I was invited to a party last night for one of my 20-something model’s boyfriend’s birthday. I was hesitant not sure I should go, because I knew I would be completely out of place. But this is a kid that I have really connected with in the studio and we have always gotten extremely good images. And, he had emailed me a couple of times throughout the week inviting and reminding me so I felt like I had to at least make an appearance. When I arrived on the street there was no place to park, it was dark and I was not quite sure where I was actually going? So I parked and walked with a case of beer in search of the place. It was easy to find because of the music and I could hear the chatter of people. It was a small apartment with not much furniture jammed full of people, young 20-somethings everywhere. I ran into Shey, the birthday boy as soon as I came through the door and delight filled his face as he gave me a warm hug and was glad that I had actually shown up. He quickly found George, his boyfriend who also came to welcome me. I opened a beer and guzzled it down and began to take in my surroundings. It was a lower level, possibly two-bedroom apartment, with festive decorative stuff strewn all about the room for the occasion. I quickly began to recognize many faces I had only seen on line or had occasionally chatted with on Facebook. Everyone seemed to be filled with such a drunken happiness. Suddenly, I felt like I was transported back in time perhaps thirty years earlier and as I began to mingle and fit into this 20-something crowd, I really began to realize how much out of touch I had grown from this generation. What became even more apparent was how much my photography does not fit into or with the group of subjects, that I am trying to really explore. Everyone has always entered my world and mostly seen what I am doing from my perspective. I began to look at images on cell phones of parties and postures and gestures that were fun, alive and full of energy. Even George, who I adore photographing, seem to have such life working the crowd. Why don’t I capture that? That is the vitality of youth! It suddenly smacked me right in the face that I truly am not capturing the essence of these kids at all. I still love to beauty of what I do, and I have a greater appreciation for them wanting to enter my world but I realize what a hermit I have become in my own mind. How my vision may not extend beyond myself at all, and how much I love in my memory. Hence this blog project, I guess. To enter a Spartan world of the 20-something kids, and see their lives filled with such joy, to live in such humble settings, I see how much I have grown over the past so many years and what has brought me to this place. My studio is a luxury place by comparison. How did I suddenly get here? Is it just the years of accumulation of stuff, of refining, defining, and the orchestration of life? I have always seen myself as a minimalist. I had very little when I lived and worked on the road. I prided myself on being able to live out of one suitcase. Didn’t have a car for a long time, didn’t need one. The process of growth has been enormous as the simplicity has disappeared. I am so lucky to be exactly where I am even as I try to awkwardly try to explain the means of my existence to strangers in a crowd where most of them are struggling in the end to just get by. As I crawled into my big comfortable bed with soft linens and down pillows I felt satisfied that I had ventured into that unknown, that my life has been well earned.
Category Archives: Photography
DENIAL!!!!!!!
A wet, cold, rainy morning, I got up and began making white bean, sausage, mushroom, and leek soup. I felt like I needed some comfort food this morning and am feeling very isolated and alone. Worked turned into I-phone nightmare hell yesterday as we had to follow and provide documentation of every single delivery and had to make multiple attempts until they were all delivered beyond all reasonable effort. I then managed to come home and completely disable the log in and all access to the new site. I was up half the night with Julian trying to regain entry. This morning I am cold, tired and very despondent so making soup seems to be giving me some comfort. I love to cook and am very creative when it comes to the kitchen. I learned to cook from my grandmother out on the ranch. She was very good cook and actually spent several years cooking for the schools. My grandmother Cyr was a genius when it came to blending foods. It always seemed so simple. She and I would always cook up a storm. My mother on the other hand could not cook at all, but then again she didn’t like food and didn’t like to eat. My mother once made chocolate chip cookies so hard that we couldn’t even eat them. My dad and I went down to the river and began skipping them across the water and they skipped too. She caught us doing it and became so furious she never made cookies again.
When I became a freshman in high school in the late 70’s, about the time Star Wars the original movie was released, I wanted to take home economics. I was already a great cook and doing most of the family meals. But, back then it was a very unmanly thing to do. I was the only boy in the entire history of the school to want to take such a class. But I was adamant and persistent and probably could have taught the class as we learned to make cream puffs and Jell-O salads with fruit of course. Hello, why wasn’t my gay bell going off then? Looking back I was totally gay. Why was it that everyone saw it but me? DENIAL!!!!!!!!! Had no idea, I , what it really meant or that a man could actually have sex or even a relationship with another man. Damn, how naive could I be? I became the manager for the school wrestling team and I remember lust and desire growing out of the locker room, but still nothing. A world of perfection designed for a kid like me and yet no ding, ding, ding. DENIAL!!!!!!!! Just a lot of spoiling the sheets and alone time in the last stall in the bathroom when no one was around. I just needed a role model and not just sneaking off to find my mother’s Playgirl Magazines hidden under her side of the mattress, and I don’t even know how I knew that???? It’s funny and how curious times in our lives become, for something that is so organic and obvious that we just can’t see within ourselves. And people still don’t think we are born this way. Hello, as a kid it doesn’t seem to be an option by choice, but a struggle for resistance. I drove my brother, a year younger out into the country, to get laid for this first time, and waited in the car all the two minutes it took to happen, but for me there was nothing? Damn, DENIAL!!!!!! I cured the fact that I just could not be normal. More time spent alone in the shed behind the house thinking about what I desired and wanted, fearful, lusting, loathing, longing, desperately trying to discover the missing link. At least this has cheered me up this morning and I can laugh thinking back and I get up to stir my big pot of soup.
The Techno Gods Must be Crazy
I am caught in the frustration of technology, banging my head against the wall, unable to move forward or backwards. I keep wondering what I have I gotten myself into and why can’t I seem to gain control of it. Why is it, our worlds are beginning to exist and rely so heavily on technology? When a few minor changes can affect your whole mode of operation and shut you down for days. For most of us it’s beyond our comprehension as to how it functions and we don’t even know how to approach the solution. Granted, it gets better each day, but still the simplest things can become major roadblocks that seem insurmountable and can consume hours and days of your time. I have a great respect and diligently try to understand the world that surrounds me and within which I exist. I have been learning this Joomla program for 6 weeks now working on this new site. It’s brilliant the way it functions and the concept of how you interact with it. It very simple, this is why I have chose it. It looks incredible. We have been building the galleries and are beginning to fine tune it. I now know this program inside and out, and can make the navigation through it quickly but for some reason, things have been reset beyond our perimeters and have suddenly brought the whole project to a halt and have made it non functional today. It doesn’t seem to be the site at all or within the site, but the server or person who controls the server who is making adjustments or changes that impact its functionality. Do I try to find a new server and begin again? We have about 800 pages built, is it possible to transfer all the work we have done? Do we have to just chalk up what we have done to a bad learning experience and move on? Or do we just try to muddle our way through the process and see if it can somehow become resolved? Yes, I know it’s time to take a deep breath, put the gun down and step away from it. It’s all just a matter of wading our way through the process. Looking back, I began this year the very first week of this project with a hard drive meltdown on my laptop and I cursed the techno gods, then there was the midyear crisis of being deactivated from Facebook for a week. I did overcome it. As I know I will overcome this too, but damn it’s sure frustrating being helpless in a vast world that rules our existence.
Falling into a morning slump
Woke up this morning not wanting to get out of bed at all, feeling a bit discouraged and beaten down. I am afraid this Naked Man Project is getting the best of me. Taking the break from the weekend only seems to have made it worse, because I have lost the momentum and it’s one of those projects that have so many facets that weave in and out of itself, that it is becoming hard to tell exactly where you are at times. I have been writing so much for the site and then to write for the blog, my fingers often feel like jelly as I make so many mistakes. I am working afternoons at UPS this week, which totally prevents me from getting much done. There was guy sick last night so it was like banging my head against the wall and I had to work late. I get home and Bob, one of my kitties is having such an asthma attack I think he’s going to fall over. I know the inevitable is coming for him, that his lungs will eventually collapse and we will have to put him to sleep, so it just ripped my heart out to see him going through this. Writing a daily blog also takes its toll, and sometimes a lot more energy than you would imagine, especially for us non-writer types.
I finally got out of bed, ground some fresh coffee, and texted Glenn, still working in North Dakota with barely any cell services saying. “I am missing the best part of myself, you.” The phone instantly rang and it was Glenn, which is highly unusual. He asked if I was all right. So apparently I don’t send him enough nice texts, that when I do he recognizes something is wrong. I said yes, just having a bad morning and that I was missing him terribly.
I debated if I should go out into the garden today and just lose myself outside, but decided to jump on the computer to get caught up in some of the back log of work I have been accumulating since putting so much of my focus into this website. It has been the season of Senior Portraits, for some reason I have had more than usual and they have all hit the last couple of weeks. So I began to work through them. They were all so interesting and fun. I forget how much fun I actually have just creating images. Senior Portraits in particular are so much fun. The kids are at such an interesting age where you really get to tap into their dreams and get to become a part of their often-quirky worlds for a short while. What a great time of our lives, lack of commitments, hanging with our friends, involved with things we are truly passionate about, aspiring to greatness. Suddenly it dawns on me, perhaps I really haven’t outgrown that stage, and perhaps that’s why I have such a good time working with them. I always interview everyone I shoot before hand to try to see life from their perspective and how they see themselves and relate to their worlds and then tailor the shoot specifically to them. There is no formula for me, I am an original through and through. Delighting in these images actually pulled me out my slump for the day as I see what a wonderful process my work and life have become. Prospects of working on the website suddenly seems much brighter.
Did I miss the streetcar named Desire?
Last night I crossed over into a strange delirium of geekdom as I had visions of naked men dancing in my head and my sexual desire crossed into a strange cyber lala land that wasn’t of men with huge penises and small tight butts, but where people were ordinary and a beauty was recognized from within. I have a kid I work with at UPS, who is a total cyber geek, whom I completely adore and I now feel like I have crossed into his dimension of existence, and I have a greater understanding of where he’s coming from. Some friends had invited me out to a drag show and when I got off work last night, I sat at my computer and was suddenly sucked in. But, it all began to click last night, instead of fighting technology I was suddenly a part of it and things where suddenly happening. Oddly enough I didn’t work too late, but had added some major elements to the project that seemed effortless. I looked up and it was only 11:00 pm and I was shocked. Normally it has been 2 or 3 in the morning. I realized the web site had past the tipping point and had crossed to the other side as I shut it down and walked away.
I took the kitties for a nice long walk under the beautiful starry sky, feeling the warmth from the day still in the air as my mind and body become overwhelmed with a great sense of satisfaction. I went to bed early and as I lay there, I laughed at how much I have changed this year and how far I have come and how I have crossed over into a side of myself that I have not felt in a decade. Sex used to make me feel this great. It seems when I hit my forties, the sexual side of myself had begun to shut down. I know guys my age who are still totally engaging in sex, all the time. Why has it all shut off for me? Mostly I think because I had the most ruckus youth and lived that prime to its fullest. I was mostly ruled by my dick from the mid twenties to those forties. I stayed in a long unhealthy relationship for almost eight years because the sex was so extraordinary, and then it took two years to get away from it because we were still having sex even after we separated. Everything became about sex and having sex, so I definitely get it.
Mapplethorpe photographed the people he had sex with and you can often see that personal connection to those subjects and their trust to allow him into places that would otherwise be forbidden. I somehow wished I had found Mapplethorpe earlier and gotten into photography during the prime of my sexual desire and could have recorded all I have experienced. Now as an older man I can only vicariously live that through my imagery and the experiences I write about. It’s like now I am on a different kind of ride, equally as exciting and intoxicating. But it feels like the last 10 years I somehow got off the streetcar at the wrong stop and ended up in a different and strange new place. The past ten years, psychologically, felt as if I had been spiraling into an unknown oblivion finally reaching the bottom at the beginning of this year as I hit the pit of despair witnessing the passing of my prime moving into middle age, rapidly approaching fifty.
Today I stand on the rampart of something extraordinary. Yet it’s an extraordinariness that I have always known and somehow felt was present. Perhaps it is all the sex, fear, anxiety, insecurities and anger that masks and keeps the true nature of our selves hidden so we can’t see it. And I have to question this morning where would I be today if perhaps I had not made this leap and come on the journey of this year. My desire has changed and so have I. I take delight in that thought and that maybe that streetcar, though still functional, just transports us to new neighborhoods, perhaps we just need to get off and explore.
