"DEAR LEADER"

The shortest blog entry ever. Nevertheless, I just can’t help it, here is a little bit more and a little it more, and if you come back soon, I show you my very own special bits, a la Terry.  So, see you soon….! But If you just can’t wait for, go ahead, just Google it. You don’t really need a link, do you?

While eating pork larb today with Adrienne, I was once again reminded that some day I won’t be around to feast on minced piggy. Someday, I’ll be long dead and burned to a crisp, released from the clean and warm embrace of a crematory’s furnace; my ashes covering my children’s faces (knowing them, they won’t remember to piss downwind and I love them for fucking it up already).

Poor little piggy is, and will forever haunt my dreams, there to remind me, that this current space-time continnuum will someday, blow my head clean off, and into a thousand little blue-grey, powdery bits.

I find myself more than unusually attracted to the morbid when I hear of a suicide or a particularly depressing and accidental end:

One of my girlfriend’s co-worker’s hubby committed himself to the deep, on the 25th, and there it is again, staring me in the face. I did not know him, or her for that matter, but my feeble mind, has an exceedingly difficult time, “comprehending” and knowing this day, the 25th, you can wake up and know that: you will end it.

I mean no disrespect or judeo-christian contempt but to take ones life goes against life’s tenuous hold on life itself, as to be as incomprehensible as death itself.

Happy, Happy, Halloween…. little minced Piggy.

Today, one of my comments is the subject of the “Photo Editor’s” post so I’d better write something quick. I wrote that comment in response to my experiences with my most recent work, work I started developing 6 years ago or so.

I did so in response to what I saw was the writing on the wall; photo-journalism was about to take a serious hit and if I wanted to continue making a living I might very well do something instead of bitch.

The resulting work was and is 100% me. It is not derivative of anybody’s, it is self expressive and personal. Something we all hope to achieve. For a brief moment I imagined it would be successful and bring me the cashes and riches I needed to continue expanding and developing it.

Nevertheless, the best part about change is that it forces you to innovate, adapt or switch and bait. I consider my work unique and ground breaking (go ahead disagree, I don’t give a shit), but apart from a few dedicated friends, editors, art directors and a smattering of the cognicenti, this new work has been a dismal commercial failure and I know it and I know why.

I am OK with it and it’s almost a blessing. I will continue working it on my own and take it as far as it will let me. In the meantime, I will work on a new, “less personal and eccentric” body of work and will use the cash I make from it to fund this decidedly “un-visually acceptable” photography.

The best thing about reverses is that it often forces you to discover who you really are as a photographer and as an artist (if I may ever so presume to call myself such a thing).

In the words of a Time editor whom upon seeing this new work exclaimed: ” You found your voice, now you’ve got to learn to sing “. I can only learn to sing by having the capital to devote to it. One way to do so is to get back to work and shoot something a little more” visually contemporary”.

I was able to find good text to voice software, and with a bit of work, I managed to find the very tone and voice, this blog is meant to emulate. I shall soon, be slowly transcribing, each and every entreaty. So, if you like reading these entries, please listen to them, it will add to the overall feeling. They are now, and will be, far more representative of my personality.

It is my great pleasure to inform you that I will be transcribing all past and future blog entries into embedded audio files, available right here, on this blog. This thecnology will allow you to listen to my entreaties instead of having to actually read each and everyone of them. A voice generating robot will be performing this thankless and dreadful task, so that I, may not have to.
A word of caution, you might have to listen very carefully. As of yet, I am unaware of any free, Mac compatible software out there, which might do a better job than Fred….Also known as the “Stephen Hawking”.

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These are my great grand parents on my mother’s side. I shot this framed image in my ninety four year old grand mother’s bedroom last month, in Milaria, Corsica. I dropped by the village for a couple days to visit her and found this propped up, on her bedroom set. It was nice to see that even at 94, she gazes at their image every night, before she goes to bed and may be dreams of rejoining their warm embrace.
I do not see any reason why I should not have 4×6 of my mother when I am her age but it was surprising to see this portrait come out of the woodwork, and remind me, that my grandmother’s memories go back so far in time, that they seem down right alien, ancient and distant to this grand child’s eyes. Time will render us all the same, and our descendants, our grand kids even, will look up some day and see us, not as we were but dead.

I would not mind owning portraits of my ancestors circa 1334, but I fear that that time has come and gone without momentoes, pics or snap shots. How rude, how thoughtless, how very, how to say, Dark Ages….
Nevermind them, for if all goes well, my descendants will be able to gaze up, five centuries from today, type in a password, hack my DNA and bring my carcass back to life, and give me another shot, at living on this planet; or the next.

Since I would not want to be a burden, I’d be willing to provide enough cash to actually live off the interest, even five hundred years from now. In the meantime, I might get there by investing my last dimes to cryogenetically store my seeds in geostationary orbit , which would, with any luck be launched back to earth at a prescribed time and date and reconstituted, for a small fee, by future scientists. If five centuries seem like a long time, a downright and boringly longtime, don’t worry, it shouldn’t feel any longer than a good night’s sleep. By the time you rejoin your descendants, even at 5% compounded, you might even be rich. Like Social Security, but without the bitterness of government pay day…..

Come to think of it, this might make the makings of a trashy sci-fi; where only those with enough cash would be reconstituted to live and work another ten decades. The rest of us who could not or would not provide well enough for our futures would simply wither away and die alone, in orbiting planetary hospices, shot into intergalactic space, where may be some other race would find us and bring us back to life to work us to death as sex slaves, or digging amonium trenches, four million light years away.

Anyway, the possibilities seem compoundingly and endlessly hopeless…… Or better yet buy some government CDs, have yourself cryogenetically preserved along side Mickey, and there you have it, when your future mother drops you from her vageen, you’ll be sitting pretty, richly compounded, on pile of money*. Grown up, eat candy, blow half your savings on Crystal, crack and hot babes, blow your brains out, repeat as needed. If all keep on going well, invest in the future once and you won’t have to ever do it again. What’s life without death, and death without compound interest.

*$1000.00 at 5% For 500 years= $ 39,323,261,827,218.67

I was out of town from August 16 until September 2nd. I shall be resuming blogging operations as soon as I get settled into my unfortunate but necessary daily routine. Thank you for understanding.

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I know, epiphanies are not supposed to be casually ignored and that you’re supposed to do something with them like transform your life or cash them in, but who has time to wander beyond these sudden intuitive realizations, when you can just as well dismiss them.

For the most part, if I am lucky enough to have one, I tend to forget about them and move on, hoping that they’ll find their rightful place, somewheres in the cerebral layer cake, to seamlessly labor on my behalf and the community of ideas I call “Me”. It is hoped that whatever fabulous idea I might have had managed to snap right in, so that someday, I’ll be able to have the motherload of all divine realization and take up my rightful place in the food chain; move up the water column, so to speak, to feast on sardines, not that krill and algae, I’ve been having.

Anyway, when I was in college, bathed in clouds of Maryjane, cassette tapes, cream of wheat and salami, I had an epiphany about music, which over the years I have dutifully put to the test of time and space.

Here it is, in a nutshell. If it seems mundane or drug induced, please don’t blame be, just the THC. As I was saying it suddenly occurred to me that besides lengthy delays, which must invariably precede any self respecting epiphany, and which I am forced to reproduce here; to do the eye opening process justice, you cannot truly understand music until you have traveled to its country of origin and gazed upon its landscapes and geography.

I cannot recall the number of times I traveled somewhere while listening to the local music when all of a sudden it all made total sense to me by simply opening my eyes wide and eyeballing the topography.

One such example of many a musical epiphany was traditional Chinese music. After traveling to China for the first time in the mid eighties it suddenly became beautiful, melodius and sweet. My brain somehow combined what it was witnessing with the music and suddenly comprehended a music, which had heretofore, been inaccessible to my ears. A picture is worth a thousand notes.

Just finished reading “Ivan’s War, Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945″, by Catherine Merridale (Picador). For those of you who might still be trying to understand the scale, enormity and shear incomprehensibility of those six, bewilderingly catastrophic years, you might want to pick it up at your local read store. Ivan’s war starts out slowly but once Catherine Merridale gets her grove on she manages to portray, with great skill, the Red Army and the men who filled its wretched ranks.

Believe me, I tend to be more easily mystified than heartbroken, but she managed the unthinkable and flipped this state of mind on its head. I soon found myself mourning and grief-stricken for the victims of this supremely Soviet state, and its uniquely echanting combination of totalitarianism, Stalinist ideological rigidity, and the absolute, unrelenting carnage brought onto them by Hitler’s equally mind numbingly hateful brand of collective insanity. There may never be any words strong enough to express the misery of the “frontovikis” during and after the Soviets’ “Great Patriotic War”.

Ever-since the fall of the Soviet Union, the reconstituted Russian state has opened its archives to greater scrutiny and researchers like Ms. Merridale have been allowed to dig in and conduct interviews with former Red Army soldiers and officers. Russian and foreign historians will no doubt have a field day with its archived decades but what is certainly not going to change is that there is, and will always be, far more ways to die at the hand of man, than there are ways for men to peacably live by it.

Given that we are such damm bloody apes, let’s stop pretending and go for a rename. How about Homo hemohabilis? Sounds nice, and beside, chicks will dig it…..and to further my case; it is widely believed that reds and oranges are meant to wet our appetite and stimulate our rage. I presume that way back when, the sight of a hominid’s blood soaked hands, still whispers sweet nothings to this primate and comforts the murderer to live and mate another day. I’m down with that….. ‘Hominid’s delight’…!

Which reminds me: Odile Crick, illustrator and lifetime mate of Francis Crick, of “Watson, Crick and DNA”, LLC… died July 5th, in La Jolla, California. She sketched life’s double helix for her husband who could not draw for shit (Francis H. C. Crick died in 2004.). I guess that’s how you might be remembered if your husband and his lab mate helped discover life as we know it. I guess that’s better than, “she once cooked Francis some steak and peas….!”.
Her DNA has dearly departed but is survived in a brother, Philippe, and two daughters, Gabrielle and Jacqueline; two grandchildren; and four step-grandkids(her DNA, not exactly, but she loved them just the same anyway). BTW, Watson’s sister, Betty, was recruited to type Watson and Crick’s research paper on DNA, keeping it as they say, all in the family. Can’t wait to read that obituary….

There were a lot of flags in that classroom, even when you turned off the lights. Couldn’t get away from July’s 4th. As for myself I take the 5th.