It’s not their struggle for belonging, equality, social evenness and self esteem.
It’s our pitiful failure to take a warm look skin deep enough to realize that our crooked, freakish and gargoylish self image is coming back to get us.
Such a sad circus, such Grand Guignol only for us, the blind and the deaf.
Such a display of desperation carefully hidden under loads of makeup and silicone, only for us, who won’t dare to see.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Sadhearted psychodrama
Bipartisan
“Who the fuck are you calling a failure?”
The verbal lash hastily hit me down to the core, while waiting for my beer at the counter of a tavern, after doing some errands.
We all keep one or two alternative selves carefully hidden, and most of the time they faithfully assume the burden of our forbidden desires, our shameful secrets, our bitter regrets. But sometimes, when defenses are weak, or the body is tired, they turn anarch and claim their rights and unmet needs.
All of a sudden, one clearly can hear their voices, and sense their anger, and notice the power that dark emotions hold, and the only mentally sound choice is to remain immobile, passive, almost vegetative, until the uprising cools down.
Enraged intentions go away one sip of beer at a time. You pick yourself together, pay the tapas, fix the discreet smile, the good guy looks, and walk away counting the paving stones. It’s just a flare-up, the beastly attempt of truth to reset its order. As it comes, as it goes.
The annoying telephone operator will spend two hours talking in circles before restoring your connection, and you’ll be affable, polite, complaisant, as if she saved your life. And the bipartisan, the angry one, the deprived will blow the coals inwards and ask for antacids. You probably saw this thing on television, The United States of Tara. Taking the others out regularly would provide great relief, but we live in the land of hypocrisy. Airs and graces, affectation, double-dealing, lip service, double-dealing and falseheartedness. For the common good.
There’s a cafe where you get discounts for the most offensive insult. No wonder plots relish on madness.
Borderline Karoshi
Of course Mr. Mizuno can afford two mistresses. He deserves it. After all, he works sixteen hours a day with unenviable dedication (plus an hour and a half commuting).
As a matter of fact, he could afford this sort of erotic honeymoon in Madrid with more than two if he wanted. He will pay boob plastic surgery for both. And a very expensive stay at the Ritz. And then, back in Tokyo, he will go to the gardens and meditate on really profound things, purify his body in the public baths, then home to kiss Akiko and the children, and return to his normal habits. An year of sleep deprivation won’t let him enjoy other carnal pleasure than just looking at them, naked on fancy satin sheets. He will sleep long siestas while they go to their appointments with the surgeon (with a hired translator, also paid by him), or they burn the Visa in Serrano.
The only thing off limits for them is taking photos. No mementos, no souvenirs, no cameras allowed in this Spanish trip.
On photography and other dangerous pursuits
Even though some days life is a shit storm and most of things wet paper, I consider myself one of the richest and more fortunate human beings in the world.
Wonder is leading and I’m in the good direction.
The click must go on.
Bareback ride
It was Henri Bergson who wrote that the eye only sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I think that the eye is only blessed by true beauty when the heart is ready to receive (and honor) whatever comes up, either if it’s beautiful or not.
There’s a powerful analogy between photography and love. The more I love, the better I see, the better I catch up the marvel moment, the brighter reality shows up on paper and screen.
I felt the horses galloping over my head, and the intense smell of dung and grass all over the racecourse. The sun was hitting vertical on the tracks and the noise of the hoofs from ground level waved electric through my body like an approaching stampede. I was totally in awe, riding my high, feeling so alive, so receptive, eager to absorb the moment and never let it go.
I’m not one of those people who go in raptures often. I’m quite latent, quite unaroused, secretly and silently passionate.
How much I owe to the woman who opened me up to this kind of bewilderment, striking truth into the eyes I now resist to shut.
It impresses me to no end the capacity of her presence to change my filters, to domesticate time and light in behalf of a clearer perception, to change the trajectory of my artistic purpose, to put my fears on hold, to make me proud of myself (as capable of love her in return, as deserving of her company), to encourage me to risk beyond comfort zone, turning all things threatening into potentially warmhearted, welcoming, hospitable ones, by melting my suits of armor and giving me my curiosity and my adventurous drive back.
I went into the shower, pleasantly tired of living fully. Just like a kid or a lover.
So lost
At the firtst sight, she reminded me Jane March cooking naked in Bruce Willis’s kitchen.
I didn’t even realize that my wife was about to arrive home with the groceries. Of course, she was not naked under a white apron with embroidery flounces and not baking cookies for me either, but I was speachless, paralyzed by her arrogance and candor to break into my kitchen like a burglar, covered only by a thin, almost transparent T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of jean shorts, soaking wet.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked in a harsh whisper, as if someone could hear us.
She was leaning on the marble worktop and adopting a naughty, deceptively naive and seductive pose. After a calculated silent lapse she said ‘I’m so lost’.
Don’t ask me how a grown up man, a married man, a self-made man, a father, a responsible adult could let himself get caught in a trap like that. I have no clue. I used to be one of those claiming life sentence for child and teen sexual offenders.
She seemed like she used sex to get a fix, to ease some kind of deep emotional pain. She seemed to be hooked on it, she craved me like an addict craves drugs. And she acted older than sixsteen. I know it’s not an excuse, but she acted older than sixteen.
We did it in less than five minutes, fiercely. And in those five minutes I had a blowjob, a soggy hookup and a back door raid better than anything before in my whole life. I came into her, groaning like a beast. Such a bang, such a seizure, such a liberation. The garage door opened just when I was making up my suit. My wife was asking help with the bags.
All of a sudden I realized she wasn’t there anymore. I came out from the trance like if someone punched my stomach. My heart was pounding wildly, my face felt feverish, and my clothes were wet. I filled a jar with water and I smashed it against the tiles, trying to arrange a plausible scenario to justify my messy looks. My wife didn’t notice the tiny footsteps, but she found a bra on one of the deckchairs by the pool and nail tracks in my back a few hours later.
I am sleeping on the couch and she is giving me a silent treatment, while she decides if I deserve to be forgiven or not. And if you ask me if I deserve, I say I don’t.
But I can’t take her wet, tiny, juicy body off my mind. I can’t think about anything else.
It’s killing me.
May love take your eyes by storm
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.
May love take your eyes by storm
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.