ABOUT LIVING WITHOUT CURTAINS

This series is about my first year living in New York, Brooklyn to be exact. You find yourself inexplicably depressed in the summer. You are young, healthy. Financially, you get by, somehow. But you are crippled by a debilitating inability to do simple things to make your life better, like installing curtains, for example. For you need to gather the strength to borrow a hammer, purchase curtains and install a rod in the wall. You can find a man to screw you, but not screw in anything practical, like a shelf. So you keep living without curtains because you're not sure, how temporary is this phase? Are you striking roots here, or are you going to move, again, as you always do? Somedays you ride your bike and you think, yes, I will have my kids here and I will take them to this park. And other days you wonder why everyone's fighting so much to be in this city, and to be here you must fight all the time. 

You procrastinate and you doubt and you are lazy. Just put up some curtains, staple a sheet on the wall for God's sake. But then you think, this is a philosophy. Living without curtains. The idea that art must be reciprocal. You cannot just observe and take pictures. You must also be willing to be seen and observed. You cannot hide behind the camera no more than you can hide behind a smile. The neighbor lights a cigarette at their window and the smoke creeps in your room. You make phone calls on the fire escape and the whole building knows about your woes. When you make love, you make love to the entire street.  I entered the street as much as the street entered me. We were all coming and going into the same plasma.  

ABOUT DON'T QUIT YOUR NIGHT JOB, HONEY

A job is a means to an end, not a career. Eating hand to mouth, shift to shift. Feast, famine. Twenty percent tips and a hundred percent living in the moment. NO 401K. No IRA. Health care consisted of seeing the Ocean once a week. Preferably on a Monday, when all of you lamented how much you hate your office jobs. Our Monday Blues were deep, sparkling turquoise kind of blues. Sometimes almost green. Whichever shade, we insisted on it. Monday is the day for us to live unlike the rest. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Janis sang it best. Nothing - is a choice. Commitment is not the issue, the question is, commitment to what? We were committed to refusing to grow up, refusing to sell out. Youth, unwasted.