A life like mine, sometimes there aren’t enough choices to make. As much as I very much want to be the kind of person who lives the Flaubert quote (“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”), if I’m too orderly the days slip away. Besides, I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.
So instead I spent a not-insignificant portion of my weekend reorganizing my bag to be black-and-white. The Rollei 35t’s got JCH Streetpan 400 B&W film. I’ve filed away my colored pencils in favor of a Micron 0.1 pen. I’m trying to rewire my brain as monochrome.
It does change things. I get in the habit of seeing colors in terms of value and contrast, rather than part of the human eye’s color wheel. My go-to move in photography is to take monochrome photos of things that really ought to be in color and color photos that could pass for black-and-white.
Uncle Nicky’s in Hyde Park, Austin, Texas (September 2020)
I loved Campari when I drank, and I particularly loved Negroni season. Three different alcohols mixed together to create some sort of alcoholic hydra monster-friend? That was my kind of season. At parties I’d set a strip of orange peel on fire to demonstrate my home bartender bona fides, which gave me complete hacker-level access to the bar no matter whose house it was. I could take surreptitious shots of gin while joking about having the drinking palate of your Italian grandma. Getting blotto never felt so classy.
Julie Doxsee, from “Undersleep” (2008)
Has Julie Doxsee passed out in a doorway? Have I?
During quarantine, I bought a Yashica-12 TLR and shot medium-format film until the camera broke and found new life as a bookend. For non-camera people, a TLR is a top-down-viewer camera you sometimes see in Mastroianni films. It would be strange if Wes Anderson didn’t have one.
Once I figured out I missed the astringent bitter of Campari even separate from alcohol, I started drinking Campari Inc.’s soft drink, Crodino. I’ve been told it’s the worst soft drink in the world.
Captain Quack’s Coffeehouse, South Menchaca, Austin, Texas (September 2020)
After my DWI and rehab, I moved to a sober living house for four months, then bought a house about a month before COVID shut everything down. There was a gap - a month or two, perhaps - before my AA home group figured out Zoom, and many of the old-timers weren’t on. I never saw a lot of those old-timers again. Those of you in the program know how strange that can be, since it’s not really your place to ask. You’ll know if you need to know.
I’d like to believe I achieved some sort of baby nirvana state while living and working from home all those months, when my brain was fresh and new and my heart was soft as an ugly tomato. I killed a lot of time walking, but I never adopted a routine. Like I mentioned above, routine scares me. I want to feel every punishing second of my life.
Jeffrey Yang, from “An Aquarium” (2008)
My father is a lifetime amateur photographer, a very good one. I don’t have a copy of my favorite picture, one he took of himself with a Rollei 35t at his first day on the job, probably around 1970. It’s in color, I remember it as all browns and yellows, and he had exactly the beard you’d wish for in 1970. He took the photo at waist level in the bathroom mirror and nailed the focus. He had a slide rule holster and a pocket protector, but he was handsome all the same.
Instead y’all get me in a purple polka-dot mask and rainbow tank-top in front of a pink and yellow striped shower curtain, taken with a Yashica-12 on a timer. It’s in black and white because I’d hate to reveal too much.
(September 2020)