When Should Dreams Die?

Kamesh. Photographed in New York City in 1997 by Greg Reynolds.

Tonight an Opening at a Gallery in a suitably downtown New York City lower eastside neighborhood features the new explorations in Black/White photography of a very famous, (not to my family but to the right people in art circles)young photographer, whose suitable good looks has made him also a subject of other well-known photographers. I venture a guess that the Vernissage will be suitably mobbed by suitably goodlooking and young gay men. I will not be there.

I'm glad I'm not the bitter type of older artist who resents the fame of sexually attractive younger artists. Well, maybe a little bit. For me, I, (perhaps naiively, perhaps not) associate fame with recognition, admiration, money, travel, great food and drink and opportunities to frequently get laid. Who could or would knock that? Like probably many other artists, I imagine my moment coming late in life as I'm wheeled out to a microphone, thank all the people who have since died many years before and obviously can't be there, and then keel over from a heart attack.

When should dreams die? Should I let them expire in their own time? Should I just stop feeding them hope or denial and allow them to starve to death? Or is a quick, clean kill the best? A decision to end the pursuit and change direction.

Sometimes I'm amused by advice directed toward the young to follow their dreams. Following your dreams isn't so hard to do if you're living at home or parents are still financing your education, but it's not so easy in middle age. Youth grants the capacity to sleep on a floor or a lumpy sofa, to eat hor'doerves and bar fruit, or to smoke or indulge in drugs and too much alcohol without looking like shit the next day. If I do that, I will look like hell and not function for two days.

I have a an artist friend with a degree from Columbia University, who, in his thirties, turned away from a career in architecture, acted against the wishes of his parents, and put brush to canvas to become a painter. He's now over fifty, does great work and slowly is achieving the recognition that he has long deserved. I admire him so much because he paid such a price to pursue his dreams, and he still struggles to pay that price each new day.

The road to success requires both a point of departure and a good vehicle. It helps tremendously to set off on your journey from a place of affluence and influence. The "affluence" will insure that you can afford the right schools, food and housing, and still have pocket money to pay for drinks and club admissions, while "influence" will make sure you actually get into those acclaimed institutes of higher learning and meet the "right" people. Yet most young people come into the world with out the benefit of wealth or contacts. To them I say, shit sinks but something built of wood floats. Make great work and it will rise to the surface where it can be seen.

The thought of giving up comes to me often, usually in the middle of the night when dreams interrupt my sleep. Yet at this stage of life giving up is difficult to do. I feel like the swimmer who dives off a river bank thinking that the opposite side is only a short distance away, but realizes when his muscles tire that he actually swims in an ocean and can no longer see the shore ahead or behind him. At that point, you have only two choices: keep swimming and pray your toes soon touch bottom, or sink beneath the cold surface and drown. To your advantage, after stroking the water for a long while, your muscles will strengthen, allowing you to paddle faster and further.

I choose to keep swimming.

Men Observed: Part 1

Top to Bottom: Justin, Patrick, Negovan, Mark and Bill, Ralph, Martin and Gary, Serbian Model, Jeremy.

Simple Questions. Hard Answers.

"How's your work going?" inquired a colleague/acquaintance at the School of the International Center of Photography in New York.

Simple question, right? But why the blank, is it so difficult to answer. I don't know how to reply. Stumbling for words only makes me appear stupid and inarticulate.

Or so it makes me feel.

The creative life is a long journey down a winding road full of potholes, shattered glass, fallen trees and detours. Along the way there are amazing adventures, but for most people it is not a trip in First Class. I'm happy for those who seem ride in great comfort and reach their destinations quickly without any wear or tear, but my means of transportation evidences dents, scratches, peeling paint and tires balder than a baby's butt.

What do I say but, "My work is going well, thanks!" It's like a stranger asking how you are. They don't really want to hear how things are actually going, because if they did, they probably wouldn't ask.

I think many artists feel uneasy about their creative endeavors. Unless there is hard evidence showing that your book will be published, your music or dance performed, your art shown, you often just don't know. You don't know because you are still in the process. Maybe at the beginning, perhaps at the end, but still nevertheless you're not there yet. And there's no shame in that. The shame would be if you quit before reaching the end.

So I decided not to quit, but to persevere. It seems to me that I've gone so far already at this state of life, that there's no turning around and going back. I can only press on.

But, to answer the question, "How is your work going?"

It's going well. I am working and I get a lot of pleasure out of what I'm doing. And, finally, I can see that, perhaps, I'm finally getting somewhere and that all the work will be worth it. Yet I'm not sure if the reward actually comes in the act of working or if it comes after the work is done.

January and All is Gray with the World

An unexpected phone call has the force to shake our little planets. The phone rang on New Year's morning. On the other end of the line was my Mom in Kentucky requesting my immediate presence. My father has been rushed to the Hospital with chest pains and tingling in his arms. The doctor's finding: blockage in his arteries (probably a result of 83 plus years of fried bacon, fried eggs, fried chicken and fried whatever "southern style." He required open heart surgery. Around midnight of that same day, I stood in baggage claim at the Lexington Airport, waiting for my bags and my youngest brother to pick me up.

Until my grandparents all passed away, I believed myself surrounded by two defensive walls made up of my parents and their parents. With the loss of the grandparents, one barrier collapsed into dust leaving only one wall standing. The thought of losing my parents means that one more barrier will have fallen leaving me standing alone before my ultimate end.

This kind of thinking, obviously, can sound pretty morbid. But, I look at it, as more sobering than anything else. Youth inspires the confidence to tackle anything believing oneself invulnerable to pain or death. While middle age makes you value life even more, knowing full well that at some point every book has a conclusion, no matter how much you may want to stall the ending.

Three weeks has now passed, Dad survived his operation and now is home recovering. My father is not a patient man. He's the kind of man who plunges three stories down a cliff, brushes himself off and starts climbing again. But you don't endure having your chest cut open and your heart pulled out, and expect to ride a motorcycle the next day.

On Monday, I fly back to New York City. Thankfully, I leave knowing that my father health will improve over the next weeks, and that he will probably have a much better summer this year than the one he experienced last year. Regretfully, I leave knowing my mother will have the full responsibility of caring for my Dad, a traditional man of a generation of Men that expected certain things from their wives. My father still expects that my mother will prepared three meals a day for him, and that means three meals daily that he enjoys, because it is no joy for my mother to prepare food for someone who doesn't believe each bite they swallow is the best bite he's ever enjoyed.

Williamsburg Time Warp. 1979

Sitting on New York City's L Train, jerking along between Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I have had the unsettling feeling that I've been transported back to 1979. Were it not for the numbers of ears I see tethered to iPods and the fingers pecking away at cellphones, I would believe with certainty that it was, in fact, seventy-nine. The long hair and beards and mustaches adorning hipster faces has the unmistakable look of my college age peers. I want to blurt out, "I looked just like you once!", but the blank eyes peering back at my middle-aged facade reveal that they fail to see what resemblance they share with me.

I think I look great for my age, but I don't look twenty-one, much less twenty-seven. Thank God, I feel no compulsion to dig through attics and basements, or hit the vintage stores, to achieve that style again. Dressing in middle-age, as you did in your youth, strikes me as too much like older men and women, who believe that keeping the same hairstle through the decades has somehow stopped the cruel hands of time.

Men differ today from the boys of my youth, as much as I differed from my father's WWII generation. I can't speak for my father, although I can recount stories he has regaled I and my brothers with since childhood, but I can compare what I observe today from what I remember seeing in my own early twenties.

Young men have always been conscious of their appearance, but today there is much more self-consciousness about their bodies and sexual identity. Today's man knows that other men -- aka gay men -- may be looking at their bodies, prompting them to want to look great, while at the same time to not solicit the gay gaze.

Although, I wasn't out as a gay man in my student days, I, nevertheless, watched the men on my dormitory floor and at the gym. Nudity was less of an issue, when guys were not wondering if gay men were watching them. Men all showered together, and whatever was thought was left, in public, unspoken. I recall at eighteen, shortly after moving into my college housing highrise, entering the floor's men's room and seeing an Adonis built senior, standing naked at the sink, shaving a day's stubble off his morning face. I the rush, not of lust, but of, awe. He was magnificent and that image, now burned into my memory, I will carry to my grave.

I look at the photographs that I took during that period and I compare them to photographs that I make today. People behave differently before the camera now, than they did, back then. Today, everyone is much more self-conscious about their appearance than twenty-five or more years ago. At that time, not everyone had a camera, and unlike today, a camera wasn't on everyone's person twenty-four hours a day. Today with proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones, everyone can shoot everyone else all the time. The digital speed of immediately seeing the image after you've shot it only makes people either more self-conscious or more self-satisfied.

People ask me if I shoot film or digital. I continue to shoot film because I love the look of it, and because it would cost me a fortune to buy a digital camera that could imitate my own medium format film camera. But one advantage I treasure to shooting film over digital, is that I don't have to keep showing whomever I photograph their captured image in the LCD screen. I tell them that they'll have to wait, and because they accept the wait, they become more relaxed and less conscious of their own out appearance. It means that the subject must trust me and allow me to do whatever I need to do without the subject turning into an Art Director.

Not only straight men are conscious of how they are being perceived, but gay men are conscious of it as well. While a straight man may want to avoid being seen as a sexual object, or even being perceived as being homosexual, gay men have become like women who don't want to encourage too much attention from the male sex. Such gay men want to be seen and admired, but not bothered. Nor does this gay man want, at least in public places, being perceived as a slut, so he wears his towel from the locker room to the shower, and never enters the sauna or steam room, where he knows that he'll find other gay men.

'The Way It Used To Be", Pet Shop Boys. Scroll down and click on music.

I'm here, you're there
Come closer, tonight I'm lonely
Come here with me
I want it the way it used to be

What is left of love?
Tell me, who would even care?
So much time has passed
I'd still meet you anywhere
Water under bridge
Evening after day
What is left of love
Here that didn't drift away?

I can remember days of sun
We knew our lives had just begun
We could do anything, we're fearless when we're young
Under the moon, address unknown
I can remember nights in Rome
I thought that love would last, a promise set in stone

I'd survive with only memories
If I could change the way I feel
But I want more than only memories
A human touch to make them real

Another day, another dream
Over the bridge an empty scene
[ Pet Shop Boys Lyrics are found on www.songlyrics.com ]
We'd spend the weekend lost in bed and float upstream
I don't know why we moved away
Lost in the here and now we strayed
Into a New York zone, our promise was betrayed

I was there, caught on Tenth Avenue
You elsewhere with Culver City blues
Then and there I knew that I'd lost you

What is left of love?
Tell me, who will even care?
So much time has passed
I'd still meet you anywhere
Water under bridge
Evening after day
What is left of love
Here that didn't drift away?

Don't give me all your love and pain
Don't sell me New York in the rain
Let's leave our promises behind
Rewind and try again

What remains in time that didn't fade away?
Sometimes I need to see
The way it used to be

Drew. Summer 2009.

Shot for East Village Boys Zine. www.eastvillageboys.com