Two girls shared an extended banal conversation at the end of a dusty wooden counter.
Three Victorian cracked mirrors reflected their faces and the busy street behind the window.
I spent a long time watching the scene, while waiting for her to come back from the ladies’ room.
The dust on the counter was part of the decoration, as well as the alabaster pendulums hanging from the ceiling, the paper glasses containing remains of tea and coffee. Everything seemed so artificially old and shabby, so London á la mode that I wondered why we hadn’t pick Prague as our destiny.
Later, we had dinner in a café where Formica-topped tables that hadn’t changed in fifty years. I looked at her pensively munching a serving of ham omelet and chips. My moodiness banished in less than a second. She touched the corner of her mouth as if I had seen a drop of mayo or whatever. She did it so graciously that Picadilly at dusk felt the perfect place at the perfect moment to me.
I suddenly remembered Clea’s Alexandria, the making of a world through love, the remembrance of things half forgotten and I noticed my new biography replacing the old one only for her.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Let the night do the talking
A struggle against conformity
It amazes me how the fragments of the moment always manage to fit together in spite of all the defective maneuvers and devices of the mind to impose a Procrustean strict conformity to what we are supposed to see and feel.
Meaning appears beyond the image, fading as we attempt to state it as if reality had a defense mechanism of its own.
The two girls with hair extensions, heavy makeup and deep racks passed by the boy without noticing him.
I shot the camera from intuition and even though I can’t remember what I was thinking at the time the shutter was released, I can easily relate to the boy’s gawk: we can only see what we already believe and perpetuate the rule in order to shrink the anxiety associated with desire and to avoid the emotional insulation resulting from rejection.
Robert Doisneau wrote that one’s got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts – a sort of intuitive medium – so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.
Maybe none of the girls were worthwhile looking at (dull, average, unexceptional), but at this moment, the boy’s glance yields a return: a foreknowing vision beyond them.
Thunder and shadow
I’m suddenly aware of my true artistic purpose: to survive the temptations of the past opening up in blatant integrity. The yes, the no, the not yet are still very challenging as my nature is a paradox of mental impatience coupled with a physical lack of verve. But everything moves at such high speed, and the moment fades as fast as my camera’s shutter so I have no time for defending old beliefs and assumptions. What comes up to my eye is reckless, and sometimes offensively bold, but if I censor the input or pay too much attention to the detail, if I black out in allegiance, trying to appear perfect, trying to get public attention, I become part of the majority that loses the day and closes the window to the wondrous failure that art is, that love is, that life is.
Despite the collateral damage, I was able enough to bounce, to take the leap, to bear off from the death house and wave my flag of rebellion from the distance. I’m still awfully scared, but I’ve never felt so mindful, so willing to put up with the truth of what is at hand. Faithfully, precisely, immediate and even religiously. So ready to conjure reality in it’s wholeness: thunder and shadow.
An exercise in glorious excess
Ava bought a house in La Moraleja. A house with a witch-shaped weathervane on the roof, called La Bruja. She paid 66.000 dollars for it in 1954. Then she moved to a flat in Oquendo and finally to a duplex in Doctor Arce, right above Peron’s apartment, while the argentinian ex-dictator was exiled in Madrid.
Against all popular sayings about housekeepers tendency to gossip, the janitor of her last residence in Spain -retired and old, but yet very clear minded- still refuses to reveal any secret about the rave bacchanals running upstairs, which made Peron go mad very often.
According Ava, Peron had one very disturbing trait. He would often march out onto his balcony, and make loud, arm-waving speeches to the empty street below. The speeches disturbed his next-door neighbor, who felt he let down the tone of the vicinity.
Ava had always been a potty mouth. She knew that the pejorative Spanish word for homosexual was maricón which rhymes nicely with Perón. So every time he step onto his balcony and began to demagogue his invisible supporters, she gathered her assistants and formed an opposition party by chanting in unison Perón es un maricón, Perón es un maricón.
He hated her wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, Ava attended secret teas with María Estela and loved her home made empanadas.
The Barefoot Comtessa would sleep all day and get up to go to Oliver, Riscal (Archy, nowadays) and Chicote after dark. Tequilas, Old Fashions, Mai Tais and Manhattans were served to her in a row until closing time. Most barmans were told never to charge her the drinks. A lady in waiting who always hanged around called the taxis and pushed her into them and then into bed, if she didn’t pick up a bailaor or a young torero to sleep with, in her futile attempts to forget Frank Sinatra.
A few witnesses of those post-war Hollywood years in Spain remember that she even drove fast cars across the city outskirts, completely drunk, landing herself in crashes no one but her could leave unharmed.
They also remember her whimsical exercise in abounding excess, her exuberance, her generosity, her magnificent audacity to make choices and face the consequences without a trace of pathos, sulks or self-pity.
She was really determined to fit in and would ask in her best Spanish, ¿Quieres una copita? or let the gypsies plop their babies on her lap to hold during flamenco dances.
Wild and innocent at the core, flamboyant and perpetually undone, she was even barred from the Ritz for peeing in the lobby, but if you ask the ones that shared those wild years with her, all of them will say she was larger than life and most of all, unforgettable.
Reportedly, a lone black limousine parked behind the crowd at Ava’s funeral.
No one left the vehicle, but everyone assumed that the anonymous mourner was Frank Sinatra. Later, a beautiful floral arrangement at the graveside simply read: “With My Love, Francis”.
Spook
This light shining through my flesh upon things on to the ground. This light that I can barely name. This life belt, this umbilical cord, this secular appearance of a revenant God, this momentary oblivion of me.
Beauty for granted
“Ahora tú, no dejes de hablar”
Some people wagered his name for years in betting pools of early evanescence, but a couple of weeks ago, he sort it out the best he could to sing La chica de ayer in a crappy and mawkish TV show called The battle of the decades. After the song, almost breathless, visibly weak and ready to drop, he answered a hollow question of the host about why should the 80′s had to win over the 50′s.
That was his last public appearance.
Watching the video I see Anabel, one of the eliminated contestants of the last edition of OT (a kind of cross between Pop Idol and Big Brother), visibly touched by his performance and his frailty.
It’s almost an oxymoron to see Antonio in that context, the heartbreaking afterglow of his talent in such a splurge of mediocrity. However, Anabel’s expression was surprisingly honest and maybe for the first time, I found in her something worthwhile to look at. Perhaps it was not her merit, but his shy and wounded gift.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and he had the outstanding capacity to bring that love to the surface through his compositions and his presence.
One cannot run away from weakness. It’s all about fighting it out or perishing and he was a light flyweight warrior of his own brittleness, yet always ready to let the blaze unfold.
I read somewhere that grace comes often clad in the dusky robe of desolation and in this case it’s true without question and beyond doubt. He struggled inner demons and he had a great craving for ingravity, but he wasn’t as sad as we imagined him to be. He wanted to have a child, he was about publishing a book of poems, he was excited about his new album, and even though his body was running away through the back stairs, he didn’t want to die and he didn’t mention death in any of his songs.
I’m afraid that whatever I write about him in the aftermath of his departure, will result in a platitude.
The truth is that his two guitars were close to the coffin, available to whoever wanted to say good bye with a few accords but no one had the guts to do so, as if the only acceptable eulogy was silence.
We owe him more sweetness and kindness than we are able to pay.
The biggest curse of our times is to take beauty for granted until it’s irrevocably lost.
That great golden hive of the Invisible
Some days after knowing about the cheating, I went to a mountain retreat with some friends.
We bathed naked in the river, we had miso soup for dinner and meditated in behalf of clarity.
Rilke wrote that all insights occur after the fact: I was scared to death, but feeling relieved by
dissolution.
My hands felt unbearably hot and I was struggling hard with a lagged need for physical
containment. In that warmth I flash backed the dilapidation, the rust, the spoilage, the washout and wreck of the previous years.
The one you live with can be a spiritual master or a scrubby guru.
The one you live with can bring your essence to light or brush truth and beauty aside until you become a dead one walking.
Since then I’ve experienced a progressive turnaround and major adjustments.
I love my daughters and my girl beyond what I thought possible.
I arised refreshed from doubt and surrendered to photography as a life-long calling.
Everything is there, disturbingly appealing to the senses, reclaiming the lost years from precariousness and seclusion, ready to bloom.
A normal, average life
She was a child prodigy in the 80′s. She could play five of the most difficult instruments and won a bunch of contests, dragged from one to the next by an histrionic mother, desperate for attention.
At sixteen she realized her queerness. At twenty two she killed victim zero.
Since then, she has been perfecting her normal, average life, suppressing one human annoyance at a time. She needs no redemption, no absolution, no amnesty or discharge.
On the verge of forties, she still settles for second best, secretly thinking she deserves better.
Her father swears that she is the best daughter anyone could have. Her mother spends evenings looking at photographs and news scraps of the time both were celebrities.
Her angelic visage and her virtuosity playing the organ, the piano, the violin, the cello can fool anyone.
She has no fears, no feelings of guilt or remorse. An exquisitely peaceful face. Even her natural, impersonal process choosing you as the next prey may be charming.
Her true nature remains invisible to the rest of the world.
She is a skilled mind reader.
Conscience can be a great handicap. Think about it.
Ask yourself how would you live your life if you had such an advantage over the majority.