Angkor Angkor

Siem Reap, Cambodia

We cruise along in the wet heat, doubled over in laughter. No traffic lights, the vehicles govern themselves and we make do. From slideshows to gallery openings to peer reviews to spicy bowls of noodle soup, to long nights of pool and beer, we weave through the dusty streets, navigating potholes and trying not to marvel too much at the scenes floating by and causing an accident. I bring Miss Adrienne Grunwald with me and she falls in love and tries to come up with ways to stay.

I see and hold my far-flung friends and we share stories. The weird, sad, freaky, side-splittingly hilarious, private ones. Not the ones in pictures. This is so precious to me. My favourite time of the year.

Second homes

I was recently asked to submit photographs to Das Magazin on “my” New York. The raucous cacophony that I pass through like a tiny tornado whenever my travel schedule will allow me. The enormity that I navigate filled with its beauty, crazy, concrete angles and deep rumbling underbelly. I feel lucky to call it a home… albeit a second one…

Singularity

A singularity. Our personal universes, wholly consuming, vast beyond perception, revolutions performed around a single axis – I.

I am amazed at the haze, opaque nothingness that separates my world from yours. Thick like a forest fire. We stand parallel but unable to see what the other sees. Is that why photography never gets old? Is that why we write? A transference of thought and vision… A continuous and futile journey towards the mind and experiences of our parallel and eternally separate companions.

What if we stopped? Would I forget that there was another way to see the world? Would I feel like my own perspectives were less real? Temporal, fleeting as the mortal coil. Traversing our life spans, each wrapped in our own cloaks of smoky trials and tribulations, unable to cross over, reach out and touch the other.

Yosemite, CA

July | 2011

Flight distance

you came too close and broached
the line I drew in the sand
came into flight distance
forced me back

Safe fires

1. Can art only ever really be experienced in its most transcendent form alone, in solitude, without the interference of another person’s intrusive thoughts?

2. Is love possibly the highest form of art, unspeakable, undefinable, eternally analysed, able to move vast emotional and mental landscapes, intrinsically experiential?

3. Does that mean that when you experience love in its highest form, your communion is not shared, but experienced alone simultaneously? Each within their own epidermic cave, finger painting their obsession and history on the scarred, hollowed out walls, lighting safe fires against the night?

Whispered conversation

I  like the whispered conversation that photographs have with each other.

I like to cup my ear and listen in.

The flesh

Of flora

Orchid

Rose

2am halfway to Manhattan

Across the bridge, Talia way ahead. The wind cuts through. I’m gulping down the late night chill, biking home from social madness, drinking drinking, a flurry of photographers with ADD. It was warm where we had come from, the small apartment in Red Hook, as it should be, crammed as it was with bodies looking for some company in the late fall. Stanley Greene came in his black beret. I wanted to dance, but spoke of psychological births and early hospital experiences instead. We left before the bodies began groping in earnest. It was a long way to get home on two wheels.

New York | USA

Alternating currents

I like my poets gentle and violent, in alternating currents. Passionate throughout, nearly always lonely. Kind of like my men. I like the way the words slam home, slice deep, hold my chin so I can’t look away from their word wounds. I like the way they whisper so close and slide the tips of their dark craft monologues along the most tender parts. Bone raw and sophisticated, doubtlessly authentic.

I like them the same, poets and men. All loved up with no where to go but my place, my eyes like saucers, hands like cups, all the better to drink them with.

Come into my room, sit by me while I cocoon. Gentleness and violence.

This city

I wandered this city without you. Many times. But I know the roads you crossed here. I know the train you rode, making your slow way home every time you had to come into midtown to do something you didn’t really want to do. The minutiae. I rode them too. Your rough hewn jaw set resolutely against the hot subterranean air. Shirt already stale. It’s laundry day soon. I saw the same stranger you saw. You know the one. Ragged shoes, down on their luck. I always make eye contact, change or no change. Reminding myself of I don’t know what. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up like that. Safety net shot to shit. No one to pick me up when I fall. This city has a way of keeping that precipice close.