make one reticent, because of the possibility of putting one’s foot in it and being perceived as one of the bad guys, or even worse: appearing to be one of those predatory faux-feminist men who’s only parroting glib sound-bites in order to get laid.

What I see as the major problem for many men who are relatively recent feminist allies is that of re-educating oneself away from the traditional “what do women want?” view (as if all women want exactly the same things and if some man perfects The Universal Formula it will work on any of us) towards a “how can I appeal to this woman right here and now?” view where you acknowledge that each woman has her own unique set of tastes and preferences and priorities, with which your own attributes may or may not mesh."

from "Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog"

Male Gaze

"The male gaze in advertising is actually a fairly well-studied topic, and it — rather than film — is often what comes to mind when the term is invoked. This is because, more than just being an object of a gaze, the woman in the advertisement becomes what’s being bought and sold: “The message though was always the same: buy the product, get the girl; or buy the product to get to be like the girl so you can get your man” in other words, “‘Buy’ the image, ‘get’ the woman” (Wykes, p. 41). In this way, the male gaze enables women to be a commodity that helps the products to get sold (the “sex sells” adage that comes up whenever we talk about modern marketing). Even advertising aimed at women is not exempt: it engages in the mirror effect described above, wherein women are encouraged to view themselves as the photographer views the model, therefore buying the product in order to become more like the model advertising it."


(from Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog)

Thinking

Write.  Delete.  Write.  Delete.

I'm better off just thinking today.  This picture can carry the entry.  It is enough.  It is plenty.

The Basest of All Things

("Prom Dress" Series)

Amsterdam.  Everybody goes.  I've never been.  Today I'll watch the Netherlands play in the World Cup, and if they win, I will watch them in the finals.  And I'm thinking that before the summer is up, I should go to Amsterdam.

I am at loose ends without any clear plans.  The weight of the summer bears heavy on me, the moist heat and frustration of living in the far south where heat and humidity cause anger and depression.  Read a Faulkner novel for a good idea.  When summer comes, somebody is going to be lynched or stabbed or raped or thrown down a well.  It is just not good times.  So Amsterdam sounds enticing.  From there. . . ?

Have you been?  Send me some ideas.  I'm plum (plumb?) out.

The photo is of a pretty girl, the same one from a few posts back.  She is strange looking here.  I did not manipulate the image other than what I normally do.  I mean, I did not try to make her look strange.  But the picture haunts me a little, she looking like the Voodoo Princess from some science fiction homecoming dance.  Images such as these populated my dreams last night.  I did not sleep.  I figure my unconscious is trying to work out all my insecurities right now, but then again, maybe it has no strategy for working them out.  We tend to think divinely about such things as if nature had a plan.

I got out of bed long before light, but now the sun is up and shining as it hasn't for days.  I think I'll dwell on a Faulkner quote for awhile:

"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid" (William Faulkner).

How Many Deadly Sins?

I look at photographs.  I look at all of them.  Every one that is available.  Do you know how many there are?  Trillions.  A day.  No one can keep up.  But I try.

There are a lot of people making good images.  There are the professionals who have help.  They have location people and art directors and make up and hair people and wardrobe assistants and someone doing lights.  After the shoot, there is a Photoshop wizard to sweeten the photos.  Everything is perfect.

Then there are the fine arts photographers.  They don't have so many assistants.  And they have different attitudes.  They spend a lot of time with an image.  They are horrid and beautiful.

Then there are those wannabes who shoot as much as they can between working and all the rest.  They have less time and fewer resources.  There can be a rich weirdness to their images.

And there are those who have no aspirations.  They just shoot.  Most of the time the processing and post-processing is lacking.  Or awful.  They are the snapshots of a generation and the purest form of documentary photography.

O.K.  These categories suck.  They won't hold up.  I am only thinking out loud here at my dining room table in the dark threat of daybreak.  But that is what I saw as I made my internet rounds this morning.  I just go mad for all of them, though.  I do.  All of them.

Yesterday, one of my images went into a pile of other pictures on the blog of a significant woman photographer.  I looked at those images today and went to the associated websites.  And because I was in the pile, it made me miserable.  Suddenly it was a competition.  I felt mean looking at those photographs by other photographers as if they were trying to steal something from me.  In the end, I looked at mine and saw it lacking.  Why did I subject myself to this humiliation, I wondered.  They were a group, it seemed, a club, a gang, and I was an outsider.  They all knew one another, I imagined, complimented one another and remembered the birthdays of children and spouses.  They celebrated each other's victories.  I could feel them laughing at my picture and disparaging anything I ever considered to be my so-called talent.

For some reason, I clicked on the link above my photo that was supposed to direct the viewer back to Cafe Selavy.  And it didn't work!  There were extra symbols in the web address.  Who had put them there?  I had hoped to expose thousands of new viewers to my work, hoped to intrigue some of them, hoped that they would come back.  That wouldn't happen.

I am not so good at the group hug.  I've learned to do it over the years, but my family was not a huggy lot.  We expressed joys and sorrows and were loyal and supportive, but effusive emotionalism was considered gaudy.

Maybe that is what shaped me most.  When I see the Hollywood smiles and the breathless voices, I go cold.  Groups scare me. Rather, I see them as packs, dangerous and potentially viscous.  They can turn any second, as soon as there is blood in the water.  Group behavior.  It is different.  There are endless studies.

I've never watched an entire episode of "The Simpsons" and have barely seen it at all.  In the one memorable scene I did watch, Bart's father tells him the Rule of the American Playground--Don't Say Anything Unless You're Sure Everyone Agrees.

I have a colleague who encourages admirers.  Needs them.  Feeds off them.  He is good at it.  Exceptionally.  It is a talent.  And it pisses me off.  I can't do it.

Last night, I turned down an invitation to go and see the fireworks.  The thought of all those people together had no appeal.  If I wanted to, I could see the fireworks in the sky above my house.  I didn't.  And so I sat alone doing the long work of scanning and processing pictures until I'd had it.  Then I poured a scotch, took my laptop to the couch, put on the headphones, and watched three episodes of "Entourage" sitting in the dark.  There is something terribly wrong with that.

I was happy.

On the photo thing, I know it wasn't intentional.  I know that all those photographers don't know one another.  I know they are not a club.  And I know that they are not disparaging my work as a group.  I'm just saying.

I'll keep making pictures.  Like these for awhile longer.  They are the culmination of looking at all those photographs--trillions of them--every single day.  I want to be the professional photographer, the fine arts photographer, the sometimes photographer, and the raw amateur all rolled up into to one big ball.  I want the images to be good and slick and horridly creative and much like those raw snapshots that people take that become so precious in the end.  They are all so good.  It just pisses me off.

The Pack

(Another photo from this "Baseball" series will appear here today, I am told)

The route of the 4th of July Road Race charts its way by my house.  I wait.  The first runners come by my window, shirtless men, all extremely lean, running fast.  Ten.  Fifteen.  Then the next pack, the first women runners.  I watch awhile as they come by, graded out by body fat.  When the people begin to look like me, I become bored.  I have run many 10K races, some half marathons, a marathon.  I always looked like the middle of the pack.  People like me bore me, I guess.  Now come the rest.  There are seemingly thousands of them.  A constant stream of moving humanity.  They talk, they laugh.  Good for them.  America on the Move.  And now come the running obese.  There is a woman running beside a walking man.  And now, the walkers.

It is a big event time of year.  World Cup.  Tour de France.  Festival of San Fermin and the Running of the Bulls.  I must break free of whatever inertia grips me.  It is not so much inertia as the other thing.  I don't want to join the walkers.  I'd rather be alone.

Still, they come.  Tens of thousands, I guess.  The flow is endless.  Where have they all come from?  They chatter and laugh now, glad simply to take part.

The last of them trickle by.  They are done.  The police remove the barricades and I am left alone.  It is a recurring pattern, this.  In a little while, I will get up from here and put on my shoes, and then I will go out for a run.  Independence Day, 2010.

Syrup and Molasses

Four days off and I am lazy like syrup and molasses.  I dream of days off and all that I will do, then nothing.  I watched both World Cup games yesterday and thought it fun.  At night, I watched three episodes of "Entourage."  I thought that fun, too.  I told myself that I was tired, overworked, and that I needed a day like that, a day off.  But today is looking much the same.  I want to document "the 4th," but I don't think I will.  I don't want to speak to people right now.  I'd rather be alone.  And so I am.  Utterly.  

There are celebrations all around me, but I do not feel like celebrating.  I think I want to do nothing more than lay upon my couch.  That should be the starting point for a contemplative essay that explores something seemingly universal, illustrating the laziness of nature or the slowness of cosmic happenings.  And those things are true.  A cat rarely does anything.  A bear.  They are masters, of course, much different than the small, edible things like guppies in the stream that runs by my house.  I would have to research all that, but I am being lazy like a bear.  And, indeed, in the cosmos, things do not happen over time but in a flash.  A comparative flash, anyway.  The cosmos is more sudden that we think.  

And if I were not so lazy and were to write it, the essay would return after its explorations and reveries to the couch where I would resolve to spend another day in preparation doing nothing that is something.  Truly, only guppies would be rushing around today.  

Little Things

On the veranda for sushi after the big storm.  It is a conceit, a remembrance, really, for the place has gone to hell with the recession.  Often now, the sushi is not so good and I send it back.  But still I come because once it was romantic with someone or alone.  The all black uniforms were new and crisp, the waiters handsome, the waitresses beautiful, all exotic to an extent, the food fantastic and fresh.  I come because the past now has as much pull on me as the future.

A drizzling rain remains and no one is about.  The storm has dispelled the terrible heat, but the air is still thick and heavy.

The waitress brings the sake.  She does not pour the first cup.  I wonder if she is insulting me or if she is merely ignorant.  I eat the edamame that is surely Monsanto's, Round Up Ready, so I know, too, that I am eating poison.  A little bit more dying.

Two boys walk by.  They are eighteen, twenty.  One says to the other, "The girl with the white hair was hot!"

"I know she was," says the other in enthusiastic agreement.

"I don't care if she was under eighteen."

I picture her immediately.  Of course she was.  I have much to say about this.  No one wants to hear it anymore.

The rain returns.  The slapping of the big water running off the awning.  The other, more constant sound of the falling rain.  The gray light fading.  Then suddenly, the rain falling harder.

I would watch a movie tonight.  "The Sorcerer" perhaps, or "The Year of Living Dangerously, or "Indochine."  Or maybe "The Lover" or that strange movie where the woman wants men to write on her naked body.

I would.  But there are no video stores open here any longer.

All at once, there are people in the rain.  It is time for the movies to begin at the theater next door.  People come running through the downpour, some with umbrellas, some just getting wet.  All the movies begin at once, within a five or ten minutes of one another.  Quickly, the crowd is gone.

And then dinner is done.  The sake was needed and the tuna kabache passable.  There has been luck.  The rain has let up now, and I will go to my car.  Sometimes little things work out.

Voices

When I saw what I had done here, I thought, "John Singer Sargent."  And then I thought, "Old Olan-Mills."  That's the way it goes with these projects for me.  One day I think I'm doing something cool and the next I think I'm a fool.  I've been feeling the fool for a few days.  I sent out some work to a big show in California and got back the letter. . . "so difficult to make the decision. . . so much good work. . . ."  But the people I work with like them, so there is that.  We've collaborated and had fun, too.  It's like being kids and making things up.  My friend C.C. is in the theater world.  Now there's a place to have your doubts.  In the end, what is there?  "Oh, I was once in a marvelous play. . . ."  On the other hand, there is no real evidence, either.  I'd ALWAYS remember myself as having been marvelous.  But with these photographs, there is hard evidence.  "Did you really think this was worth doing?" I hear future voices asking in a mocking tone.  "Shit, we had that done at the Sears Portrait Center," or," That looks like the photo I had taken for the high school yearbook."  Truly, don't think I don't fight those voices every day.

I thought that it was all over, though, my working in this way with the Polaroid film.  It is all gone, sold out everywhere.  So I took a chance and sent an email to the Impossible Project and told them of my plight, that I was in the middle of three big series and could not do this with any other film.  I sent them example images to convince them.  And they helped me out right away.  Great people, really, just wonderful.  So the project goes on.  And I get to imagine that it was the images that did it.  I want to let myself imagine them reading the text without interest, then opening the jpegs and saying, "Oh, my, we must help this fellow out.  Look at these!"

Or, perhaps, they thought I was the portrait photographer at K-Mart.