Heading up to Boston later this week. “Maggie” has a gig.
I walked to City Hall and got some sun to photograph the City Clerk. Already I have a beach tan and soon will be the Jersey Shore. Sunday looks like rain is possible. Oh-well.
In the market news seems like the economy might be slowing down, and also construction also seems to be slowing down.
Did you see the article on Zombie mortgages? Pretty much these 80/20 dual mortgages have been purchased and the forgiven part actually gets reactivated into an unpaid debt. People are loosing their homes due to foreclosure.
Ouch…
In day two of thought, it seems like merging my writing and photography has some limits. Not so canned as I thought, but I think still an interesting way to show my photography.
The writing about my father is poetic writing by itself. I could use shots of Brooklyn that mostly concentrate on Williamsburg and Greenpoint, but at best this would only be a short.
Still it would be a bit disjointed and too random to make sense.
I think the bigger story here is my search for a sense of home, and in my case having something permanent, that being having photography to take with me as I had the premonition that one day I would be forced to leave.
My narrative is that the experience of long term Foster Care (defined as more than 7 years, and I was in Foster Care for over a decade) has 5 highly probable outcomes: mental illness; homelessness; addictions to drugs or alcohol; criminality; and lastly suicide. Pretty much I have been told I am the exception.
Getting moved like an object as a child and all the disruptions is a different kind of homelessness. Then being a gentrifier and getting displaced again and again with a lack of permanence pretty much for me was somewhat reliving my childhood.
So I kinda see my father’s story as a kind of subtle way to lead from my father’s history to my own personal history. Not an easy story to convey or tell, but my street shooting and how I liked to capture the destitute and run down sections of the city that were gritty was a reflection of where I came from and escaped.
Not sure if I need to include the part that includes the Accidental Icon, the travel, the luxury, posing and that rabbit hole. I think I need to keep it pure, where I just needed a sense of permanence to finally have a sense of home. Pretty much I think this is the story I want to tell.
Think about the concept of home. A safe place, a place where you are welcomed, a place where you have roots and ties, a place where you belong. It takes about 18 years for a baby to become an adult, a long period of maturation, but disrupt that, and remove all the things I just mentioned above and pretty much life is all about impermanence.
For much of my life I never really thought I had a future. Growing up there was all this confusion, my past blurred by trauma, and pretty much I was an animal living only in the moment on impulse. I lived with an intensity that scared people, but this level of edgy anxiety was not sustainable and at one point in my life I was diagnosed as a manic depressive.
I was 32, and basically I had to learn how to relax, something I never learned to do. When I credit my friend Iron Mike for saving my life through biking, I’m not exaggerating.
There is a character arc: I used visual arts to process my jumbled thinking into multi-layered images that interacted with each other in a sculptural manner; I got my first Masters in TV Journalism to be able to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and an end in 6-7 sentences, and was able to write an autobiographical screenplay about the loss of my mother, but only in the third person voice.
It was after September 11th that I got my MFA in Creative Writting and was able to write in the first person.
Some of my friends pointed out that there was a time when I spoke of myself as a third person all the time. I was so damaged that this was a defense mechanism to blunt all the pain inside me. My friends thought I was being playful and funny, and I had not realized that I had this behavior.
On a side note, the homelessness and mental illness on the streets of NYC today is a bit too much for me to bare at this point in my life. It disturbs me because that could be me. I have now a home, a sense of community, and a safe place. Today NYC disturbs me. The chaos, the anxiety, the stress of the city is not good for me.
I’m almost done with our friend’s Sari Botton’s anthology “Say Goodbye To All That.” This book is a collection of essays about falling in love with NYC and falling out of love with NYC. Somehow this collection is aligned with the moment I’m in now along with all the other things that are converging that I claim is divine intervention.
Maggie and I call ourselves “Refugees from Madhattan.” Actually I coined the term. You could add the word “Covid” as an adjective to define a timeline.
I can see using street photography and my urban landscape shots as a visual journey that coincides and gets to explain how my past meets and merges into my present. Two journeys that basically are one. Perhaps a title could be “A Sense Of Home.”
Anyways here is some of my sketch padding. Clever thing is that I’m using my archive of photographs, my writing, and living history to frame the story. I know in advance a lot has to be edited out.
Cal