Flashback.
I was walking along the shore today and stumbled upon what seemed to be a student project in progress. I stopped to watch when I noticed the big smile on my face, the same one I recall from 20 years back. I was a student at Los Angeles Valley College, in a two-year photojournalism program, and I was fired up about photography, insatiable in fact. I would rush through my assignments and grab interesting faces to photograph from social gatherings, relentlessly cultivating a lifetime journey as a photographer. I would eat, sleep, and breathe this craft, and bore anyone who would listen, to be perfectly honest.
One person who never grew bored is my soul sister from London, Antonella, the one who to this day spurs me forward. Here is a photo I took of her on the beach 20 years ago, in those indelible school days, experimenting with Polapan instant slide film when my assignments on Tri-X had long been handed in.
Last year I had my first exhibition abroad in the upstairs space at her Cafe, just opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I brought the roots of American Western culture to that little space in London, which was also an amazing reunion with old friends from Sweden and Italy. The images represent so much for me, as the intimate and complex relationship between the human being and his heritage provide a limitless canvas for study and representation.
To bring something so personal to a place and person who has been with me throughout my own history and heritage was a most magical and deeply intimate experience, as I was surrounded my those who have been the fabric of my own development, and that of LEGACY OF PRIDE.
Jaws of Life.
When I met my Shary, he didn’t want a dog. Although he was kind, he was adamant about not having wanted a dog in his house, in his life… and especially one with, erm, “challenges.” (Anyone who has ever owned a dachshund will tell you that they are not for the weak of heart, the precious of carpet, or the fan of discipline!) But Lincoln, court jester that he is, won over my King. And here he is with his jaws of life sunk into the tennis ball once again, King playing in servitude to the jester’s tomfoolery.
Exuberance.
If I define exuberance in its purest form, it is my dachshund, Lincoln. Particularly on the beach, and exacerbated by the “chuck-it” and tennis ball. In fact, he is so crazy when it comes to tennis balls, they have been known to cause him temporary insanity.
I recall a particular day in the sleepy town of Solvang, strolling at a snail’s pace down one of the streets named with first a suffix, and then a “dag,”dotted with picture windows overrun with Danish tchotchkes and bedazzled wine country paraphernalia. Along came an elderly gentleman, likely in the twilight of his 90s, walker adorned with chartreuse tennis balls on its stoppers that shuffle-dragged in time with the man’s slippered feet.
Suddenly Lincoln lunged at the walker, seizing a tennis ball with his vice grip, and tugging feverishly at the enthralling green fuzz. The man, with sense of security compromised, began to panic, shouting in fear, yet fighting the smile on his deeply-creased face. After all, who doesn’t laugh at a crazy clown of a dachshund?
Expanded service area.
Daily beach walks from my home in Malibu provide endless entertainment. This one made me chuckle… I know Charter boasts an expanded service area, but this is a bit excessive!
I only wish I’d had a camera in hand the other day when my dachshund discovered a sheep’s head washed upon the shore. That was interesting! Do I really want to know the story behind that sheep’s head and where it rolled in from? My taste for the exotic took my mind to a Santeria scenario…
Beauty. Simplicity.
This is Grace, and she emodies it. Being back in the USA, specifically in Los Angeles, feels better than I could ever have predicted. This type of work is something I have missed greatly on my travels. I find myself referring to the years leading up to my current status as having been on “a long journey home.” Perhaps wanderlust is the psyche’s innate way of challenging one to deepen his roots, to plant firmly and look at one’s own nature.
My nature, as I see it now, is to embrace beauty. I find that today, as in my younger years, I am inspired by the diversity I have known, and brought home to my own studio.
It is the spirit of my subjects, their uniqueness, that holds me and keeps me stretching.
My favorite quote becomes more dear to me with each passing day, the one from Jack Keouac’s On The Road: “
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Mother.
06 March 2011, Venice, Italy, Carnevale
Oh Venice, city of Woman, She who slaps, and then gently massages the sting away with her gloved hand, I am forever under your spell.
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Debauchery lingering in the breeze, the brightly colored markings of will’s triumph over repression, and the whispered spirit of lusty poets who needn’t sleep to dream… I have felt them all. Blowing laundry has been my hypnotist throughout this great land known as Italy, but here in Venice it brings me fire, the inner fury that is Woman, the colors of retched emotion, polarity, and passion are enlivened, and I have no tonic for this bewitched awakening.
Time away allows for the crystallization of adopted behaviors and practiced desires, months of deliberate measures to gracefully become all the collected aspects that travel promises. But then assimilation’s rival appears at doorstep, a most problematic aspect of my recent ex-life, the insurmountable challenge I came onto this plane to master: a bittersweet wire by which I am attached to family, delectably perverse tendencies that recycle as the same challenge in different packaging time and again. The slap of mother and the gentle massage to follow, now under the watchful eye of Mother Venice… Of my dependency, I speak very little, for there is a contorted, tainted love that is fire and wind, a secret longing for independence, with the pain of emotional dependency that is my life’s work. Yes, it is here in Venice that Mother meets Mother and Daughter, and the differences with which I struggle are aimed at me from all angles, the Mother of all things unconventional a backdrop for a great play.
At this time when immersion is crucial, a mere yearning no longer manageable, I approach 42 still terribly young. What a shame to waste past years in anger, and now possibly more in regret. Is it the anger from which I suffer so deeply, or is it the guilt I bear in anger’s habitat? Oh, glorious Venice with your rich history of breaking rules, how inspired I am by your character. How strengthened I am by your confidence, and how courageous I’ve become under your guardianship. The breathtaking color of your symbolic loins gives me such a burst in your baptism, the spirit of the one that takes a stand for her own desires, free from shame and remorse. Venice, with your richness and unspoken vocabulary, history written by rule makers and breakers, contrarians and awarians, you have taken me by the hand to let it all go. I offer all the “should”s to your waters and replace all the “can’t”s with your steadfast glory… and all my love for Mother is set free to form its own landscape, for love is wild and dynamic, unbridled and without rules, even between a mother and a daughter.
By the bank of your canal, I have received your gift, a silk scarf, four quadrants that represent the seasons of your firey and frigid nature. A Gianni Versace with one corner dipped into the water, its anchor, as you waited patiently for me to discover your blessed gift of colored laundry in the breeze of your instructive teaching. You must be my Heaven, for you have set me free from the Self that could not grow, breathed your maternity into me, and left me standing tall with a newfound love, all things born of religion and sin, comfort and self-loathing, order and chaos… the dichotomy of love and pain are all the glory. In two day’s time you have given me the spectacle and the brutality then the loving touch that heals the fury of a daughter’s struggle.
Pathway.
03 March 2011, Train from Pontremoli to Pisa, Italy
When life is lived completely openly, Heaven on this Earth of ours shows itself in everyday life, in small villages and in breathtaking grandiosity, in the colors of the rainbow and in the blackness of a moonless night, in the face of new love and in the tears of a broken heart. Or in the train conductor, who offered me a throat lozenge to soothe my bitterly raw throat, without any knowledge of my three-week walking illness. Another glimpse of the greater gift awaiting our submission.
So was the man in the otherwise-empty station who mysteriously appeared with change when the ticket kiosk had closed for midday, assisting me at a machine that operated beyond my ability to reason. And it is in my lovely Maria, the Polish cook can laugh and cry at the same moment.
When open, one is an airway through which a breeze can sweep, through which light can illuminate his sacred path. But when one is dense, preoccupied and stayed, the wind of change and of wisdom is met with resistance, fighting against a firmly planted mud wall of a being.
In the absence of complicated language, smiles and hands fill in holes where words could only fail. Words, spirit thieves of the modern world, abbreviated literal statements void of heart and shy of depth that comes from trying so earnestly to communicate… I love being a foreigner. And I love looking like a Russian, or a Spaniard, or a Swede… I could be anyone, and I don’t dare lose my seat in the front row of life by offering the shallowness of an identity. Identity travels in the company of opinion.
An open heart receives but never asks. An open mind learns with little effort. One without greed lives entirely in abundance, seeing and feeling more glory than the dense or tarnished could ever know. Behind the conductor’s smile, beyond his grimy teeth, a lifetime on the tracks burnished like hot cinders, a subtle yet passionate locomotion, with passing landscapes of blessed day after blessed day. Are Italians a joyous people, or merely mirrors of my hungry soul? I have yet to encounter anger, contempt, or even mild disdain. If they are merely masks I see, they are worn well, an airtight fit I can only wish I could export.
Nothing excites me like the sun’s play through darkish clouds, dotting the hilltop villages along the way, or snowy peaks that stand watch over terraced olives and domiciles, freshly-mined marble for sale at roadside stands, and backyard vineyards and vegetable gardens tended according to the moon cycle by old-time farmers who live forever free of technology. The soil is rich with life, either atop a fertile hillside, or in a modest plot beside the electric railway. Living from what exists is the life of an Italian, and not just a city-dweller’s retirement fantasy. An 80ish-year-old woman prunes her garden as the train whizzes past, while her neighbor down the way fights the wind to tie a grapevine, wiry grey hair scraping against a weathered cheek. I want so badly to shout out:
“I am alive with YOU beating within my chest… my heart is singing your songs!”
This is life. This is the land. There are no questions, only unspoken pathways.
The conductor is seated beside me now, pointing out vineyards and trees, marble and granite. I want to cry, but instead I tremble. He has come to see the photo I took of him earlier, and has yet to leave that seat. But I don’t mind. In fact, I love it. The only adverse party is Lincoln, whose explosive bark from within his carrier box sends the conductor into orbit before he settles back in, canine barrier established just outside Massa Station. There is room for all three of us in my little quadrant with cobalt blue headrests, and the conductor charms me further with his suggestion that I ride the old-time train Garfagnana that still runs on gasoline. His passion for the railroad twinkles in his eyes, most enchanting in the golden afternoon sunlight.
Marble garden sculptures and palm trees mark our arrival at the seaside, the gusty mountain climate only mere miles behind giving way to magnolia trees and artichokes in the setting Mediterranean sun. Of course there is graffiti in places along the tracks, an abrupt departure from warm shades of stucco and the early appearance of daffodils. But how offensive really is “figlia di puttana” in the grand scheme of things? Not really violent. Not really gangsta. A man speaks softly into his mobile phone, but the voice on the other end is completely audible, even three quadrants from mine. Another reads the news. Three beautiful women chat about a workshop on positive thinking. It seems there is a protective layer preventing utter jadedness, leaving manners and respect neatly in tact. A team of three Nigerian umbrella salesmen enters the car and sits behind me, loudly, without the frightfully shifty vibration of repute. In fact, only moments later, one of them is seated beside me where the conductor once charmed. He interacts with his friends behind us and Lincoln doesn’t seem to mind. White laughing teeth against satin skin in the golden light only exacerbate my shame.
Oops. I guess they have been misbehaving after all, in a most civilized way, because the conductor is back, but not to fight for my honor and reseat beside me. With a smile on his face the conductor is removing the lot of them, their failure to pay for the train ride a common offense in any country. It is the most genteel quasi law-enforcement scene imaginable, a smile for four others back, and even an “arrivederci.” No great threat to public safety, civilian crime is managed seamlessly.
Long shadows decorate the platform with human exclamation points in pom pom hats punctuating the texture of Pisa S. Rossone Station. The conductor is back to remind me that the next station is mine. I won’t have to miss him, because I am taking him with me. I continue collecting the faces of those I wish to become, fragments of a collective Self that will one day wash up like colored sea glass from this glorious life of mine.
Angels.
02 March 2011, Florence and Lunigiana, Italy
In the train station there are all sorts. Workers, students, Germans, Africans, Romanian gypsies, lovers, laughers, fighters, criers, androgynous teenagers with topiaries for hair in cool shades of rose and violet, grandmothers, spinsters, bankers, tourists, dreamers, and thieves… All are loved by at least someone, and some are loved by very many. Every one of them has an untold story, and yet none knows himself a part of someone else’s romantic picture, mine.
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A glimpse into someone else’s daily life for even just a moment is the colorful fantasy that travel encourages, the cinematic rendering of a life unknown, a journey into another state from which I can always bring the stamp of a souvenir, a frame to keep forever, a small piece of someone else that earns me greater compassion and breaks down walls of ignorance. In life I have fallen into the hand of ignorance’s trickery, placed judgments and caused harm, but only due to a border of isolation and not from pure spirit. Photographs, trinkets, quotes I jot down in a messy scrawl on the train that whizzes past monuments to other ways of living are tokens of a life well spent, ignorance the prominent symptom of a life well wasted.
Perhaps the only thing as awe-inspiring as a direct experience with the divine is being blessed to bear witness to another’s. Last weekend in Florence was the Universe’s gift to Teri Love, and certainly to me, for I absorbed every last savory morsel of sweet Grace along the way, the sweet seal of a friendship that will carry us over miles on this Earth and timelines in the Beyond.
For my dear, gentle friend, Florence was a bittersweet proposition, blue-grey stone and marble structures in which deep and sometimes somber memories of her son are indelibly etched. Although my maiden voyage, a blankish canvas was still soiled with expectation, a force to which I lose time and again, I unable to move beyond the trappings of my mind and its intrigues. Again, I was focused on planning and organizing. This time, it was a dinner party and overnight invitation by a friend of my cousin, whom I’d not yet met, and never would in fact. Coordinating our arrival and the plans I’d laid was of the utmost, or so I’d thought. But apparently this great Energy, the one that gives with the love of mother’s touch, had a design of its own for Teri Love and for me.
Tyler Love was her beloved, her heart, and now her Angel, his short life of 22 years the inspiration for her wine company, Gioia. He had spent his college years in Florence, the birthplace of Gucci, and then joined Gucci itself. For Teri, Florence is textured with memories of Tyler and his friends, a passionate road cycling group who loved food and wine, Ducati motorcycles, and fashion’s gorgeous leather fare, alongside the art toward which there is no immunity.
And then there was Chee Chee, the absentee dark angel. The haughty “city chick” from New York who runs with a fast crowd in Florence, the one who’d insisted on a dinner party and sleepover, the one who’d laid the weekend out for us, and the one who left us standing at the train station, refused our phone calls, and disappeared into the ether. Her role is the sort of biblical presence depicted in art and scripture, the illustrative crossroads, the fork in the road… There we stood, gorgeous bottle of wine, luggage, and dachshund in hand, ripe with the life experience that says “let go,” the sort that comes into play upwards of 40ish… what lends itself to understanding a greater plan at work where panic has no place.
Steps away was Hotel Universo, with room for us and Lincoln too, warm smiles at the front desk to light the way into Tyler’s Florence, where we would play and delight together in his honor, and to shop and taste and drink and wander the streets, finding Tyler’s two symbols in the most unsuspecting places. Yes, hearts and ladybugs sought us out, appearing at nearly every corner, guiding our weekend all the way through.
The beckoning silk Moschino scarf at the department store, ladybug pattern circling round and round to form a giant heart of beetles at the center, the carousel in the center of town with mirrored hearts reflecting colors and images of light and love, and then his favorite meal at his favorite restaurant, ravioli stuffed with pecorino and pear at La Giostra… The owners, having remembered Tyler as if the past five years were frozen in time, celebrated the memory of a beloved regular guest with us, Teri’s healing lovingly encouraged by a celebration of his life. Magic like this is scripted by Spirit, and received in the absence of matter’s agenda’s and attachments. It is the very void in which the greater Everything can be shared. At nearly two in the morning in pitch darkness, our attention was once again captured by the wonder of the night, the sound of fluttering, screeching bats at play encircling the ancient cavities at the church in the piazza near our precious little mod-style chartreuse and black accommodation.
Back at Podere Conti, Teri and I, still reeling from the magic of the Angels in Florence, opened Chee Chee’s unused hostess gift, a lovely Barolo, paired with aged pecorino and tomino. It was only after the last of the spice-scented bubbles circled down the long drain in the footed soaking tub that I looked up in the foyer, Teri passing through at the exact moment, to find the reflection of the chandelier tossing a confetti cascade of hearts around the corridor, the prelude to the bedroom suite’s shower of ladybug reflections. Neither of us spoke, humbled by the presence of pictorial language, the silent communication between two worlds that takes tossing plans and reason aside to receive its glorious message.
Firewood.
24 February 2011, Podere Conti, Lunigiana, Italy
Relentless discomfort shared my bed last night, for today interwoven with my intended carefree spirit is the sort of worry and anxiety I know too well from prolonged exposure to an ordinary life, the one wrought with seeking and chasing a state of being that truly does not and cannot exist.
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A person can live all his years attaching meaning to a person, place, thing, or idea, and chase it forevermore, a self-proclaimed glittering diamond on the horizon that is forever out of reach, only to reveal itself as a mere mirage at the end of a wasted life. This morning’s fear is the same old intricate thread stitched through the fabric of my life, the sort that gnaws at me in spite of my efforts, the one that keeps coming back in one form or another, that lifelong karma I’ve brought with me to cast shadows upon an otherwise-idyllic postcard of a lifetime. For today I fear returning to an old familiar place where I will present the labor of my being for valuation, if indeed anyone sees value within the bestsellers and thrillers of the world, that is. And then there is my outer being, my image, one of which I have fought an endless battle to contour according to modern beauty cues, and failed time and again to satisfy. In short, at “home” I feel useless, out of place, and undiscovered, while on the road I am enraptured with possibility and passion, a sustainable place of constant joy, until the reality of the almighty dollar bares its fangs at me. Why is living in a state of trust constantly buckling under the burden of fear that has been fed to me by a tarnished silver-plated spoon with the promise of pure sterling one day? Why can’t I dive into unseen village wisdom, to simply sweep the stoop with gratitude for another day that history has not repeated itself?
How many times have I bundled up to trudge across the property for the sala di caldaia (furnace room) and added logs to the fire that sustains the entire agriturismo’s heat? How many times without realizing until just this morning’s trip, that with each log I place on the fire I am visiting with my beloved father? How he loved his fires, and how I could have loved them with him, been with him so many times per day, all these cold weeks I had been seeing only the chore in it all. How many other missed opportunities are victors over my preoccupied mind? And how can I focus on a life of Mindfulness if I can’t even recognize such opportunities in this guided lifetime?
Monday in the village of Filetto was such an opportunity. I had in my grasp a friend visiting, wine producer Teri Love of Gioia Wines, for only a few short days. A prestigious pinot noir award in San Francisco is what I believe to the only reason she isn’t beside me today, because a weekend in Florence and the local gnocchi with pesto and organic Chianti might well have ruined her. Together we explored tastes, and together we explored splendor. And on Monday we explored Filetto, an incredible village and its historical cavernous street, the backdrop for more wonder in an ever-expanding scope. We drove the Contimobile through the arched entrance to the ancient village, eyes widening with each cobblestone and every artery, until we parked at the Duomo, the center, the bull’s-eye of a village too small for even a local map.
Enter Mario, a local wine shop owner who breezed through like a pin sweeper, collecting the two standing in plain view at the piazza. He led us through hallways that doubled as walking streets, stone wall fortresses insulating a centuries-old community, colors of curtain and clothesline splashed across the otherwise hue-less textured monochrome. By what seemed a giant fireplace we found ourselves encircled, shaft of light ricocheting against the irregular-shaped chimney walls above and pouring into to the very center of the fortress floor to reveal a table for six set with vintage handmade linens and table bits, all of it for sale. This ancient fire pit was now Filetto’s antique store, tucked gently away within the village’s musculature. The streets might have been hollowed out by natural causes, or smoothed along as a formed-rock slide on a slow-moving river. Every twist, every turn was hollowed and rounded within its miniature infrastructure. There have never been cars in Filetto; only ambient and human energy have shaped these passages for millennia. Mario stopped at a corner whose street sign read brightly in the cotton-cloud daylight: Borgo degli Ebrei. The Italian smiled and explained enthusiastically: “Ebrei…Ebrei… Cattolici e… Ebrei…” He waved his hand to either side of the narrow street, indicating that each side represented one particular thing exclusive of the other, and he continued stammering through an explanation until the light popped in my head. The Hebrew Hamlet was on one side of this tiny medieval street, a piece of Judeo-Catholic history petrified into foreverness, solidarity frozen in time, even in ancient Italy. I smiled and told Mario that Teri and I both are Jewish. He said: “I know.”
He must have also known that Teri would have loved nothing more than to be let into his otherwise-closed-for-the-season wine shop, and for me to have continued random discoveries to unveil, for as Teri felt bottles and read labels, I was whisked away once again, Italian-style, by a seven-year-old Lorenzo, Mario’s son. Giving the identical walking tour to his fathers’, Lorenzo repeated each aspect, stopping and repeating learned history, with pride and adoration of his father. No, the sever-year-old did not leave a single note out of the hymn-like tour, including the Boro delgi Ebrei, and thus Teri and I left with a loaded camera, a bottle of Syrah, chestnut flour biscuits, and Mario’s gift of chestnut cream sweet spread, which I was dying to taste. If it tastes at all as sweet as the son’s devotion to his father, I will only be able to take a small bit, for squinting into the setting sunlight I could make out Lorenzo’s back trailing behind his father, eager to help, eager to learn, and eager to shine… the sweetest delegate of the slow life, the one who lives happily placing logs on the fire in honor of father and family, to heat and to nurture, and to be a part in the sum of everything.
