I'm further north than south

We went to a yurt near Astoria for the weekend. It had a killer skylight.

Mama said knock you out.

I'm working on a story about two teenage boxing brothers. The older one, Gabe, just fought his first pro fight. The younger, Cesar, is fighting for the amateur national championship next week. I went to watch some sparring matches at their gym Wednesday night. Boxing (particularly in a dark room) is NOT easy to photograph. Oh well. These blurry shots feel like what being there felt like.

Burn what is left of me.

More scenes of the sandy ground.

where the light bends at the cracks

and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs
pretending the echoes belong to someone
someone I used to know

new slang when you notice the stripes

I went to the beach. Found some messages in the sand.

Under the sea

My new friend Cristina spent two days this week teaching me how to pick, clean and cook various sea creatures. We started seafood fest 2012 in this tiny shop on Powell Boulevard crowded with tanks of live creatures (and a few, namely fish and squid, dead). Here are some scenes I shot with my phone.

In this misty place where hunger finds us

The fog has rolled in thick in Portland this winter. Here's my fire escape, disappearing into it one morning.



Driving through it, I keep thinking of lines from what was my favorite poem in college:

Fog Report
By Audre Lorde

In this misty place where hunger finds us
seeking direction
I am too close to you to be useful.
When I speak
the smell of love on my breath
distracts you
and it is easier for me
to move
against myself in you
than to solve my own equations.

I am often misled
by your familiar comforts
the shape of your teeth is written
into my palm like a second lifeline
when I am fingerprinted
the taste of your thighs
shows up
outlined in the ink.
They found me wandering at the edge
of a cliff
beside nightmares of your body
"Give us your name and place of birth
and we will show you the way home."

I am tempted
to take you apart
and reconstruct your orifices
your tongue your truths your fleshy altars
into my own forgotten image
so when this fog lifts
I could be sure to find you
tethered like a goat
in my heart's yard.

how fast a thing unravels

Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity?
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins. - john ashberry

And if the distance we've sewn together is thin

For the past few New Year's Eves, Ryan and I have made stop-motion videos to memorialize our nights. The conceit is a little silly -- they're mostly staged portraits from a night -- but they're fun, I think. Making the pictures creates this space of excess celebration and nostalgia, I think, which, for my money, is pretty much what NYE is about. Anyway, this year, we were wondering how we should make the video, and Ryan thought it would be fun to recreate an old Photobooth. He took a picture of Photobooth curtains, brought over his flash, et voila. He shot most of the photos, and you can see them on his Flickr account, but here are some I made.