Package Inspection

I woke up late, so my screed about a shop-owner's right to inspect all packages will have to wait, for now.  I need to gather more information and experience.  I'm going to offer to let them inspect my package first, sensibly.  Test the reverse limitations of their proclamation, etc.

Where has this blog taken itself?  It has lost its way. It drifts against the topic, wandering from the facile to the disingenuous, then to the un-authoritative. Though the opinions themselves would never concede any such lack of authority, they are merely delusional auto-suggestions.

I've lost sight of the pursuit of naked beauty.  I have become caustic. At what price, Oh Lord...?... at what price...

Whiskey makes me apocalyptic. Though I haven't been drinking any. I feel as if I have been drinking gallons of the really cheap stuff.

I have never possessed much consistency in thought. I have rather been plagued with an unwieldy and repetitive abundance of it.  It can be self-convincing, something to always be on guard against. I never tire of hearing my inner voice persuade itself of yet another preposterous private theorem, or what it believes to be so.  A sort of cognitive consonance that would frighten those more astute and self-aware than I...

I leave you with an image of yesterday, when all my troubles seemed to sway:

Pastor Al

(painting by: a neighbor)

Jesus, I must be unhappy.  The internet used to make me laugh.  I made the mistake of coming home after what I've been conditioned to feel is a reasonable day at work and read through the last week of my own posts.  I used to be funny, I had thought.  I didn't even get a giggle out of myself, scarcely a smirk. It was like reading through many acrimonious pages of divorce testimony.  

Awful stuff.  Horrible. Bitter to the mind.

I used to write a column for a website out of Amsterdam. It was a music website that was quite popular and I was commissioned to do 'stringently editorial' pieces, sort of.  It is difficult to explain now.  It helped me ruin my career in the music industry, but I had a lot of fun doing it.  It was irreverent.  When I try to be irreverent now I just sound like an aging producer of fringe pornography whining about The Constitution, a humorless Larry Flynt, if that's even possible.

I am just now beginning to glimpse the ever-fleeting beauty of youth, luckily, as my vision fades, taking my memory with it.  

Youth is a tremendous thing to consider, a sometimes horrendous thing to have endured, a marvel to repossess in the life of another...  

It is a hell of a thing to wish for again, to seek. 

Lover, barely understood there, and less often revered, 

into youth we fell forever upwards and then away. 

Oh gods, were it only helium....

But, to repossess time... to foreclose,
to put a lien against that established past.

If only the gust of promise were as enforceable as an unpaid debt.  

Interest is not interest, as I've come to understand it, to know.

So-so many meanings....

To be young....

The girl that I was dating at that time, we had some cultural differences, she often had a yeast infection, but there were other problems too.

She was the first to hit the 1000 repetition mark of slurring loudly: "Everybody's a DJ..."

Look it up, you'll see. 

I also hit 1000 with the response: "...or an aging model," but the internet has been cruel and patchy in recording my successes.  Now I sound like a gay Larry Flynt.  Is that even possible? 

Hustler, indeed.

So, I'm bald I got that off of my chest, or glad, for typos.

I'll try to lighten up again, and remember that there are artists like the one featured above, willing to take colorful chances, unafraid to be unacceptable, desirous of deficiency, piddling to be pathetic. Those are the real hero'es.... terrorism has no power to forever destroy the trivial.

When I wake up in the morning I'd like to recount in prose a story about going to a local deli and seeing a handwritten sign that stated: "We Reserve The Right To Inspect All Bags!"

My only hope: I haven't slept my mood away...

... and there are still a few bags around, willing to get rightful inspections.

The road to hell...

There is a passage in the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that has stuck with me.  The book didn't appeal to me much as literature, but it is a thoughtful work that has some interesting ideas, though many borrowed ideas found there are just re-introduced from history as part of the story he is telling.

I found the passage, so I will just re-type it here:


"He noted that although you normally associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all.  This is what led him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn't what he meant by Quality either.  Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.

I don't know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn't be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other.  It is the point at which subject and object meet.

That sounded warm.

Quality is not a thing. It is an event.

Warmer.

It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.

And because without objects there can be no subject - because the objects create the subject's awareness of himself - Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.

Hot.

Now he knew it was coming.

This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object.  The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of Quality!

Now he had the whole damned evil dilemma by the throat.  The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification, that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects.  It was not! He brought out his knife.

"The sum of quality," he wrote, "does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence.  It does not just passively illuminate them.  It is not subordinate to them in any way.  It has created them. They are subordinate to it!"

- Robert M. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

There is so much of genuine quality to see and experience in New York, but there is also the other.  I try to avoid all of the wide east/west streets here, the ones with both eastbound and westbound lanes.  They are denser in foot traffic than the rest and attract an agitated slovenliness of the soul, they are hostile spaces.  

So much of my worldview has to do with the assessment of quality.  I am accused of being a snob on a regular basis, sometimes rightfully so.  I prefer quality to carelessness, mostly.  I prefer beauty in art to shocking social commentary, though you might not know that by reading these posts.  I prefer things that strive for an otherness to things that merely remind me of things as they are.  I prefer unexpected confessions of inner weirdness to anything that U2 has ever done.  I do not want to be reminded how to be moral in art, I would rather hear unpredictable personal disclosure, whether it is accompanied by remorse, ambiguity, or the desire to repeat. 

I can make my own judgements, though I do thank Bono for his efforts at reminding us all to be human. Remember when Bono wasn't Sting, and when Sting wasn't Sting?

Canal St., Houston St., 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, etc., etc.  Those are the streets I meant. All of these places fatigue the eye and the mind, the spirit.  

I avoid them whenever possible, and avoid the people whose thoughts resemble those streets.  There is a cheapness to the human spirit that destroys me.  I don't mean the reluctance to spend, but rather the willingness to substitute.

A friend wrote me an email that said, "expectations are as satisfying as a line of coke."  I told her that I would steal that line from her, but after all of this moral and social opining, I just don't have the strength...

   

"Road to hell paved in unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault." - Ernest Hemingway

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Bob On the A Train, pt. 2, year 1

It has been just over a year since my friend from the neighborhood passed away, Bob.  Time does an odd thing when it is forced to.

Mortality reminds us of mortality, then life.

When I reflect that a year has passed since his passing I am reminded firstly of him, but then of the oddness of time, its awkward trick of the mind.  It seems that it has been longer than a year, but somehow only a few short weeks since I have seen him.  Numbers align against me.  As I gain age my relationship to death changes.  It is more easily accepted in others now, almost expected.  I come to terms with the passing of acquaintances more quickly, though repetition has offered an invaluable subsidy in that regard.

More has happened to me now, and others likewise.  History accumulates, etc.


I have no memory of death until perhaps the age of 7 or 8 years old.  I had to call my brother to verify.  It was a friend of my father's who had died.  I saw the casket-bound body with young frightened eyes.  I was stridently requested by my mother to pray in front of it, for it, to show it reverence.  My brother was crying, which scared me, so I was crying also.  Years later I decided only to pray when crying. That is when prayers breach heaven's ears most effectively, through tears.

One's sense of time's passing from one Superbowl to the next is very different from a single year since the death of a friend, unmarked by ritual or acknowledgement, by most. The Superbowl happens every time you need it to, at a sensible distance from the previous one. Death offers no similar courtesies.  Death is rude... it is also patient, it is often unkind, it always perseveres, death never fails.... death never fails... and now these three remain: death, doom, destruction... 


That's biblical.


Robert Scarano, a hawk with a bad shoulder.
Bob, a hawk with one great shoulder.
R. Scarano, standing on the shoulders of giant gnats.
Bobby, a lover of constrictors, reptiles and birds alike.


Bob usually assumed that you were as curious about life as he was, and would talk about all things with an almost equal passion. An awkward zeal that favored airborne conspiracy, the always tandem helicopters above, the ever-present belief in and resistance to Black-Ops....


I have also been a periodic enthusiast for the lot of all things.  It often leaves me exhausted towards the mundane interactions that are so necessary for the semblance of a normal life.  It's not that I'm incapable of having civil interactions, it's only that most of them vaguely disgust me, fill me with dread, as if my lungs filled with lead.  Pedestrian morality sickens my sensibilities, though I often long for it.  Ahh, only to be able to conduct life as if it were a well-run suburb of moderated landscapes, a day-job of interests, a 401k of joys....


It is a strange thing to see something of yourself in someone older, the fully realized errors, as well as the other thing, the undernourished youthfulness, still growing.  It's not naivete', but a perpetually struggling exuberance for all there is, or most all there is, or most all there ever was, or anything at all, but now.

I am talking about myself, rather that Bob.  Do you see what a year will do...  He would hate this.


As I was writing this, drinking a beer, I accidentally spilled some beer on my pants, paying too much attention to what I was thinking, and too little to what I was doing.

One of my brother's friends, at his wedding, described the experience of talking to me thusly: It's like being on a bender.

It is for this reason alone that I shouldn't do drugs, though there are also other reasons.

Clouds are a dangerous metaphor to teach a child, especially one with an interest in science.  I've had teachers that encouraged us to see things in the sky, to name them, describe them to others, then let them pass.  It is a game of imagination, you see.  All of that water vapor ends right back up in the ocean, never to return in our lifetime.  I imagined that.


The message here is that humans are capable of immense untutored beauty, though they produce very little of it.  Bob did a little of both.

The possibilities seemed both daily and endless.

Sympathy For A Devil

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"Water Liars"

Here is a story I like. I hope you like it too.

This was reprinted here without any permission from the publisher. I encourage them to sue me for any and all damages they might have incurred from my reckless and wanton use of their property, and to go after the many advertising dollars made here on this humble site. It was published in a collection called, "Airships" by Vintage Contemporaries, that is where I found it anyway.

No, I kid again.... I want no trouble. Just ask me to take it down, and I also will tell, and be crucified by, the truth.

"Water Liars" 
By Barry Hannah

When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.

I’m glad it’s not my name.

This poor dignified man has had to explain his nobility to the semiliterate of half of America before he could even begin a decent conversation with them. On the other hand, Farte, Jr., is a great liar himself. He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tells big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghosts took out of Farte Cove in years past.

Last year I turned thirty-three years old and, raised a Baptist, I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three. It had all seemed especially important, what you do in this year, and holy with meaning.

On the morning after my birthday party, during which I and my wife almost drowned in vodka cocktails, we both woke up to the making of a truth session about the lovers we’d had before we met each other. I had a mildly exciting and usual history, and she had about the same, which surprised me. For ten years she’d sworn I was the first. I could not believe her history was exactly equal with mine. It hurt me to think that in the era when there were supposed to be virgins she had allowed anyone but me, and so on.

I was dazed and exhilarated by this information for several weeks. Finally, it drove me crazy, and I came out to Farte Cove to rest, under the pretense of a fishing week with my chum Wyatt.

I’m still figuring out why I couldn’t handle it.

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. The movement of every limb in every passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.

You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.

I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.

My vacation at Farte Cove wasn’t like that easy little bit you get as a rich New Yorker. My finances weren’t in great shape; to be true, they were about in ruin, and I left the house knowing my wife would have to answer the phone to hold off, for instance, the phone company itself. Everybody wanted money and I didn’t have any.

I was going to take the next week in the house while she went away, watch our three kids and all the rest. When you both teach part-time in the high schools, the income can be slow in summer.

No poor-mouthing here. I don’t want anybody’s pity. I just want to explain. I’ve got good hopes of a job over at Alabama next year. Then I’ll get myself among higher-paid liars, that’s all.

Sidney Farte was out there prevaricating away at the end of the pier when Wyatt and I got there Friday evening. The old faces I recognized; a few new harkening idlers I didn’t.

“Now, Doctor Mooney, he not only saw the ghost of Lily, he says he had intercourse with her. Said it was involuntary. Before he knew what he was doing, he was on her making cadence and all their clothes blown away off in the trees around the shore. She turned into a wax candle right under him.”

“Intercourse,” said an old-timer, breathing heavy. He sat up on the rail. It was a word of high danger to his old mind. He said it with a long disgust, glad, I guess, he was not involved.

“MacIntire, a Presbyterian preacher, I seen him come out here with his son-and-law, anchor near the bridge, and pull up fifty or more white perch big as small pumpkins. You know what they was using for bait?”

“What?” asked another geezer.

“Nuthin. Caught on the bare hook. It was Gawd made them fish bite,” said Sidney Farte, going at it good.

“Naw. There be a season they bite a bare hook. Gawd didn’t have to’ve done that,” said another old guy, with a fringe of red hair and a racy Florida shirt.

“Nother night,” said Sidney Farte, “I saw the ghost of Yazoo hisself with my pa, who’s dead. A Indian king with four deer around him.”

The old boys seemed to be used to this one. Nobody said anything. They ignored Sidney.

“Tell you what,” said a well-built small old boy. “That was somethin when we come down here and had to chase that whole high-school party off the end of this pier, them drunken children. They was smokin dope and two-thirds a them nekid swimmin in the water. Good hunnerd of em. From your so-called good high school. What you think’s happnin at the bad ones?”

I dropped my beer and grew suddenly sick. Wyatt asked me what was wrong. I could see my wife in 1960 in the group of high-schoolers she must have had. My jealousy went out into the stars of the night above me. I could not bear the roving carelessness of teen-agers, their judgeless tangling of wanting and bodies. But I was the worst back then. In the mad days back then, I dragged the panties off girls I hated and talked badly about them once the sun came up.

“Worst time in my life,” said a new, younger man, maybe sixty but with the face of a man who had surrendered, “me and Woody was fishing. Had a lantern. It was about eleven. We was catching a few fish but rowed on into that little cove over there near town. We heard all these sounds, like they was ghosts. We was scared. We thought it might be the Yazoo hisself. We known of some fellows the Yazoo had killed to death just from fright. It was the over the sounds of what was normal human sighin and amoanin. It was big unhuman sounds. We just stood still in the boat. Ain’t nuthin else us to do. For thirty minutes.”

“An what was it?” said the old geezer, letting himself off the rail.

“We had a big flashlight. There came up this rustlin in the brush and I beamed it over there. The two of em making the sounds get up with half they clothes on. It was my own daughter Charlotte and an older guy I didn’t even know with a mustache. My own daughter, and them sounds over the water scarin us like ghosts.”

“My Gawd, that’s awful,” said the old geezer by the rail. “Is that the truth? I wouldn’t’ve told that. That’s terrible.”

Sidney Farte was really upset.

“This ain’t the place!” he said. “Tell your kind of story somewhere else.”

The old man who’d told his story was calm and fixed to his place. He’d told the truth. The crowd on the pier was outraged and discomfited. He wasn’t one of them. But he stood his place. He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about.

I told Wyatt to bring the old man back to the cabin. He was out here away from his wife the same as me and Wyatt. Just an older guy with a big hurting bosom. He wore a suit and the only way you’d know he was on vacation was he’d removed his tie. He didn’t know where the bait house was. He didn’t know what to do on vacation at all. But he got drunk with us and I can tell you he and I went out the next morning with our poles, Wyatt driving the motorboat, fishing for white perch in the cove near the town. And we were kindred.

We were both crucified by the truth.

Airships © 1978 by Barry Hannah

Erotiqa

I've decided to dedicate the remaining days of this blog to purely erotic writings and images.  What the world needs is more of the male sexual vision.  I tire so quickly and easily of the female governed world of sexiness.  It's time that we corrected this disturbing trend of enforced vagina vision.  We must tear down all of the yonic-dominated images, close all of the nation's tunnels along the interstate highway system, all public gardens, bring beavers to extinction.... Death to the silk purse!!!!


Ok, I just woke up and the image above was on my desktop, the image below is from a Soho shop window, circa Christmas 2010...  I haven't had my coffee yet, etc.  For those of my friends who read this blog only to keep up with my life, Rachel and I had a very sweet Valentine's Day yesterday, don't let my ramblings mislead you.


But since we're discussing feminism, I heard a joke the other day... No, I merely jest, there's nothing funny about feminism. 


Again, a harmless joke.  


I have always felt that women got a raw deal, in some ways, in the last few decades.  The struggle for independence can be a slippery slope in capitalism.  The rise of feminine equality and its attending concepts coincided imperfectly with a drop in value of the dollar, so that now most couples' income is actually less powerful than a single-earner was in post-war America. The feminist movement was quickly converted into labor-value rather than actual equality as they might have envisioned it.  So, it is even more difficult now for a single mother than it was before. All individuals enjoy a lower standard of living, though there has been a flattening of income differences between men and women, which is accordingly encouraging.  


If only the value of the dollar would have remained where it was, then.


I read in the February issue of Harper's that the median income of women who are single, in their twenties, and live in a city is $2000 higher than that of men.  Harper's also stated that the chance of an unmarried American, under 30 to agree that "marriage is obsolete" is 1 in 2.  Chances that he or she wants to get married 19 out of 20.


What does all of this tell us?  Vaginas have ruined advertising. Watch Mad Men, it will show you all that you need to know about the devastating and insidious effects of the vaginal power interchange. The emerging dominance of the receiver and the fading glory of the transmitter.  In the risible world of the internet anybody can transmit, the shift of power is truly and uniquely in what you choose to receive. But the internet is still an imbecilic and untested place.... though, it is where I met my doppelgänger....


... my ghostly counterpart ...




Jesus Christo, this post has come free from itself.  This is what happens when I don't pick a subject before I start writing, when I just sit down to espouse my soon to be drunken scrawlings.




The U.S. Border Patrol can legally perform warrantless searches on anybody within 100 miles of land and maritime borders.  The percentage of Americans that live within that area is 2/3rds.  Though In New York they no longer need a warrant to search anybody, but they do request that you have black skin. 


Also, from Harper's monthly.  Not the last sentence, just the facts....

Seminudity, the return

So, only one friend actually requested more nudity, half-jokingly. But my lone reader has spoken.  I must abide.  I have nothing else to say about nudity. What would I have added to the great historical conversation anyway?  The long lineage of lingerie.... I merely wanted to cast my vote as "for" rather than "against."  In these topsy-turvy times I think it a duty to make one's points clear.  I am, and always have been, pro-nudity, both partial and full.  In fact, there have been times when I felt it should be mandatory.  In any girl shower scenes, for example, that calls for full nudity.  Pillow fights, partial.

I'm glad I've finally made myself clear on these distinctions.

Nothing really to say here today.  I picked my guitar up and played a few chords for the first time in quite a while.  My fingers began to hurt almost immediately .  I have lost my playing callouses.  It sounded nice though, the sound of the chords drifting through the apartment on this Valentine's Day morning.  I was going to sing a song for my wife, but her phone rang.  The "L" train is out of commission today, apparently.  Plans must be changed, people will arrive late, or not at all.  My fingers were saved for the time being.

My friend over at selavy made a good point yesterday.  He was telling a model that he was working with to not watch pornography because it will get you thinking about things and then you will want to do those things.  I think there's some truth in that, as well as its alternate.  If you watch movies and read books about people who strive to have dynamic lives then you also will want to live a dynamic life and you will begin to structure your life in such a way that it will begin to happen for you.

A few months ago, or perhaps a few weeks, he posted an excerpt from a book review that stated that nothing of any consequence could happen in this book because of the language that was used.  That for anything of consequence to occur in a work then the language must reflect that.  I will see if I can find the post, hold on..... no, I couldn't find it.  Anyway, it said that the language used by Flaubert in "Madame Bovary" is what gives the consequence itself dimension and importance.

I believe this to be true.  It is one of the reasons I don't play video games.  What little consequence there is to them, if any at all, is lost on me.  I work in a place where I listen to people discuss gaming from sometimes to all-of-the-time, it amazes me, the talk not the games. Could anything be less consequential, or of a manufactured nature?  Certain drug experiences maybe. They argue that at least they're participating with the game, which is preferable to just watching tv.  Even idly watching a sitcom involves receiving some small does of literature though.

If sports are where excellence meets insignificance then video games are where ordinariness meets the abyss.

Here is an image of a woman's shrouded vulva, with the reflection of a man talking on the phone in the back.

This work of art forever separates me from the gamers....

And another semi-nude woman tenderly staring down at the passer-by, notice the gentle look of sadness, the delicacy, the distance....

Isn't life both sad and beautiful, just like Avatar?

Luxury Retail Space Available

Since I returned from the ski trip I have had no free time. None. I have run from one place to another without purpose or effect, forever rounding the Monopoly board, only ever landing on Baltic Ave.  It's as if the cursed dice that I am bound to use have extra digits that only ever equal the sums of 43, 40 or 37, without further variation.  Eternally hovering around the Baltic region of the game.

Last night I had a discussion with one of my managers whose conversation I often enjoy. I was leaving work at the time, sensibly.  My side of the conversation quickly devolved into the futility of my position and the comical and unlikely chance of promotion, that I am in a place that has no career path, that ascendance is discretionary and awarded without explanation....  That there is no relationship between effort and reward.  He disagreed, so I made my point more forcefully, with exaggerated emphasis. I was about to leave and was running out of time, you see.  This quite confirmed my position.  I had won the argument by forever proving my point. Such is the potency of my rhetoric, combined with the power of my unique brand of neurotic persuasion.

My personality is not one that will likely ever be rewarded in certain situations... like, at work.

Will I ever learn?  Or is it just that I have a self-destruct mechanism, a personality doomsday device, that ensures that any time I'm given a reasonably fair opportunity to excel then I am far more likely to become the court jester, forever poking fun at anybody that would ever advance, or worse: try to advance.


Years ago I liked to play the game Monopoly.  It is an incredibly easy game to win and relies on one basic principle at first, then on another principle to employ if you fall on hard times. The only chance anybody ever has of beating me is playing the exact same strategy, and then it just boils down to the luck of the dice, or lack thereof.  It is mostly a bitter, unpleasant experience predicated on the fantasy of wealth, affluence and the misuse of power.

It is a game of waiting, principally.  Like a gluttonous landlord, you wait for others to unluckily land on your holdings so that you can unfairly charge them.  It is a form of price-fixing that appeals to the type person who once during college might have dreamed of moving to New York and becoming Donald Trump.  People who like to utter the phrase, "You're fired".... Those who enjoy being playfully possessive, and are animated in their ways of expressing the "I got you, you fucker" sentiment.

I am immediately suspicious of anybody that ever suggests playing this game and I quietly offer thanks to the stars if those people are childless, and poor.

No, I'm just kidding... it's lots of fun to screw your friends over with a semblance of law and property. It is a game enjoyed best while drinking cognac and smoking large penis-shaped cigars.  Wear a silk top-hat to complete your image of yourself.  Put your cigars out in fresh baby flesh. I find that helps with the odor.

No.

I've always wanted to bring a Monopoly game board to my bank and sit down and honestly ask the manager questions about strategy and how to incorporate that into my estate planning...

Jesus, I'm sick. Though not yet Lazarus.


I have had a recent request to return to my "semi-nude" series.

After today I will take that under very serious consideration.

Addendum: My wife wanted my fair readers to know that she is vehemently opposed to the use of the "baby flesh" joke.  

Duly noted.

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Nude Pt. 2

The second, and perhaps final, installment of my semi-nude series.  I find myself tiring of the theme.  No, that is not it. I've taken on another assignment.  Not true either.  I'm bored of looking at women in their underwear.

Never, nevermore. Quoth the baron....

It's just that the life of a fashion photographer is a hard-one.  Or should I say difficult... All of the free drugs, the late starts to each day, sleeping in, international first-class travel, champagne lunches, gracing others with the bulk of my work, knowing who to trust, and when to pretend... feeling totally justified at belittling and demeaning those that are lucky enough to work for me, especially the one's I barely pay, if at all.

What actually is an intern? Why don't you tern into a line of coke for me... ingrate is more like it....


My arm is sore from throwing my cell phone at people.  Why haven't my very public tantrums produced better images, greater art... Is nobody paying attention to the genius behind the lens any longer.  I might as well get a desk job, in the service industry.


And the models are just impossible, all cardbored and one-dimensional.  Incredible to look at but starved for attention, either black or white.


Am I the only one that gives a fuck about beauty any more....

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Pictures of birds in flight

Life is confusing. The more I try to clarify, the more confusion I seem to create.

Never defend yourself, especially if you haven't done anything wrong.  It will only make you appear guilty. When you defend yourself you automatically appear defensive.

As I get older I have less and less time and patience to maintain personal relationships.  It saddens me because the relationships that I do have I tend to value more, as time passes. Some of them.

I once read that most people form their significant relationships before the age of 30, very few form significant relationships after that age.  That hasn't been true for me and I can count several close friendships that were formed after the age of 30, but perhaps I am a late bloomer.

But lately I do notice that I have less patience for what it takes to maintain relationships.  It's not that I don't care about them, it's just that I've become less tolerant of certain things.  I have always been a somewhat emotionally needy person, so I tend to be more tolerant of those who are similar.  But as I become less and less needy in that way I have also lost some of my patience for those people.


Time becomes a strange thing, so much more transitory and less fixed, though perpetually moving towards complete and total stasis.


What do I know?

"Look how big my shadow is..."

I used to be famous, sort of.  The internet makes it seem that way. It's like having your DNA trapped in amber for others to re-animate after decades, centuries, eons, weeks, minutes....

I recently did an internet radio show with a friend of mine, Taimur.  Here is a link for those of you who may be interested.  It is a collection of dance tracks from around the time that I used to be a resident dj at a club called Twilo.  It was a special time for many people.  People still ask me about the experience quite often, giving vague credence to the history of the occurence.

I never know what to say when asked.  It was a privatized experience and one not easily shared in words, with strangers.
 

I checked Wikipedia to see if there was anything about Twilo that I had forgotten.  It turns out that I was one of the many things that had long since been forgotten.

I used to be famous, sort of....


"Look how big my shadow is when I stretch." -Laura  (From "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams)

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sex cells, protected by glass....

(unexpecting is not a word)

I've decided to do a new photo/essay series.  It will be all semi-nudes, shot semi-live in the streets of New York, with pedestrians happening upon the photo-shoot both unexpecting and semi-unaware, participating without knowledge or consent, mostly.  I will (of course) be in most of the photos as well, overdressed, but eager to participate in partial nudity, as always, in any way that I can... the cool and distant recorder of the smoldering sensuality of the models, protected by glass.

Oh wait, that's been done before, and I don't have many models willing to get naked for free, nor do I have resources, or time.  But my god... there sure is some beautiful booty-pie to look at here and there, spread out generously across the city.

(nor is aqtor)

I feel a little bit guilty looking at this picture above.  Whenever the model turns and looks at me I feel guilty, especially as someone is passing, just trying to walk their dog.  There is a fantastic passage in the book "A Sport and a Pastime" by James Salter that describes a man standing behind a young naked woman who is facing forward, lying down, preparing to be entered from behind, or should I rather say in behind.  Anyway, he is holding a jar of vaseline in his hand and he describes the guilt and shame he would feel if she were to turn around and see him holding the thing, the article of sin, the embodiment of the act to follow.  But it is not the act itself which he is ashamed of, it is only that he should be seen holding the jar which enables it.  I have perhaps remembered the passage wrong, but that is the effect it had on me.

This picture does a similar thing.  I like the framing of it.  A frowzy woman just trying to walk her dog, with a bus passing by, temporarily separating the reflection of the abdomen of the model from the reflection of the tree, while revealing it more for what it is, a body.  

It looks like the woman walking the dog is trying to insert my ding-dong into the model's booty-crack.  

That must be a mirage, an urbana fata morgana.

"w're al' but aqtors, fueling rselves along a sinsless oddisy..." - senetesticles

DMV, NYC

I have wanted to tell this story for several days. But I was afraid that I would tell it only in anger. I wanted there to be some humor in telling it.  I feel there was some humor in the thing.  When I relay the story to anybody verbally it is coming across only as angry. 

So be it.

I recently went on a vacation to Colorado. Before leaving it occurred to me that my Florida driver's license had expired. I would need a valid license to drive the rental car in Colorado.  In New York you have up to one year after your license expires to swap it for an NYC license.  I checked into the requirements for swapping and there were a few that I was unprepared for.  The two main issues being that I needed a new visual test performed by my eye doctor and that I MUST have a Social Security Card.  Just having the S.S. # would not do.  I had to be in possession of the actual card.  Luckily there is a Social Security office on my street, just a block east of where I live.  So, I went down to the office about a month before we were leaving and brought with me all of the needed documentation.  When I was done I was told that it would arrive in the mail in 2-4 weeks.  I inquired about the possibility of rushing the card with extra payment but no such options were available.

So I waited.  

I went to the eye doctor and found that my eyes hadn't changed much, but he gave me a new prescription anyway so that I could get a new pair of glasses.  I took a fresh picture of my retina off of the computer screen there in the testing room and told him that I used it as my Facebook profile pic and he warned me about the future and about how my retina is more unique than my fingerprint, identity theft, etc.  I assured him that nobody would want my identity, that along with it comes a soul-crushing inventory of shames and a catalog of ignominious but blurred memories.  He laughed but warned me that yes, even those might be desirable to the ne'er-do-wells of the future universe one day.

I left his office feeling better and with my eyes dilated so that all of the snow in New York glowed with an incandescent inner and outer glow, painful to look at, impossible to ignore.

When I got home I found my S.S. card in the mail.  Not the German paramilitary organization, Schutzstaffel, but the card from the Social Security office that I had mentioned earlier.  I opened the letter, verified all of the information as correct and put it with my other papers so that all was in order, and I was ready to apply for my transit papers....

So, I was prepared for the DMV.

I went to the DMV office two days before we were expected to leave for Colorado, where we could drink beer made by a man named Adolph without irony or nazi-sympathies. Sidenote: Coors, not Coors Light, is actually a pretty good American beer, though Adolph Coors was a supporter of many conservative causes, he still made pretty good beer.  Check out The Heritage Foundation and The American Enterprise Institute.  Adolph committed suicide but began a conservative legacy that was more fully realized in his offspring who went on to run the Coors company.  This alone should be enough to keep me from drinking Coors, but it is not.... 

So, I went to the DMV, armed with all of the necessary documents, prepared to wait all day to get my license.  When I arrived and found the appropriate line to be in I was informed that the computer system that enables them to trade out my out-of-state license with an NYC license was down and all transactions were being done manually by hand, which would add considerable time to what was already a lengthy process. We were all encouraged to reconsider this day as a day to perform our official state business.  I contemplated coming back the next day but thought better of it, as that would give me no time whatsoever to correct for any mistakes, so I stood in line for 2 hours.  

Finally I made it up to the window where the process would begin in earnest.  I had a few questions and I began to ask them to the gloved man pictured below:

He told me that all of the information I need was provided on the website for the NYC DMV.  I asked if it wasn't possible for him to answer my questions since the reception in this government building wasn't very good and it was important for me to make sure I got this done today.  He said, No, that he wasn't there to provide information.

Ok, I said.

He then asked to see all of the necessary paperwork and I provided it all for him.  When he saw me pull my Social Security Card out of the envelope he asked me to sign it, so I did.  He then asked me to stand against the board to have my picture taken, which I did.  He then turned his back to me and prepared the documents for me to continue the process, then he handed me all of my paperwork and told me to have a seat.

I waited and waited, another 2 hours.  Finally my number was called and I approached the appropriate window to get my license.  I handed over all of my paperwork and the woman began to process the request.  Within a few short minutes she came back and told me that I wouldn't be able to get a license today, that the name on my Social Security Card was incorrect.  She showed it to me.  Sure enough, my last name was spelled incorrectly.  I stood there in complete befuddlement. I asked if there was any alternative identification I could use, my passport, credit cards, anything.  She said, No, that was a requirement, and pointed to the signs that were everywhere around the office stating so.  I walked numb out of the office and down to the street, all of my efforts thwarted by a bureaucracy run afoul.

I stood on Broadway below, outside the offices, looking from left to right, unsure what to do.  After a month of concerted effort it turns out that I would not get my driver's license before our trip, that my wife would have to drive everybody through ice and snow, and mountainous terrain, for days on end.  This was not good. This was not good at all.   I chastised myself for not recognizing the mistake earlier.  I stood dumbfounded at how the name could be right on the address portion of the paper but could be mis-printed on the un-detached card portion of the paper.

I pulled it out of my pocket, and out of the envelope, and looked at it more carefully.

The numbers have been removed for obvious reasons: to keep my eye doctor happy.  But look at the name on the card, specifically the last name, which should read CUSICK...

The modification seems obvious in this picture, but to the naked eye it was more deceptive. The subtext was clear.  I had to hand it to this bald albino rat, it was sort of funny.  By changing the I in my name to a D, he had partially spelled out the word DICK, and when one considers that the I is obscured in the DCK portion of my name, then the joke is complete, and the meaning unambiguous.  

That I was not going to get my driver's license because of this penned change only added to the prank.

I turned around, went back up the elevator, went past all of the lines of people waiting, demanded to see a supervisor.  She appeared.  I explained that I had checked these documents and they were all correct, that the only person other than myself who had touched this card was her employee, and that if she examined it carefully she could see that the modification was made with the same pen that he handed me to sign the card just a few hours prior.

She examined the card with a magnifying glass, she laughed, she apologized.  She marched me back over to the desk where mole-man was working, gloves still covering his diseased, criminal hands.  I prepared for a confrontation.  She walked me to the woman working right next to him and whispered something in her ear and walked away.  The woman began the process all over for me.  I said, No, no, no, no... I had already been through all of this. I was at the end of the process, not at the beginning.  She handed me all of my paperwork and directed me vaguely to the other side of the room.  Mole-man sat there with his bald head down as if it were a forward-facing-blank-mask of sorts, obscuring his joy and deceit, garnished with a fading hairline and partially framed by his dangling glasses.

I walked back across the room to where the supervisor was already busied with other bureaucratic concerns.  I waited patiently as she helped somebody else and then I explained to her that I was already at the end of the line, waiting to get my license, not at the beginning. She asked to see my paperwork. She examined all of it and then walked away instructing me to follow her, leaving my passport on the far side of the counter, separated from my paperwork, her and me.  I leaned over the counter, alarming those around me, especially those behind the counter, recovered my passport and followed her to the window that I was previously at, where she instructed the woman to issue me the license, that there had been some sort of mistake.

In a few minutes the woman handed me all of my paperwork back along with an interim driver's license. I walked over to the supervisor where I could see that she was waiting for some thanks for all that she had done.

None arrived.

I asked her for her name and for the employee's name that had drawn on my S.S. card.  She gladly gave me her name but refused to give me the employee's name, stating that this was, "a DMV issue now" and that, "You got your license, let it go..."

I told her that I appreciated her assumed authority in this matter. But that this issue was well outside of the DMV's jurisdiction, and that the FBI generally handles matters of government employees committing crimes involving the altering of federally issued identification documents.

I left the office, taking this last picture on the way:

Of mole-man, beware....



The response among my friends in New York has been both universal and strange:  "Why did you go to the midtown DMV?"  I patiently explain each time that it is the closest DMV to me and the office that one must go to in Manhattan when swapping out an out-of-state license.  I am then given all sorts of advice about upstate DMV offices and ones in the outer boroughs, and online options that simply would not function for me in the capacity that I had hoped, mail-in rebate DMV's, coupons, etc., etc.

New Yorker's are not helpful, they only need to feel better informed than others and will offer erroneous information as if it is actual help, when in reality it is a way for them to assert their NewYork'ness over yours...

So, that is what I am doing now...  Avoid the midtown DMV at all costs, and if you happen upon this miserable little dungheap of a human, then do not allow him to turn his back on you in possession of your identification.


I had been warned well by my eye doctor:

His head is that shape because he is from the future.... It is a bureaucracy plow.

Beware...

The many mountains of Colorado

I'm back.  I've changed my mind about skiing. It is a lot of fun once you move past the fear and shame of high-speed downhill disaster.  Moving past the fear does not stop the wipeouts, however.  It only makes it possible to enjoy them, sort of. Which also diminishes the shame, a bit.  Learning how to quickly get back up and ride also helps, though it is an awkward business, one that is difficult on the legs, the knees in particular.

I had hoped to take many more pictures while skiing but the two activities are not very conducive to one another.  It requires more dedication than I was willing to commit, and reminded me of the many years that I didn't own a camera, and didn't want to.  I believed that a camera prevented you from participating in something and relegated you more to the recording of things.  So the camera stayed at home, mostly.

Time used to keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future... now it just breaks its hip.

I tried a few times to capture the beauty of the mountains, but their impressiveness escaped me, mostly.  I didn't dedicate the necessary time to photographing them that I would have needed to come closer to getting the pictures I wanted.  It was shockingly cold and my instinct towards other things kept me from taking up anybody else's time with my new hobby, mostly.

It was refreshing to get out of New York and try something new.  The skies are wide open there, almost from horizon to horizon at times. The azure ambit is disrupted with the most astonishing upward breaks from the earth.  A confusion of consistency marked by immense earthly forces.  

It is a strange and lonely place.  It speaks a frightening truth to the heart, its allure is its immensity in scope, the near total boundlessness of earth and sky, the void between, the void within.

.

Silverthorne via Pagosa Springs

I remain unconvinced about skiing. The people we are traveling with have cajoled me into trying again, though perhaps not today. It is -30°F where we are up in the mountains somewhere near Silverthorne this morning, but it's supposed to get up to a blistering -15°F or so later today.... perhaps warmer.

We drove to Pagosa Springs yesterday.  The road was cold and bleak though beautiful at times.  On the drive home I took a wrong turn and we drove over an 11,312 ft. pass called Monarch, across the continental divide. The winds were blowing up the ridge of the mountain and across the road in such a way that it was impossible not to imagine how long it would take to die in that weather if the car were to fail, or we were forced to head out on foot in search of help, or happened upon by an angry and hungry lycanthrope....

Tonight is the new moon.  We are perhaps safe for another 14 days.


The picture below was a long exposure taken in Pagosa Springs.  I wish that I remembered more about basic astronomy. I would tell you approximately how many degrees of arc are seen in the motion of the stars.  It is very little but there is evidence there of the earth spinning through the cosmos and me along with it.