We are trying to finish our film “Battle of Brooklyn”, and since my wife is the editor it has fallen to me to watch the brood. It’s always a bit of a struggle to get my older daughter to leave the house. She’s had some anxiety issues for a couple of years. Things had improved last spring when we unfortunately witnessed the tail end of a phone jacking. The thief ran through the playground we were on and I got set to tackle him. My daughter was clearly upset so I was already backing off when the nice young man yelled at me to step back because he had a gun. Needless to say, her anxiety bloomed anew. However, things have slowly improved again and i was able to coax her out. On Sunday we spent a couple of hours at a street fair and then spent the rest of the day at the playground. I was pleased because she was relaxed and having fun.
Labor Day Monday was gorgeous and I would have loved to take them to the beach, but they always complain about going places, so I took them to see “Ramona and Beezus” instead. I was surprised to find that it was almost watchable. It was a timely film about stressful families and the difficult task of parenting difficult children. It was also about hopes, aspirations, sacrifice, and stability. Sweethearts married and lived in the homey neighborhood houses that they grew up in, or returned to those houses to rekindle the romances of their youth. All of these dramas were observed and altered by a precocious 9 year old who was anchored in her community. Everything was a bit too perfect and precious in an un-Brooklyn fairy tale kind of way, but it beat the hell out of the 3D animation on steroids crap that I normally have to put up with for my daughters.
Oddly, there were almost no kids movies playing anywhere this Labor Day weekend, so we ended up driving a half an hour to Queens to see the film in quiet neighborhoody Forest Hills. When we arrived for the 1:05 labor day screening, the theater was empty, except for a solo older woman reading a newspaper. A few others arrived as the previews rolled. As the film unspooled I found myself laughing too loud at all the wrong places, just like my father used to do. My daughter shushed me repeatedly and pushed my hand away when I tried to put my arm around her. I remember a very similar situation when my father took us to the Eddie Murphy vehicle, “48 hours”. My brother and I sunk into our seats as our father laughed way too loud at all the jokes about hookers and race, terrified that kids we knew might be at the theater. As we skulked out of the theater he said, “that sucked”. I felt kind of the same way yesterday. It was more afterschool special, than cinematic event, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t laugh through the whole thing and cry at least three times. I was thinking about him the entire time.
It was a bit slow for my 4 year old, who squirmed distractedly throughout, but my 8 year old loved it. I think it meant a lot to her because she saw a lot of herself in the character. In true Ramona fashion, she spilled her milk while snatching her sister’s food at dinner.
Before dinner I had a reverse fairytale experience. I was worn out from two solid days with my girls so I went for a quick run through the park. I haven’t been running much because my knee is out of whack, so I’m a bit rusty. As I rounded a curve and started to cross the massive stone steps on the East side of the park I heard a loud crack as a glass bottle exploded about 10 feet in front of me. A group of 5 or 6 young boys- probably between 6 and 9 years old stood to the side watching. I wasn’t sure whether or not they had done it on purpose but I when I jogged toward them to discuss the incident they headed up the stairs. I called after them, “Hey, what do you all think you’re doing? This is your park and you could get hurt on that glass.”
I deal with a lot of kids this age at my daughter’s school, and in a split second I knew that scolding them wasn’t going to be useful, but I also felt like I couldn’t let the moment go un-challenged. i jogged after them and they tossed a couple of rocks at me. These were kids. I can’t say it didn’t feel a bit unreal to have little kids trying to hit me with rocks, but at this point they were tossing them instead of really aiming. They had another bottle and I got them to slow down and talk to me. Some of them were being really aggressive while a few others were being more reasonable. They fanned out a bit and while one of them explained that they were just making noise with bottles and rocks; he banged a rock on the bottle, a few others continued to chuck rocks at me. I wasn’t yelling at them and I wasn’t scolding them, I was trying to stay calm and to get them to realize that the park was their park, and that breaking glass was a bad idea.
One kid said something like, “No no, I understand what he’s trying to say”- while another pointed out that he had just tried to hit me with a rock. When i turned to talk to talk to the kid with the bottle, the understanding kid chucked another rock at me and then they all took off running down the stairs. When they got 20 yards away the kid with the bottle threw it at me and it exploded a few steps in front of me. It was a lost cause and I didn’t see any reason in following them any more.
A woman was running across the stairs, in the same route around the park that I had been taking and they started to attack her. One kid slapped her bottom and when she turned to see what had happened another one zipped in from the other side. These were little kids, and she was laughing like it was all in fun. But it wasn’t and after three more slaps I had made it down the stairs and the kids took off running. As I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t all in fun, one kid whipped back up the stairs and gave her a last smack while the others continued zipping rocks at me. One connected with my arm and they cheered and continued on. I didn’t get to finish talking to the woman, she sprinted away.
I was a little upset as i continued on my run. I’m sure, that as kids who live in the projects near the park, that they saw me as an outsider, but the truth is i’ve lived there for way longer than they’ve been alive. A woman stopped me and told me that those same kids terrorize people on that side of the park. I certainly felt some empathy for them, which is why I stopped to talk. It’s clear that they don’t have a lot of positive guidance in their lives. It was also clear that they didn’t want it from me. I wasn’t scared of the kids, but I was scared of the fact that a pack of 6 to 8 year olds didn’t think twice about throwing bottles and rocks at a person who simply tried to talk to them.
When I got home I left a couple of rambling messages for the community affairs officer at the local police precinct. Part of my message stated that I wasn’t sure what they could do, but that i was sure they wouldn’t call me back anyway (they didn’t).
School starts tomorrow and I hope that the structure, and some strong adults help them right their course. Life, unfortunately, isn’t like a fairytale, it’s deeply complex. i felt kind of like a fool trying to talk some sense into some senseless kids. But I also felt like if I didn’t even try then i was a bigger fool. Today they’re probably still laughing about pegging me with a rock. Maybe, though, one of them feels bad about it, because really, what the hell did i do to them.
***this post is a bit unfinished- but i wanted to get it up before going out of town***
I have been writing in general about the stages that we all go through in life. The stages of my adult life have been clearly demarcated for me through my artwork. I can visually track the transitions through my photographs. I was a prolific photographer in high school, and the images that I made during this time were all over the place. There’s nothing that really holds them together. When I got to college It took me a year to start to find my voice. A lot of my photos from that first year are about isolation. They are in themselves transitional photos. By the time I was a sophomore in college I had developed a more refined sense of what I wanted to do with my work. As an adolescent, music was a big part of my life. In NY it increasingly defined it. Almost all of my time not spent on school was spent on music, and I began to photograph bands. For the next 10 years my life was consumed by music and photography and they were intertwined.
When I started playing in a band I had an unconscious understanding that it would be for about 10 years. I didn’t consider myself a musician as much as I did ” a bass player” or “a member of a rock band”. To me these were distinctly different categories. To be a musician indicated that it was a vocation, or a career path, it would also indicate that I thought of myself as “musical”. I did not. Instead I considered myself a part of an artistic culture that was interested in creating work outside of established pathways. Bands didn’t sign to major labels, they started their own. Writers didn’t try to write for big magazine, they started their own, and photographers and filmmakers toured with their work just like a band would. For us our community wasn’t the neighborhood we lived in, it was the people that shared a vision for how art and life could be. (The world has changed a lot in some ways. Yesterday my daughter celebrated the culmination of a week of willie mae rock camp- which was created and fostered by friends who were a part of the community I speak of. The whole experience was extremely empowering for her and the other 84 girls in her camp)
I grew up in a loving and supportive environment. I don’t think that my mother could be classified as a helicopter parent, but instead an actively facilitating parent. she sought out classes, lessons, and teams, that my siblings and I might want to take or participate in. However, I can’t recall any sense of pressure to practice or excel at any of them. My mother was ceaselessly complimentary, and my father bluntly critical. I don’t mean to paint him as a mean bastard who belittled us. In truth he was just deeply, yet pleasantly cynical. He also tended to interact with children as if they were little adults. When he told me that I couldn’t sing my way out of a paper bag, he was just telling the truth. I couldn’t sing, and even I understood on some level that there was no sense in humoring me. I couldn’t trust my mom in that sense, but i could trust my dad. Unfortunately sometimes the truth hurts. And as Erikson would point out, and my father should have known, sometimes the young need a little help in building up their self confidence before it gets torn to shreds. One problem that I now face is that I am so much like him in many ways that it’s difficult for me to keep my own tendencies to act like him in check. It doesn’t help that my older daughter is way beyond her years.
The dissonance between my mothers unflagging supportiveness and his somewhat brutal honesty helped me to develop some issues that I’m still sorting through. As a child of the post 60’s social upheavals, I don’t think I’m alone. The touchy-feelly ideas of “supportive parenting” were still on the cutting edge of child raising when we were little, and as such there were a lot of stumbles as new parents tried to make this paradigm gel with their own ingrained expectations from their own childhoods. My mother sometimes talked of how harsh a parent her own mother was. In an effort to not repeat these mistakes she likely made some of her own. I appreciated and still do appreciate her support, and I do believe that it has given me a sense of confidence in my own abilities. However, the critical nature of my father’s responses did a lot to undermine that confidence leaving me with an underlying sense of doubt that has hampered me in many ways.
When my future wife (who was a film student at the time) and I met I had developed a large body of work surrounding the youth culture that I was a part of. This work defined this stage of my “emerging adulthood”. I suggested that she drop out of school and make a movie with me about that world. She replied that if the film looked anything like my black and white photos we’d be all right. When we wrote a script and sent it to my Dad he read it and gave us one main note. Across the front of the script he had scrawled, “Where the fucks the conflict??” He was right. We were so in love with our characters that it was hard for us to see flaws in them.
His comment was brutal, but it would be unfair to not point out that we then spent a lot of time discussing the script and his mentoring was invaluable in helping us make a film we could be proud of. More than anything I wanted him to be proud of me and the film, and he was. Still, it would be many years before I could fully believe that.
When I was working on the Transitions book with my father he referenced Erikson’s 8 stages of life in his version of the introduction. We struggled with the tone of the tome, and I feared that his reliance on long standing studies and references to phsychologic fact would take away from the directness that I sought. It wasn’t that I didn’t find the information valuable, but instead that I was trying, as I’m wont to do, to look at it from a completely different perspective.
In some sense, the reason we were compelled to write the book was because no one had really done any work on the main issue that we were discussing; the transition from a parent child relationship to a more peer based one. However, it now looks as if our line of reasoning was in lock step with the thoughts of Jeffery Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor who has begun advocating for an addition to Erikson’s list. He wants to add a section called emerging adulthood.
Erikson saw life as a series of transitions between stages, and further that a central conflict drives the transition between each of these stages. If the conflict isn’t successfully overcome then the person has a tendency to become somewhat stuck in the earlier stages. In this series of progressions, successful transition between the earlier stages relies a good deal on decent parenting.
For example, in the first stage, infancy (birth to 18 months) the central conflict is trust vs. mistrust. Feeding is the driver of this conflict. If the infant doesn’t get reliable care such as food when needed, they might develop an overriding sense of mistrust. In early childhood (2 to 3 years) the main conflict is between the individual’s ability to do things for themselves vs. a sense of shame and doubt. Again, if the parenting isn’t somewhat supportive in a process like potty training it’s possible that the individual might develop a sense of shame at their lack of ability. I believe that his focus on the caregiver’s behavior as a determinant of the cared for’s well being laid the foundation for the ascendency of Nurture over Nature as the overriding factor in terms of an individual’s success.
As I have continued to work on my film about the nature of family, I have become increasingly aware of how ascendent the concept of nurture was when my generation were children. This evolving understanding has enormous hidden implications. As an example, when I considered being a sperm donor I recall thinking that my “nature” was fairly unimportant because my unconscious understanding was that it was really “nurture” that was important. As the son of a psychologist (and a social worker) who came of age intellectually just as Erikson’s theory’s were coming to the fore it makes perfect sense to me that the idea that well intentioned parenting was much more important than the genes we are born with . The flip side of that coin is that it places enormous pressure on the parents. It creates a foundational belief that as parents we are responsible for our children’s success or failure. This in turn leads parents to become increasingly involved in their children’s lives.
Arnett’s argument for this expanded list has come under criticism by some in the academic establishment because Erikson’s list is meant to be seen as a universal, a series of stages that cuts across culture. There are others who argue that culture affects this process so it makes sense that different cultures would have different stages. This seems to make even more sense in the later stages as evolution likely tends to wield a less powerful brush as we get older. I was discussing this idea with my brother, who is a social psychologist, and it struck me that it might possibly be Erikson’s list itself which was one of the greatest contributing factors towards this need to define a new stage.
One of the main points of the book that my father and I were working on was that in our modern world, parents and children have become more entangled in each others lives. These increasingly complex relationships also have less clearly worn pathways and rituals to define them. We’ve all heard the term helicopter parenting in reference to the way in which modern parents hover over their children. While there are positive and supportive aspects of this behavior it creates issues that must be resolved. The more entangled we become, the more difficult it is for us to redefine our relationships as we grow and change.
As i write this I have been looking over a chart of Erikson’s 8 stages. What strikes me most about them is that they are “coded” with a progressive’s sense of supportive parenting/teaching. In stages 1-4 the successful transition seems to demand a nurturing environment created by, and supported by, adults. These descriptions appear to be re-defining the relationship between adults and youth and in essence paving the way for they youth culture progressivism of the 60’s and 70’s. I’m not an academic and I’m not basing this on studies or established literature. Instead, I’m basing this on intuition, as well as the work that I have done to understand my own generation’s rocky path towards adulthood. When I refer to my generation I am speaking less generally - and more specifically- about a community of artists, writers, and musicians that I belong to. I’m also looking towards the sense of child/adult relationships that we glean from media as we grow up. Holden Caulfield, for instance, seems like he would fit right into today’s generation whereas in his own he was completely out of step. I remember reading books that were set in the 40’s and 50’s and adults always talked down to children in a way that would seem “disempowering” if one were to follow the ethos of the progressivism of the 8 stages. When I was growing up afternoon TV would often be things like “The Brady Bunch” followed by “My Three Sons”. These are shows of slightly different eras and I recall understanding that there was a dissonance between the ways in which adults treated children in the different shows. These cultural cues/clues both reflect the subtleties of time, and influence the understanding of social relationships and more in young children.
I am pleased to see the concept being discussed in the way that it is. One of the greatest difficulties that my father and I had was that I had chosen to follow a path that he and I had no blueprint for. I didn’t know what I wanted to do exactly, but I did know what I didn’t want to do. i felt extremely stifled by convention, and I knew that while I might find a certain level of comfort in the safety of an academic pathway, I knew in my bones that it wasn’t for me. Why that’s the case is a completely different discussion, but knowing it forced me to seek out a different path. Had my father been a more direct colleague of Dr. Arnett’s I can assume that we would have had a much less rocky path ourselves.
One thing that the NY Times article points out is that an acceptance of these ideas by the establishment would call for a whole new set of social policies. Frankly, I’m less interested in the concept of the government codifying these ideas, than parents and children having the means and tools to work through them.
About 15 years ago, when I was transitioning from being a “musician” to being a filmmaker, I was having a very difficult time with my father. I loved my father deeply and in general we communicated really well. I was a passionate young man; passionate about music, about art, about opposition. I’m not exactly sure why, but I always despised norms and beaten pathways. Even though I knew that I wanted to be a photographer, I didn’t go to art school. That would have been too easy.
I think that some of this impulse had to do with growing up in a college town that was stifling in its calm coddling comfort; especially for the children of professors. Something about the University system seemed so…. wrong to me. I’m not sure why i felt this way, perhaps it was the crowds of privileged seeming frat boys and sorority girls that crowded the streets of the small university town. They didn’t seem too interested in learning. I also saw that in some ways that setting had taken away some of my father’s passion. He had gone soft. A lot of my friends ended up going to the local college but i had a need to get out. I wanted to learn about the larger world, but I didn’t know what I wanted to “do with my life”.
I ended up at NYU when it was still largely a commuter school with no sense of campus life. As such it was much less cloistered than the schools my friends went to, something I reveled in and suffered from. My mother is quick to remind me that I had a rough time the first semester. I had sought the energy of the city but was homesick for the comfort of a bosomy campus. As a photographer and observer I found myself exhausted from simply walking down the street. The details of the city were overwhelming. The classes were intense as well. On my first day I had an 8:00 am class and was told to read the first three chapters of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” by the next class. I picked it up and then spent the next three hours trying to understand the first page- which was one of those half pages because it was the start of the chapter…. (this is not an exaggeration). I eventually understood the book and learned to notice less. This pained me on one level, but it was either adapt or die.
Over time I thrived intellectually and artistically at the school. I met some incredible people who took me under their wings and I focused on my photography and started a band. After college i wanted to continue to focus on these artistic pursuits. However, my …. juvenile resistance to doing things the “right” way made it difficult for me to turn these pursuits into a “career”. This is where the conflict with my father came in. Each week when we talked on the phone he couldn’t stop himself from ending the conversation with, “Write when you get work”. This drove me crazy.
My mother was a serial supporter. She was complimentary even when I had failed at something. As such her opinion didn’t mean as much to me. My father was supportive but critical; at times very critical. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut even when he was putting his foot in it. His painful honesty, coupled with my vast respect for him, made his thoughts even more powerful. My father was sharp, funny, and interested in everyone. He made people laugh and he made them feel special. Even the check out girl at the supermarket couldn’t escape his questions, and I witnessed how often it led to extremely “human interactions” that pulled people out of the furrowed habits of their lives. I wanted to be like him, so it was hard when he couldn’t see how much he hurt me.
I wasn’t making a lot of money, and I wasn’t having any great success with my work, but I was in a wildly creative period of my life. Almost all day was spent in some creative pursuit. Even when I was working as a messenger I was taking photos and observing how the “real world” turned. On the nights I wasn’t practicing with my band I was out going to shows and taking pictures of other bands, or at the darkroom printing them. I was part of a mutually supportive creative community and I felt completely on track. However, with his one simple jokey question he would derail my fantasy of a life lived creatively, and it certainly didn’t help to put me on a better track.
At 41, without the comfort of any kind of job security, I understand why he was trying to gently nudge me in the direction he was. At the time though, it was supremely undermining. While my father had a tendency to be an asshole in this regards, to his credit he was good at owning up to his failings. When I exploded in rage at his jokingly veiled put downs he always demurred and apologized and then did it again the next week.
In some sense I knew that he was right, but I also knew that if I didn’t follow my passions when I was young, I would never have the chance to follow them. I don’t mean to create the impression that he wasn’t supportive of me as an artist in any way, but instead that while he was was often complimentary he still left me with the impression that I would never, “make it” as an artist and that I better line up “real work”.
I was reminded of all these thoughts and emotions as I skimmed through this weekends NY Times magazine story on the 20 somethings. Even as my father was proud of the work that I made, he would point out that I would “never make it” as a musician. I know that as a parent he had strong feelings about helping to make sure that I would be ok. What he wouldn’t listen to was that I never intended to “make it”. In fact, my goal was to “not make it”, to find some way to be creative outside systems that I saw as hopelessly corrupt. I still see them as corrupt but i wouldn’t mind taking some kind of payoff to be a part of them now….
My father could be an asshole, but as a psychologist he was trained to listen, and he was good at it. Over many years we worked together to move past our antagonisms and we were able to communicate in a more supportive way. In working through our issues I realized that one of our problems was the lack of ritual in our modern non-religious lives. Rituals, like bar mitzvahs and communions used to pack a lot more meaning. The young entered the ritual a child and exited as an adult. That transition involved both the child and the adult and it changed the way that they related to each other.
In our current world, our young people travel far away to go to school where they have life changing experiences that their parents do not perceive. When the return in the spring they are changed, but since their parents have not been privy to the transition- because they haven’t experienced the ritual of change with the child- they often find it difficult to see them as changed. At the same time, because the child goes through this process without the adults of their community it is difficult for them to see themselves as a part of their parent’s adult community. There is no transition to a more peer based relationship.
One theory that I have, which has been somewhat borne out by being a parent, is that in some ways it’s important for younger children to see their parents as all powerful. When we believe that adults can do almost anything, then we are secure around them. In the safety cocoon, of our belief that our parents can and will take care of us in a “perfect way”, we have the freedom to experiment and test our own abilities. Adults rely on this sense of power to keep order in the community. However, if there is not formal transition, welcoming the young into the world of adulthood a certain dissonance arises. Intellectually we know that the adults are not perfect, but in an underlying way we still expect them to be, and that expectation causes all kinds of problems. On a basic level I believe that we expect too much from adults, and when they don’t live up to our idea of perfection we get unfairly angry with them. In addition, this idea, that they should be perfect, also gives us the idea that we too can attain perfection and we tend to be too hard on ourselves.
If instead both parties can see each other as peers they can forgive each other their transgressions, and forgive themselves when they make mistakes. Without some form of transition it is extremely difficult for them to have forward moving, productive relationships. My father and I realized some of these things together by trying to work through our own issues in these areas. I suggested that we write a book together, to kind of go the last mile towards being peers. He agreed, but it was tough. This was his provenance. I had no real training in it, so it was a little unfair of me to expect him to see me as a peer in this process.
We sent a series of notes back and forth but it was clear that we had different ideas for the book. I was looking at something that was more pop culture oriented, a series of tools to aid parents and children in reaching these goals. He wanted to quote other psychologists and reference their studies. We were never able to finish our work on the book as it started to cause more problems than it was worth. Still, the process did bring us to a better understanding of each other and ourselves. When he was hit by a car and killed a few years later one of my first thoughts was, “at least we were in a good place with each other”. I didn’t feel like I had missed an opportunity to let go of my anger with him, he had helped me to do it.
At his funeral a former grad student of his approached me with a folder. It was our notes. He had asked her to type them up and comment on the work. She told me how happy and proud he was to be working with me on it. Maybe it’s time for me to finish that book. Clearly the world needs it now more than ever.
Last week I posted a couple of hundred old photos of the early 90’s NYC music scene on our facebook fan page. A lot of the photos had been seen before, and many of them were from my book, “Scraps”, but only a handful of people had gotten a chance to really look through them as a group. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The internet is a powerful engine, and having the ability to share them so easily was exciting.
I’ve always felt that photos need a chance to age in order for them to develop their full power. While William Eggleston’s images of the south were likely shocking in their simplicity at the time they were taken, the passage of years gives them exponentially more power. A portion of this power comes from nostalgia, but it is also due to the forward thinking eye of the image- maker; the ability to see important details where most people see the mundane. Some of the reaction to my images was based on a sense of nostalgia (we’re all getting old), but I’d like to think that as a group, they capture a sense of the time and place that becomes even more apparent as we move away from it.
When I started to get interested in photography during high school there was no internet to provide a window onto the world of images. Instead I was limited to the photo books in the local library. These consisted mostly of how-to books and a few art survey books. My parents also had a couple of photo books laying around as well- like a huge Avedon book from the 60’s. I remember being drawn towards images of people. I connected with the images that weren’t about the camera person but instead about the situation. I was moved by images that told simple stories. Avedon’s grainy blurry images struck a chord with me as well. I never liked things that seemed too perfect. Over time I discovered Friedlander, Frank, and Winnogrand. In high school I got to take a photography class and spent endless hours in the darkroom. I was that kid that took most of the photos for the yearbook and school paper. I loved seeing my photos in print, it gave me a sense of power to be able to kind of force people to see things as I had seen them.
By the time I was ready for college I knew that I wanted to be a photographer, but I didn’t want to go to art school. Somehow I intuited that the work that I was drawn to couldn’t be taught- or that if it was taught it would screw it up. My work would become somebody else’s… or some such nonsense. In college I ended up with a BA in Religious studies because by the time I had to declare a major I realized I’d already completed one in religious studies. In addition I took one photo class a year and happily I did learn a lot about image-making, but also about trying to get to the bottom of what I was doing. I think the most important thing that I learned in class was how to look at my work, as well as the work of others, for what it is, and not what I want it to be.
When I was a sophomore I took on a major project, documenting the street vendors of Astor Place. At the time, the late 80’s, the gentrification of Manhattan was starting to shift into high gear, and this daily street market was under threat. I loved the market because one could find almost anything there. One blanket would hold spahgetti and an electric guitar. Another vendor might have porn videos laid out next to the bible, Marx, and a portrait of JFK. On one visit I found a book called “Invisible City”. The seller wanted a lot of money for it, 7 dollars. Most books were 1 or 2, and I was broke. I walked away but quickly ran back when I realized I had to have it. The photographer, Ken Schles, had documented the changing East Village a few years earlier, and in the book I saw a past that was still almost present. It painted a romantic picture of a bohemian life that I longed to live, and it had a huge impact on my photography at the time. The contrasty, night vision rendering of community would shape my work for the next few years. In the spring of 1990 I spent several hours a day at the market, and watched as the police made more and more of an effort to sweep the vendors off the street. Eventually they scattered and the city continued its march towards prosperity.
At the same time music was more important to me than school and I went to shows at least 3 nights a week, often with my camera around my neck. I photographed bands I liked, and then, when my I started a band with friends, I photographed the bands we played with. I had a cheap Nikon and even cheaper lenses. The only time my images looked sharp was when they were over developed because the high contrast deadened the blur. In a way, this worked out to my advantage. They gave the images a distinct look that hold them together. I liked blurry, and it worked for these images that recall a blurry sort of time.
About the time that I was getting out of college, gentrification was in full swing and rents in the East Village were pretty much doubling each year. I first ended up in a cramped apartment with college roommate that was cheaper than most at 800 bucks a month. However, with my messenger job, and a few other side jobs, I wasn’t able to spend as much money or time on photography as I liked. A few months later I went to a party at a friend’s apartment and immediately fell in love with it. It was a grungy, tiny, apartment on Ave B, which was still pretty rough. It had a nostaligic charm, though, as it was unrenovated, with a 1950’s fridge still chugging away, and a bathtub that would have been in the kitchen if someone hadn’t thrown a wall around it. When I professed my love for the place my friend told me I could have his room, and the 150 dollar a month rent that went with it. A few months after I’d moved in, a friend asked me if I knew the photographer Ken Schles, as he lived in the building. It sounded familiar and then I realized that the book, “Invisible City” that had shaped my psyche was mostly shot in the building.
The cheap rent allowed me to concentrate even more on my photography, my band, and my art. It was a time of peak creativity for me and I loved it. Time and responsibility caught up with me a little bit. I fell in love, we bought a house, I had to get a job, had kids… The job wasn’t oppressive by normal standards, but it felt like my time of wild creativity was coming to an end. Having to get up and go to work each day, then come home and work on the house wore me down. Then the kids…. forget about it. I’ve had the ability to continue being creative since then, but not with the reckless abandon of my youth. Looking back at these images has been really inspiring to me. I want to find a way to get back to that feeling that anything is possible, and forcing myself to reflect on that time is helping.
I often think of that Talking Heads song that goes, “You may ask yourself, where did i get this beautiful car, where did i get this beautiful wife, how did i get here?” The older I get the more prophetic it is. Simple decisions, such as what neighborhood to live in have such profound impacts on our lives, who we know, and how we see the world. I really am often flabbergasted by it all.
I was just thinking of it as I worked on arrangements for my younger daughter’s afterschool program. All of a sudden I have a third grader and a girl in pre-K. How did I get here? It really does seem like yesterday that we were thinking about having a second child.
We are also in the midst of finishing a film that we have spent 7 years working on. 20 years ago the thought of working on anything for a year didn’t seem possible. How does everything end up taking so long now that I’m older? Our older daughter was 1.5 years old when we started. She wasn’t even in day care yet.
The other night I was shooting some video of a friend’s band. A 20 year old friend came to help out. Before the show I was talking to a friend and realized that we had gone on tour together nearly 20 years earlier. My young friend pointed out, “I was 2 or 3 then.” ouch.
I don’t mind getting older, and I have few regrets about the decisions I’ve made about how to live my life. Still the slow cold creep of age is tricky, and David Byrne understood that before I did.
