drmstream[writing]

This is where I am: An old man dying from can­cer, but still vital and bemused by the inten­sity of life, is walk­ing on a dark path that runs behind an old house down the hill to the run­down apart­ment build­ing he lives in. The lit­tle patch of woods is the byprod­uct of a geo­log­i­cal quirk. Millenniums […]

  I was at lunch with an artist today and asked him about his work. “I keep push­ing ahead and it changes,” he said. I asked him to describe a cre­ative phase that was par­tic­u­larly dis­tinc­tive. He became ani­mated as he talked about the chal­lenge of adding a third dimen­sion to his paint­ing. “I painted a very […]

  What I see clearly I pass by. What I see but do not see, I stand to wit­ness. My heart goes wan­der­ing, pulls my soul from its slum­ber, pesters mem­o­ries to give up their hard, wary shell and stretch out in child­like glee. All while I stand cap­tive to what I see but do not see. Then […]

Some­times when I talk I hear my voice echo­ing in my head so I stop. In mid-gesture, mid-sentence, I’ll stop and go fol­low the echo. The moment that I am in — that absolute instance of inter­ac­tion — is sep­a­rate and unique from any other moment and I want to com­mu­ni­cate in a pre­cise and fresh way. The […]

Secrets are dan­ger­ous things. My grand­mother hid behind her secrets. She car­ried them every­where. When she fought with my mother, she’d sit on the couch look­ing shat­tered. “It isn’t that bad, grandma,” I’d say.  She’d look away, whis­per­ing in a quaky voice, ‘You can’t know how bad it is, Danny,’. When I got older and […]

  You worked hard to keep us from see­ing you straight on, didn’t you? That was hard, I imag­ine, when you walked through your day with a cam­era around your neck. No, you put your­self on the other side. The other side of what, that’s what I won­der. Was it the other side of life altogether? […]

  We aren’t meant to ever wit­ness lives in their total­ity.  The long view smooths out the highs, fills in the lows, and reduces every effort to the mean.  We come face to face with the over­whelm­ing scale of exis­tence, the futil­ity of pas­sion, the incon­se­quence of our work.  We might call it beau­ti­ful, but […]

When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that she had been a fat girl. I didn’t know what to make of it.  She wasn’t fat when she said it, and even when she would com­plain that she was fat, I’d think to myself that she was small and slim and not like all […]

  That was a mean choice, giv­ing her the mir­ror, point­ing the cam­era past her fleshy arm. You aren’t being ambigu­ous.  You don’t like look­ing at her but you want to pho­to­graph her.  She’s a Gor­gon; her hair is filled with snakes and if we look her in the eyes we freeze to stone. You say […]

Imag­ine tak­ing 5 pho­tographs a day for 50 years. After 18,250 days, you would have more than 100,000 pho­tographs. You would have stepped out of the flow, peered through your viewfinder and cap­tured a sin­gle moment more than 100,000 dif­fer­ent times. What else will you have done out of inten­tion, out­side of the flow, more than 100,000 […]