Saturday Feb 28th, 2009

“Life is a tippy crap bucket sometimes. Send God some money and it will get better” – God.

My house flooded. It did not flood with love, nor money, nor oil, nor the holy spirit, but with brown rain water from unseasonally high temperatures. It was lunchtime a few Wednesdays ago and I was editing photos when I noticed my new rug was wet – and my bed was wet– and the floor under my rug...well you get the idea.  I called a man in a trenchcoat smoking in the shadows at the parking garage; who goes by codename “landlord”, and told it that the ship that is my crappy apartment is finally sinking. My new floor installed in my studio – DELETED. All my expensive photography backdrops – DELETED. My faith that there is a supreme being somewhere above this basement apartment who really isn’t taking a drunken piss on me – GONE - DELETED. I think “God” is just an abbreviation for “Gone and Deleted”. I came up with THAT one myself.

So, I packed up my smile and jumped on a jet to New York. If there was ever a place that could soothe my troubled soul it’s a large heartless city. I love New York. New York does not pretend to be Chicago, or TRY to be downtown Buffalo. New York is just New York. A big smelly city with good food and terribly confusing subway systems. I suppose it is possible New York is also some sort of transformer which will one day be done recharging and transform into a large unstoppable killing machine that will stop at nothing but the pleading of a young child who offers his balloon to New York City so it will not crush and destroy his crippled dog Spike. That is POSSIBLE – but not really probable. We all know New York is an asshole and Spike deserves to die for what he has done.

Do you know that uptown is sometimes called “Downtown” and do you know that Uptown is sort of “North” but that does not matter if you try and get the C train going Uptown to the Bronx because that train only runs when the A train is running and the A train only runs on the third Winter Solstice before the Celtic New Year? I have been to New York probably over a dozen times and I manage to get lost EVERY time I go. At one point Piper asked me if I was having a good time because I was complaining an awful lot – just because I COMPLAIN doesn’t mean I don’t ENJOY complaining.

I was supposed to do a photoshoot with singer Jay May – but she had a family emergency so I had to cancel. I was supposed to photograph Woodhands in Manhattan, but the club owner knew I liked Star Trek better than Star Wars and told me to get lost. In the end, I had a photoshoot with a big galvanized steel bridge and took about 400 photos of Piper (who incidently is not made of galvanized steel). I also did a stop motion video of people walking in and out of Starbucks from my hotel window – which seemed like a good idea at the time. (Did you know that the man the Brooklyn Bridge is in no way related to Brook Shields?)

Also, the most humbling moment of my trip was meeting with an old friend from Highschool Marianna Rothen. She is a photographer/Model who lives in New York in an apartment that is as amazing as it is expensive. Her photographs are all amazing and her furniture is amazing. Though she did say sometimes she could hear rats in the basement – but likely they were baking her some sort of cake so I don’t think that counts as a con.

Anyone who says that ordering Chinese food while drinking a poor quality Cava and watching “There will be Blood” in your hotel room isn’t a good way to spend Valentine’s day better not speak to Piper. She seems to think it was “pretty okay” – even though I got quite ill from the Chinese food and spent most of the night rubbing my hairy belly and apologizing for ruining her life.

So back to logical sentences – I did a photoshoot with Ben Folds last Tuesday. Ben Folds played the Koolhause and I also photographed the opening band “Miniature Tigers”. Ben played a variety of what he called “Fake songs”. If you write and play a song – is it not real? I like Ben Folds but I didn’t enjoy the show as much as I usually enjoy him and I suspect it had to do with his set list. I love Ben Folds mainly because of his lyrics and he did not play the songs which I consider his best lyrically. Piper is a big Ben Folds fan and is gonna shank me for saying that. Shank means a prison stab by the way.

I wrote most of this blog about a week ago but did not post it for some reason or another. I think the reason I didn’t post it was because I got caught up in scanning old photos from my late Nono’s house that I removed when I was visiting him in Italy this summer. My Nono didn’t have a single photo where I wasn’t at least 12 years old. In his eyes, when I showed up there this summer he probably thought I was still the little chubster wearing the “RonJon Surfshop” T-shirt with chocolate stains in the corners of my mouth. To be perfectly honest I didn’t think he HAD a single photo of me before I went there because I had never had any contact with him from Italy. His collection was like a “Best-of” version of my family photo albums with school photos, family photos and many never before seen photos of my parents when they were a young couple.

Something very odd I noticed about his photos were the percentage of people dying or actually dead in them. Also interesting are the random photos he had of local townspeople that they gave to him. My grandfather was so important that people facebooked him old school with photos of them standing on piles of dirt.

I began to think that if I combined them in JUST the right order that I would unlock some sort of deep family secret which could possibly lead me to take a step back and see a photo mosaic of me sitting at my scanner at this exact point in time which THEN pans to a camera out shot of my arms raised to the sky which pulls out even FURTHER to reveal an even larger photo mosaic above the earth of this hilarious photo of my brother I found where he looks very much like Pee-wee Herman. That photo is below.

 After I completed scanning his entire photo collection into HUGE poster size file images my apartment flooded again. None of the photos were damaged but it did help highlight the fact how fragile photos used to be. In my grandfather’s case many of the photos of his life were as mortal as the people in the photos. Indeed the photo below of my Great Grandfather Rocko is the only photo I can find that exists of his image and it is nearly completely lost.  I am not sure where I am going with this – but it is probably some place depressing.