oddities n images

bikko's second impression

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Danny Bikko rolls over two minutes early and pesters me with questions about my project. Who is this character I want her to play? What motivates the character? How much am I paying? This is the primary question, of course. And I should ask Danny what I’ll be getting for the kash but I am too polite and we experiment forward.

The character is a woman in flames.
Dreams not dashed yet, but curdling.
The perfect love is a cruelty of imagination and self respect is no longer expanding commensurate with time. I.e., a sense of accomplishment is wanting.

But I sense Bikko calculating and cut to the chase: Let’s do a scene:

Is this what you did as a child?
Watch women?
(pause)
Maybe I should ask myself
who was watching me
when I was a child.
But I can’t do that in front of you.
I won’t do that in front of you.

Bikko hammers the scene, a baby shark let loose in a playground of guppies, and I get teeth marks around my neck. And then she says:

“I can’t have nude pix of me floating around cyberspace, Blue. No nudes.”

bambi, meet bikko

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I am not a photographer. I am a poet in a producer’s body. But when I was a little bambi in Beirut growing up in the laps of my nannies I started drawing the world into shades of possibilities and both love and hate became the same color, primary. I knew when I saw something what color to make it and how much love or hate to put in the picture.

A lot of lifetime got spent between the laps of my nannies and the day I took this picture of Brendan Sheelagh Bikko in the hills on top of Lalaland. The instant I saw it I recognized this page, even these words and caption next to the sunshine girl waltzing into tomorrow.

I am no bambi now, and Beirut like Barbarella has lost its balls, so I know when I shoot her the first time that this is my last chance to make something beautiful rather than something cool, which is all I’ve ever tried to do. And that night after we sat beneath the hooting owl and talked about the future I peed blood into the present and got another warning about time and its intention not to stop on my account even if I might be on the verge of knowing how to slow the fucker down.

I have already died once and I do not look forward to doing it again. So I keep moving, an engine with no rust but no starter, until I collide with Danny Bikko, who is trying to be an astronaut and an actor and an assassin and a naughty girl all at once. She will bring me to a stop if I realize her potential before she does, so I do my very best to ignore her.

“When can we shoot again?” she asks on my voicemail.
“Never,” says me on hers.
“What? You looked at me yesterday as if I were a dollar sign.”
“Coz yesterday I was broke, and today I am broken.”

Brendan laughs into my voicemail and tells me she’ll be right over.

Into the Sun (pages 4-5)

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The original title of this book was

“Brendan Bikko Flies Into the Sun”

but I changed it when Brendan said she thought the title was cliched. “Every yuppie has gone photovoltaic and if you want to make some pesos you should just stick me in a garter and bra on the cover and say something real simple, like ‘According to Me by Blue’ and sit back and record the cash registers ring, and besdes that you always want your books to begin with ‘A’ so you’re at the top of the list of new releases and the editors check you out first. But no matter what you do, don’t put that blue picture of me with the prism streak in my hair coz I look 29, and if you want to corner the lonely old men you’d better have me looking fresh and ready to be pushed into the mud.”

I like the picture of Brendan with the prism blue streak in her hair, and I like to think of her at 29, when women reach the apogee of their desires, when wildness gets old and relevance and perception are up for their last grabs; seize the Universe with both eyes or get ready to lie down in a man’s world.

Also, I caught her in the future, just when everyone was trying to touch her now, so just between me and her she owes me five pesos extra for trying to see beyond what she wanted to show.

(from "According to Bikko" pages 4-5)

Brendan Sheelagh Bikko #13

I have other things to do, and am pressed impossibly into situations I have made for myself, and the musical has got a life suddenly in Lalaland, and I just got a thrilling e-mail from the photo book editor at Taschen without my knocking on any door in which he writes we must meet soon, and here's this radiant cherub from the boundary waters answering all my questions with an unusual shy aplomb.

shot by Blue March 18 2007

Brendan Bikko Flies Into the Sun

I love this photograph the instant I see it, and when I cull the 250 shots after Brendan leaves I immediately seek it out and find it every bit as satisfying as the moment it happened. The image is untouched by photoshop. I will find out later that her father installs photovoltaic cells for a living, and as I lie down at night to read the end of a story about rainbows another idea comes twisting out of the firmament: "Brendan Bikko Flies into the Sun." I do not want to even think about this idea, since it could ruin my life as I know it now and send me off on an impossible tangent into Most Important Project No. 174. And I must focus my dwindling time and energies right now on the target I have set for myself.

(shot by Blue March 18 2007)

Juxta Posing

She swears she will not look at me as she gets dressed to make money. Bikko is sick of posing. She has just ridden in from the desert and avoided the birds and the virus, and now I am another obstacle, peering. "One of us will kiss the other on our deathbed," she says, "And whichever one of us is left will have to learn how to be alone when taking a sounding of our surroundings." I am off to hunt down a man who traps coyotes, but Bikko's words are a trap of my own. What are my surroundings now?

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Pretty Lost (Lipsticked)

Soon after I met her, I became obssessed with making Abbi look ugly. When a male says this, he really means to make the model look multo attractive so he can push her in the mud or dirty her up or throw a scar across her back. Worked for Newton and Beard. Abbi laughs her throaty laugh and gets ready to get dirty.