Two New Paintings By Frida

On the Left: Self-Portrait with Monkey. On the Right: Monkey with Camera...

Marissa With Scissors

...we stole flowers ("BUT YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE!"..."you're carrying scissors in your purse..." "Oh.") and then crashed an MFA show and stole their food...but i kind of just like to think about it as taking what is in abundance...

Ilana Painted As Painted By Maori Warriors

...squint...see?

phony ponies

...he left his subject matter just layin' around...

Pete from Nostrand Avenue...

...bought flowers for his second wife on Mother's Day, 2009. He didn't want the cane to be in the frame. He was well kept and polite, with dyed black hair and a way of carrying himself that smelled of reform / change...change isn't easy. in fact, nearly impossible...maybe it has something to do with his first wife...and recognizing everything he can in his second...and in the present, as opposed to regretting...

for m.a.bravo, but for pop first

i'm just missing a huge cactus and a naked woman swathed in white cloth laying in the foreground... in bedford stuyvesant i know two girls who have made the type of home i would like to live in someday, someday very soon...open windows, clean kitchen with kitschy and beautiful art alike taking up most of the space...scattered typewriters mark each room and feline/canine paws scatter through the hallways...mementos, empty frames, film canisters...a backyard, some faded wood, and pink flamingos...a faded pony on springs and plastic swing-set, plastic lobsters and drawers full of love.

My Laura / Our Philip / Phil Breeze / His Laura / (My Back Pages)

This is mine. Me. Hers. His. Isn't she spectacular? She was younger than me now ("...ahhhhhhhwww but I was, so much older then, I'm younger...than...that...nowwwwww...."), but already accomplished, a woman in many rights, about to meet me, having already met my Father...FF to 2009: Breezy (hi Breezy) is married to a Laura himself. Maybe Breeze was my Grandpa Philip in another life? Nah, that is too easily/literally circuitous... It is obvious we only have one life. Fucking soap operas always more accurate than we would like them to be...so, yesterday we spoke of my nanny project...for a long time. I had a rather intuitive / sensitive day; fascinating...and came to some (lame/obvious/true) realizations...albeit (can i say albe-them???) big realizations...albethem big realizations...my nanny project, hidden behind words like 'domestic workers' 'women of color' 'surrogate motherhood' and ideas that dance around class/politics/race and (now) two photos (Robert Frank / Ian Blueberry) of black nannies and white babies...is really nothing more than my exorcism regarding motherhood (past / present / possible future). Namely: no one else could have raised me. i am not ready for the ineffable. i still have an umbilical chord (we joke mom, but really...). she had me at 28. i look like her to an extent but not exactly alike...which i guess i see loosely speaking to the idea of nannies as CHOSEN mothers, not chance mothers...and what does it do to a white boy (pardon me) to look at a beautiful woman from Granada for the first 8 years of his life? Nothing? Anyway, all of a sudden it got more complex. Especially when OURS is nothing but unconditional singular LOVE---and love, the word, the sound, the idea, the power of it---has no place in academics, does it? Not even in art...not so explicitly as what I guess I am drawn to BY NATURE: warmth, accessibility, acceptance, touch...in sum: warm fucking fuzzies!...that is not cutting edge journalism, now is it? is what i really am exorcising is a big exhale, a photographic-"phew" at the luckiness of the situation i was born into?! this little Laurita was essentially, born for me?! Isn't that how children see their world? I am the sun/daughter, and you turn around and for me?

Ironic, because I thought, if anything, I'd be exorcising father-issues in my photography, not Mother issues...because she and I have none...

Anyway, I disappointed myself a little bit...even though I know, in my heart of hearts of palm, I am not a particularly controversial type...although I suppose we write about what we know / and we photograph what we know, or didn't know we know, or need to know more or WHATEVER...and SHE is the only thing I KNOW. She is that place Barthés talks about, after Freud...she is my landscape, that familiar, particular space from which I will/must build everything...this specific photographic (project) process, then, has been more than just a logorrhea of confused words and ideas, or a relapse into bulimic tendencies as exorcism, or an exorcism of self and images, but an actual heimlich...heimlich: an "awakening in me the Mother...."

(pg. 40 - Camera Lucida)