a picture of my brain

i'm feeling a bit like this right now: lots of circuits, somewhat organized, but impossible to describe simply. it's easier to take a picture of it.

my favorite picture from new york

i put lots of pictures of new york up at my photo site. sleety snow streets, natural history musuem, people, and my favorite, banality.

doing doing doing eek

okay, little time to write, been busy. went to nyc last weekend, saw friends, went to nico muhly's concert at carnegie hall. great. met some new friends, too. i have pictures, but haven't uploaded. on the drive home, by myself, i read out loud a long story, a novella really, that i made up as i drove, speaking it in a strange, low, slow voice. i really got into it--the story that is--and i really didn't want to stop driving when i got home. the things i uncovered--as good as therapy! designing lots: my apartment, a house for a couple, a faerie camp, a recycling of a building into a theater, offices and apartment, and a couple websites. doing photos with jason. doing a television commercial for revolution, a store here in white river. starting graphics production for white river indie films, our local film fest. i am doing, doing, doing. and in the midst of my doing i was stopped, full stop, unexpectedly, by the image of someone i once knew intimately posing suggestively in a brochure. startling the power of an image, startling the power i confer upon his image, his memory.

polka dot howl

last weekend my friend jason and i did a long photo shoot exploring among other things handstands in the presence of chairs and howling in an unbuttoned polka dot shirt. jason is no stranger to being photographed and is recently famous in some circles as a cover boy for butt magazine. butt is a breath of fresh air in the thin atmosphere of gay magazines (at least my experience of them) and i'm reading nightly a compilation of its first five years which i'm loving. it's brash, broad, unapologetic, printed on pink paper, and carries interviews with gay luminaries as well as garbage boys, all pluses in my mind.

i'm no stranger to being photographed either but i haven't yet achieved the heights jason has, although in new orleans i'm quite sure i am on at least a few refrigerators in various mardi gras getups (who really knows?). but, i've never been photographed at length, with hundreds of shots of slightly different expressions, allowing time for ideas, concepts, thoughts, feelings to develop and be captured. the challenge for me was to drop the idea i needed to look good, sexy, cute, whatever and to just let loose whatever surfaced, much like meditation. watching the faces of isaac and jaden, brenda, eve's and gabriel's new baby boys, i see a stream of emotions rising, falling, rising and falling, seamlessy and without particular order or consistency, and i think, why not be just like that in front of the camera? turn off the filters, take down the guard, unpeel before the lens, just let your own humanity flow. this seems to make interesting pictures. in some ways, it's like therapy, because there is the observed the observer. just the presence of someone else, in this case with a lens, provokes confession when the setting is safe, so it's possible to make deep psychic inroads. i know i hit some powerful stuff because i'm still tingling from the experience.

migration

i've migrated to gmail, google's email service. it's interesting to me how the computer world started with large centralized machines, moved to desktop machines, and is now, in many ways, is heading back to the centralized model. both have their pluses and minuses. neither is perfect. with respect to email, i like the centralized model. it's useful to be able to check email from any machine, or even cell phone, rather than have it bound up on a single machine. i chose gmail because it imports email from all my other email accounts, sorts it nicely into conversations and then allows me to download it to my home machine for backup, just in case. it's also very fast on slow machines and is almost advertisement free and doesn't tag my emails with advertizing footers.

along similar lines, perhaps, the remark made by einstein, "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler," or words to that effect, has been resonating with me. my life is pretty complicated and i find myself, on occasion, trying to simplify it beyond its simplest, and as a result stuff gets lost, forgotten, ignored, unattended. it's not good. i'm trying to embrace all the complexity of my life and myself without trying to crunch it into this or that paradigm. i guess i'm a sucky fundamentalist.

zebra man

here i am mardi gras day, early in the morning. it's remarkably easy to stand on one leg in platform pumps. there are more pictures posted of the krewe of saint anne here. the 2007 pix are not yet in the menu, but will be shortly.

recouperating

a cold that had been simmering for days became terribly wicked right after mardi gras and put me through spells of chills, fever, coughing, sneezing, wheezing, snorting, snotting, and sleeping. the headache was perpetual and intense. various remedies helped but the cure was simply time. i found that driving home on 1000s of milligrams of vitamin c was a pleasant experience. i stayed very alert despite my fatigue.

so, life is back to normal. what that means is that i'm attending to the three weeks of stuff that i didn't do while i was in new orleans at the same time i'm pressing the wave of future things to do further into the future. my most prominent skill seems to be heaping my plate full and disregarding all dietary recommendations to cut back and chew slowly. i can't seem to resist a new project. the old ones i either try to swallow whole or spit out. perhaps i should have been a snake.