Lotta Yard Work Today

Coincidentally, soon after a fully armored SWAT team broke into his neighbor’s house, Carl Simmons came out of his house to pick lint from his broom.

“Got some sweeping to do,” he said to an unresponsive police officer. Moments later, two handcuffed men were led out of his neighbor’s house.

At last, those bastards, he thought to himself. “Yard work,” he said out loud. “Sure wasn’t expecting this. If I’m in your way over here, just let me know.”

The police knew better than to lead him on. They knew they’d get an earful about these neighbors.

So Carl swept.

The Way I Photograph

A good photo, first of all, has to have familiarity.

That means the viewer can plug in, understand the scene, and be confident she “gets it.”

I want each person to navigate an ambiguity, to interpret it uniquely, and completely understand that other people will see it differently because that is the nature of ambiguity.

This freedom to navigate can only happen when the artist makes no editorial, no noise.

I like to make art that is like a prism. It’s so simple, and basic, yet a line shines through it to open up the whole spectrum of the rainbow.

4th Grade

I had a dream where my entire class was sent back, at age 23, to redo 4th grade.

We were sat down in assigned seats and we took turns reading aloud from the same page of the same book.

We were covering topics that were dead simple, things we already knew, things that didn’t matter.

I raised this point to the teacher, who disciplined me like the disruptive student I have always been. What made this bizarre deja vu into a nightmare was that my classmates, now 23, joined in shushing me so that the teacher’s lesson could continue uninterrupted.

Lie with Me

Third floor, fourth door,
sixteen-hundredth building,
eighty-fourth avenue;
no one looking could find
our lifeblood apartment
in this fully loaded city
of overstimulated people.
Too many freaking spaces.
It’s urban nature, acts of god,
growing lists of things amiss.
It’s how it is, living here.
But look, I’ve made a nest
in the chaos, discovered this
hollow where we fit
like slippers – no questions
getting in at the seams.
Lie with me, my dream,
sleep here safe with me
among our bookshelves
and all our trappings, in
blankets that hold stories
like voyagers who enshroud
you and make you believe.

Lie to Me

Truth infinite. It takes an infinitely long book to truthfully describe the complete detail of a nanonsecond-long slice of the universe.

All of our perceived reality is an interwoven system of agreed upon abstractions of this infinite truth. We use abstractions because we understand them and we can’t grasp the infinite. Good storytellers create abstractions that others find agreeable. Scientists are storytellers the same as writers. They decide what to leave out, what to leave in, they editorialize, they work within the confines of language. These abstractions are not facts; they are summarizations and they are abstractions of infinite truth.

Nadja

My name is Nadja and I am from Minsk. My father pushed me to do ballet since before I can remember.

People think ballet is about having the perfect body, or having the genes of a czarina. I am being honest when I say there have been girls better than me at every step of my life. What separates me is I never wanted to quit. Doing ballet is what I love most. I do not think you can fake passion. The audience, whether in Moscow, Tokyo, or London, they know if you dance with every nerve in your body.