***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.

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.

So I have done the eft thing a few times now and while i don’t know that it’s having any major effect I have to say I think I’m a bit more relaxed. In fact my wife was a bit frustrated last night after dinner as she thought that i was kind of tuning out- but in retrospect realized that i was just more relaxed.

This morning on the way to the pool I was in traffic on the BQE and I had a guy hit me from behind when i was nearly stopped. A couple of weeks ago we were hit by a guy who ran a stop sign. I was furious, and I jumped out of the car and started yelling at the guy. Even as I did it I knew it wasn’t the best way to handle the situation but wasn’t able to calm myself. It didn’t help my kids, and it didn’t help me. It was a week after this that my hip went out so badly and i know it was related.

Today I felt my body tense in that way it does when you’re hit from behind. I took a deep breath, got out of the car and took a look. There was clearly some damage. A screw was sticking out of the bumper. The bumper wasn’t in the best shape to begin with so I wasn’t that concerned cosmetically but thought something might have been thrown out of whack. The other driver approached and He didn’t speak English. I pointed to the screw. He went over and pulled it out. I looked like it might have come from his license plate.

I did a quick calculation in my head. It was raining and we were on the crowded highway. It just wasn’t worth any more discussion. I took his hand, looked him in the eye, and shook it gently. “OK”. I turned and got in my car and drove off. I still felt that whiplash tightness but it quickly dissipated as I drove away. I have to say i got a bit angry when we took the same exit and i saw him pull up next to me on the phone- but I let it go.

In the pool my hip hurt about the same as usual, but I was a little looser. i thought about how the idea of eft helped me deal with the same sarno issues by giving me a way to take a positive approach to the issues- rather than beat up that part of me that’s causing the pain it allowed me to be a bit more forgiving.

in any case, i’m feeling better so i’m gonna keep at it.

I mentioned my craniosacral massage to my friend Gus the other night and he told me that he had been regularly going to acupuncture. It got him interested in the mechanics of it all so he started researching on the internet and stumbled across EFT or emotion free therapy.

I’m not going to go into the details - but it involves tapping certain spots on the body to free up negative energy… or something like that. It’s interesting because it sounded like it dovetailed with the HANDLE process that we have been doing with our daughter F.

F was having very serious problems with defiance and anxiety last year. A friend had used handle with her son and it had done a great deal to help him with attention and learning issues. We had the handle person come by and evaluate our daughter and immediately it was apparent that there were several things out of whack that she thought some simple exercises would help. For example when she put on a pair of glasses that had one red lens and one blue lens she saw red on one side and blue on the other. If a person’s eyes are ganging properly then they see some form of purple because the colors get blended. If the eyes aren’t ganging it can be incredibly taxing to make sense of the world as ones eyes are competing. a simple exercise of drinking a cup of water through a straw with her eyes closed helped to strengthen the ganging ability.

There are many similarities between EFT and Handle and in a sense craniosacral massage. All of these methods bring me back to Sarno. Sarno is pretty adamant that his practice has nothing to do with any sort of “alternative” medicine. I agree. At the same time I see a very clear connection between the way in which he discusses the autonomic nervous system disrupting blood flow- and the idea that energy flow is disrupted as discussed in acupuncture or EFT.

In any case I downloaded the EFT manual free and read through it. Some of it reads a bit hucksterish. I tried it out though and while I’m not all better in my hip, I do feel a bit more positive - so i’mma gonna keep at it.

This morning while biking my daughter to camp I passed an old friend who is a writer. He now works at a NY magazine that I used to subscribe to. It’s a weekly that’s filled with all kinds of fun things to do in the city. Instead of doing any of these things I ended up feeling bad that I was missing them all- and that was before having kids…. Since it was a thick weekly and I tend to not throw things out, they piled up everywhere. I also used to get the NY Times delivered. In addition to it piling up, I couldn’t keep myself from reading it cover to cover so I never had any time. He was a bit down on the job because it’s less writing than editing. At least he’s got a job….

Now I just get the New Yorker and The Sun. The Sun is a weird animal. It takes no ads, and is filled with vaguely uncomfortable writing that’s just a little too personal. I like it. One of my favorite writers, Sparrow, regularly publishes pieces in the Sun. They also run a lot of interesting photos, and in the past they ran some of mine. We’re both from Chapel Hill so i feel some kinship with it as well. I just thumbed through an over-thumbed bathroom copy and came across an article about the role of positive energy in our lives. Like a lot of articles in the Sun it helped me to do a little perspective taking.