The CLEAVAGE PETS™ — A NYC REALITY NOIR — episode 2

“Damn,” she said, “Don, I can’t figure out just, just how to start doing this.”

Holly’s last words reverberated in my head. It was interesting seeing what she could and couldn’t do, what she did and what she didn’t, and when she did things. It WAS sortof a weird new thing, even for where I was now, “decades” after she’d actually said such things, I saw no evidence that anyone else had ever tried to do what she was doing… here where I was.


“I know I gotta do stuff like this,” she said “it just makes sense to make it seem more like I am actually there in the future, and by the way thanks for sending the letters in Don, mwa,” she mock kissed me. “Puff,” she puffed. I love it when you can hear that someone is smoking, over a phone… or the thing I had to listen to her on.


I was shooting Lydia, and I was hoping HVV could use this one. She wanted pictures that had a resonant quality.

“If you want to blow people’s minds, you have to have… there has to be a certain amount of familiarity or it won’t work… I think. What I am doing is about the past and the future… it just, I just want something THERE. Like — so I can totally make up things to go with these pictures and there will be a resonance to pick up on… the cool has to be believable, you know what I mean Don.”

“With an element of the actual past so obviously there in the pictures, it will be easier for the past to digest the imagery, and perhaps even believe what I write, as long as there is real energy in the shots… this should work.”

Since I probably wouldn’t see what she was going to do with these pictures till a while later, it really was hard for me to shoot for the years and years as I did… relatively blindly to the actual narrative that would emerge. We had to trust me. It was a zen photography experience. But, the basic reporting was all we cared about in the beginning anyway. Holly and I concentrated on that.


“Fuck I love you,” I said without thinking. She started laughing. Right after this.

Right now I was trying to concentrate on shooting Lydia, but as you can tell, it’s hard for me to focus. But really, this is a big big picture. Just knowing how to think about it is a difficult challenge. I don’t want to miss things, and there is no map. I listened to my friends that I made, and didn’t pay attention to any papers or other “media” as I have found the call electronic information/entertainment outlets.

Goddamn, look at those eyes. I want to kiss you now baby. I want to wipe that look off your face with my dick. That’s right, you are the first bi-era, double timing, living the vida LOCA superlife baby. You. You are a part of the real Marvel Universe. Sexy.
To quote my mind.
“Fuck I love you,” I said again, and she laughed again.


Even now, sometimes, Lydia made me think of Diane. I wish she could have seen this. She almost got to, she could have. We all could have had a big fucking laugh over this shit.


I loved Diane, she would have helped me with this writing...

Noone is writing this down but me, there is no way anyone would ever know this ever if I didn’t write this, and it is a strange thing to know. At any rate, this is the only account that the future will have of this. “The past will never know,” HVV said over and over. But the future would, I would think to myself at the same time. HVV never knew I was doing this.
She only knew I gave her exactly what she wanted like I was her herself.

“And this internet thing you told me about is very interesting. Data is totally doable then?”

It was!


Somehow, we could rig the machine we used to (among other things) transport me here to carry the data back to where HVV was. That’s the machine in the background of this picture. That’s Tigger James Ferguson, and Dirty Martini,

“Don, we are gonna tell the past that The Capitol is Coney Island, and that Tigger is Mayor of Coney Island.”

“Oh — and that Dirty Martini is a General.”

“Maybe others of these times,” (and HVV definitely meant both times — 1933 and TwoThousandThen) “think black politicians are radical… but till I see a man like this man Tigger you found, in office… I am not impressed.”

Me, when I saw this, I had to shoot it for HVV, it was just what she would think is funny. “We’ll tell the people that he’s at an art show, that will cover up the machine being there, hahah. Mayor Tigger James Ferguson and General Martini attend the exhibit by Donato Giancola at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, hahaha. You would totally think that is an art gallery hahah.”

That was when I started to really catch on. What was the truth what was the past what was the future, what lies… could mean to history. It was really screwy, because it wasn’t a linear development with us. At all. Sometimes it felt like it was threatening to melt my brain like she said how porn from where I was now would melt people’s minds back then. But at least that could be understood far easier than the initial creation of such a machine as we were trying to make, just from pictures and text.

“They are going through the same things where you are now — as they were where I am! Where we were! They even talk about it [the past] — as a way to figure out what to do! Can you believe how lucky we are? That we have that to work with as a reality to show… to show that progress is an illusion.”

That was uncanny, that’s for sure.

“Progress is an illusion like a new suit of clothes is an illusion, I just bet your ass, Don.” HVV knew that, knew that before history would prove her right decades later during times no one could have imagined.
Look, people still had horseracing!


And guys like John Velazquez.

HVV loved my horseracing/jockey coverage… which in itself was actually super ahead of it’s time…

“It hasn’t changed at all,” HVV said, looking stunned at the first of the racing pictures I showed her. "Shit, look at that!"


“Look I know and trust you Don, but seriously, that horseracing still exists and that it still looks so the same, and that — look, you have to start covering these guys, now, I mean I never saw that as happening, and we can totally use these pictures because they are so close to both eras. So close. Perfect. What’s this guy’s name?”

“John Velazquez,” I said.

She’d have no idea why I did not sound as excited as she did… HVV knew all about Lydia, but she had no idea I had been shooting the tracks for a couple of years already… and the track stuff as I’d shot I just knew after awhile that that is just what she wanted me to do. I actually did take this relatively seriously, almost as a battle, and this is the kindof thing that the leader would want to know.

“He doesn’t know anything about this right?”

“Uh, no.”

“Fucking, oh Don, people would totally relate to this shit right now!”

“Yeah, I uh, I really thought you would like these… since we didn’t talk about it ever… you know, but then one day I saw an ad in the paper and it stopped me in my tracks. You know what it was like when I just got over into T3…” Nothing looked familiar.

“Haha 1933 was the racing year for news too we got a bump from the fight — hahah, Don.”

When I asked her how she thought that 1933 was the best year for doing what she wanted to do, she told me that a superficial change, like the one she imagined would happen — “if in fact change happened at all” — would not stop what she thought would happen, judging by the way people were.

She wasn’t answering my question hahah.

In the end, she found the machine in 1933. That just happened, and we got lucky. The genius year she chose to send me to, was TwoTousandThen. Where another depression was happening! And that wasn’t all. I haven’t asked her how she came to that year, I am not sure I could understand, and I am not sure HVV does either.

“Timing is so everything.” That was her version of religion, time. She followed it, she worshipped it — “You don’t call yourself lensjockey if you don’t feel time and timing, pace, making time-based decisions on the fly.”

Anyway, it was too bad for me that Johnny looked just like then.


Horseracing indeed was one thing that I found that just had not really changed. In fact, the only real action in that scene (after decades) was happening now… of course. It wasn’t doing too good, I’m not saying it was doing good, but it was still around.

The few times HVV asked me for some special image, say, a composite, she gave me such great direction the results were stunning. The first one she wanted was of a horserace running out of a cemetery.

“Hahahah, I doubt that many people in 1933 could comfortably deal with horseracing in cemeteries. See if you can give me something — people will think the world just went to SHIT.”
And she was right. I even sent images of composites I’d made with tape… and people reacted to them in even stranger manner.


Tape itself had only recently been invented in 1933, I found that funny…

That "The Woodlawn Invitational Cup" was the first feature story she published under the “operation.” That story broke from the gate like a winner, and caused a commotion for months. She just had a really good way of putting things together… I bet she had fun writing that.

"...disgusting, sick, crazy."

That was what people really said about these pictures in T3 — imagine what they would say in 1933, I couldn’t really finish imagining… somewhere along the line the concepts would all bottleneck and my thoughts would jam entirely.

We never had time to talk about what she was doing after I came here to T3. But somehow, we had such a rapport, a creative understanding that I could think for her here sometimes. This picture I sent along with “The Woodlawn Invitational Cup” images. I thought she’d weave that into some spell.


“Thanks Don! That will look great in black and white, Lydia’s ass, totally pops. You are a genius matching that stonework, hahah from such different locations, and the lighting is perfect! Shit!”

Looking at her ass, made me think of John Velazquez.


Because I had just found out recently that they had been having an affair. And I still had to shoot him at the tracks. Now especially. I didn’t bother telling HVV what had happened, I showed her the racing stuff and that was my responsibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to deal with it yet myself. This shit me and HVV and Lydia were doing was too important to fuck up with emotional shit… but it was gonna drive me crazy.


He knew I knew, but he didn’t know why I wasn’t doing anything and mistook that for me being an idiot — the smiles I'd started getting in the shots could just be mistaken for sportsmen courtesy, but they weren’t. I’d started getting these looks from the jocks that were different…


I believe it flew around like gossip does, and then I think, well, now I think, I think quite a few people know. I think Calvin knows, and Edgar…


shit. Things started to make more sense…
Shit, I don’t know what to do. This is not what I need… and it didn’t seem like Lydia really knew what kind of guys these jocks were, but it doesn’t matter why it happened, only that I know it has and all of this together would make anyone’s head fucking spin.

But I’m a patient guy.



TO BE CONTINUED.


______________________________________________

NOTE! THIS IS A COMPLETELY FICTIONAL ACCOUNT USING THE REAL PEOPLE I HAVE PHOTOGRAPHED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY FOR YEARS. IT IN NO WAY REFLECTS REALITY!

here are the other episodes sofar:

episode 1) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/08/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir.html

episode 3) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/09/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir-episode.html

episode 4) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/10/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir-episode.html

BOOBS, JOCKEYS, BOOBS, JAZZ, BOOBS.

This is Angie Pontani.

 

When I saw her perform, it was like she was a huge shaking and snapping eraser, erasing all the ignorance and residual ideas I had about burlesque. She was performing a tribute to Blaze Starr. (Whose real name is: Fannie Belle Fleming!) I had forgotten about the Governor Long story, of which Blaze was a huge part. A woman who moved like that in the 50s would just be able to take over. It was fun to watch now. Back then, I can only imagine.

 

All this is about how I learned to live. I’ve learned how to live by jockeys, by jazz, and recently I have thought about life in terms of burlesque.

I am afraid that asking people to read between the boobs sounds too clever, which it is. Yet, when I think about it, I really have the feeling that that is just too close to the very truth of what I am doing now. Next to slapping advertising pasties on a pair of a neoburlesque star's climactic assets, the idea of slipping a couple of worthy souls between some slammingboobyflesh in the hopes of getting some deserved attention for some other interesting interests seems like an idea anyone could at least imagine some entertaining consequences... of.

 

This is Calvin Borel.

 

 

Calvin Borel has won 3 of the last 4 Kentucky Derbies. This is unheard of and unheard of. Just for that I think he deserves alot more attention, just because it really makes no sense that profoundly worthless "personalities" (that is a word I don't even trust anymore) really can effortlessly segue into comfort and applause and gain far far more attention than someone who really should be thought of as more like hmmm... like — christ if this was baseball, this guy would have been on magazine covers forever. He won something three times (in four years) that any jockey would really just do anything to get... once… in a lifetime of riding. He can't read, he can't write... but the horses he rides and he himself, have become something... freakishly wild. And yet he’s almost unknown.

 

What I am really into saying is that perhaps even more attention to be paid to really looking at how people spend their DVI (disposable visual income). Because it can’t be good for people to consume so many really pretty defective, completely subpar people (stars) the way we do. And we miss certain real badasses, like John Velazquez, Edgar Prado, and Calvin Borel. Just the basic knowledge that someone won 3 Kentucky Derbies (with even the smallest touch of semi-understanding), is inspiring.

John Velazquez is badass.

This is Jo “Boobs” Weldon

 

Yes, shooting just the boobs could be seen as a transparent gimmick... at the very least, if I was a guy I might be perceived a pervert. But there really is something that I am trying to say with my own version of burlesque portraiture. I am saying that there are things and subjects right under the radar that perhaps should be focused on... like the boobs of burlesque have been under the radar in a way. They have always been there, they are still the focus of the performance, but yet there has no photographic focus (to my knowledge of course) on the simple exclamatory glands themselves. As a comment, as pretty, as witty, as anything. Burlesques breasts seem to be the breasts of exclamation and attraction itself. So I am just adding alittle bit of punctuation I think to my work... it is actually quite a challenge shooting good boob shots. In a burlesque show, they are always moving around so much... sometimes the high speed boob shots don't look good at all. Maybe the last word in any writing on burlesque should end with the tits, I mean that is the so called “reveal,” in a burlesque performance — the end of the story. I really do wonder why noone just focused on the boobs… there has always seemed to be a lot of boob fans… aren't the tits enough?

Really, I have checked so many pages of flickr burlesque shots and googled and checked out burlesque photography... sofar, I haven't seen a single shot that just focused on the succulence and artistry. Where's the S&A? Please direct me towards the truth if I am in error!

 

About Jo “Books” Weldon:

 

The stories of burlesque (as every burlesque performance is a story) — they end in so many ways. They pretty much end up all at the same places though, so it’s really all about how to get there. And how to get there and what to wear on the trip is all in Jo “Books” Weldon’s first book, The Burlesque HANDBOOK. This book is just released from Harper/Collins, and Jo writes with such candid flirty eloquence about burlesque choreography and acting — she tells us that it sometimes has more to do with Bugs Bunny animation than well… what you might expect. The artist R. Crumb in the 1994 Zwigoff documentary mentions a real “crush” he had on Bugs Bunny. That two different artists involved in very sexual expressions both gained such powerful influence from Bugs Bunny is super touching to me. If you were gonna be anyone in any of those old Warner Bros. cartoons, there really is no doubt that that is who to be. But as an example of how to work a burlesque routine — and the specific animation in particular that she uses for THE example, will be instantly recognizable to a substantial demographic — we’ve all seen it — I find an animation to be a GENIUS model for how to move in a burlesque performance. I will never look at Bugs Bunny (or perhaps movement itself) the same way again. She is dead spot on. The parts where she talks about her animation influences/references was a surprising revelation. I mean you know, if Bugs Bunny entered a burlesque competition, you know the wabbit would win. No DOUBT. If you’ve recently gotten into burlesque, you won’t have a good understanding of burlesque if you don’t read this — it seems that there are not many good books on burlesque. I actually find that easy to believe. I have just started getting really interested in the neoburlesque scene... so it was so great to have all this information all there... really. Great book Jo! Nice world ya got there.

 

Jo Weldon is a revolutionary, in the art of telling a good boob story. It is hard work, that is one thing I see with her, she gives everything to the book, to what she does… She totally works her boobs off. I admire that. A lot. That is what I love thinking ad writing about... people who work really hard and just rock on what they do.

 

This is Meschiya Lake, I probably don’t need to intrioduce her to some people.

 

 

I really doubt that there is a better world to watch in New Orleans than Meschiya Lake’s. I’m a New Yorker, and I felt like I’d fallen down a rabbithole when I visited last October to take pictures for her newly released CD “Lucky Devil.” New Orleans is so exquisitely different. It’s grotesque what is happening now… we thought we had enough to deal with with Katrina which doesn’t look… so… bad…………… now. It’s like when there was a big herpes scare, in the 70s or something… and that really seemed to freak people alittle judging by the coverage, but then AIDS happened and herpes seemed almost okay. To me, this is, thanks BP, pretty much, like watching something taking a huge shit in the ocean right in front of us. That is how I see it. It’s like a Bosch nightmare to me. Real grotesque human nature. We are all getting a nice close look up the stinky smelly ass of human nature.

 

You know Meschiya Lake would take your mind offa that. She is the party in New Orleans that we all should have wherever we are.

 

The CD? — I immediately want a glass of red wine and some NOLA chow. I’m not a dancer! I just really like the daydreamy fantasies I have about living in a little depression era looking Walker Evans lookin little apartment with a little victrola or radio playing this... and then I just keep seeing and wondering how noone had that voice yet! Meschiya’s voice is so different. And I love hearing those instruments like I like walking around and looking at flowers and trees. If flowers and trees had tattoos, or a whole city, or the world, tattooed with the Chrysler Buildinglike spires and dots and the family wings and the mermaid tails of the tattoos she gots. I feel like there is something different about the tattoos of Meschiya Lake. Like if cities had tattoos, New Orleans would have them, somewhere… but it can’t, she has them.

 

 

 

Neo-burlesque, the Neo-Depression,

I’m suspicious that progress is just an illusion now, I have been for years, but now I am really into the world that has trombone players named The Butcher.

Meschiya Lake looks cool. She looks tough, she looks sweet, she looks. She just dresses herself.

 

The salty sweatiness of the song Lucky Devil is molassesy and almost stumbly, very lovey. It actually sounds kindof hellish… in a really comfortable and soothing way, like the poppies in The Wizard of Oz.

 

If you don’t check out the credits before you listen, around the third song you might sortof have a feeling like “wow, I didn’t know anyone sang things like this then…” and those for me were her own compositions. They are a chick being real, in so many ways.

 

I’m sure whatever she is doing as I write this is totally doc worthy. That’s just what she is like in real life. It’s been hard for me to know of her, and also see so much real SHIT on TV and go damn, this is what is interesting? I mean the evidence is that it must be right? But it just has to be some crappy programming we humans have that we should look at, because I really it distracts from reality. Kim Kardasian — everytime we see her, what she is really really doing is distracting us from a very scary reality. She and her sisters are fembots, scarier than the ones in The Million Dollar Man.

But Unce Jack? Tuba Skinny? Chief Sitting Voelker? They are there for you. They have Meschiya’s back, they have yours too.

 

If I didn’t have the people I follow like I do, I would be so bored. I would not get the coverage I want out of the coverage there is. That is why I am doing what I do. I want more coverage of the subjects I like… I think that they are good enough to share too. I want to share the jazz world with the jockey world and the burlesque world with both. Today I got a message on facebook from a horseracing fan asking what burlesque dancing is. I liked that.

 

This is Legs Malone. The girl with the 341/2 inch inseam.

 

 I hadn’t seen Malone in awhile. I had some investigating to do. 

Hmm, last time she was on myspace was 12/28/2009. My birthday is actually the 28^th of December so I thought that was cool. 

Let’s see, I missed a lot.

Whole lot of Sugar Shack, The Legs Malone Show… oooh I missed so much. And after investigating a bit more I found she has a very intelligent background. Not surprised. In the picture I took of her in 2008, she gave off such an earthy cool charisma. Now, she looks like the Manson chicks would look like if any of them had actually been charming, too bad she hadn't been one of them, maybe she could have told them the WAY TO GO. 

She has a very distinctive catlike face. She’s like if Catwoman from the Batman TV series, Julie Newmar, had had a lanky Steve McQueen lovechild.

 

I think she is worth following.

FROM JOCKEYS TO LENSJOCKEYS

By Holly Van Voast

Boy am I burned out. What a week!

Issue 2 of LENSJOCKEY magazine was about struggle and love and pictures and people — photographers. At The NY Photo Festival 2009 — just last week! I got reactions ranging from disgust and meanness to genuine feeling and encouragement. All those things came from the same group. (And some of the genuine feeling and encouragement came from the top — William A. Ewing — just sayin.). I met people who listened and people who didn’t. I saw my nightmare and my triumphs. I triumphed over the fear of putting myself and my own ideas out there in front of the hip tough crowd of New York City photographers.

I’ve done it before. 

When I went to the racetracks in 2002, and started my seven year involvement shooting candid portraits of the jockeys riding in New York City, I had no idea what it would really lead to. And that crowd is a tough crowd too, that was good training. I went to the tracks cold, just like I did to the NY Photo Festival in 2009, seven years later. Cold and unknown, and not looking like much to so many. I really went from jockeys to lensjockeys — really. 

If I don’t tell this story, it won’t get told.

These are the pictures I took of those jockeys — 

I saw them in a way that was exclusive of the horses they rode. 

Over seven years I collected a group of portraits that were never-before taken of the men who I loved who rode the horses at 35 mph, and exploded from big metal banging gates on those horses in search of a win. 

There’s a TV show now, and the races get alittle more press these days, but when I started going, it was a ghosttown of a world, totally forgotten and insulated from the city around it. Totally.

God, I loved jockeys. 

I’d go to Aqueduct racetrack – sometimes on both weekend days — a 2 hour ride on the subway at least — just for one or two shots for a high. 

I never bet on the horses… 

I bet on jockeys — I thought they deserved way more attention than they got.

I still do. I can't shoot as much there as I used to — the magazine work takes up so much time and I got involved with a completely different scene for a time, but there are more and more people shooting jockeys now. Raymond Haddad — who shot the author photo for the second issue of LENSJOCKEY #2, was a friend of mine when we worked together at BMG/Columbia House - years ago, and he started to see what I did with the jockeys then. He saw a book I wrote, he read what I wrote online and off about the jockeys that I loved, the ones that I portrayed — and he saw my pictures. He loved my pictures. He can shoot there now more than I can, and that hurts, but he has become known in his own way for doing what I started in 2002. I see people shooting from the spots that I shot from, places where no professional would want to shoot from... now it is common, when I did it, I had it all to myself. I really felt like I had it all to myself. I have a priceless collection of men who rode from a time that doesn't exist anymore at all. I have the best collection of Norberto Arroyo Jr. portraits, a great collection of Edgar Prado portraits — John Velazquez, Pablo Fragoso, Alan Garcia, Mike Luzzi, Channing Hill — it seemed like such a golden time to me.

This is a picture I took of Alan Garcia in 2005 where he rode in a stakes race — The Gotham — at Aqueduct. He rode most of the race with his right foot completely out of the stirrup. That's what a jockey means to me. Just bombing down the track even if your foot is out of the stirrup. He almost won that race. It was pretty spectacular. he wasn't winning the race here though, I just wanted to shoot him because he was in the Paraneck Stables silks and he was a favorite jockey of mine. If that is the only racing shot I ever get, that would make me happy.

And that's how I feel about LENSJOCKEY magazine. I'm riding with one foot out of the stirrup and I might not win, but that is how I'm riding my life.

you can see my collection of jockey portraits on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lensjockey/sets/72057594063826614/

and even earlier pictures:

http://finalturngallery.com/g2/main.php —scroll down to the bottom! To the album titled 

"The Woodless Wood Day" I posted my portraits there for years before going on flickr. It's disorganized, but those pictures are to me the soul of the start of interest in jockeys exclusively, there was nothing like that, noone had ever followed these men with a camera like me. I feel so lucky to have shot what I got at all the tracks I shot at. It is in the spirit of jockeys that I conceived of LENSJOCKEY magazine. Truly.

I started something at the tracks just focusing on jockeys, and I want to start something now with the photographers I see in New York City now. It's the same thing for me. Eric Brown is just like a jockey to me. He just uses a camera. btw - he's about to enter a contest in Alaska with his spectacular mutton chop sideburns. Good luck Eric!