An Iconography of Escape
Behind the bushes planted by the front door of our row house, I found her. Unambiguous in the gender department, she was always a she, a big, light green translucent marble, what was known in kid culture as a “cleary.” I never questioned that we belonged to one another even though we had never crossed paths before that afternoon when I unearthed her while scratching around the dirt. Her surface featured numerous distinguishing nicks and cracks, yet her flaws only enhanced her loveliness; it was through her crystalline glow that I first understood the absolute singularity of beauty.
I became obsessed with the thought of losing her. Fearing a thief would enter our home and deprive me of my treasure, each night before bedtime I placed her in a different hiding place. In mothball scented closets, in the warm dampness of recently worn shoes, in the furry pockets of my mother’s muskrat wrap, in dust bunny darkness under beds, amongst the Ajax and Mr. Clean bottles beneath the sink, I prepared a safe bed in which to nestle her. Regarding this rotation of sanctuary, I took no chances and left no clues; no one was aware of my sacred duty to protect her. In my nightly prayers I whispered a desperate beseeching to the Divine for her safekeeping.
Every morning I scampered in pajama-clad sleepy-headedness to where I had anxiously secreted my treasure the previous evening. With breath held, I rescued her from behind the television or bookcase, from vacuum-cleaner hose or clothes hamper. In the dim light of daybreak, my crystalline emerald treasure was safely delivered from the night, back into my desirous hands. In this daily retrieval I found renewal, I rejoiced at my fortune, my gratitude was boundless. This became my habit, my ritual, my daily affirmation that all was right with the world.
One morning, sprawled and splayed on the floor at the foot of the couch, I stretched my arm towards the previous night’s hideaway. Something felt different, I seemed to have her in my grip and then not, as if part of her was escaping through the spaces between my fingers, as if she has suddenly become quicksilver. Like an epileptic spider I shuddered in my effort to stretch beyond the limits of my skin. After a final thrust and grasp I pulled my hand out an uncurled my fingers to reveal two marbles sitting side-by-side in the scoop of my dusty palm. Like two big green eyes staring back at my mute astonishment, one was just like the other, undifferentiated with the exact same scars, the very same slivers of glass shaved from their surfaces. My cleary had doubled, had recreated itself, had given birth, in my limited understanding of reproductive possibilities, to a fully-grown baby.
Crosses
I became an altar boy moments before the Second Vatican Council attempted to renegotiate the medieval hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. To me the most significant manifestation of this ‘modernization’ was the elimination of the Latin Mass that had come to be seen by the reformers as archaic and inaccessible. To my second-grade brain, this downgraded the faith from the mystifying to the mundane. From this point onward the liturgy would be uttered in the native tongue of the congregants; Spanish and Portuguese for Latin Americans, French for the French, English for us. I was devastated, I had labored for months in order to memorize prayers in Latin. After school found me perched on in the church steps amongst a flock of altar boys-in-training twisting tongues around obscure syllables, gliding over the hard parts with a devilish mumble. We had looked forward to the mornings when we would occupy a privileged place on the altar while, in a sing-song voice burnished with echoes of Rome, the priest would quaver “Dominos vobiscum” and we would summon our most solemn reply, “Et tum spiritu tuo.”
Even in as humble a church as St. Francis of Assisi, a economy-sized neo-gothic structure planted on a hillside adjacent to the highway that headed north out of Boston, the architecture made me feel diminished physically. But I felt as if I had become an initiate in something greater than myself. Upon entering the church after the janitor Mr. Mahoney opened the doors at 6:45 in the morning, I felt small yet chosen. How proudly I took my duties to light the candles before 7:30 mass; to spread out the priest’s vestments before he arrived; to open the golden censer and with a hefty wooden march light the fragrant cubes of incense for funeral services. Christ on the cross, Veronica proffering her veil, Mary Magdalene, St. Francis engulfed by swallows, all of these and more were represented in stained glass, faux-frescoes, in white plaster statuary. A swirl of images, objects and ritual clothing adorned the chanting and singing of that mysterious language, that dead language of fraternal celibacy.
My imagination, which up to that point had been relatively free of anchoring cultural symbols, was increasingly drawn by the gravity of Catholic symbology. The animated world of my pre-school childhood teemed with disembodied voices, leaping stuffed animals, self-replicating marbles, miniature ice castles forming under encrusted snow, and wayward shooting stars. This organically porous fantasy life was increasingly replaced by a baroque but stable repertoire of the Virgin Mary, the crucified Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Trinity, and a supporting cast of saints and martyrs. My internal landscape acquired a heaviness, a slowing weight of moral responsibility that seemed to gather poundage under the tortured body of Christ that literally and figuratively hung over my head in any room I might occupy.
During the Latin mass, the priest, with his back to the rest of the parishioners, held up the Host to proclaim “Hoc est corpus meum.” With the unleavened circle of white wafer hovering above the priest’s head, this timid offering is the moment of transubstantiation , when the bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus. (The phrase “hocus-pocus” is originally an anti-Catholic slur that refers to this metaphysical transformation.) As the priest genuflected, one of the two altar boys serving mass rang a cluster of hand bells while other boys held the trail of the priest’s vestments, preventing them from brushing the ground. I loved this most mysterious and theatrical of moments, and while ringing the bells I fancied that I had developed a style that allowed the longest possible resonance before sitting the bells down upon a velvet cushion to a sudden and hushed silence.
I daydreamed during less crucial points in the mass while the priest conducted the remainder of his inscrutable business. The most frequently repeated scenario in my daydreams involved an updated and localized recurrence of Noah’s Flood. I imagined the endless rain and the rising waters as they seeped into the homes of neighbors and friends. As the sky darkened with then oncoming night, I sensed that, despite its location on the top of a hill, the church of St. Francis of Assisi was in danger. Like Joan of Arc inspired through Divine inspiration, I knew that I was chosen to wade through the torrents and make my way to the church to protect the sacred host.
The Host was displayed in a shimmering monstrance and was not to be touched by sinners like myself. Only the fully initiated, i.e., the priests themselves, could lay hands upon the latent Body of Christ and the precious housing that contained it pale aura. Knowing this, I stood sentinel upon the highest step of the altar, watching in anticipatory horror as the waters slowly covered the floor of the nave and sacristy and began to inch up toward my feet. I then faced a moral dilemma: If the flood water rose high enough to engulf the Host in its monstrance, should I have the audacity to pick it up in the attempt to keep it above the surface, risking sacrilege? In this fantasy I was never forced to resolve this question of religious etiquette because just as the water level approached the sacred object, the flood began to recede. In the morning the priest would find me asleep at the foot of the altar, damp with self-sacrifice. Silently lifting me from the silt-stained marble, the priest would be humbled by the presence of this fervent and even saintly little boy, who’s near lifeless body he carried home to frantic yet awestruck parents.
Saucers
I.S.P. – Investigation of Strange Phenomena: This was my secret organization and I was its undisputed leader. I was convinced that aliens lived among us and using my powers of persuasion I recruited Johnny Palumbo and other friends to be dues-paying members of I.S.P. I had recently read Incident at Exeter about a couple who discovered under hypnosis that one night on a lonely road in rural New Hampshire that they had been abducted and probed by visitors from another planet. My suspicions confirmed that season by the premiere of the TV program The Invaders starring Roy Thinnes, about a guy attempting the thwart an alien takeover of Earth.
We met in the basement of my parents’ house where I had taped grainy images of U.F.O.s onto the cinderblock walls. After synchronizing our watches, we would fan out into the neighborhood on our banana-seated bicycles, notepads and stubby pencils in our back pockets, looking for suspicious sites and spooky behavior. Exhilarated by an afternoon of information gathering we reconnoitered in the warm blue dusk, in the hour between the dog and the wolf, between the fragile security of out neighborhood and the wilds of industrial waste.
At the end our street was a fenced-off landfill with such ancient technologies as rusting water heaters that we fancied to be ancient satellites that had plunged to Earth. Television and radio tubes appeared to up as tiny space probes set by Lilliputian yet advanced alien cultures. Any unexplainable light in the darkening skies was noted and collected for the archives of the Investigation of Strange Phenomena. During the summer of Apollo 11, a municipal public works project dredged the bottom of a local pond, depositing the murky contents in our beloved landfill. Craggy piles of moist gray clay crowded against one another, creating an unearthly landscape of mountains, valleys, and dry ocean beds that we names after the surface features of the moon: Tycho, Copernicus, and Archimedes.
While standing in the checkout line of Stop ‘n’ Shop with my mother and three younger bothers, I noticed the National Enquirer headline that the noted psychic Jeane Dixon had a vision of an underground civilization beneath the surface of Mars. She predicted that on a certain day the Martian spaceships would arrive in droves to kidnap Earthling children to help repopulate the dying subterranean culture of the Red Planet. I was thrilled. I bought the newspaper, ignored the stories about turtle-children and miraculous images of Jesus in tortillas, and gobbled the words of my incipient redemption. It seemed as if I had been preparing all my life for such a moment, for such an opportunity. Finally I could get off this planet, be saved from this early purgatory, be whisked away to what had to be a more civilized world. As the day approached I imagined myself in a field, my entire body upraised toward the celestial heavens line an animated El Greco, with eyes raised, brows arched, head up, arms open wide, skin stretching to transparency, my heart and spirit about to burst out of my chest in fervent hope, not of Divine Intervention, but of Alien Emancipation.
The Martians had to be aware of my I.S.P. activities, of my leadership and vision related to all matters extraterrestrial. There was no doubt in my mind that I would be one of the children chosen. As if preparing for a quiz show at school, I immediately reread The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, trying to anticipate any questions or problems. On the appointed day, in preparation of the long space journey, I packed two peanut butter sandwiches and a banana in a paper bag. I left behind a note for my mom, who had gone to work before I left for school. In the note I stated my love for her but explained that all my life I felt as if I had been born not only into the wrong family but the wrong planet. Around the perimeter of the text I drew tiny delicate saucers with radiating lines emanating like the glow of halos. All would be right with the universe now that the Martians had come to retrieve their long-lost son.
Needless to say, I had not completed my homework for that day as I intended to skip school entirely. Utterly confident of my interplanetary journey, I had absolutely no fear of reprisal from the Sisters of Mercy. Not being sure of the exact arrival time of the Martian space ships, to be on the safe side I made it to the shores of the Sea of Tranquility by eight o’clock in the morning. I had a long wait. My neck ached from the strain of constantly looking up. I ate my peanut butter sandwiches out of hunger and boredom, though I feared it might seem symbolic of my lack of faith, like Moses striking the rock twice. Where were they? Had they come earlier in the morning? Would they come later that night? Was I not worthy? Could I have alienated the aliens somehow? At dusk I headed for home, filled with disappointment and dread, for now I would have to face the consequences of my attempted escape.
Hammers and Sickles
Having a dad who wasn’t around very much and a mom who worked two jobs had certain advantages; I was pretty much left to my own devices. On Saturdays I often took public transportation into downtown Boston to spend the day wondering the streets and poking around department stored such as Filene’s Basement. The Public Gardens, with its swan boats, the gold-domed Statehouse, colonial graveyards, and the yet-to-be-gentrified waterfront, became my playground. I was particularly drawn to what was known as a “head shop,” just off Boston Common. Its walls were covered from floor to ceiling with posters of rock groups, psychedelic graphics lit by black lights, and large grainy images of political and historical figures like Emma Goldman and Che Guevara. Music much stranger than the Top 40 I was weaned on played loudly. Robert Crumb comic books beckoned me with their haunting vulgarity. Upon walking through the doors of this place and overwhelming density of incense rushed my nostrils I was falling through the rabbit hole to Wonderland, passing through the back wardrobe to get to Narnia, except that I was traveling without a palliative narrative arc on which to cling for support.
This candy-colored, acid rock, hippie tchotchke underground outlet was the gift shop for a parallel universe of other states of being. I knew the line had to be crossed and I would be leaving behind not only my child-self but somehow my parent’s world as well. This threshold to drugs, sex, and politics both appealed to me and seemed to threaten the very foundations of my consciousness. The Beatles circa Sergeant Pepper functioned as a kind, user-friendly, less-threatening introduction to this cultural shift. The accompanying turn toward the hirsute coincided perfectly with my own changing prepubescent body. Hair was springing out on the upper lips and chins of John, Paul, George and Ringo at exactly the same moment as the first whips were appearing under my arms and between my legs. The Beatles were no longer the cute, lovable mop-tops singing “She loves you, yea, yea, yea,” but bleary-eyed long-hairs wearing multicolored uniforms singing about “rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies.” When I first saw the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album as listened to the music, I was so shaken that I literally got on my knees and asked God to make the Beatles go back to the way they were. Of course, this was coming form a boy who until the age of fourteen had no understanding of erections and prayed that this horrible affliction be taken from him.
As difficult as it may be now to imagine, at this time hippies were living on encampments on Boston Common. All manner of tents, lean-tos, yurts and teepees were propped up like urban tribal lodges across Frederick Law Olmstead’s landscaping. Hundreds of colorful streamers knotted to branches spun in the summer breezes. The twirling head-banded youths gathered between dogwoods and maples, forming circles of conga drumming and guitar strumming, came to represent proverbial Dionysian wild children, who, by their very presence, seemed to mock the staid colonial fetishists that had for centuries inhabited Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay. I warily passed by these encampments, attracted, repulsed, and undeniably obsessed. These people were entirely “other” to me. Neither children nor adults, neither working class nor patrician, of seemingly many different races, I could not place them in any pre-existing categories of human.
I was attending Pope John XXIII High School in Everett, Massachusetts, where the length of my hair and that of other like-minded boys was surveilled and commented upon by almost every nun, priest, and teacher. Furtive tresses were pushed behind ears and away from foreheads as we entered the school each morning, only to be vigorously shaken free at three o’clock each afternoon. What a secret victory it was when a few strands of out bangs could be pulled down to reach our mouths. I constantly found trouble in passive-aggressive behavior, such as wearing lapel buttons that read “King Kong died for our sins” or “God is not dead, he’s been busted.” Inn the closing days of my freshman year I found a bottle of prescription drugs in the bushed outside of school. During geometry class I thought it would be amusing to roll one of these pills down the aisles to demonstrate some characteristic of motion and resistance. Soon I was facing accusations of drug dealing and asked no to return the following autumn.
Fervent, idealistic, politicized middle-class and upper-class graduates were marching out of local universities, intent on spreading their hermetic revolution beyond campus borders. I was now attending a public school and ripe to meet the handful of radical young faculty who has infiltrated this working-class high school / Viet Nam draftee factory. Before a month had passes, I found myself with a small cell of other students sitting in the living room of the new history teacher. The walls of her apartment were a collage of inspirational revolutionary quotes. Amidst the exhortations hung a poster featuring a photograph of Chairman Mao playing Ping-Pong across the black-and-white image, painted in red, the words “Serve the People.”
We met there on a weekly basis, becoming editors of an ‘underground” newspaper that hoped to speak directly to high school students’ concerns. As a writer/editor for such student publications as Fenced In, New Dawn, its from cover graphic featured a black fist in a rising sun, Breath Free, I employed the pen name L.D.V., which stood for Leonardo Da Vodka. (Little did I realize how appropriate that moniker would be in my later life.) It was in these meetings that I first understood the words “feminism,” Marxism,” and “proletariat.” In endless discussions about that to do and how to proceed with the imminent popular uprising, I began to unravel the meaning and contexts of a dizzying array of initialisms, such as NLF, SDS, PLP, YSL, and UFW. What were we to call ourselves? The females in our group wanted to be referred to as “women,” not “girls,” although I hardly felt comfortable calling myself a “man” at 16, especially since I was beginning to question the definition of masculinity itself.
When it came time to design and paste up our manifestos in sequenced pagers, were introduced to the basement offices of the Old Mole in Central Square, Cambridge. Disheveled but serious-looking young men and women passed in and out of the doors, carrying bundles of community-produced newspapers such as Lavender Vision, an early broadside for gay liberation. Leaflets tucked under earnest arms and stuffed in denim pockets announced strikes, boycotts, teach-ins and general upheaval. For me, this place smelling of ink, rubber cement, and seat, was the cellar of the revolution, vividly bringing to like the images I was forming from my reading about Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Fidel, and Ho Chi Minh. I felt that I had found my tribe, my international tribe beyond political and geographical borders. With a gleam in my eye and a fist in the air, I dubbed myself a “High School Revolutionary.”
My father had fought in the Koran War as a Marine; his green woolen uniform was packed away in an old hope chest in the basement. I secretly appropriated the jacked, adorning its back with a circle-shaped American flag overlaid with a hand painted peace symbol. On my lapel was a red star with a hammer and sickle in the center. As my hair grew and my clothes became more hippy-military, I would be regularly assaulted by neighborhood thugs, who actually used the epithet “commie faggot.” I was temporarily expelled from high school for distributing “subversive literature” on school grounds, calling for students to resist the draft. During my junior year I was almost held back because it had become impossible for me to attend Phys-Ed classes as the routine in the locker room involving my grease-monkey enemies became increasingly violent. My messianic delusions involved leading my fellow proletarian youth to rebellion against the “military-industrial complex.” Unfortunately, although I was becoming aware of the unacknowledged class privilege of the “counter-culture,” I was becoming equally alienated by the violence and intolerance of my own working-class roots.
Art and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll
Initially the act of ingesting illegal substances was considered part of the revolutionary lifestyle, although it was not long before anything vaguely antisocial could be justified in our minds by attaching the prefab aura of ‘rebellion’. Before I was initiated into the world of mind alteration, I had heard rumors on the street about how to get high by utilizing domestic substances that could be found around the house. There was no way I was going to inhale cleaning fluid, but I did scrape and bake the insides of banana peels in order to smoke the resulting pebble-like nuggets. I also rolled and smoked pine needles, producing the worst headache of my life.
When I was seventeen, I briefly and unofficially dropped out of high school to help start an alternative school and to take drugs. At the prompting of my more experienced girlfriend, I had recently discovered mescaline and other psychedelics. Like a flock of altar boys ringing a million tiny bells in my head, this was the closest thing to salvation I had ever experienced. For a year or so, my friends and I had been smoking marijuana and hashish when we could get it. Gradually we became the willing guinea pigs for any drug that made its way into our high school; we were gatekeepers to altered consciousness. Indiscriminately we consumed Benzedrine, Black Beauties, Crossroads, Reds, Crystal Meth, PCP, Angel Dust, Purple Windowpane, Mr. Natural, and Orange Sunshine. Whether the substances were homegrown or came with manufacturer’s warrantee made no difference. My friends and I passed most afternoons of our junior year at Eddie Rojas’ house, each of us wandering in our own smoky corner of the universe while listening to progressive-rock concept albums like Close to the Edge by Yes, Pictures at an Exhibition (my introduction to classical music) by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Jimi’s Electric Ladyland.
My politics grew fuzzy-edged, naive class analysis mixed with vague pop-utopian fantasies of establishing alternative societies in rural communes, desert islands, and Irish castles. In a kind of rehearsal for these futures, every weekend that we could get away en masse, my friends and I would load up a borrowed van with tents, sleeping bags, beer, pint bottles of Southern Comfort, pot, psychedelics, guitars, accordions, congas, banners, mosquito repellant, and cans of Dinty Moore’s beef stew and head out for the wilds of New England.
One of our favorite spots was the wooded banks of the Swift River near the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts. The closest town was Nichewaug, which was no more than a few houses at a crossroads. Nichewaug became the adopted home for our social experiment; we invented a Nichewaug high school chant, “Nich-e-waug, Nich-e-waug, Nichewaug Woo! Nich-e-waug , Nich-e-waug, Waaay Up!” We declared ourselves citizens of the “Bufo Nation,” out mascot was Bufo Americanus (American Toad); our fraternity, “Gamma Delta Bufo.” We appointed each other Minister of Bufo, Minister of Mushrooms, Minister of Appropriate Chants, Minister of Carpets, Eddie Rojas, the royal Minister of Music, played bagpipes as we marched scruffily behind him along century-old logging trails, happy, lost, yet temporarily residing in our own utopia.
Back in the city, our quest for appropriately otherworldly for our self-administered drug experiments often found us spending entire days wandering the halls and exhibits of the many museums of Boston/Cambridge. The Museum of Fine Arts, the Gardner Museum, and the Peabody Museum at Harvard were a few of our regular haunts. Tripping on three hits of Purple Windowpane, I stood, for hours, in front of an enormous lighthouse lens on display at the Museum of Science. I was utterly mesmerized by the multifaceted crystal structure rotated on its axis, its beam of light caressing my face. In its golden warmth, the light became a medium, a message that seemed to contain and transmit the entirety of Babylonian culture. As the luminescence swerved toward me I could hear the rising music, see the Hanging Gardens, and even feel the sweet intensity of the Babylonian sun. In a momentary crescendo, my consciousness was filled with the cacophony of voices, street sounds, and temple chants. I was bodily immersed in ancient sensuality. As the beam swept away from me, a kind of dusty yearning for a glorious epic past filled my heart and I felt the loss and melancholy of history in the disappearing echo of Babylonian song. I stood distraught and empty, only to be revived once the beam came around in its rotation and again filled me with its burnished wonders.
Yet another psychic excursion found me standing in front of Renoir’s painting Dance at Bougival, which hangs at the Museum of Fine Arts. I knew nothing about Impressionism, could not tell a Monet from a Hallmark card. My interest in art up to that point was mainly in the altered realms of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali. Yet something happened on that rainy, miserable November afternoon: a teenage boy, whose brain was addled by lysergic acid, was for the first time touched, entered, moved, animated, subtly yet somehow fundamentally altered by a two-dimensional image consisting of colored pigments spread across a canvas surface. Looking back on it now, I am tempted to apologize for the boy’s naive taste, for his adolescent romanticism, for his aesthetic sentimentality. But I will be kind to him and describe that experience, that art experience, as something like falling in love for the first time.
The tall, narrowly vertical canvas shows a couple dancing, hermetically sealed in the power of their collaborative embrace. As if occupying a world entirely different from that of the ladies and gentlemen conversing at tables in the diaphanous background, the man peers intently at the women’s face, his eyes hidden beneath the soft brim of his floppy hat. She avoids his gaze, looks down and away, yet her lightly pursed lips remain tantalizingly close to his. One toe peeks out beneath the pink and white ruffled dress suggestively gathered at her hips. With his right arm he pulls her upper torso unto his dark blue suit, and I, too, am pulled in, seduced by this painting, immersed in its atmosphere of dappled pastels. In a sense I inhabited this pained space on that afternoon, made a temporary home there, took up residency in an image painted ninety years previously in faraway France.
After the failure of our alternative school experiment, my friends and I took to hanging around a teen coffeehouse in Union Square, Somerville. We transferred out idealistic desire to share our knowledge with others to offering classes in guitar, candle making, and the history of the war in Viet Nam. A group of self-styled “media activists” opened a storefront across the street. Before long we were co-mingling; they were interested in raising the political consciousness of the local youth, we were interested in really cool cameras they had, which included the first portable video systems. One of the activists, who looked exactly like Cat Stevens, put a 35mm camera in my hand and offered to teach me how to develop and print my own pictures. It just so happened that I had tickets to a Led Zeppelin concert that weekend and without flinching he rolled me three cassettes of black-and-white film, lending me the camera with an impressive-looking 200mm lens.
Well before the mega-hit Stairway to Heaven came to stand for art rock excess, I was fully under the sway of Led Zeppelin’s head-banging, guitar-screaming, psychedelicized blues perversely and inextricably bound with the lyrics of sex and Tolkienesque battles between good and evil. That night, while holding the camera high over the crowd, I wormed my way close to the stage at Boston Garden. In order to succeed photographically, I chose to remain relatively undrugged, and only smoked a little pot. Guitar god Jimmy Page was playing a double-necked Gibson SG, six strings stretched across one neck, twelve stings across the second. During the long dirge-like improvisational solos, Page employed a cello bow across the strings, producing an unearthly electric howl that twisted like filigree, entwining with the inchoate falsetto cries of singer Robert Plant.
Plant swung the microphone in an orbit, in perfect unison with his swinging hair. Droplets of sweat flew from his golden curls, catching the light, making a frenetic halo around his heathen head. I stood beneath, solidly anchored in the seething mass of male adolescents, camera raised to my right eye, the 200mm lens bringing me up and into the orgy of sound and effect. In this moment I made a personal evolutionary leap; the pollywog became the toad, the consumer became the producer. I was no longer just a fan, I was a participant observer. I could transform experience into image. As I learned from Arbus later, the camera became a passport, a way in and a way out. Not that I could be Renoir, but with humility and awe, I became a newly born artist standing at the doorway of the symbolic realm as a creator myself. Yes, I was yet another stoned teenager at a Led Zeppelin concert, but as I gazed up through the mechanical recording device, I saw my future as a ladder of images. I envisioned each frame, every exposure piled up into an accretion of pictures that would take me elsewhere. And elsewhere is where I always intended to go.
Originally Published in Exposure, Volume 35:1, 2002
