Glad Girls

I'm a bad bachelor. I may have mentioned this before.

My girl is somewhere in America on the Human Rights Watch Donor Dinner tour 2006. She left two Sunday's ago and isn't gonna be home until this Sunday.

At my worst, I drink a bottle and a half of wine (good stuff, mind you - Chilean or Argentinean reds) and order Chinese food and fall asleep on the couch with THE TV on Channel Static.

The cat jumps on me or licks me or something at 4am and just looks at me like - idiot boy, go to bed...(but feed me heartily in four hours...)

That's EXACTLY what it would say if it could talk, and our baby kitty can ALMOST talk. Really. Serious shit. People have seen it almost talk. It's sounds are SO CLOSE to human words.

And who says our language is the best anyway. Fucking self-important opposable thumb assholes that we are...

I digress.

The other thing I've done since my girl has been gone, in-between dealing with my corporate clients and the IRS, is scan, scan. scan negatives. I also make trips into the city and back to Brooklyn to drop off and pick up negatives. So I can scan them. 13 rolls of Neopan from the damn West Coast excursion - 13!

This is the way it goes at US COLOR LABS

Hi Tony.
Hey James, where’ve you been?
On the West Coast shooting my ass off.
How many rolls?
Thirteen.
All girls?
Nah, I shot a wedding too. But yeah…
1:1 develop, reference prints glossy with borders.
Yep.
Tomorrow at 8pm?
Yep
But like 8pm?
That’s cool, Tony, I’ll either stop by then or come by the next morning.

I’ve been getting my stuff done at US COLOR LABS since 1990. I am often asked by fellow photographers if I process my own and my answer is always the same: I am too old to give up that much time and hell, at this point, Tony knows more about how to process my stuff than I do. And he likes seeing the girls, so he gives he a healthy 30% discount. Tony will be thanked in my first monograph.

I shot Lee, a model from my home state of NC last month. We had been talking about it for a year or so and she finally made the trip to NYC. I booked a studio (there’s a shot in a previous post) and even though she was an hour and a half late due to transportation difficulties, we had a great time and as I was scanning the negatives today, I realized that we got great stuff. Very 1960’s Audrey Hepburn/Marcel Marceau if that makes any sense.

Lee was MAD when she showed up at the studio and I gave her a big hug and told her not to worry about it. She recoiled and said that she really needed to vent, to get the trains and taxis out of her system.

I understood that intuitively. And liked her all the more for going there first. She’s got a New Yorker’s soul whilst living in Durham, NC.

Just like me a long time ago.

The photo is her, completely relaxed and inventing. Reinventing, perhaps.

Or as Bob Pollard would say:

Reinvented nightly
Wake up with skills like this
And do you want me in your head?
But what's behind your scattered eyesigns?

I want to reinvent you now

Fifty hats and bargain suits
We will wear them if we must
But who will be a human boot?
Kick the wave of current hotlines?

I want to reinvent you now

Reinvent you nightly
Reinvite you rightly
I'll reunite you

ps - he was amazing last night. And really fucking drunk. Really fucking drunk.