What it means

To be free.

I remember being young. Nosed pressed up against the glass. Breathing mist. Heart beating in earnest as I imagined the myriad of lives and adventures to be had beyond the twisted sycamore trees, past the monopoly houses of the burbs, track-suited moms with their porn star nails (it was the 90’s). I would feel my nose itch as the tears pushed through. “Please get me out of here”, I prayed. The tiles were cold beneath my thighs as I sat cross-legged on the floor, pushed as close against the outside as I could, eyes half-mast and dreaming. Time spent at my bedroom window.

My dreams were extrapolated fragments taken from Hollywood films, novels. Lives made fiction by their authors, ensnaring me nonetheless in their ideas of a world filled with long roads made for exploring and young men with a fire beneath their feet and questions in their hearts.

All road trips have a beginning and this is mine.

California, USA | July, 2011

Submerge

I know these people. I know their lives. Photojournalists, photographers, visual story-tellers, however you want to put it, they see life, often the darker side, and bring it to the rest of those who do not travel and do not see.

The consequence is a solitude and a dark shadow that flits within the dim retina of their eyes. The solemn Onlooker. Submerged beneath the surface of raucous laughter, devil-may-care attitudes and sunlit smiles are memories that can’t be let go of. Vast journeys that sear the skin and the appraisal of a thousand strangers, locked in their own battles and greeting the Onlooker as they win trust and weave intricately beneath the surface… a poem, a story, an idea… with images.

PM

My wanderings in the PM.

(A lonely place to find yourself)

Somewhere along the Dan Shui River, Taiwan.

AM

My parents recently bought a holiday apartment in Taiwan somewhere along the Dan Shui river.

I’ve called it “A lonely place to find yourself”.

My wanderings in the AM.

 

Modern Romance

Baby I’m afraid, of a lot of things but
I ain’t scared of lovin’ you
Baby I know you’re afraid of a lot of things but
Don’t be scared of love, ’cause

People will say all kinds of things
that don’t mean a damn to me, ’cause
All I see, is what’s in front of me, that’s you

Well I’ve been dragged all over the place
I’ve taken hits time just don’t erase
And baby I can see that you’ve been fucked with too
That don’t mean your lovin days are through, ’cause

People will say, all kinds of things
that don’t mean a damn to me, ’cause
all I see, is what’s in front of me, that’s you
Well I maybe just a fool, but I know you’re just as cool
And cool kids, they belong together.

~ lyric excerpt from “Modern Romance” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Histories

Military histories, once vicious, now sanguine. Once bloody, now clean. Monuments raised in memorial, weapons mounted as artefacts. We like to think that we remember to not repeat the mistakes of our forebears. We’d like to be smarter than that.

Lakeside

Half submerged in dark green water, the bloated whiteness of a fish belly-up lies prone against a swath of brown canvas. Nearby, a lakeside restaurant filled with people chat and eat, overlooking the calm waters, overlooking the decay that delivers their meals.

I read that Agent Orange still seeps into the wet earth of Vietnam.

Some memories fade fast and become distant stories long before their time.

Vietnam | November 2010

Slow trek

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

Albert Camus

The Architect’s medium

The architectural artist’s fundamental medium is not buildings, nor its forms and masses, but nor is it space, nor light, nor materials, nor any other of the thematic preoccupations of contemporary modernism. As simply as we can say that the plastic artist’s medium is imagery, and the writer’s medium is language, we can simply say that the architectural artist’s medium is activity. “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of human interaction and movement,” to paraphrase Le Corbusier.

– Quoted from The Diagram of Everything

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

 

 

 

You think you’re safe here

If I were content, I would not move. If I were reconciled, I would not have come back.

Instead, I find the lies offensive, baiting. I cannot believe them, the ones you make to yourself and to the people around you. I cannot shield myself with the same veil that you drag across your eyes as you shuttle your toddlers back and forth, making cheery small talk with people you would never let into your home.

How do you ignore the rotten core? The fakery, the leers, the forgetting pills and powders, the rape, the murder? How did you become a part of it?

All hidden away behind the waterfront property, the candy coloured town. What a great place to raise your kids – the collective moan.

I came back to find the place that formed me. I came back to touch the artifice again, the warm, crushing boredom, mindless wandering and suppressed violence in a place that looks right but feels so wrong. This place brought me to my knees and kept smiling as she did it, twisting, asphyxiating. My demons live here, camouflaged within the pastel landscapes. And when I return, I am the mad one. I am the one who points at nothing, shies away from imaginary things and speaks of a world that apparently died in our younger years. The white-veneered, red-gummed mouths tell me that I over-react, I should let go, I speak of a wound-like corruption where there is none.

I smile a mad smile and think I know better.

(You think you’re safe here)