Images in my head.

November 29, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Through our shooting star and into the light we fly, grateful for all the joy in our lives.
It’s been a trying two weeks. Walking through hell and back on the wings of a few words, yes but pausing to give thanks, too, and that act of will redeeming.
And there was my birthday, and the pearl of messages from friends around the country and around the world on social media was a sweet reminder of my wandering life. It was a reminder of the power of the word. Words against the flow of images from all these years that have become unbearable to see for they remind me a little too much of death. Against the flow my friends’ thoughts dissolving the images away, images that I made and that made me, all those images now no more than a fool’s folly, not my truth, not anybody’s truth, just images willed out of what is now my history.
It has been a strange two weeks.
Dylan turned ten.
I remember turning ten, one of very few childhood memories, and the cake on the table in the large living room of that sixties-styled house in the South of France my father designed, the large living room my father wanted painted bright orange-red, the fireplace in the far corner, all concrete and consuming wood, the table with the cake my mother made and my family there and Paul and Hélène, my parents’ artist friends who lived down the street and were my grandparents growing up because my real grandparents were either dead or nonexistent, a cake and a present and two close friends, and it is all I needed, and that is all I need. I remember thinking getting two digits for sure meant the world belonged to me, I had finally attained the right to step onto the springboard to real life.
Remembering is all I seem to do these days, my circus life long gone but my present full of its trails, bits of nails left on the floor, the dust there.
It has been a long two weeks, a presence an absence an unflinching reality, and my history in pictures dancing in front of my eyes in his eyes.
It has been a strange two weeks, and I am exhausted but at peace in my world of mirrors.

My country bleeds.

November 15, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

My country bleeds, and in the small closed kingdom of my heart I bleed, and all I can write about today is a world of hurt.
My country bleeds, my family is well but all know of someone who is not, who was there, the daughter of a friend of my mother, in the restaurant where one of the attacks happened, she is safe but the friend next to her is dead, my country bleeds and we all bleed, the daughter of another friend in the Bataclan that night, and I bleed and I want to cry Why? but I know why, and there is hard part, scores of disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youth left in the ditch of French society for decades and ready for the brainwashing of groups like the Islamic State, an immense collective mess-up turned international tragedy, and I try but can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, nor at the end of my own inconsequential intimate world of pain.
My country bleeds.
I bleed.
It is a reflection of the beauty of my life so far that I have no pictures to express that, but this one taken from a dance production.
I think of James Nachtwey’s picture of a child crying in a Romanian orphanage, the one that reminds me of the famous painting called The Cry by Edvard Munch.

Roaring at life, we are.

November 8, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

I feel like roaring.
One of those days. One of these weeks.
As my friend and newspaper photographer extraordinaire Denny Simmons said, I “got some love” this week and it felt so good. Excerpts from my very personal and now painfully personal project, The Mudshow Diaries, were featured in a major publication and the thanks I need to extend are endless, even as the bitter-sweet reality of this part of my life being closed are still slowly sipping through my psyche trailing their infinite thread of loss pearls.
But there I go again, waxing sad and melancholy when what this week brought me was sheer raucous joy and not just from my peers and the photo industry but from my two little grains of life, new haircuts and same old ways, just as hard and just as great it is raising them, roaring with laughter and dancing loudly one day and grinding teeth the next, and professional success or not this won’t change a bit, my friends.
But today I do feel like roaring still and it does feel good, simply.