mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
My Photo Blog
Flickr / Videos
Facebook / Twitter
Email
/
Archive
Ernest Belloch Photographing a Prostitute, George Schmidt.
When Abby was last in town, she, Will, and I visited the gallery of George Schmidt, a New Orleans artist, to deliver a canvas stretcher. He treated us to a polymathic and monological tour de force as we wandered around his building, discussing the very high and the very low with equal enthusiasm. He laughed at his own constant and usually ribald jokes while showing us a work in progress I’d give my car for.
The painting above is of a man more commonly known as E. J. Bellocq, well-known for his photographs of prostitutes in Storyville, a district in which New Orleans legalized prostitution from 1897 through 1917 (as is always the case, the goddamn Feds eventually interfered for their own selfish reasons).
His photographs are amazing; this is from 1912:
Bellocq and Schmidt are both part of and concerned with the idiosyncratic and unusual side of New Orleans that is inimitable; Schmidt’s current painting treats in a manner both comic and reverential -the archetypal New Orleans Catholic stance- of the city’s four holy figures in a scene I can scarcely describe. Hopefully I’ll be able to share more on both of them in the future.
Potential captions for this sad photoset of Abby and her pumpkin include, but are not limited to: (1) the memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime; (2) for dust you are and to dust you shall return; (3) “So passes Denethor, son of Ecthelion”; and, (4) live by the kitchen knife, die by the mold.
Abby in San Francisco about a year ago, before I knew her.
Through the absurd kindness of super-duo Chris and Alexi, Abby and I went to the Telluride Film Festival this weekend. It was a purely wonderful experience, entirely happy and thrilling and engaging, and Chris’ synopsis -as we all lamented our return to ordinary life- will be the coda:
On a thanatotic, bureaucratically burdened morning like today’s, memories of Alaskan Ale, Millsner’s challenges, gigantic-breasted cartoon women, reluctant maturation (!), cookies on the sidewalk, cracking up on multiple gondola rides, arguing about grossly misleading jazz documentaries, women seducing boat captains in highly unusual silk pajama pants, rain-soaked hot-tubs, pee-soaked shirts, unadulterated cranberry juice, full-bore gaffling on cycling and various nuts (sorry Alexi, sorry Abby!), jeeps with snorkels, orca-hating young Louisiana men, jort-wearing cinephiles, basketball trees and eagles in drag, bring to bear to the full power of nostalgia, the sense of pain and lost homeland already made a dolorous pleasure.
There’s nothing for it but to do it again. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Abby and I again see the fittest brainiacs since intellectualism lost its interest in physical vitality (a date which I’ll leave to others to fix).
If possible, I’ll be contributing some reviews -despite my pitifully poor grasp of cinema- to Filmosophy. I’ve already sent in some thoughts on Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and may add my inexpert views of Das weiße Band, Breaking Point, An Education, or Vincere.
The photos are here; I hope some of them are interesting to you, and I’ll post a few I liked later.
Long before I had the chance to photograph the moon through B’s telescope, Abby sent me the homemade book above; I found it amusing, striking, touching. In it, the moon is variously described as
- a clever little sliver
- the ruminating rind of albino orange, with no ballast
- a mischievous melon; an obtuse milkdrop
and more, and it is illustrated in its phases. I particularly loved the binding and the back cover, with its question (the answer, of course: the maria).
Today I am going to see Abby again, thanks to the generosity of the wonderful friends I photographed in London; they’ve invited us to see them in Colorado, so after some exciting air travel I’ll be out of touch for a bit. Take care!
Toots & the Maytals - It’s You.
I think this song is fun, even if it lodges itself in my mind and won’t depart for anything.
Abby, Will, John, Rebecca, Andy, and I went to the ranch for a few days of filth, scrum, shooting, swimming, high-bluff-jumping, smoking, night-photography, drinking, and more. We didn’t take enough photos, possibly because we were too busy having a good time.
We followed some deer and some hogs and even caught some rain, despite the drought. Worse than usual, I am having a hard time being back.
The photos are here; I’ll probably post some more when I get the chance.
mottled black by the inverted
pillars of the red elms,
in perspective, that lift the tangled
net of their desires hard into
the falling rain.”
(From Little Potato: moss, diagrams, letters, colors, quincunx, more).
After a bad day, I came home to a small, meticulously-bundled world on my doorstep; it took me out of the large, carelessly-arranged world in which my day had spilled out earlier, and I liked it so much I didn’t know what to do.
That’s when cigarettes come in handy. I smoked one and read the enclosed essay, letters, and poetic fragments before silently thanking its creator, who is at once meticulous and accident-prone, such that this sublime world had both precise details almost too fragile to believe and an unintentional overwash of Orangina smudging many of its pages. That, of course, made it even better.
