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.
