Tuesday, February 24, 2015

When in Rome...

photo by Joel Westendorf

When in Rome make sure you are armed to the teeth and watch your back at all times. Or is it when in Rome get down and party with your tribe and pray the bacchanal lasts forever? My life is exploding into chaos in every direction. It is beautiful and terrible all at once. It is painful and ecstatic. Misery and happiness are duking it out in a never-ending battle royale. Have I learned something in the maelstrom of this eternal dance? Yes. Not to panic. To focus. And to trust whatever it is out there that drives me eternally searching for what I know not. This is my element. Perhaps it was a form of madness to think this is were I would find solace and from where I would begin to create again. But it is happening and I welcome every crazy minute of it.

We did the first photo shoot for Sisters in the Wasteland (see previous blog if you really want to know all the weird shit that swirls around in my head and what I obsess about - non-linear time, Gnostic creation myths, witchcraft, etc.) last weekend at El Matador Beach in Malibu. The images here are nothing what they will eventually look like, but I thought I would share them anyway. This is not a glamorous project. The pictures will be heavy, dirty, and elemental. They will be distressed and border that delicate line between the ugly and the sublime. None of us working on it really knows how it will all turn out but that's half the fun of doing a collaborative project - seeing what everyone brings to the feast.

I warned everyone involved with this project that it would open up a rabbit-hole because these sorts of things always do, but I did not realize it would bring fictional characters I fashioned long ago in fevered dreams into my waking world. Reality is a bizarre and multi-layered fantasical beast, and like Yeats once wrote, "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarachy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned..."

You know the rest...

Photo by Joel Westendorf
photo by Joel Westendorf

photo by Joel Westendorf



Much love from where the worlds touch.

S - xx









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