-Staring Down the Old Hag-

I used to think there was a monster under the bed. I was fucking convinced.

My gran told me that it was because I didn't love Jesus enough, so I prayed and I slept with a dirty pink Precious Moments Bible, but at night it would still come. And it still does. Of course, now I'm an adult and know it's just hynagogia, but in those moments while it's happening, it's the most real thing in the world. You feel like your death has come to fetch you. And sometimes I'll still catch myself praying.

You hear it before you ever see it. You feel it on on your skin before you know it isn't real. Pops and hisses, croaking and clicks. It's weight against your side when the fingers start to drag down your arm. Salvia floods your mouth as the panic shoves its way into your chest. You choke on it your panic is so thick. But slowly your mobility creeps back into your limbs, you can finally sit up, have some water and forget that you're still afraid of the same things you were when you were six.



It's kind of fucked that this is something that's gone on since I was a child, but since the hynagogia began leaking into and inspiring my photography it's almost something I actively seek in myself. It's a case of poking the bear.

Momma might night have raised a fool but she did raise a glutton for punishment.

-Make Mine Marvel-

Comic books? I damned well love them. Superheros, noir, fantasy. I read it all. If it has even the scent of Campbellian monomyth I'm all over it like stink on shit. Because I have the same over arching need to gravitate and immulate something larger than life itself as a twelve year old boy.



Again, it's that pull of narrative visuals. It crops up in my work as the over saturated colors, some of the compositions and the habit towards multipanels.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm really not anything but standard.

-1C 13:11-

When I was a child, I'd sit in a sweaty church in itchy lace and pour through Revelations. I'd ignore the hour sermon and soak up as much imagery about Whores from Babylon, Lamb-Dragons and Snake Tongued Prophets as my child mind could absorb. At that age, it's the action that excites you. Same reason you'd rather watch Lethal Weapon and Rambo instead of The Seventh Seal.

However, the older I got, the more I was distracted by Corinthians and Mark, especially when I finally began to understand the extremisms some of my family took their Faith and began to defuse my own conflicts.

But even knowing that the degrees and strides some of those around me were taking were excessive, I never really understood just how far it went until I was much older, and it took a benign comment from a friend to nail it to the head for me.

Said friend was from the Eastern Bloc and grew up with religion being a major subtraction from her education, least to say the ferver of Holiness and Signs Following. She was positively fascinated by tent revivals and she couldn't quite understand the aggressive negativity I held for these elements of my upbringing that held over most of my late adolecence and very early twenties.



To her snake handling, speaking in tongues, submerged baptisms and faith healings were something novel and amazing and probably nothing truly real in her mind. They definitely were never the little quakes of terror they had been for me as a child. They were quaint cultural quirks.

And the funny thing is, that now, for some reason, I find myself defending it all. I just don't understand it. Maybe I just need to have it taken seriously. I guess I didn't like that she was going for the flare and theatrics of Pentecostalism. Just like I did as a little kid only paying attention to Revelations.

-Move-

I've become obsessed with screen stills.

-Sympathy for Lady Dixie-

I've already put it out there that the subject material of my work relies heavily on my childhood and the culture that framed it, but it would be sheer idiocy to claim that growing up Southern was the only damned thing that's ever come across my plate.

If my childhood supplied the content, Asia designed my aesthetic. Specifically, the violence and horror genres. The color palettes, the composition, the lighting- all of it I learned from Asian cinema. Especially from director's such as South Korea's Park Chan-wook.



My educational background is actually Asian studies and that foundation has become a heavy basis for my adult perspectives. The amount of influence it's had on me at this point could fill a month of Sundays, but for now, it'll have to be enough to give credit where credit is due.

-Piggy-

Once upon a time, a vegan friend of mine told me she believed that people only ate meat because the processed product was so far removed from its original form that people were able to distance themselves from the fact that meat was once an actual critter. It was an eloquent arguement, and one she's used to prove her point before. But there's a few flaws in it.

So, I described to her a pig pickin. Words can't describe how big her eyes got and I'm not all that certain I want to know what she thought of me after exposing that particular facet of Southern cuisine.



Pig pickins are pretty much exactly what they sound like. You spend the entire day roasting a hog and then you literally pick the meat right off the carcass. It's absolutely delicious and I have many wonderful memories of all the men gathered around, beers in hand directing the roasting and eventually looping off the head for us kids to play with (usually under the pretense to discover whether or not the head would sink if tossed in a canal. They float.).

These are social events in the extreme. The mommas making ambrosia and coleslaw, gossiping in the kitchen, the daddies only sort of keeping an eye on the kids outside, the kids who were mostly up trees or chasing the girls/squeamish with the pig's liberated head, and the requisite dog, inevitably named Shep, running around barking up a hazard.

Food and community are so closely tied in Southern culture that it's almost impossible to talk about one without mention of the other. I'm hard pressed to think of a conversation I've had with another Southerner that didn't include at least the presence of drinks, but usually heavy meal.

My vegan friend blanched at the mere description of this feasting tradition, and I'd hate to see her reaction if I actually brought her to one. Or maybe the sadist in me would love it. Either way, they're something I remember fondly and I look forward to the next time I get to go to one.

-Paper Cuts and Brain Freeze-

I'm a reader. I go through books like elephants go through peanuts. My wallet hates me as a result and I've become a fixture at the little used bookstore downtown.

But over the years there's been a handfull of books that have held more sway over than me than most, to the point that I'd go on to say that they've actually altered the way I view the world and as a result, the way I create my work.

Six Books That Have Fucked With My World:

*Joan of Arc: In Her Own Words Willard Trask.


Given my other posts, one would probably expect me to include the New King James Bible in this list, but my relationship with outright religious texts is so complicated that I've over looked them for this. However, about ten years ago, my mother went out with some friends and during the course of the night she ended up at a bookstore and bought this book for me. It's the collection of depositions, testimonies, war journals and confessions of Joan of Arc during her trial by the English.

At 15 the stark language of the trial and the conviction of her responses floored me. More than anything, including the religious base of Joan, her conviction is what caught in my mind more than anything. Feral loyalty is something that has been a fixation for me and it was this book that came to mind years later when I studied the Hagakure.

*Preacher Garth Ennis:


I'm a rabid defender of the art of comic books and I couldn't give a rat's shit what you think, they're an amazing vehicle for literature. Preacher was the book that proved what I always knew to be true. The book follows the adventures of Jesse Custer, a possessed minister on a mission to confront the God who has abandoned his throne. If anything, the nine volumes of this series reaffirmed my own moralities (and lack there of) and personal conflicts.

*Fight Club Chuck Palahniuk


It seems trite for someone from my generation to list Fight Club as a mind altering novel. But there's a reason my peers flock to this Neo-Luddist piece- it speaks a shit ton of sense. And non-sense. And enough swagger to keep my interest. Dissatisfied, underwhelmed and angry, the book brought words to my mouth for the things I felt and the things that needed to be said.

*Thundering Silence: The Sutra on How to Better Catch a Snake Thich Nhat Hanh


I read this book at an extreme low point. I was an emotional shit stain and needed to be washed off. I found this skinny little book in a used book shop and took it's message of intellectual vanity to heart, panicked and, to the odd looks of my friends, got rid of all my books, ashamed of my own hubris. Of every book I've ever read, this is the one that provoked the most extreme and immediate of reactions. It also began my explorations of Buddhism and a dismantelment of certain hangups I'd been shredding myself on for years.

*The Mysterious Stranger Mark Twain


I'm a fan of Twain in general, but his unfinished novella was the one that bit the apple for me. Following an angel named Satan and some children he comes across. It examines a dialogue of accussation and existentialism that resulted in a PBS special that still spooks the shit out of me. It also contains one of the most important quotes I've come across.


*Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Murakami Haruki


It's hard for me to pick a Murakami book that has influenced me the most, so I'll leave it as the one that started the obession. Hard-Boiled remains one of my all time favorites though. Surrealist and nonchalant, while somehow touching on reality at the same time. The complicated and dual plots pull in the competing narrative without destroying the flow. Something I hope for my photography.