I've written and rewritten this entry 3 or 4 times now, but I never seem to get it quite right. By the next time I revisit it, everything's so different that I have to start over. And given that this is public and I don't know who reads it, I'm not even sure how much I can say here anyway... so yet again I have to wonder why I bother to write these things if I can't be specific. I mostly write as a means of processing experiences and committing them to memory, and none of that is nearly as fun without including all the little details. Oh well.
Barry and I broke up in March. It was hell at first. I'd never had that kind of a closeness with anyone before, and to have that ripped away from me felt utterly cruel and unfair, even though I understood why it had to happen. All things considered, I've lived a pretty blessed life (and "blessed" is not a word I ever use), so somehow I'd managed to go about my days with this naive assumption that "when there's a will there's a way," and "love conquers all" and all that sappy BS. This showed me, I mean really showed me for the first time, that sometimes good things fall apart, and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it. So that's a pretty sobering realization, and it's easy to let it convince you that it's not worth all the effort--reflecting back on those years spent getting to know someone, earning their trust, learning all their favorite things, becoming a unit... it's kind of exhausting just thinking about it. But luckily (or stupidly), I've never been one to guard my heart. It has a mind of its own, for better or for worse, so it's out there again, hobbling along with all the same glossy-eyed, fluttery-stomached enthusiasm it's ever had. I hope that never changes.
I've learned a lot about people in the last couple of months. About how difficult it really is to form meaningful connections, about how there's always two sides to every story, about the things people say to get what they want. I've learned a lot about myself as well; about my comfort with independence, about my selective pickiness and how quickly I begin to care too much (at which point anything that I probably should be picky about suddenly ceases to matter), and also about how I stick to my core values even when faced with serious temptation. As for whether that's virtuous or just uptight... I guess the jury's still out on that one. Above all, I keep getting the same lesson drilled into me over and over again that my tendency to assume that interest is not mutual (whether that be in my personal or professional life) holds me back, and I could benefit from learning to have more confidence in myself. But that's something I've literally always struggled with, so I don't know if I'll ever be able to internalize that fully. There are lots of new characters involved in this weird story I call a life (and they all have colorful stories of their own that I'd love to get into), but I think it's a little to early to introduce them quite yet.
My photographic life lately has consisted of a lot of excitement, disappointment, frenzy, and ultimately, not much actual movement. Again, without getting too specific or naming names, I was recently put in touch with two very promising connections. Both turned out to be exceedingly difficult to get ahold of; the first blew me off a couple of times and when I did meet with her, she seemed disinterested and spent the majority of the time on her phone. When she suggested that we shoot a couple of days later, I agreed because I didn't want to say no, but I quickly realized there was no way I could get everything together in time so we decided on the following week. I spent the next week trying in vain to get all the necessary information from her (I didn't even know what the products looked like until the friend who set us up sent me pictures of them), and when I finally called her two days before the shoot date after all other methods of communication had been left unanswered, it turned out that she wasn't even going to be in town, and she'd neglected to tell me. I still might follow up on that and try to arrange something with her, but I found the whole experience very frustrating, and given how casual she wanted the whole thing to be (and given how these types of shoots almost invariably wind up being posted without credit anyway), I'm not entirely convinced that continuing to chase her down is worth my time, especially since the one thing I that did know about the shoot was that I wasn't going to get paid for it. I don't think I'm acting entitled here; even though I know I should be getting paid for the professional work that I do, I am willing to swallow that if I think a connection could benefit me in other ways. But I am not convinced that this would really have benefited me ultimately, even though she is a fairly big name in the industry.
The second connection had to reschedule a few times too, and it took about a month and a half of back-and-forth emails to settle on a day to meet. But she legitimately has a lot going on at the moment, and she was always very polite and apologetic about it, so I'm sympathetic with that. She was a pleasure to chat with when we did meet; conversation flowed much more smoothly, we both had questions for each other, and she seemed genuinely interested in me and my work. She said that she has a lot of photographer friends, many of whom have worked with some of the top fashion photographers, and she offered to put me in touch with them. She's also undergoing a whole rebranding process, and there was some talk of working together to get new photos for her website. Whether any of that will actually happen or not remains to be seen, but she did stress repeatedly that I should continue to reach out to her often and that I should never feel like a bother for it because she does want to help me out, so I do have much higher hopes for this one. Also her style is much more what I'm into, so it would be really fantastic if this turned into something.
Aside from that, there's a shoot I did back in April that I've been trying to get published, and for the first time, I've really been struggling with it. The magazine that gave me a pull letter never responded to my submission, so then I submitted to a few other magazines, and for a while, the only one that was interested was Institute, which apparently has a $165 "design fee" (that seems crazy to me--why make your contributors pay for inclusion when they're already giving you free content?). I did finally get another publication interested, so my editorial will be in their September issue coming out in about a week. Art is so subjective--I was really confident in this shoot, and I thought it was some of the best work I'd ever done, but it's had the hardest time getting picked up out of any of the editorials I've submitted so far.
I guess the next bit of news would be that I got to go to Croatia this summer for the first time in 4 years. I meant to write a whole separate travelog on that, but I never got around to it. The highlight, of course, was getting to travel around Istria. We stayed in an apartment in Rovinj for four nights, and did a lot of sightseeing within that time. Rovinj itself is nothing short of magical. It's one of those charming little towns with narrow cobblestone streets that you see on postcards and you think to yourself, "chyeah right, that's totes photoshopped, no place in the world really looks that gorgeous in real life." And then you go there and realize that, holy cannoli, it really IS that gorgeous in real life. #mindblown.
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| I mean, for shit's sake. This is a real place. That exists. I seen it ma'self with mah own two see-globes. |
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| Old world charm. |
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| Swanky bar (with $18 cocktails--yeesh!) on the rocks. Hah, get it? On the rocks? I'll stop. |
I'd been to Rovinj before, I think when I was around 14 or 15, so I remembered it pretty well, but I always feel like I appreciate things more the older I get. And in any case, Rovinj certainly isn't a place I would ever mind revisiting. Much like Venice, Rovinj is best experienced via aimlessly wandering. It isn't very big, so it's pretty easy to see it all in a day, but there are all sorts of little nooks and crannies and little galleries to be discovered. There are quite a few galleries actually--many of them contain kitschy touristy crap, but there are a few hidden gems. Some years ago, my parents discovered a student who did incredibly haunting pen drawings, and they actually bought a few of his works, which now hang in their house. He's sold out a bit since then unfortunately, and his work now isn't nearly as interesting, but this year we stumbled into an incredible gallery/studio of paintings by an Austrian artist named C.B. Schneider. His work resembled a hybrid between surrealism and abstract expressionism, and it all seemed somehow simultaneously effortless and incredibly intricate. Apparently he achieves his delicate calligraphic lines by painting with a feather.
While staying in Istria, we made a couple of day trips to visit other hill towns, including Motovun, Grožnjan, and, briefly, Beram. They're all very small, but Motovun in particular is quite a sight from a distance.
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| This really doesn't do it justice, trust me. My first words when I got out of the car at the overlook were, "Holy shit." |
Grožnjan is a strange little town, in that it's fairly remote and it's inhabited largely by musicians. My parents informed me that there is a great music camp that takes place there, so as you walk through the streets, you can hear the sounds of people practicing coming from the windows. There was a group of musicians in the main square that was practicing a simple little middle eastern sounding tune over and over again, which my parents and I got stuck in our heads for the rest of the day.
And Beram. Beram is a great story. There's really only one reason you'd ever go to Beram (unless you live there, but even then, the population is probably something like 50), and that's the chapel. The Church of St. Mary of the Rocks is a tiny chapel hidden in a little forested area, and although architecturally there isn't much to see, the insides from floor to ceiling are covered in frescoes painted sometime in the 15th century, which have been left totally untouched since then. What makes the whole experience so special, though, is that you can't just waltz into it like any old tourist attraction. There's a woman who lives in house #38, and if you knock on her door and she's home, she'll take you there for a small fee and unlock it for you with this giant iron key that looks like a theatre prop.
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| Seriously, look at this thing. |
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| Close-up of the Danse Macabre. |
On the way back to Mulo, we made a few brief stops at Opatija and Lovran, and some other gorgeous beach that I don't think we ever learned the name of.
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| Opatija |
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| Caffe Wagner, Opatija. Super duper fancy desserts and people dressed in 1800s garb. |
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| Mystery beach. |
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| I should have taken a picture of the piece in the store... oh well. This was one of the photos I took last summer. The zipper coat is by a Croatian designer named Ivona Martinko. |
I never met my mother's aunt, and I didn't have any kind of an emotional connection to her, so that enabled me to experience the event as a kind of impartial observer. First there was a short service at a little church up the hill from the graveyard, during which a priest said a few prayers and sprayed the coffin with holy water shook from a rosemary sprig, and then there was a procession down the hill to the cemetery. I'd never been to a funeral before, so, as totally stupid as this sounds, my only real frame of reference for funerals was the show Six Feet Under (which I was in the midst of binge watching at the time). What occurred to me in watching all of this was how differently people and cultures embrace grief. My impression is that in America, for the most part, it's pretty much expected that anybody who knew the deceased in any real capacity should speak at their funeral, and, while crying isn't looked down upon, people do make an effort to keep it together in public. By contrast, there were more than a few wet eyes at this funeral, and there was one woman in particular who was loudly sobbing for most of the service. My mom later explained that in Croatia, it's usually expected that the family of the deceased are in too much grief to be able to speak (which, frankly, sounds a lot more natural to me). It reminded me of a scene in Six Feet Under where Nate explains that during his travels abroad, he witnessed a funeral where the mourners all wailed and threw themselves at the coffin, and that at first, he was put off by such a display--but he later came to realize that this might be a healthier way of coming to terms with the death of a loved one, by letting it all out at once instead of stifling it like in American culture.
Even though I'd never been particularly close with either of the deceased, the experience did bring about a kind of closure. This was in part because I'd never gotten to see my grandfather's resting place (the last time I was in Croatia, he was still alive). Although much of my trip was the same as it would have been anyway, the house did feel weirdly empty without them in it. I never saw my grandmother that much, except around meal times or when we'd all have coffee together, but my grandfather and I used to play briškula all the time and be silly with each other, and I missed having that around. In general, as my parents put it, the downstairs area still felt like "their space." It's been four years since my grandfather passed away, and even though I came to terms with it a while ago, seeing the corner of his coffin as they put my grandmother's urn in with him made it all real again. The cemetery was interesting in its own right too; most of the plots were marble family crypts, and looking at all the old-timey portraits and the birth and death dates was almost like seeing a small chunk of history. One of the names on our crypt was another Marija, and I noticed that she'd only lived 16 years. I asked my mom if she knew what happened, and she said she'd been hit by shrapnel in the Yugoslavian civil war. I don't know why, but that really hit me for some reason.
Anyway. There are lots more stories from the trip that I could get into, but as usual, this is turning into a novel. I think I pretty much covered the main events. When I got back to New York, I actually had a couple of friends suggest that I host a slideshow party, which I found really flattering. Usually I feel like the reaction to "slideshow party" is a collective groan, but I had multiple people suggest it, so I hosted one of the Tuesday dinner things we've been having, and figured out how to connect my laptop to the TV screen. It was a great time, except that I made jalapeño poppers and made the mistake of not wearing gloves when I cut and seeded the peppers... a mistake I will never make again. I had to run my hands under cold water every 10 seconds, and they burned the whole night. I tried dunking them in milk and white vinegar, I tried all the suggestions I could find online, but nothing helped. I wound up falling asleep holding an ice pack. Stupid. But hey, at least the poppers turned out well.
Woof. I think I need to put this post out of its misery. I'll leave you with some tunes I've been listening to lately. I think I'm gonna make that a thing now... like I said in the Nostalgia Playlist post, I associate times in my life with the music I was listening to at the time, so it makes sense to include that, right?
Track listing:
- Piazza, New York Catcher - Belle & Sebastian
- Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL - Sufjan Stevens
- How To Disappear Completely - Radiohead
- Sapphire - Bonobo
- Time To Pretend - MGMT
- Midnight City - M83
- Here It Goes Again - Ok Go
- White Knuckles - Ok Go
- Juicebox - The Strokes
- You Only Live Once - The Strokes
- Don't You Evah - Spoon
- What You Know - Two Door Cinema Club
- This Is The Life - Two Door Cinema Club
- Excuse Me Mr. - No Doubt
- Bathwater - No Doubt
- Can't Say No - April Smith & The Great Picture Show
