Picture It

 Close your eyes please. Please. close them, and imagine a room you can't leave. Maybe it's a fine room. It's not too hot, not too cold. Maybe there are some people who make you chuckle. But you can't leave. Well, you could. The doors aren't locked, but if you leave that's it. Once you leave the people in your life won't know what do do with you because you won't be doing anything. Because you chose to leave over staying. Once you leave, you won't have anything. Sure you'll have you head, your heart, your stomach and your bones and the things they give you. Humor, and taste and inspiration, but by way of connecting with anyone you won't have anything. You're life with be illegible, even if everyone you know hates returning to the room everyday after they are told they may leave for the night- or the day- people won't know what to do with you, wandering the wilderness. Locked out, rather than in, to paraphrase Virginia Wolf. Not to mention the starvation. You'll dwindle. You won't have any cash because they give you cash for standing in the room. You might be able to scrape some up but there's no cash really outside of the room. Certainly not if you were born into the room. It's starvation on all fronts. Starvation of the gut and the spirit. I certainly wouldn't call this just. 

welp

 Trump is president again and all I got was this hellish country we call America. For the ten(s?) of you that read this I would like to be candid. I didn't vote. I didn't see much of a point, time and again being made promises from politicians that either do not understand, or simply can't, navigate the contradictory histories and degenerate aims of capitalist economics. I want things that politicians cannot give me, and so I thought, no matter the outcome, I just couldn't bring myself to give a shit. The bombs would still fall on Gaza. I would still require currency to keep myself from being homeless.  I would still be emotionally ill equipped for wage labor. The things that matter to me wouldn't change. The by ways of our political systems are so entrenched that voting feels like pissing into the Mississippi. Just a trickle into something rolling with an unthinking momentum. The base assumptions of the ballgame of politics just ain't changing. There's too much money, there's too much dedication to keeping the money flowing upward. I often wonder that if I wasn't an American, if I was French for Finnish or German, maybe I'd be an electoral creature. I'd have faith that my government worked toward my most basic needs. But America, with it's brutality and its benign, greedy indifference, has made me an Anarchist. A loud, suicidal, crazy bitch who see's flames in my dreams because from sea to shining sea I see little possibility for a beautiful life for myself. 

And now Trump is president again and my layers of cynicism are wilting. I wanted Harris to win, for whatever marginal safety she would provide as a predictable politician. Even in my Cynicism I wanted her to win, I hoped she'd win, all the while talking out the side of my fucking mouth about how it just didn't matter. And here I think I erred most in forgetting, somehow, that the one material thing Kamala could deliver on is abortion rights. Is an amount of bodily autonomy for women (with splash back rights for trans folks). A country in which a pregnant woman dying from complications can be saved instead of her swiftly arriving death being observed by gutless and cowardly doctors. Trump is president and all days it's just been dawning on me all day how deep the trouble could get. How frighteningly indifferent this country will continue to be. How the angst and combativeness of life will flourish. What is a trans dyke to do? Who do I pray to? I'm scared. Sorry I can't escape the the gear of solipsism. I'm scared and sad about what the trajectory of my life might take. So many of us are scared, we're scared and we live in a society which has, for decades, been disarming our capacity to build interpersonal relationships and hold cogent ideas about political power. But that is the hope, right. Every time something like this happens, that's my hope. That I will step into a world, not where everything has become perfect, but where at least I am surrounded by people will to do the hard, joyful, work of building something that's not about elections. or political parties. But rather something that both transforms our lives and our world. 

But it's that hope that will probably break me. 

What this means for American politics, and it will mean something, is probably beyond me. I could gander a guess that it will further erode any sense of accountability among our elite class. While the dems have spent the last eight years parading around their moral bona fides, make no mistake they've become more feckless and reckless than they already were. The republicans will salivate and waggle their genocidal jowls and prey for the death of undesirable populations. I had hoped this would be a happier rambling. But I'm also hoping to paint an accurate picture. To say how I really feel amidst this terrifying sense of foreboding. I sense that the hope will break me because American's are truly first rate at mediating their experiences through a deep seated delusion of normalcy. My fellow citizens have graciously walk through catastrophe after catastrophe, all the while reimagining the past as a place where the present always was. And that, I suppose, worries me most. Our capacity to accept with a strange resignation, or an even stranger amnesia, the increasingly difficult parameters of living on this earth. More girls forced to give birth. More girls dying from medical complications that are treatable. Only in America could a theocracy be disassociated from any actual meaning and become some vague political consequence. At least the crusaders had the guts to fly the flag as they sacked Jerusalem. Now we have fuckers who tweet. Podcast dweebs talking about how grandmothers become valuable in childcare. At least our fascists' used to mean it. Talking to a dude I went to high school with probably a couple years ago I mentioned the 'dragging you from your house in the night' rhetoric of the Republican party. He didn't know what I was talking about- I was talking about how at the recent RNC someone had used the phrase "we must eradicate transgender people from public life". He proceeded to talk about vaccine cards and how hormone therapy is like giving a little girl steroids. The death of consensus reality, right. 

I want to love people. Love so hard, as the phrase goes, that only liberation is possible. If I saw you, the hypothetical you, out somewhere, would we know that we need each other? Would a 'revolutionary optimism' have a repository? Electoral politics is seductive because you don't have change anything about yourself to do anything. You don't have to face a real fear of rejection. The possibility of impossibility. I keep seeing people post about organizing their communities and I keep asking myself, what communities? Have I ever been apart of a community? Electoral politics don't require you to contemplate the vagaries of "community" and "organizing". But did anything ever change using the same strategies? No, and maybe some vagaries are what we need. Our society is formed around power structures which don't forefront independent thinking, creativity, or autonomy. And every day we have opportunities to exercise our brilliance, our dedication, and our heart for the sake of one another. 'Cause that's really what's going to get anything done. And so, let me speak plainly. Friends, hold me. Please. Because I need it. And when you need, I'll hold you too.  

Making the Composition: On Film and the self

 Armed with a camera and thirty or so frames of film, the intrepid photographer is faced with infinite possibilities. And once you've graduated from wanting to take focused in pictures of parking meters and mail boxes you might be asking yourself, much like I did after taking the film cameras out of their bag after three years of rest, what will constitute your limited frames. Relative to technical limitations your options are limitless. Much like words on a page and notes in a composition, the starting point is a pretty vast horizon. the matter, as in most cases, gets more complicated as you try and build up a theme, or an idea, or to portray a desire. That's when it really gets down to the composition. If you don't get an idea about what you're trying to scrape up from the world around you, then you're just a prick holding a camera in a park. And that pressure, if you're me, mounts fairly rapidly. You might bring the camera up to your eye, pull the focus, evaluate. Put the camera down, keep walking. Try and try again. The limitations of film as a medium, to belabor a cliché, define how one creates that relationship to the work. The scarcity of function in using an old, in all reality half broken, piece of equipment, creates the opportunity for a kind of self reflection that the infinitude of digital photography doesn't. The facsimile, the realm of the camera, has penetrated every aspect of our lives (I feel like I'm just piling clichés on top of clichés) at a speed and velocity that creates a kind a world of the image unto itself. Out perceptions are defined more by the mediated image that perhaps they are by our capacity to ingest the material world around us. If a photographer sets out to, instead of consume, create images, photos, art then they have to come out of a usual frame of mind (forgive the pun). In this pursuit, the film camera, I believe, is well suited to the task of aiding the artist who wishes to look with intention. After you have taken the camera up to your eye, and lowered it, and again raised and lowered it, you might find that first thing that feels worth the price of the exposure. Maybe a Pidgeon. A boat on a river. Maybe someone quite interesting. Will you take a picture of them? Will you ask? It's perfectly legal to take a photo of someone in public without asking. Maybe that's not something you're considering. Depending on what kind of image your trying to make you're going to have to interact with people, express something of yourself and your relationship to other people in the pursuit of the work. You're going to have to figure this out, as your walking around with your camera. When I got into the groove I found myself shooting people from behind, positioning myself as a kind of peripheral figure, taking a shot of a river with some people in one corner or another. taking pictures of a beautiful water feature that has children playing in it, so you get a wide frame, you don't take a picture of anyone specifically. And that postured just continued as I wandered Coolidge park on the North Shore of the Tennessee river. Getting a couple in the bottom right corner of the frame. I was behind a large masonry planter, they were on the other side, cuddled up, arm over shoulder. They were obscured by swaying plants. I was framing up a bridge, there are three wonderful bridges that span the Tennessee river near Coolidge park. I still don't know what that picture will look like. If it'll convey anything like an emotion, or an idea... or maybe they're just pictures, moments frozen in a miraculous chemical reaction. Perhaps that is simply what you pull from the world with your camera. But I don't fear intention, or the rigor it brings.