Yesterday I was cranky and felt rather hopeless about everything. Even though I had learned about Ruth St. Denis and her costumes made me very happy as did her use of kohl eyeliner, and I had greatly enjoyed a Spanish film called Unconscious because it was set in 1913 Spain and there was lots of Art Nuveau and again the costumes were great..............I still felt it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to keep a good conversation flowing. I am not currently flowing, I'm concerned about the lack of work and next month's bills and I have been impatient with the universe and myself. I did manage a conversation with a friend and she made me laugh when she mentioned one of her sister's believes there's a lot of truth or reflection of life in quotes from the Godfather movies!!! She happened to use one on my friend from the scene where Connie introduces a new boyfriend to Michael and he disaproves...........uses lines like "I don't know.....this guy"..........and on and on. There's more that made it funny and I hope my nephew has the movie in his collection so I can find the scene and perhaps improve my whole outlook with more quotes from the Godfather.
Today I was inspired by Christoph Niemann's blog in the New York Times as well as Oxier Muhammed's Harlem photos. Christoph is an artist who moved to Berlin with his wife and 3 sons. He wove paper and created images to accompany his thoughts about the Berlin wall. I checked out some of his previous posts and they were so clever and interesting. History of his growing appreciation of coffee drawn out on napkins, using Legos to construct New York memories and more. He reminded me of one of my favorite photographers: Duane Michals master in the art of photographic narrative. I was enthralled with Duane's sense of humor and his ability to tell stories and how he drew you in to his photos, only to be fooled by the ending shot or the overview of the entire piece. I created a few of my own pieces and realized I loved black and white photography and I loved writing - another black and white media. I loved the process of getting the idea out quickly. In my recent dejected, dullard mode, I'd forgotten one of my passions. I'm even afraid to call it a passion because I'm feeling so lackluster and unworthy...............but creating photo stories was fun. Seems I've become best friend to writer's block, think he's an Aries with a penchant for disco.......
I was equally moved today with Ozier Muhammed's photographs, mostly because he described it as walking on sacred space and that even though many great photographers had already taken wonderful shots of Harlem, he would continue to take photos, because he loved it so. Passion. Passion, that's what I'm talking about and that's what I'm missing.