Monday, November 29, 2004


gambling w/ our lives he said (for mister man)
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this image is 3' X 3' and dedicated to mister man. gambling w/ our lives he said is a poem i wrote in 1996, the title being the response i got when i told someone that when we fall in love we gamble with our hearts. "no," he said back to me "we gamble with our lives." that phrase has stuck with me ever since. the image has about 30 separate photos nested in it -- like the disa orchid photo of mine in the lower right-hand corner. the central piece -- the swirls -- represent logan square in philadelphia. while not technically a square (it is a circle), the artist who designed the fountain -- calder (he is the father of the contemporary mobile artist and the son of the artist who helped design philadelphia's city hall) -- also has a shakespeare sculpting adjacent to the fountain. so, between the three nymphs in his fountain and the shakespeare sculpture, i figured it was a much a square as its name stated. if you stand in logan square and look behind you, you can see city hall (calder's dad's work) and if you look ahead of you, you see the philadelphia museum where the calder mobiles hang (his son's work). so there was a tremendous sense of lineage in that spot, the spot where i had my first date with mister man (i slipped and fell into the fountain, if you must know). that kind of familial fractal is the resonant theme of the image. each of the smaller swirls in the center of the image have a photo in them (each swirl standing for one of the nymphs and the fourth for the shakespeare sculpting). the other major, recognizable image is the transamerica building here in sf, where we moved (me back home, mister man for the first time). he loved sf. so it is only fitting that its icon be so prominent. the poem is there in the lower left-hand corner and it can be read clearly in its entirety even when the image is reduced to 50% its real size. the three line excerpt from wedding sonata is from this poem. one other comment – after glenn died and when we were cleaning out his apartment as well as going through photos of his, i came across a photo he took of me when we first moved here to sf. i had no idea this picture existed until it literally fell into my lap. if you look just above the poem, you can see that photograph.

Sunday, November 28, 2004


bloom in dublin - primary image
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bloom in dublin is an 18-poem autobiography which i gave my mom several years ago. since then i have edited all the poems, added four addendum stories and now have completely illustrated the whole work. the entire work is 25 panels in all, and each panel is 21” X 15." i should complicate this right now by adding that within the actual "story" panel itself, there are 3 distinct images which make up that panel -- the core image from a photograph of mine of chinese scroll (see below), the poem nested into a smaller version of the core image, and a background collage of the various renditions of the core image. the exception in all of this, size-wise, is the poem nested into a smaller version of the core image (it's 12" X 9").


i've uploaded 5 panels from this piece. bloom refers to not just the flower, but also to james joyce's protagonist leopold bloom. ulysses is set in dublin (hence bloom being set in dublin) and having been raised proudly irish, on top of my one-day-with-out-a-map-finding-leopold-bloom's-fictional-home-when-in-dublin, it all just made sense. the half-way point of the 18 poems is the shortest poem i have ever written (2 lines, 11 words) while the final poem of the 18 is the longest of all of them in this piece (rewritten to about three times the original length).

the core image for all 25 panels is a photograph of mine of a 2-panel chinese scroll painting. i am sincerely indebted to mrs. ogata for allowing me the chance to photograph it. i would be remiss if i didn't acknowledge my mom's acquiescing and letting me break our agreement about when this poem/image could be seen by anyone other than the two of us. the subject matter of the poem (as a whole poem in 22 pieces) is personal, honest and at times not very pleasant, but it is the what it is to be human.


bloom - story 1
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bloom - image 4
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bloom - image 9
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bloom - addendum a
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