At the edge of everything, I seem to find the fullness of self. One more step leads into a fall or a drift which will break me to pieces. This balancing act, of leaning out over an empty drop, while still aware of orbits and anchors, is a path I’ve followed all my life. Like a trapeze flier, or walker of high wires, the attention I attract is not usually due to fond familiarity but to the possibility of failure. And of failure with consequence. Extinction, scars or exhaustion. But here at the edge there is energy and treasure to grasp and collect, not just from being in places without people, but from being forced by planetary grandeur to admit that in the end I am a person without a place.

Love comes without invitation or warning, and leaves the same way. So why would anyone spend a minute waiting for it? And why chase it? Except how can you deny how elemental love is, especially as you value solitude and knowledge more and more with age? The more you study, the more you know you don't know, the more love shines as something to admire or celebrate but not to possess or clutch. Letting love go is the best way to find out who you are, and how capable you may be in making love or rescuing it when it calls out for help, and asks that only lovers respond to its troubles. But here I am, putting a human sense onto an emotion that has evolved to help society survive and procreate. And I do this because I am impressed into creating a piece of literature that explains love and defends it only when it is capable of destruction, because to feel it as a comfort is an insult to what loving means: love kills you, if you are very lucky and very brave. Who expresses this? Why?

I was writing beautiful shit. I mean, pretty. And then a deadline moved into the movie, and the four scenes I have left (which explain everything) are suddenly shy as snow leopards. I washed the dishes, sang in the shower for an hour, called everybody and said nothing, read Camus and watched Monica Vitti, flirted and threatened and made people cry and laugh and curse me upside down, and still the writing hides . . .

"It's probably the best way," her voice says, as she breaks up over the line.

She will always be going where the reception is in danger of failing, so she can be herself, in her own universe. And in that place, there is no room for me. I do not fit. Because I come attached to a million dreams, huge balloons that carry me in unknown directions. She falls in love, or she fights with a friend, or she just wants to dance, and she will not notice if she punctures a balloon of mine. But then her universe is quiet, and her imagination starts working without schoolwork in her head or a boy in her pants, and she remembers what happens when we are trying to make something, how thrilled she was to be the center of my attentions.

How far she swam to leave her universe and come into mine! She can't stay long, because that is not my nature, and she learns to fly, because escape will always be her desire. Other people will see us flying and shout "Look at those people in the sky!"

But can this ever happen outside of her dreams? Will she ever broadcast herself again to me? Because now she won't hear me. She no longer trusts me. Because she cannot listen to her own impulses nor trust herself, so how can she do these things with me?

"I am just like you," says me.

"No, no, nobody is," says she, and the reception breaks completely, leaving me in shocking silence, with her all alone in her dreams. She will drink and dance and get laid and maybe think of me in the middle of the night with a burst of anger or frustration, and think again that it is not her who has changed but me, and I cannot call her then and say: "I still want to watch you being you, and I am still looking for you, waiting for you to show me who you wish to be, so I can make a picture and say,

'Look, Maya, do you see?'"

Oh, she thinks, that person does not look like me!

But, Seanie, I love your picture. 

Do you have more? Of me?

________________________________

If the circumstances turn out a certain way,

this is every woman's nightmare.

I come in to her small ranch outside Vegas and find her in an empty hot tub, huddled and in tears. Daddy is bleeding from his eyes. She doesn't look at me or acknowledge me and my camera. "Daddy's bleeding from his eyes, like tears, dark, burgundy." I can't say anything, you never can, but I sit on the edge of the tub and she reaches up her hand to touch. "I know it's impossible, Blue, since it's only been two months, but I can feel it kicking."

The baby.

No way. She says she can feel it trying to come out. Daddy is dying, and she is pregnant, giving birth. "It's like a race. I have to win," she says, and she repeats this a dozen times. I can see her belly and thighs straining, and I tell her to relax, that she will win the race only if she relaxes, and this gets her out of the tub and into bed, where she's asleep seconds after lying down. She sleeps until the next dawn, when the caw of some bird wakes her up in fright. I smile, she smiles, and the fright flies out the window.

Daddy will be happy to see you, she says. Maybe, thinks me.

+++++

This little passage opens a novel publicly written by Blue in 2009. You can catch it in action right here. And for more of the Raindancer in images and some small words, go here.

The think tank is spooky at night, and the hairstylist wants to know if I am afraid of ghosts. There is not a spirit who I wouldn’t be happy to meet, I tell her, and if there are any in this building they will certainly come looking for me. Because my creative impulses are finding similar beats in people ready to make some noise. Thieves are in charge, more here in Iceland than anywhere else in the world, and they are using the national values of family to keep the citizenry in the dark. So people fed up with being ripped off by a handful of redneck aristocrats find my quixotic campaigns either amusing or inspiring, and new friends seem to be everywhere, tuned to the possibilities of revolt. It makes for an interesting new year, when anything can happen and probably will.

Photography is the province of the privileged. There is a wide discourse current on the Net which asks us if the proliferation of cameras is a good thing for photography. Aren't there too many people taking pictures? Hasn't the medium turned mediocre, with any impulse for creativity instantly gratified for a few hundred dollars and 12 megapixels? The people who make this argument tend to be the amateurs who once shot with actual 35 millimeter film, and they are aghast at the arrivistes passing them by with 3,000 shots a month. For a blue collar stiff like me, improperly self-educated, the situation is wonderful: anyone (almost) can shoot and document their own barrios and inner souls without suffering the interpretations and infatuations of the rich. And Diane Arbus, bless her soul, was rich, the daughter of a man who sold furs in Manhattan. Arbus studied under Lisette Model, who was so well-off she had a maid to tie her shoes; Lisette as a teenager still did not know how to tie shoelaces. No wonder it is tempting to say now that Arbus was mining the veins of poverty for her own profit as she stalked transvestites and circus freaks. She put in her sweat, after all (working with her husband on fashion shoots), and the equity allowed her to capture faces and places the rich rarely encountered. But what did she say about these people? What did she think? Does Diane Arbus still influence how we shoot? Or did she know, somehow, how shallow her lifetime of images would become? Was it that despair that drove her to suicide? Because in the end, what is a photographer left with, if the only impulse to shoot is to record what you see? Which photographer can you say has recorded what he or she felt about themselves? Well, actually, Arbus: How many times did she admit the freaks she shot were simply her mirrors? Her weird photographs actually seem to say more about her than they do about her subjects. That realization alone would be enough to drive her to the pills and overdose. It's tempting to read that possibility into her thoughts, but she left us with too little to mull. Like other well-heeled photographers who made their names by wandering among the poor, all Diane Arbus really left us was a bunch of arresting images with very little explanation for not only their existence but why she made them.

the breeze brings memories of the dead, chats and chortles, but work is done until daylight puffs out because there are tombstones to clean and faces to paint, children to decorate in halloween, in skulls or flowers, so let the men debate sports and politics while the engines keep churning to keep traditions from falling out of favor, where most traditions would go if it wasn't for a mother to protect them, unless they have to do with killing or medals, at which time a man is only too glad to snap to attention; but for making the cemetery into a flowery display, fuck that, the males congregate around the results from the futbol or the scandals in the Mayor's office, unless it is their woman, their mother maybe, or hopefully Heaven forbids it their daughter, lying in memory beneath the stones, under the dusty soils and broken shreds of last year's celebrations of the day of the dead, in which case the man turns poet and bends to the task, choking tears and coughing for breath . . .

The college recruiter is 32, and is in the basement of the convention center in Portland, where he gets the attention of my niece Aisha. He's trying to sell her American University, even though his own alma mater is UNC. He feels guilty when potential students are turned away because they can't afford the $20K in annual tuition, but it's his job to recruit, so he's fishing for dollars anyway. He's still paying off his own college loans. Aisha asks him if he could be doing something better with his money than paying back loans, and of course he can think of a million things to do with the cash.

How do you feel about an innocent 12th grader getting dragged into a lifetime of debt, asks Aisha of the college recruiter. He wishes that schools are a lot cheaper, and he indeed borrowed to go to school and has a few years to go, and here he is trying to pay his nut by getting other fools to pay up and go to American U. So now he's got a degree and is working in college admissions, although he admits he hopes this won't be his job in another ten years, because he's afraid it will make him hardened. But it's not me who designed the system, he keeps saying, to which Aisha keeps replying: Yeah, but you're the messenger.

I arrive two days before she dies. With my father, it was a handful of hours. My mother went to the doctor and was told he wanted to remove her leg. She asked for a taxi and split. She would die with all limbs intact. They set her up in a bed in her living room, where her family could come for uncomfortable reminders of what is coming in all our futures. Hospice came and played Mozart, which she hated. Force fed her until she couldn't go to the bathroom any more because of the state of her leg. She didn't eat another bite, and didn't go to the bathroom again. No more potty, no more norurishment. Men with a funeral car came and zipped her up into a body bag. I helped them carry her out to the car and they drove away. I helped my aunt write a laughable obit for the newspapers. Seems like my mother founded the Sorbonne and brought peace to the Middle East and I didn't even know it. Controversy started soon afterward, and my brother-in-law came up with the best quip: "This is her way of getting more attention from her family." I have to admit I thought she would take a lot longer, and drag everyone with her, but I was wrong. I apologise. She left the world the same way she came in, with no grand plans and not at all eager to make the place any better than she found it. But I suppose we can say this about most parents if we stop to think about it. My parents were both humorous, extravagant people, but not heroic in the slightest. Mikey Cormier calls me and says I can join his Orphans Club, and from the sound of it, a few beers on his tongue and sadness in his tone -- he and my mother respected each other quite a bit -- he is calling me from that Club. I will have to go and see what it's like.

----------

It's where the fibre of the art is, isn't it Chris? The first thing I think of here is van Gogh's purples in the wheat. Where did he get that color from? The eye isn't picking it out, but it's there, submerged from view perhaps but not absent from the structures of everyday life. This is the first time I read that you had "lab days" and like a flash so many of your pictures come into sharper focus. I was just about to write about the glare in your outhouse picture, the way it flakes off the doorway (and off my retina) in the dark contrasts of the buildings, and here a few pictures over is the explanation: A camera like a microscope is such a cool tool to use while searching for secrets, not just of angles and textures and shadows, but also from feelings, from life. There is science in these photos, and science bursts with unimaginable poetry and color, as in this connective tissue sample; it's cool that you can make a poetry of these underlying lines and ties. And isn't the object of all science to get us closer to understanding the poetry of being?

You can see more of Chris Whitney's photographs at his website, or at his JPG site. 

The flood comes in stronger than two decades, and tops out at the bridge at 17 feet above normal. The trees are submerged, and the life on them and in them is swept away, but nobody is counting. Spiders and daisies have no defenders, and the flood becomes a tourist attraction. I am out in it for the colors, to concentrate on something other than a kidney stone or aching testicles or radiation poisoning, and the photos are drips of panacea. Especially as dark falls, and the shooting gets difficult.

Blue says in a conversation with Roland Varity:

And I remember McQueen, walking around in Marseilles, which is just the epicenter of racism, of skins forced apart, and a gang of kids were hanging out, and he heard them speaking in Arabic about how they would jump him and take his money, and just when they were getting to their feet, with a few moments to spare, he said to them in Arabic: “Why you talking about me like that, you motherfuckers!” And they were laughing and calling him brother, slapping his hands, hugging, and he told me, “Dude, in another two minutes, I would have probably been sitting here with a broken jaw.” And that to me is a very French story.

Interview is coming to BadTV. 

Gigi -- Thanx for your note, a drop of gasoline on the embers of last year. I was just sitting in a swirl of thought wondering whether I would make 2008 a year of accomplishments -- real, defined, verifiable efforts -- and it occurred to me that I would need some artificial measurement of my writing intentions. "You know, one year Sean wrote a million words of poetry," and the thought lit up as appropriate to me, now. When, if not now? One million words, why not? Do something astronomical, quantifiable, 2739 words a day. Then your salutation blazed in, carrying the authority of all your great pictures, and the idea of a million words just seemed so tangible and accessible. Why not?

Your message fell like a small flame out of the sky of possibilities. A piece of flint slicing into my imagination. A spark without a map. And I have thousands upon thousands of pictures to illustrate with poetry. A thousand pictures, a million words . . . why not? Means nothing if I don't accomplish it. But if I do, what a brag. I wouldn't have to say anything. I could sit on my ass and think I did something in 2008 I will never have to do again, and the slightest whimsy of timing pushed me into it. A thought, building, and a message of encouragement, that fantastic fuel of theatre and art. Idea, enthusiasm, aflame.

I hope you make in 2008 more of what you've shown here. You have a special, special view of life, and everyone should see more of what you capture. Thanks for the note, Gigi.

This is 282 words of 1,000,000 in 2008. 

You can see Gig Tindle's magnificent pictures at JPG Magazine. 

(UPDATE: Gigi quit JPG, more or less, and hopped over to 15x100, and I followed her, more or less, before I quit 15x100 in a silly huff, and then went looking for her there and wonder what's happened because now there's no link for her at 15x100, either, so I wonder . . . Hmm . . . But I found her at RedBubble, in disguise. Check her out; she's part genius, no question.)

You always talk about Venus.
But which Venus are you referring to?

The naked redhead standing on an oyster shell?
Or the planet, full of volcanoes and hurricanes?

You kiss the redhead,
get her to fall in love with you,
you’re in hell.
And if you land on the actual planet,
you’re definitely in hell.

Just re-read the hilarious memoir by James Brown, Lalaland screenwriter now prof of lit, and submitted to the impulse to ask for an interview, shown below as a letter to his handlers:

I'd like to do a short 15-minute interview with Mr. Borwn for BadTV on Youtube. Despite the fact that we are an underground organization, we stumble periodically into the mainstream. We also run a youtube channel called the memechannel, wheer we would excerpt a few minutes of Brown's ideas on life, writing, California, and that horror called the future of humanity.

We'll be happy to pay him to secure the 15 minutes, if need be. I guarantee he will be as amused by our views of the world as will be edified by his. The fifteen minutes will pass extremely quickly, and we can interview him in a hallway if need be. We don't believe in wasting time. Especially our own!

Thanks, Seanie Blue

Note misspelling, first reference to the writer!

In every model's life there are moments when beauty is a curse. Aisha turns 18 this month and is immediately burdened by the freedom of choice: to model or to nurse Mother Nature? She loves the camera. She feels the Earth wailing every time she crumples up the plastic containers filled with leftovers she will never eat. Does she give in to the pleasure of possibility or fight against the profiteers? What is her choice? She thinks about it, and my shutter opens; we've conspired to make her ugly, which any model knows is a chance to look beautiful, damaged, discarded, that fantasy every pretty face has, of finally reflecting the tortured inner landscapes we all deny. She is still pretty despite the smudged makeup, but the planet is a harsh judge and she feels its pull. Glamour or gravity? She thinks about it.

Taking pictures of what I saw made sense to me long before I could afford a camera. I made mental images of my memory, and have spent the past twenty years revisiting everywhere I've been. And now wherever I go I make images to see if I can match what I saw then. The beautiful thing about trying to examine past experiences is that you keep making beautiful new past experiences.

Possession and time might not be mutually exclusive. You might be able to have both. But acquisition and time may be mutually exclusive. And acquisition usually results in possessions; so the more shit you buy the less life you live. But here's a little wrinkle: What if you acquire memories instead of possessions? The formula then round into: Time can be acquired. But with what? What do memories cost? They cost time, of course. So if you spend time to get time, you might be multiplying your time. Time x time = time2. Makes me wonder about the origin of the phrase "time well spent." And a friend at dinner tonight ponders the dissolution of his possessions to fall out into the world, but at what risk? Do you ell the house and stocks and make more of yourself? Or do you keep your investments and make more of them?

At Jim Brandenburg's gallery in downtown Ely, I stroll over the $1400 lithographs and glycees-on-canvas, a student, studying, and walk outside into the chilly autumn to take more pictures. Each shot is better, thanks to Brandenburg. Details, details, details. The tripod comes out of the trunk, and the notion that I must stay in one place, patiently, grips my plans as I head south toward the city. A photograph is not a moment. It is a study of evolution. I have to capture Darwin, not drama.