Angel Angles (sorry)...(actually, no i'm not)

i noticed this thing happening a couple of months ago, in the wonderful dashwood bookstore in nyc and also on a few random peoples' photo blogs and maybe also on not so random peoples' blogs (read: scandinavians, read: staid, read: affected 'oddities' in the presentation of a human face/expression)...anyway, i thought it was beautiful. and not that odd. and then when i saw one, i saw many - they were everywhere. then of course, a photograph crossed my path that showed the back of a woman, seated, slightly sepia-ed, amidst a base of ruffles and skirts and poofs, with her low neck bun precise and pinned and detailed, and i could read her face from her posture and tightness, or so i wanted to, and i realized yet again that nothing is new and if it is new it is just contemporary and the game is over until there are years between us and the work and so...so....so, i mean, how many angles of a person's bust/head can you really take? if not front, then back, and then what...well, an infinitum of angles and sides and degrees, true...but i suppose by virtue of the person's expression (i still try to understand where 'that thing' in photography meets those very scientific facts that make up its existence, the object, etc)...on the plus, this is how real-life trumps everything...all expressions all the time from any angles your two little eyes will grant you witness to...anyway, i like the back-of-the-head-stuff i've seen...i wonder when it will get old...

so here is LP, who is going to FREAK OUT because god forbid anyone see a head of curls just slept on, twisted, unruly, unpresentable...i find them familiar, unique, singular...these are good words that don't just apply to borja-paull curls...you could BEEEE these things, and then we could have tea.

with the red and black lumberjack, in the back, with a hat to match

...i might use that lyric more than any other...except for every bob dylan line, i suppose...tater and i saw bob dylan when we were 17 years old. her mother drove us to UCLA some time in may, i believe...it was a monumental trip. we were, of course, in the nose bleeds...we cried like we were seeing the backstreet boys...except that would be those girls, and this was us...fanning out on a 60+ year old man, and not just to be unlike the other girls in our class, and not just to impress the bohemians at our high school (there were none), and not because our fathers had listened, first...but anyway, tater had been searching through his words from about 14 on - i just, last week, came to understand some lines of his from love minus zero / no limit...but tater has always understood everything...she gets everything, at once, from every angle...she gets every one, too, from every angle...their moves their notions their p.o.v., their motivations...she is always right, and i always hope that she's always right...and i hinge my future happiness, at times, on ways that she says i'm going to get out, or through, and i hinge my moods on promises she makes ME, about me...and i hinge my respite on an answered text or a thorough email and sometimes i print them out and put them in my pockets and read them on the train like her messages were a personalized magazine article, with secrets only for me, and between only us...on most days, i look to her as some sort of magic 8 ball, and it has been like that since we were children...our chemistry / our roles were defined for us and at times maybe we fought it or rejected it or played into it or didn't play into it enough or ignored it or didn't want it or thought it meant more or less than what it really means and it wavered but never...really...that much.....and so we assume our adult-ish roles in our own lives, accompanied by a heavy past in our collective memory, an unbroken trust and a unique sort of dialogue... and i think that over time, we just love each other more...

i remember the afternoon tater had found 'blood on the tracks.' we lay on her bed in her wonderful room that i always wanted to be in more so than mine on silkwood drive...her mom usually wasn't home from work before six, and tater had received a stereo with a 6-cd changer, and a remote to match...so we listened to tangled up in blue and by the day's end she had already memorized it...sometimes we went for drives in the orchards just to sing out loud with the windows down...2 years ago we did the same thing on our last trip to santa cruz, in february of '08...i danced in the passenger seat to make her laugh - i always over do it - and i always try to hit the notes i would never try to hit on my own, or care about, on my own, because if i hit them it's funny, and if i don't, it's still funny...and regardless, i wouldn't make any unnecessary noise if she wasn't listening...

happy birthday kmb, from now 'til infinity.

globos para s. shokrae

...sunny and her good time jaunt beautiful unassuming photographs! it's true - they're subtle. i see this little bar, ballooned and marooned in an outer borough, to be the antithesis of sunny's environments...just want her to know if she ever needs a bit of respite, from being the cat's pajamas, she could call a borja up, and i could take her to ovidio's bar...scotch on me, sugar lump.

imaginary naps / things that bloom and hold even in winter

the camera was broken and stuck on 'bulb.' which means that if you hold the shutter down it will stay open for as long as you want it to...which means everything -- most likely -- will be flooded with light and out of focus because you move the camera while pressing/releasing the shutter. anyway, i always think facts like this won't affect me...of course they do.

this is jj's imaginary nap against a wall in a secret locale only a few of you know about. he would have stayed like that for more than 1/250th of a second if i had asked...he's a photogenic sunnmabitch, and he knows it.

Anne-Marie Paul

...as of Saturday had not heard from her 8-year-old son, Mother, or Sister who reside in Carrefour, outside of Port au Prince...I asked her a dumb question: "Do you feel that they are ok..." She thought about it and said yes, but wavered. I felt they were, too. Another stupid thing to say. As of Monday (today), she had heard from them and they were ok, just thirsty...

after Sunday Service - French Baptist Church (Songs for Haiti)

Mount Olive Church - Flatbush