apologetics

dear friend,

i hope the playlist isn't annoying. you can turn it off. i ask only that you take a moment to appreciate the thoughtful selection and judicious editing invested in it, before you turn it off.

you see, it isn't just a collection of what i like. there is a whole pile of songs that i listen to almost every day, that i didn't include. neither is my collection limned along an aesthetic of what will strike you as stimulatingly tasteful and inoffensively sexy...for that playlist, visit a j. crew store.

...i'm not going to tell you what the tie-together is. because that wouldn't be poetry, would it?

i just wanted you to know that i took pains. there, i'll leave it at that.

also, do you like the shadow pictures on the right? those are the kind of photographs i would like to take. i'm glad somebody has that talent. you know who is freakin awesome, is alfred stieglitz.

i think he was married to georgia o'keeffe.

how do you reckon they influenced each other?






painting makes so much more sense to me as an art--a tekne, if you'll pardon me--than photography does. photography is like prophecy. look at this one:

don't tell me that shot was set up!
or this one, one of my favorites:









or even that cliched robert doisneau shot:










even studio photography, as engineered as it is, has such an out-of-control element to it. you're not just trusting the muses and their influence on you; you're involving their influence on another person, to say nothing of that person's neuroses. the realer and more commonplace your model, the less control you have, it would seem to be. working with a carefully-engineered personality, like this:














would seem a safer bet--i find characters are much more predictable than real people.

when i decided to leave new york instead of stay here forever, i started carrying my dinky digital nikon around with me. i've been seeing the wacked-est things here, every day; having forced the issue--now that the time is now--i stopped waiting for expertise and began taking pictures on instinct. you'll see them.

this may just be me--beautiful is peculiar. marilyn monroe is more beautiful than ava gardner because she looks tortured, not confident as one expects a bombshell to be. i find the lower east side more beautiful than tribeca. "minha galera" (on my playlist) is more beautiful than anything by coldplay...sorry. even salvador dali...well, not that i would want to have sex with him, but he is more beautiful than than the self-styled hedi slimane-clones that walk around soho and the meatpacking district.

(i did mention that i wouldn't want to have sex with salvador dali, right? i just want that to be perfectly clear.)