What I Try to Do

I want to call her Ling-Ling.  You'll be seeing a lot of her here, I think.  She has a severe look.  At least with me.  In her other pictures, she looks like a school kid.  But this is what I do.  Everyone looks ten years older than they are in my photos.  Funny that given my proclivities.  Ling-Ling was a quiet girl and did not talk much.  We listened to trance music while we shot.  She dates an Italian/Filipino rapper.  She is Korean/French.  Quite the combo.  I don't mind trance.  I drank.  She didn't.  I must always drink when I shoot for I am nervous.  A mess, really.  I sweat through my clothes.  "Why are you nervous," they ask?  "Because you are beautiful and wonderful, so if the pictures are bad, it can only be my fault."  It is mostly true.  I always want to be their favorite photographer.  It is a flaw, I think, just as are most of my impulses.  I fall in love with each of them and want them to fall in love back.  "Love," though, is a metaphorical term.  I do not wish to be their lovers.  There are very few people I love in that way.  I didn't love in that way for a long time.  Things change. 

I love jazz.  Jazz makes me love.  Not all of it, of course, but the slow, bluesy club jazz of Miles Davis on "Kind of Blue" and Bill Evans, too.  I am not a fan of those who play too many notes, who run scales like madmen or women.  Coleman Hawkins has become a favorite.  And of course Stan Getz in his Bossa Nova period.  Some Coltrane.  It is love like beautiful New York City and the Met and MoMA and the Gug and the Neu.  Even the Frick.  It is love like Central Park and the Upper East Side.  It is love like a Saturday afternoon in SoHo used to be.  It is love like the girls who live in NYC who no longer speak to me.  It is love like anyone who wants to go there with me now. 

It is not love like California, though.  It is not love like the West.  That is something different entirely.  That is an album by Josh Rouse or Jack Johnson or that wonderful college station out of Santa Cruz. 

Those are my two great loves and what I want to show.  Music and art and food and drink and beautiful interiors and unspoiled nature. 

Ling-Ling would not understand that, I think.  But I'll try to make her images fit.  It is also what I (try to) do.