Ahead of the festival, Indiewire said of it, “‘The Dream Machine’ is one of the highest-profile shorts playing SXSW 2025. Hailing from director Jimmy Marble and indie animator Francis Haszard, the creative exploration of grief is a reminder of the endless possibilities that come with short form filmmaking.”

The movie is about a woman who’s grieving the love of her life’s death, and her use of a novel invention that allows one to turn their dreams into reality by reading the atomic structure of their imagination and rebuilding it atom by atom. On the surface, I recognize that this reads very autobiographical. Oddly, however, this is a script I wrote when I was 22 years old, living in Paris, far away from marriage, quite well-versed in heartache, and deeply fascinated by the mysterious nature of the universe.

At the time I was 23 and developing my point of view on the aesthetics my art would showcase. Obama had just been sworn in a few months earlier, and the Bush years were still heavy on my mind as a young person. Namely, the media manipulation that led our country into multiple wars, the general public’s lack of literacy for visual culture, and their passive consumption of lies hidden by artifice. I was teaching a course on art history (survey of French New Wave, to be specific), and my job awarded me an orange ticket that allowed me into every museum in Paris for free. If I were meeting a friend for a beer, I’d see which museum was most near the cafe and get there a little early to just cruise in and see something beautiful on my way. As the year wore on, all I wanted was to spend time with Henri Matisse. I was in love with the modernist painters for all the inverse reasons I was so disappointed in American culture: The beauty was revealed through the honesty of artifice. The artifice was the whole story, not the hidden vessel of an idea or ideal. You loved it for the strokes, for the color harmony. The story and scene were low priorities. Propaganda would be impossible in this style, as the modern style requires you to think and enjoy the work critically, which is the opposite of what propaganda hopes for you.

I knew going forward I wanted my viewers to experience my work’s artifice first, the story second, in the hope that it would inspire the joy of critically engaging with the visual world around them.

I began writing scripts that would become my first short films with these goals in mind. (Also, this is another ‘stack for down the road, but at this point in my life I didn’t know how to take photos, had no interest in photography, and was only focused on being a director. Photography didn’t come to me until my late 20s. I believed photography was for dorks.)

By the time I left Paris in the summer of 2009, I had three scripts for three short films.

Cleo in the Universe: A space explorer gets an ultimatum from her longtime on-again off-again lover to meet her on the moon or lose her forever.

and

Red Moon: A loyal Soviet patriot/werewolf (an existence strictly forbidden by the communist party) becomes a submarine captain to hide from the cruel realities of his terrible secret.

and

The Dream Machine:

Cleo in the Universe and Red Moon are clear exercises on genre expectations. They were scripts I wanted to explore because of their aesthetics and rules I could break. But, The Dream Machine was a deeply romantic, philosophical piece that I craved to make because it was truly a piece of who I was. It was my creative heart exposed. I believed in them all, but I cared most about The Dream Machine.

I came to America radicalized and ready to make short films and change my life for the better. I had no money to spend, but I had friends and a strong sense that I could turn not having money into an aesthetic that could be beautiful.

In terms of movie-making, Cleo and Red Moon were relatively easy in that I was able to share the script, communicate the vision, translate it into sets and costumes, and get a large group of people all together at the same exact time. By 2011, both were finished, premiered, and my group of friends and I turned our attention to The Dream Machine.

But, the beginner’s luck ran out.

I had big ideas for making The Dream Machine in a sort of retro-futuristic Guy Maddin style that would infuse silent cinema styles with lush pastels. Art Deco meets Sgt. Peppers.

This was the first time I learned the reality of this goddamn biz: Making movies is hard. When my collaborators asked me, “So, how are we going to film this thing?” I didn’t have an answer because I couldn’t think of a good idea.

The film had a much more elaborate variety of locations, which necessitated a larger budget than I had ever had, especially if we wanted to stay committed to the hand-built aesthetic we had been creating. The furthest we got was screen testing my friend as Marianne, the short’s heroine.

It’s a little bit obscured in this photo’s crop, but Marianne’s styling was inspired by this gorgeously surreal photo of Greta Garbo with the USC track coach. This photo was my desktop background between ages 23-25. It feels like David Lynch to me. Bizarre and wonderful.

So, The Dream Machine was a dream deferred. Luckily, the first two short films were doing their job and somehow created a splash on the internet. Enough so that I began booking my first jobs as a director, and all of a sudden I was distracted enough to let this short film drift away from me as I began carving a career. The story was a nut I couldn’t crack. An aesthetic I couldn’t communicate. A missed opportunity.

The script kept collecting dust all the way until the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when, for the first time since I had had a career, I all of a sudden didn’t. I was home and not on set, and I was getting itchy about it. A DP friend had been posting all these delightful animated sketches he had been making, and I was deeply inspired by them. Maybe, I thought, I should make an animated project.

I browsed all my old scripts to see if there were any I already had that might work as an animation. Lo and behold, my old flame, my first real love, The Dream Machine! When I re-read it, I was shocked that I ever thought it could be anything but animated. The way the universe collapses over and over again, and the way dreams move from one space to another in a blink: The whole project clicked into my brain in an instant. By the end of summer 2020, the movie was storyboarded.

And by the end of fall 2020, my life fell apart. The painfully short version is my wife’s cancer relapsed after a secondary treatment and we were looking at either palliative care in California, or rolling the dice in Texas and trying for clinical trials at MD Anderson. By January we were living in Houston. By June we were back in Los Angeles, and I was saying goodbye to the woman I loved.

In the daze and shock of the loss, all I could do was find meaning in my work, and I began calling friends asking if they could help me with some temporary vocal tracks. Temp music. Rough sound effects. An edited animatic. By the end of the year it was a series of drawings you could watch like a short film. I shared it with the production company Ways & Means (my friends who have been producing many of my short films since 2015), and they got on board.

Sometimes the creative gods shine their most beautiful light on you, as was the case when I first met the animator Frances Haszard over Zoom in the spring of 2022. Her charm was disarming and her drawings were breathtaking.

I saw this music video she made and knew that there was no one else in the world I’d rather work with on The Dream Machine. Her style was so sensual, so designed, and I couldn’t get enough of the way her worlds ate themselves. The frames she made felt dynamic and alive. In short, in Frances’ work, I felt very much that artifice came first, and I felt a deep aesthetic kinship with her immediately.

Over the course of that summer, Frances began imagining the world, sketching out the characters, and creating a color palette.

Then she began sending me images of things in motion, like this original version of The Dream Machine.

My skin was a goosebumps farm. The possibilities of animation clarified in my imagination, and this world that vexed me my entire adult life all of a sudden became possible.

Every week I would meet Frances on Wednesday at 3pm, morning her time in New Zealand, and she would share with me her progress of the week. Second by second, week by week, I watched the world turn from idea into reality.

When I began working with Frances, the idea was we’d take the remainder of 2022 to finish the film. However, the deadline came and went. This initially made me uneasy as I’m one to love checking a box, finishing a project, and moving on with my life. But Frances assured me: We need to make this as good as possible, which is going to slow us down.

I, up until this moment, have refused to slow down. But I couldn’t betray this collaborator, and so I followed her lead and took the path she wanted to take. And so we spent 2023 continuing to check in with each other once a week, 3 pm on the dot, and going over all the new clips that had been created.

It’s difficult to describe wanting to watch something be real for so long, finally becoming real. In the span of having the idea/writing the script to this project being fully realized, drawn, voiced, and scored, I had lived so many iterations of my life. I had loved, I had lost, I had raised a human. But this idea was a constant through it all, and now, by March 2024, here had finally arrived on Earth and was right in front of me.

Late in November 2024, the night we got our invitation to screen The Dream Machine at SXSW, my best friend Billie and I drank champagne, but not before I absolutely bawled my eyes out for the entire journey of this movie. It was like a deluge of grief from all my lives lived: Moving from Paris to LA, the version of the short film I was never able to make, the version of the movie I started making when Jesse was alive, the final version she never got to see, and the good news I never got to share with her.

I look forward to making so much beauty for the rest of my life. It’s all I want to do with my days. This short will always be the first thing I ever made that I thought was really truly beautiful. I knew it when I was 23, and I knew it when I was 39.

Meanwhile, I was living in Paris and spending all my free time in museums. What struck me the most, taking in so much art, was the sheer volume of what’s been created. In particular, I remember visiting Musee Picasso and just being like, this dude filled up an entire museum. Plus the one in Barcelona. Plus the ones I don’t know about. Plus his major hits being in other museums and rich people’s homes all over the world. I resolved that the masterpieces weren’t the results of genius but from a willingness to always be creating. That the only way to make something lasting and enduring was to make lots and lots of lesser works that no one will care much about. And so when I decided I was an artist, this became my core belief.

But, in the last year (and a huge reason why this is my first post all year long) I’ve had my nose to the grindstone on projects in a way that’s brand new to my creative process. I’ve begun to value refinement and process in a way I never have. I’ve forced myself to slow down and hone rather than just go go go. I can’t share the results of what I’ve been working on immediately, but I can tell you that I’ve made some of the very best work I’ve ever made in the last year. It’s just unpublished until further notice because the projects are still growing. But, it involves lots of writing, new creative partners, and a new body of photographic work.

In the spirit of that, and inspired by Bryan Walen’s recent post, I wanted to pay homage to this year that brought me a new process. Bless your heart, 2025. You were a year that changed my life. I can’t wait to see what grows from you in the years to come.

Here is the year in snapshots. More about life, not too much about work, because boring!

January

NY, NY! I was invited over to the city by my collaborators at Vogue and really decided in my freetime to lean into the tourist activities. I finally got to visit the Statue of Liberty just to discover she’s only that big. But, she’s beautiful and we love her. What a woman. Also, finally got to spend a proper day drawing pictures The Met, laugh at The Comedy Cellar, and ate at that one gorgeous steakhouse with the red booths that I can never remember the name of.

February

I have been itching for years for a European vacation, but had been punting it down the road because I didn’t think I could do it as a single dad. I felt like I should wait to meet someone or wait until I felt more who-knows-what. But, I hit a new point in my grieving era where I finally stopped feeling inadequate because of my loss and felt capable of living the life of my dreams as it is. My family might be small, but goddamn it, we’re beautiful (just like the Statue of Liberty). So, we went to Paris, Chamonix for a ski vacation, and visited friends in Provence. It was easily the best vacation I’ve ever been on. Don’t be afraid, people. Life is short.

March

My first ever animated film, The Dream Machine, premiered at SXSW in Austin, Texas, and I was invited into the Criterion Closet. I don’t know if I could have ever dreamed of checking off two life goals within 24 hours of each other like this. But, what a stunning thrill. My next post is going to be about the creative process of The Dream Machine and the 15 years it took to make. It’s a huge part of me reconceptualizing my creative process toward a slow burn.

April

In January, Martha and I started LA Art Club, where on the first Saturday of every month, we invite a group of friends to come with us to a new museum. In April, we went to The Broad. This is Martha and my childhood best friend Sage’s daughter, Thomasina. They were taking turns drawing the art they were taking in. This was a moment that made me so grateful to be raising a child in Los Angeles.

May

I love living in Los Angeles. I love sitting outside in the morning. I love my coffee shop. I love journaling. I love drawing. I love trying to improve slightly every day; moving the needle. I love domestic routines. I love artistic ambition.

June

This is the underwear I wore the day Martha was conceived. They were hand-dyed by Jesse in Martha’s Vineyard back in July 2015. They are forever the luckiest thing I own. I retired them immediately, but pulled them out of retirement in June for a meeting on the westside that went exceptionally well (part of the slow burn written about above). Bless these undies.

July

I was barely around in July. Santa Barbara for one of my greatest buddy’s wedding! Barcelona for a shoot! Martha’s Vineyard for a family vacation! C’mon! I was breathless. But also thrilled. Life, if not my art, remained extremely prolific.

August

Here’s my writing partner, Annie Monroe, lying on her daybed, pregnant as could be. We’ve been writing writing writing writing all year while she was growing this little guy who finally joined us on this side of things in September. I am a big-time believer that babies bring abundance. It’s the most beautiful process to watch. So grateful I got to watch the daily time-lapse of that baby’s blooming from the front row.

September

This is Dane Johnson, longtime friend and collaborator. I met Dane at a pool party in 2012, and we bonded over doing trick dives. 13 years later, we still get to be friends and make beautiful images together. This was on a shoot for Hollister, which has been one of my all-time favorite clients, led by creative director Katie Markus, whom I met on a Billabong shoot in Cartagena in 2019. I love the longevity of these relationships. It’s one of the things I value most in this whole world. It’s a huge win to get to continue spending time being creative with people I love.

October

I was properly obsessed with baseball in 2025. I went to I think 8 Dodger games and watched nearly every single Mariner game on TV that I could. It came to an absolute fever pitch (!!) in October when both teams made the playoffs. I fully developed IBS, and my good luck rituals became truly overwhelming and exhausting. But! Worth that championship, babyyyyyyy!!!!!

November

I turned 40 this November. The lead-up really was difficult. Jesse was diagnosed with her lymphoma a week or so before her 40th and started chemo on her birthday. I have since been shocked every time I’ve watched a friend turn 40 without stress, without worry, full of health, full of hope. But, I have nothing but good things to report about my 40th year, including an absolutely gorgeous Thanksgiving slumber party in Topanga with some of my closest friends, followed by the most stunning day after beach day in Malibu.

December

Sometimes the world will just grab you by your little baby face and say, “If you don’t understand that you’re surrounded by miracles upon miracles, I don’t know what I can do to teach you.” I got to take a work trip to the Bahamas in December, and it was just that over and over. Nothing but the most dreamy water, lagers that drink way too easy, and friends staying up late laughing on repeat. Plus, some of my favorite images I took all year. Or maybe in the last few years!

I’m writing this post in the Delta SkyLounge in Seattle, WA, on my way home to Los Angeles and on my way home to 2026, a year I’ve been waiting for like an old friend. See you soon.

When I was young and covered in dirt and new to town and often feeling down and out, I’d ride my bike to Ooga Booga (RIP) in Chinatown and browse all the books I couldn’t afford and look at all the clothes that weren’t covered in dirt and were also intimidatingly close to being art objects in a way I had never seen clothes be in person before. Ooga Booga was about the size of a rich person’s walk-in closet, but it was packed to the gills with the most inspirational things. I’d come in, covet, and leave resolved to make some money so someday I might be able to bring something home with me.

So, it became a tradition that on those beautiful and rare days I’d get paid, my first stop would be Oooga Booga. 

The most lastingly impactful purchase I made during that chapter was the book Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita. Her bold, optimistic art spoke to me emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. I felt such a kinship with her. Her work made me fall in love more with Los Angeles. More in love with color, semiotics, and process. Most importantly, more in love with working. 

Tucked away in the book’s backwaters on page 46, the author included Sister Corita’s rules (she was head of Immaculate Heart College’s art department). I can’t stress how much I’ve tried to live by her rules since the moment I first read them. Top 5 most influential things I’ve ever read, easily.

Later in that decade, I became obsessed with the Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, and read his book Win Forever on an airplane. In it, he talked about the key to sustained success is having a deeply refined and understood personal philosophy and being able to easily articulate it, especially when in a position of leadership. I started filling my notebooks immediately with what I believe in (Beauty! Optimism!) But it stayed as that. Journal entries that I could look back on. 

Last winter, I read Frank Lloyd Wright’s Studio 10-Point Manifesto and loved his playful and abstract take on rules. Right then and there I made it my goal that I would have studio rules of my own by the end of the year. So, slowly throughout 2023 when I would make my monthly goals, I would also create a rule or intention for the month to focus on and be guided by. 

This list is not final and should be revised constantly, but, after a year of writing, thinking, and declaring, I finally have my own list to share: 

1a. Everything builds

1b. Everything is new

2. Find pleasure in the struggle and the discovery

3. Nurture the momentum 

4. This is only a moment: Success and failure are equally fleeting

5. Good Dedication is grace, purpose, and optimism 

6. “An honest ego in a healthy body.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

7. “The Only Rule is Work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.” - Sister Corita Kent

8. No one gets rich quick

9. Clarity of goals and how they lead to the studio’s vision

10. Don’t move laterally and get upset if you aren’t moving up

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Anyway, that’s my shame talking in the form of a preamble to share one I wrote the other day that’s been floating in my head for a while. Here it is:

How are you still here

It’s been years and you’re still getting mail here
Yesterday ironically it was a letter from the life insurance company
Asking if you wanted to up the stakes 
Go from a million to more for just a little a month
And another one from a health care corporation
Saying there was a data breach and your personal information had been compromised.
I wonder if maybe you’ve been given a second life
As a credit card, racking up charges at Benihanas or gas stations
Maybe making a jailbreak to Ipanema  

I’m still filling garbage bags with your longevity oils
And face masks that you stashed in every corner of our house
Like you were planning a self-care hibernation bender.
There was a prescription for ibuprofen that was prescribed to you in 2016
That I threw away because it was basically just store strength and it had expired.
And there’s a drawer of tampons that seems to self-replenish. Every
Other month I take a handful of them to the garbage but it’s never-ending. 

This morning I found a candle a witch made you to heal you
I had an inner debate to light it and I haven’t yet. 
You aren’t sick anymore
So maybe its magic is gone, too.

When we met I had a small apartment that I abandoned fully furnished. 
I’ve hired multiple moving trucks, filled them to the absolute brim, 
Slapped the driver on the back and told him Thank God for you
And watched your stuff leave
Hoping that the burden leaves too.

Then I open a drawer and there’s the pregnancy test 
That told us we were going to have a daughter
I didn’t know you kept that.
And nearby buried under more essential oils,
there’s a key to the room we slept in on our wedding night.

More jewelry
More spritzes 
A little girl’s voice in the next room
Proud that she just made her bed.

Which is very fitting, as PawPaw Rod’s music is a unifying pastiche of genres. He effortlessly mixes hip-hop, afro-folk-funk, soul, and R&B into a contemporary sound that has found its way into Apple commercials, playlists, and airwaves all around the planet Earth. There’s an eternal youth sound that threads throughout his songs that gives even his moodier songs an optimism that I personally really connect with. 

Rodney, when I listen to your music, I feel like I’m in a time machine because I feel like I could listen to it in any decade for the last 60 years and it would feel relevant. When you’re writing music, do you have an audience in mind or do you just let it rip and bank on it connecting with people? 

I don’t really have an exact audience in mind when I’m writing. I ask myself stuff like, is this from the heart? Am I going to feel good about saying these words in front of people night in and night out? And I having a good time? I really just make things I want to hear personally, with hopes my future great-grandkids listen one day and know they had family out there making songs about love, joy, and journey they can be proud of. 

You’re a military baby who grew up all over the place. Do you find being on tour like a return to childhood? 

All the time. I went to like 9 different schools, so being the new kid was the norm for me; felt like I was constantly introducing myself. The tours feel like a mix of being the new kid at school, especially if I’m an opener and the crowd isn’t too familiar.  But also a family reunion; folks may be excited to see me even though it may be our first time interacting in the flesh. Crazy feeling!

You’ve been living in LA for a while now (I think it was 10 years?). What do you think is LA’s most inspiring quality as a city? 

More like 6! Feels shorter than that when you think about those weird pandemic years. Haha. I still romanticize this place every day and can get a weird sense of Deja Vu pretty much anywhere because of books I may have read about LA, movies, or music videos and you always meet people who have succeeded at what you’re trying to do, pivoted completely from what you’re trying to do or in the same exact boat. To me, that’s the most inspiring on so many levels. 

If you had to spend 1 day as a wild animal, what animal would you choose and why? 

A super old Greenland Shark! The lifespan of one can range between 252 and 512 years old!! What the heck do they know?! 

What makes someone a really, truly, great friend?

Someone you can be vulnerable with and trust that makes you feel confident in yourself. Being able to share stories of love, loss, excitement, anything! Loving you for who you are. 

Bear with me, and I’ll explain everything to you so you fully understand. You’re enjoying your favorite cup of coffee on your favorite coffee shop’s patio. If you were to close your eyes you’d smell dust fresh off a dew evaporation. You’d hear children — happy children that you know are being cared for and supported — nearby in a way that feels abstract and intangible, like, of course, there are children but they’re not mine because responsibilities are not for me. Not by a long shot. Not here with your eyes closed smelling dust, feeling warm air on your mostly exposed body that is mostly exposed because you’re young and your body loves you still and it hasn’t started to look at you with side eyes for all the dumb things you put into it yet. The warm air is hitting your skin like a water balloon hitting a cactus in one of those slow-motion videos on the internet where you see the water’s tension in all its brilliance and fidelity holding the line, staying a water balloon even without the balloon, and hugging that spiky plant like it were its savior. Your eyes are closed, you smell this, you hear this, and you feel this. And your favorite coffee is right there. And you open your eyes and it’s only the morning. You sip your coffee. The layer of ice you woke up with between your eyeballs and your brain thins, and everything becomes clear. So, you journal and you feel with absolute certainty the future is imminent and you are in control. 

Then, slowly, like the way you might hear high heels on the opposite side of an empty museum, the feeling that you might have to pee comes into existence somewhere in your mind. Nothing urgent. Very faint. But there’s that clicking in the background that you don’t care about because it’s not significant to the beauty that’s right in front of you as you take another sip and continue to fill your journal with ink that wasn’t on those pages when you woke up but are there now and each stroke of your pen feels like it’s saving your life. There’s no effort. You’re drenched in the water balloon of the warm air and your body has become the center of something special and it’s all happening right in front of you like you’re the lucky one. There are children in the distance and they’re happy and safe. And you, you are getting to be part of this morning, and you take another sip. You’ve never really thought about children, and you aren’t really thinking about them now. They’re just there, and conceptually, you’re thrilled. 

Yes, I have to pee, you think, but that’s fine. I can go later. The now is for me and I am in full bloom. Still, that clicking becomes near. But it’s chic. Like, ma’am, are you walking toward me? It’s only the possibility of having to pee, and possibilities are intoxicating today, so you try to divert your attention away from this sensation. But, you can’t help but start to wonder about the approaching feeling. This woman, I mean, first of all, how impractical to wear heels in a gigantic museum, even if it is just a daydream, and yet that’s precisely her charm. Her feet should join a symphony, you think. The rhythm she walks, it’s as if the ocean were a marching band. You feel yourself get taken somewhere in her steps, in her riptide. All your abilities to think of anything else have already surrendered to the approaching clicking sounds as if all the cells in your body were cowards. And you’re taken. She has taken you into her depths where all horizon lines are more ocean. You’re floating now, and you realize this is all cosmic, and what was once your point of reference for scale now seems senseless. You’re now part of all that ever is, was, and all that ever will be. 

You take a sip of your favorite coffee and a clear thought forms. You have to pee more than you ever have in your whole life. Somewhere in your brain one of the guys who watches every single second of your life checks all the tape and is able to confirm this is. This is the worst you’ve ever had to pee. You personally step in to crosscheck the guy: What about the New Year’s Eve party where there was only one bathroom in that big loft and so many people had to use the toilet that the party was also the line, and you went in there with that girl and she peed first, and you hadn’t met before and she introduced herself to you while she was peeing. It was more thrilling than if you two had had sex, to watch this girl pee and have her watch you pee without having known any personal details about one another. While you were peeing someone violently knocked on the door because they had assumed you two were having sex, but you just had to pee so bad, and you and that girl were talking about how long it was taking you, and she was impressed because she hadn’t ever peed as much as you were peeing by a long shot, she said. She surprised you and asked if she could hold your penis while you went, and you said OK, and she said she’d always wanted to try that, and she confidently stood behind you and grabbed hold, pretending she was peeing from her own penis. You had never thought about how unique of a feeling it is to feel the pee come through your penis because you’d always taken for granted the way you can feel the thrum of liquid moving under your fingers. Little lug lug lugs pushing out of your body. Not everyone gets that opportunity.

But the guy in your brain confirmed that this sensation you’re feeling currently, here on this coffee shop patio, was in fact more urgent than that time, and you agree. 

You close your notebook to preserve your secrets, and you quickly debate if you should put it away in your bag. You don’t want to just leave all your secrets out in the open like a salad bar for someone to help themselves to. But, it crosses your mind, so quickly that thoughts aren’t even registering as thoughts, that if you put your notebook in your bag and then disappear to the bathroom, someone might think that you’ve left entirely and that some poor soul, you, abandoned their bag. The likely decent person who stumbles into the scene will seize the table, bus your nearly empty coffee back to the counter, and say to the staff, “I think someone left their bag.” And the coffee worker will go, “Oh, yeah, I’ll take that.” It’s not far-fetched. So, later after peeing when you return to your table and discover that there in your place is a reasonable and thoughtful person, you’d be forced to go to the counter and say, “Did someone turn in a bag? It’s green, and has all of my secrets inside.” 

Your coffee will be bussed, long gone, and the day will have taken a rough turn that will require some effort to bounce back from. Once you lose the flow, it’s like regaining trust. That is to say, very hard to do. Trust lost is a trauma that never fully goes away. Is there anything more sacred the human body can feel than trust? You decide to leave the notebook on the table. You choose trust today, or really you intuited trust because your thoughts are moving so fast that your cells and molecules have been given power of attorney and have guided you here without your brain having to even create a thought. In your brain all there is is pee. Pee is the only thought and the only feeling. Now not even the children can be heard. Not even as a concept. At this moment not only can you not hear children, you’ve never even heard of children. You are a fetus floating in the womb of pee, your entire universe. 

You stand up in a way that makes it seem like you're standing up just because. Casually. Not to draw attention to yourself as a person in the midst of an emergency. You’re just being a human being who has to let their body momentarily become a drain. There’s no point in communicating to everyone that you’re just a fetus floating in a womb of pee. Everyone has mouths, and soon because of it, they’ll have their own alarms going off, and they’ll understand. They’ll stand casually in a way that makes it seem like it’s just because. Nothing to see here. Just a human being having to acknowledge their body.

You slink your way to the bathroom but the door's locked. 

The bathroom's not in a secret place or down a hallway. It's more or less in the middle of the coffee shop, so you're on display. Again, you're not embarrassed to be in line for the bathroom, but one thing you do hate is you just hate being obvious, and it's obvious you're waiting for the bathroom. No mystery here and you love to be mysterious. At least you love the idea of having secrets. At least the fun secrets. Like the time you were at the beach with your friends and you jokingly threw a stick at a seagull, but the seagull for some mysterious reason didn’t move and the stick struck it directly, killing it. You all looked at each other and you yelled, “Why didn’t you move, Seagull!? You’re supposed to move!” And your friends and you laughed and buried the bird in the sand and had a funeral where you all fell into the character of mourners and shared solemn words. Mostly about how the seagull was a good bird, but didn’t hold up its end the deal of moving when it was in danger like it was supposed to. Later, you told your roommate about it and she was abjectly repulsed by your story, and you thought, “This was more fun when it was a secret.” Right now standing for the bathroom in the coffee shop feels like your roommate telling you she didn’t like your story. She had gone on about violence and killing an innocent animal, that she was sensitive and could never have found it funny and joined the funeral, and it made you feel judged. You were sensitive, you thought. But now you weren’t sure and you felt a weight attached to the moment that wasn’t there before. Standing here you feel human in a way that’s a judgment. This act of waiting in line is creating a feeling in you that you’re being held hostage. Not just held hostage by your human body, but by ancient laws that have required — nay, dictated — precisely when and where a human can be an animal and drain their waste — their waste! It dawns on you that you’re in the waste line. You remember the posture of a dog defecting and how you’ve always wondered why they look ashamed while doing it, and you think of what your roommate told you, and how you’re standing in this line, and all the dots connect at once about your shame and about being an animal. There is no comfort. There is only the shared posture of you and that shamed dog being told it’s time to drain.

You contemplate shaking the handle of the door again as if maybe the first time you tried you had simply not done it right. Like, maybe this is a different type of door handle that works in a way you’re unfamiliar with. Or, maybe you had momentarily forgotten earlier how door handles work, and now that you’re really thinking about it, you could do a much better job trying to open it. And while these thoughts are being had by the cells and molecules in the back of your brain, the front of your brain has started to focus on breathing because your genitals are in pain. 

You hear the first sound you’ve heard since the sound of children playing left your ears: The quick snap of metal. The door unlocking. The quick feeling of release. 

The door opens in a way that feels infinite. Like doors have always been opening and doors have never been shut. You remember the steering wheel of a bus you sat on once, and how the driver had an enormous belly and the wheel pressed into it, and when the driver made a right turn the steering wheel rubbed his belly to the left, and when the bus straightened out, the steering wheel slid through his hands and back across his big belly the other way as he took everyone to places he wasn’t going, but they were. His belly rubbing back and forth like a Buddha taking everyone to enlightenment all across town. This is how the door opened. With the generosity of a Buddha who had no interest in enlightenment of his own, but insisted it was for you. 

And then you see her. And you make eye contact. And you forget that eyes are eyes, and not swimming pools to dive into. And you wish that her face were a mountain and that you were a cartographer and you could spend the rest of your life creating map after map for future generations to understand. You would name her cheekbones after beautiful things your mom told you about and sleep soundly in the hammocks of her pores. Actually, no, you don’t wish that. You wish she were a mountain and you were the same mountain because you’re tired of being separate. You’ve been separate in this body your whole living life and right now for the first time, you’re realizing this singular body has reached its limits and you want oneness with something else. With her in particular. Deep in your heart, there’s the perfect thing to say that is true and meaningful and could act as a key that could unlock this moment for the two of you and you could enter into it together and find peace. But she breaks eye contact with you in a way that communicated shame and you feel alone. 

And you’re left with that loneliness like a baptism in reverse. She felt shame as she looked at you. She did not share your desire for peace, or oneness. Only to flea your presence which she did with no sign of hesitation. You weren’t raptured. You were left behind. Where the gnawing and gnashing is. Where there are still bodies, and they’re still lonely and separate.

You go into the bathroom and lock the door. The quick snap of metal. You’re secure. You’re safe. You’re alone, which is its own universal oneness you realize. You breathe. But, all at once you understand why that woman wouldn't look you in the eye. You are in the midst of a fog of smells that’s so potent it reminds you of when you were a child, and you realized that other people’s poop smelled so much worse than yours did. You remember your father taking shits in the bathroom that your mom always yelled about being just for guests. It was the most conveniently located bathroom in the house, and you like your father before you, and your brother, also like his father before him, used it anyway almost exclusively. And after your father would take a shit, you and your brother would try to wrestle each other into the bathroom and close the door, as a game, where the loser had to suffer the smell that you thought might be lethal. But that woman, whom you had just wished you were the same mountain as, had done what your father had done, and circumstances had done to you what your brother had done, and now you were locked in this room to suffer.

But, you don't care because you're all of a sudden peeing and the rapture has returned. You are feeling your body create the closest proximity to an actual miracle, which is physical relief that is able to produce complete and total emotional relief. Now it’s you, not the woman in the high heels in the museum, but you who belongs in a symphony, conducting a fugue that rips you from an existential drift into the cosmos and firmly places you back on this planet earth, not like a flag but like an exclamation mark. You are a human being and this is where you belong and you know it with your whole body. Your body hears the sound of water beneath you as if through a funnel aimed directly at your DNA where it has communion with your ancestors who spent their lives listening to water beneath them, surviving, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes barely, but always near the sound of water, and always surviving. 

Then the door handle shakes and you’re back in the room, but you’re still peeing, and someone is trying to get in. You wonder how long you’ve been peeing. For the quickest moment, you wonder if you’re going to pee for the rest of your life. You know this is an absurd thought because you’ve never heard of anyone who was always peeing, but this morning, with this pee, you have already lost track of time and you think maybe it’s possible you could pee forever. You wonder what the logistics of that might be. There’s no hint that you’re almost done. Just the gentle lug lug lug under your thumbs. The skin is so thin on your penis, you think. Penis skin is the cashmere of your body, you think. Your chest is like an acrylic blend. Durable, thick, but wearable. Your legs are like a wool. It would be itchy to wear your leg skin, you think. Your arms are a soft cotton. You wish your face and hands were like a baby blanket, but realistically they’re like worn underwear. Reliable. Built to last. Your feet, you think, are like a cheaper cashmere, like from J. Crew instead of a place that specializes in cashmere. 

The door handle shakes again and you realize you’re still peeing, and now you’re looking for the end, like a person on a subway platform who pokes their head into the tunnel to see if they see a hint of a light. And there it is. The end is near. And you feel the stream settle, the moment winds down. The Earth starts spinning a little slower. You return to your breath. Thoughts of peeing for the rest of your life have vanished.

You rinse your hands and then make sure they’re dry enough to return to your life. You open the door. Life is a strange miracle, you think. You feel affirmed as you re-enter the coffee shop, the day’s flow still intact. You smile. You have a body, and that alone makes you feel not alone in this giant mess of feelings and molecules that we call our universe. You re-enter the coffee shop, and with you comes the smell of the woman you were for a moment a mountain with. The smell of her shit wafts out with you as if you in fact become one with her. And the fog of her is now you, like a ghost in a house, for all to forever associate one another with. And right there in front of you is a new stranger, who, somehow, someway, is also just desperately striking in appearance and who was definitely not standing here earlier when you were. And you look at her, and she looks at you, and you want to find the words that you know could unlock a mysterious place where you two could join each other and find an understanding. But instead, she looks embarrassed for you, but in a way that’s polite, which is even worse. She’s embarrassed that you have to be known as the smelly one. That today, in this coffee shop, everyone will look at you, and say, this one has smelly insides and he always has had smelly insides and always will have smelly insides. Her eyes dart away from yours, presumably forever. You hear the door shut behind you. 

You walk back to the patio and you sit back down with your coffee and your secrets. You open your mouth and more coffee goes in. You breathe in and the air starts to feel warmer. In the distance, you hear the children and they are still happy. 

The title came to me while I was living in Houston and my wife was being treated at MD Anderson. I didn’t have a story attached to the title at the time, I just felt those words captured exactly how I was feeling and I was desperate to communicate some sense of how crazy I felt living was.

I wrote the film in the months after losing my wife and mom, right as the world was opening back up after Covid. I felt completely ill-equipped to end my isolation and rejoin the rest of society. I had been in isolation and had only experienced the world through my phone watching other people live their lives who all seemed to be thriving way more than I could possibly imagine. I had never felt so strongly that everyone on earth was much better at life than me in every single way possible. And so this character Zizi came to me and eventually Suzanna Son brought her to wild, unhinged life. I’m so proud of this whole team and this short film. Cruise through the link in my bio or stories! I hope you love it. 

Here’s the link to watch it!

There’s also a cool little write up that the people at Nowness made which I enjoyed reading.

Get primed with the trailer!

My grandpa Marble used the metaphor of the onion in a lot of contexts, but like a good metaphor, it connects to everything. You can peel an onion and take away layers without missing them, until eventually, you don’t have an onion anymore. At a certain point, you have to stop and be pleased with what you have.

++ 

Marigolds were our stake in the ground. They were our national anthem and we paraded in our national colors like every day was May Day. Marigolds were the only flower we had at our wedding. Marigolds were for dessert. Jesse held a bouquet of marigolds. I had a baby marigold pinned to my lapel. Marigolds were in our yard. It would have been a sin against our marriage to walk by a can of marigolds and not bring some home. We named our daughter Martha Marigold Marble. We believed in their sturdiness. We believed in their smell and their magic.

Months after Jesse passed away I was dreaming about her. Not really of her. She wasn’t in front of me. I had had those dreams where she and I were together. Sometimes she had come back from the dead and the moment felt like jubilation and eureka, like, I don’t know why we didn’t try you just not being dead anymore sooner. Other times she was dying in front of me again, in fresh pain, and I was saying goodbye with new tears that were warmer and wetter than I remember in real life. But this particular dream felt like I was with her in spirit and her spirit had something to show me. 

Exactly like the Native American guide in Wayne’s World 2, she took me to a desert of endless sand dunes. Ahead of us, springing from the hot, white sand was a massive perfectly circular yin-yang made out of yellow and orange marigolds. The green stalks were tall and the leaves were full. The blooms all looked like their own miniature suns joining together into this dichotomous, graphic shape, like the way a galaxy looks like a solid object when you look at it from far enough away. 

Jesse loved yin-yangs. She was a pilgrim for balance. And like all pilgrims, she had a very human struggle to find what she valued and desired most throughout her life. And so the yin-yang was like her north star. A reminder that easy come easy go. That balance might be a constant act of letting go of what you cannot control. For every ebb, there’s a flow.  

This dream took place in the fall of 2021, about half a year after Jesse had died, and I remember immediately wanting to turn what I saw in that desert into a photograph. But at that point in time I was doing everything I could simply to keep my feet planted on planet Earth. I had just restarted a career that had been paused for nearly two years and was now a single dad to a two-year-old. But, the vision stuck with me through the fall and through all of 2022, like a friend that I had sushi with every couple weeks to catch each other up on our lives and what we had been working on, who we had been seeing, what we were hoping to do. My good friend The Vision. I was amazed at the loyalty of The Vision. It never flaked on me or made me feel guilty for not acting on the hopes we had for each other. The Vision stayed the same every time we met and every time our lunch was over we’d say the same thing.

“We should take this photo.” 

“We will, we will.” 

“No, but really, we should.”

“It would be so fun.”

I could smell the flowers. I could feel the sand. I could bask in the afternoon sunlight.

In 2023 I was feeling more in my body. More enough in my body. At least enough in my body to want to try and do things again outside of the most basic obligations expected of me. And when I caught up again with The Vision, we got out a calendar in earnest and said let’s get serious about this, and let’s really do it. 

I remember The Vision looking at me, and I remember it saying, “It’s time.”  

It was March 2023. 

My studio manager Lindsey and I started to lay the plans.

At literally that exact moment, things started to go wrong. 

The Marigolds were the first to go. The florist we hired to design and construct our yin-yang told us they weren’t in season and we weren’t going to be able to find a giant yin-yang’s worth of marigolds anywhere. Which, in hindsight, was probably not a great sign. In fact, in double hindsight, waiting for those flowers to be in the season would’ve been a very reasonable thing to do. But, if you remember, we had laid plans, and when you commit to a project, you sometimes have to accept that everything is a compromise. It’s a march to the end, and in the end, everything will be different than you expected, but you’ll never be able to imagine it any other way and that’s just the process. It’s a journey and it works, and the creative process has been proven successful for basically billions of years, and who was I to say this photo absolutely lived and died on marigolds? 

The next thing to go wrong was the financial reality of having a budget. Which is a baked-in problem of every shoot in a way that it’s not an issue in dreams and visions. Flowers aren’t cheap, and to make 20’ yin-yang of two flowers limited my options significantly. But we made our flower choice because it would be good enough. I didn’t love the flowers. But they were flowers, and they were pretty, and we were marching, and when you’re marching, you don’t stop until there’s no more marching to be done. 

The Vision, my loyal friend whom I had stayed in such great contact with for over a year, shared all those sushi lunches with, and who never wavered in their optimism and belief in our dream, was a very patient collaborator because I was not only compromising, but I also took liberties. Because as the photographer, I do reserve the right to take liberty because, at the end of the day, it’s my name that’s attached to the photo, not The Vision. I felt like what the photo needed as a cast. Like, a small cast. Two older men. In my mind, these two older men, probably dressed in robes or kimonos, or something that made them look incongruous in a scene that was already incongruous, would give the image a sense of immediacy. So, Lindsey and I cast two older men. If I closed my eyes, I could see them filling the composition reaching out for each other, me close to the one in the foreground on a wide-angle lens, and blocking them so their faces weren’t visible so there was a nice mysterious anonymity to them. It wasn’t part of The Vision, but it became part of the photo and it felt dynamic. 

There’s a handful of dunes around Los Angeles that would work for The Vision. There are dunes out in Death Valley on the Mojave, there’s one near Palm Springs, and there’s one in Pismo up on the central coast. Energetically, I didn’t love doing this shoot somewhere called Death Valley. I’d also shot in Death Valley a long time ago and I associate it with 2 things I didn’t love: 1. Getting a phone call from my crying mom telling me that my very special aunt was about to die, and 2. A cashier at a gas station looking me in the eye and saying, “Do you know what we call it out there? We call it The Devil’s Asshole.” 

Jesse and I had shot in the Pismo Dunes together in 2019 and that whole day no one made mention of any assholes owned by the devils, and I didn’t get any phone calls about people I love dying. Sometimes when you’re shooting you look for whatever home-field advantage you can find for the sake of taking that much of an edge off the challenge. In this case, shooting in a place where I’d already taken fun photos with Jesse to take a photo that Jesse had pressed into my brain felt like the right move.

The Florist packed a van from top to bottom, front to back full of flowers, and even filled a Toyota Corolla with flowers. The flower team left LA at 9 am. Lindsey, one of the old men, and I left shortly after and headed north to Pismo. The drive was one of those drives where you feel like your heartbeat is the size of the car because everything around you is so beautiful. The hills broke the color green into a million pieces and were replaced with a new green. Instead of mile markers, there should’ve been tombstones that read, “Here lies where the color green once was. It was murdered by a superior color that now reigns. Green is no more. Now only Ultra Green lives.”

We land in Pismo and picked up sandwiches for all at Jersey Mike’s. Easy stop. Love sandwiches. On the walk back to the car, a pickup truck that was the opposite size of a small penis nearly backed into me and my car at full speed. Lindsey, whom I’ve mentioned earlier and offered no real description of, but is truly one of the most serene people on earth, which is highly important in regards to what’s to come, said, “Did he do that on purpose?” 

“Yeah, weird vibe.” 

According to the internet, there are two ways to access the Pismo Dunes. There’s the public route where you pay the park service at a toll booth right at the beach, and then you’re invited to drive along the ocean and into the dunes. Or, there’s an RV Park that butts right up against the dunes with open access. When Jesse and I shot here, we used the RV Park, and it had been in my mind that would be our plan again. We rendezvoused with Flower Team where the North American continent ended and the Pacific Ocean started and caravanned to the RV Park. The plan, which as we approached the park I was beginning to realize was very half-baked, was to arrive at the RV Park, introduce ourselves, ask if we could unload our gargantuan amount of flowers on their property, and then park off their property and hike back into the dunes. This is what my memory told me we did last time, and last time was smooth. 

Life used to be smooth like that. 

If today were going to be smooth, it would go like this: We enter, introduce ourselves, eat delicious Jersey Mike’s sandwiches, and by 1 we start loading flowers to the dunes and set up a 20x20’ yin-yang in a spot that communicates vastness. By 3 we’re in the perfect afternoon light, and we’re taking the photo. The older men are moving gracefully in their robes, and the whole team is feeling a sense of group accomplishment and even the cells inside their bodies are thinking, “We’re making great life choices.” Fellow dune visitors are looking over and feeling lucky to be part of it, even if from a distance, sensing the dedication and passion and are completely taken by The Vision. By 5 we’ve wrapped and we’re Yelping dinner spots in Pismo, carrying flowers from the dunes to the car, everyone wanting to look at the back of the camera again to see the image just one more time, just to assure their minds that yes, it exists. By 8:00 we’re on the 101 South. We’re in bed by 11:00, with tired bodies, eager to sleep in peace and await transmissions from other realities for new Visions. 

Right now it’s noon so we’re right on time as we approach the RV office. I pull over and hop out and am greeted by the man running the place who has most of his teeth and a demeanor so calm you wonder if he’s ever had an opinion in his whole life. But I could feel his soul raising its right eyebrow at me, which is a superpower I gained being raised in a rural, conservative part of the world. I can sniff out existential disgust instantly and in particular when it’s directed at me. And I can understand. Here I am, a city slicker with no RV to speak of, rolling into his park with a caravan of arty types with vehicles stuffed to the gills with blooming flowers. But, I’m truly thrilled to be here, so I let him know how beautiful his park is, and ask him if it would be alright if we unpacked our cars in his park before our afternoon in the dunes. 

He was the type of guy who repeated everything back to you before commenting. Eventually, he said, “Oh, sure. That sounds fine.” 

“And would it be OK if we had a little picnic here in your park beforehand?” 

This produced a bigger sigh than I was expecting, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but he said, “I suppose that’s alright.” And he pointed to some picnic tables not too far off from where we were standing.  

I got back into my car with the intention of doing a quick lap through the park, identifying where the entrance was, wrapping my head around how the unloading would go, and then come back to the picnic table the old man had just gestured toward where I would devour my incredible Jersey Mike’s sandwich that I definitely hadn’t stopped thinking about since I bought it and was almost killed by that big truck. I led the caravan forward, looped around, and spotted the entrance. Then, right as I was about to turn around, I saw a couple of picnic tables in a vacant RV spot no more than twenty-five yards away from the entrance to the dunes. 

In my mind, I thought, well, that’s extremely convenient. So, we parked our three cars in this one RV sloop with the picnic tables and annihilated the Jersey Mike’s sandwiches. I have the ability to lose myself in food, and the world becomes a calm, still, sanctuary and the universe slows its expansion and the buzzing of all the atoms reconfigure into a morphine drip of dopamine, and I feel a momentary sense of inner peace. I disappeared into the void of mayonnaise and vinegar and cold cuts and grasping for napkins. I ate until my fingers were clean and the trance was broken. Right as I was clapping my hands together to get everyone to work, I saw one of the scariest things you can see in this lifetime: A golf cart approaching rapidly. 

Driving the golf cart was a man in a blue polo shirt that brought to mind the ocean. His skin had never met sunscreen, and he had a horseshoe mustache that looked like it was made up entirely of expensive paintbrushes. If there wasn’t literal froth foaming from his mouth, the metaphorical froth was infinite. He approached in a way that brought to mind violence. He approached in a way that let us know this was his personal January 6th. This was Bob and Bob was absolutely furious we were in his RV Park. 

Lindsey, the most serene human on our team if not ever, intercepted Bob. Lindsey’s from rural Texas, where I’m assuming all the boys she ever met had Bob for a dad or an uncle. At the minimum, Lindsey was fluent in Bob and could defuse his fury like one of those kids on YouTube who do Rubik’s cubes behind their backs. The facts were we had permission to be here from the old guy, and Lindsey was going to melt Bob’s heart with her unflappable pleasantness and explain the misunderstanding. I watched from a distance, waiting for Bob’s body language to change. Waiting for that moment where he went, “Oh, I understand now.” 

But the problem was Bob had his mind made up on the approach. Bob initiated the moment raging at 50 on a scale to 10. Bob hated us. And Bob was, I couldn’t believe, phone to his ear, calling the cops. There’s a certain energy that the Bobs of the world have when they’re on the phone with the police. They’re talking with the operator cop, but they’re actually talking to everyone in their physical vicinity. I started walking back to the group and Bob started walking to me. “You’re trespassing, mother fucker.” 

You just have to remember what you know and what’s dug you out of situations with Bobs in the past, which is to let them know they’re not wrong, but kindly, there’s more information worth sharing. “Sir, I don’t think you need to be so aggressive and yell at my friends. The old man over there gave us permission to use the access to the dunes. We’re just unloading—”

“You’re not unloading, you’re on private property!”

“I think there’s a misunderstanding because the old man—” 

He started yelling a description of me to the cops. 

“Alright, we’re packing up. We’re out of here.” 

I think he told me I wasn’t out of here, which was obvious because I was using future tense, but Bob was beyond the physics of grammar. This round went to Bob, and our caravan scooted out of RV sloop. For peace of mind, though, I just absolutely needed to check in with the old man to get his pulse on Bob. For all I knew, maybe Bob was just a local psychopath and not an employee of the park at all. Sort of like a stray dog that a small town collectively takes care of and affectionally refers to as “The Mayor.” 

“Hey, so, we were just kicked out of here by a really angry man named Bob on a golf cart who called the cops on us for trespassing.”

The old man was concerned, almost exasperated, but in the most calm, unnerving way imaginable. “Oh, but you weren’t trespassing. I told you you could be here.”

“I mean, you and I know that! That’s what I was trying to tell him!”

“Well, he shouldn’t have kicked you out.”

“This is what I was trying to say—”

With the grace of a hungover cowboy on an untamed stallion, Bob skidded his golf cart right at our feet. His face remained in its naturally frothy state, and Bob yelled at the Old Man. “Get this guy out of here! He’s trespassing!” 

“Well, now, Bob, I told him they could unloa—”

Bob could care less about the Old Man. It was clear Bob had spent most of recent history turning the Old Man into his doormat, and The Old Man’s eyes widened as Bob laid further in: 

“They weren’t unloading! They were eating lunch in slot 148!”

The look of relief on the Old Man’s face was like a mother seeing a child she thought she’d never see again when he realized he wasn’t going to have to stand up to Bob. He quickly looked at me. “I didn’t say you could have lunch here.”

“No, I asked you if we could have a picnic. And you said yes.”

“I said you could have a picnic at those tables.” He pointed to the tables he had in fact pointed to earlier. I could see how this was going. The Old Man had absolutely zero interest in parsing through the absurdity of which picnic tables with Bob. Bob had dictated and the Old Man was thrilled to seek refuge in this picnic loophole. My only option was to accept defeat and leave the RV park with my mind spinning. 

Bob hated us. It was eye-opening because I can’t recall ever experiencing irrational, blind hate before. It was outside reason. It was outside anything I could grab onto. It wasn’t a misunderstanding that could just get cleared up. He hated our existence and wanted us to stop existing. At the very least existing right in front of him. 

Plan A was foiled, so Plan B got set into motion: Head to the beach. 

The silver lining of getting Bobbed was our team had lived through a confusing and maddeningly dumb trauma together, and now we felt like a Team. You can live your whole life and never find a better motivation or rallying cry than, “Fuck that guy.” With the RV park in the rearview, and the expansive Pacific ahead of us, possibilities felt not just near but galvanized. Art was to be had. 

To paint a picture: Imagine you’re driving into a state park, and there’s a paved one-way road with a tollbooth and a smiling ranger who’s there to take your money and point you confidently in the direction you’re heading. Right ahead of you is land and trees and rocks and, importantly, more road. Now, imagine all of the first half of that right up to the ranger. Then remove everything in the second part of the description, starting with pointing you confidently in the direction you’re heading. Ahead of us was no road, but an immediate dip onto the beach, and from there, you can go left or right or take your chances driving to Japan. When I asked the Ranger for the easiest way to the dunes he pointed to my left, but when he spoke, it was like from his mouth was a vortex of where words lost their meanings and only the idea of sounds rang. I kept asking for clarity on the easiest way to get to the dunes, and his responses kept amounting to you are already at the dunes, the dunes are already with you, and you are the dunes, and you always have been the dunes but in general, they’re that way and we only accept cash. Which I luckily had. Lindsey, me, and one of the older cast members, who’d somehow managed to be asleep in the backseat nearly the entire day so far, pressed forward with the van and Corolla behind us.

The Pismo Beach Sand Dunes and Recreation Area is the only stretch of beach in the state of California where you can drive directly onto the beach. No more than 30 yards into Plan B, the van and the Corolla were stuck in the sand. Cartoon stuck where the tires spin comically and the car sinks into the earth like a casket at a funeral. We’re still basically within talking distance of the ranger who’s got his hands on his hips watching us like there’s nothing he could’ve said to us ten seconds ago to prevent this. I’m trying to get something besides sand under the van’s tires while Lindsey goes over to the ranger to see what can be done. The other awake older cast member meanwhile clearly lives for situations like this and has sprung to life and is with me rocking the car back and forth, giving instructions to all of us like he’s personally helped a hundred cars out of this exact situation in his lifetime. Lindsey, steadfast in her serenity, shuffles back to us with good news.

Enter the Jerk Pirates. 

The Jerk Pirates are a tandem of guys in a massively jacked-up pickup truck with large pirate flags flying from the bed and their only objective in life is to free people from being stuck in the sand. They don’t require payment. All they want is for people to enjoy their lives, free and mobile. The Jerks circle the van and squawk car words back and forth, on their knees, on their backs, standing up, hands on their hips, dodging eye contact with non-Jerks. They hook the van up to their truck. Boom. Free van. They hook the Corolla up. Boom. Free compact car. As they set us on our way, they remind us if we should ever need them again, they won’t be far. They’re not Jerks. They’re not Pirates. They’re heroes. They’re angels. 

We make the life experience-informed decision to leave the Corolla in the parking lot. But, a decision had to be made if we should roll the dice again with the van, as it carries everything that’s important to this shoot but is clearly not built for the peril ahead of it. The decision to bring the van back onto the sand was an inflection point that highlighted how much the day had already lost the narrative. The Vision was on the back burner’s back burner. My blood was circulating nothing but stress throughout my body, and none of the stress was even remotely related to the fact that we were here to take photos of flowers in the shape of a yin-yang surrounded by sand as far as the eye can see. Now closing in on the exact time we were hoping to be getting ready to take the first picture, we were facing an existential moment of doubt. But sand be damned: We had a Vision to create. The van had to press forward.  

Slowly leading the way, we made it to the damp, compact sand near the shore, turned south, and took control of our day again. We could see the dunes. The sun was shining. The Pacific was sparkling to our right. The sleeping older cast member remained asleep. The cortisol in my veins was intoxicating. Bob couldn’t hurt us here. We were behind schedule, but we were resolved, determined, a team. There was art to be made and having to earn it gave the whole day a sheen of cinema. We were good vanquishing an ambush of evil. 

And yet, somehow, someway, out of the blue, the beach was interrupted by a river. Again, something the ranger could have easily mentioned. And yet, here I was, again halted, hopping out of my car, onto the sand, looking out ahead of me at a river probably 30-40 yards across and a truck tire deep. 200 yards past the river were the dunes, rolling on and on. I could see exactly where I wanted to take our photo. Exactly where the Vision could come to life. And yet, the fast feeling of the day sinking away bloomed in my chest as the river rushed the California rainwater into the ocean. 

A sheriff, armed to the absolute teeth like he was also traumatized by Bob and expected him to appear at any minute, stood by watching the mini-parade of gigantic lifted 4x4 trucks ford the river like they were cosplaying a modern-day Oregon Trail reenactment. Warily and with great reluctance, having already had the cops called on me just an hour before, I approached the tactically adorned sheriff and asked if he thought I could get across the river in my SUV. 

“You could try,” was all he said without even looking in my direction, just like a dick. I nodded. Not helpful. I asked him what’s the deal with the river and he told me, still not looking in my direction, that it was from all the rain this winter.  

Lindsey and I huddled to figure out what could possibly be our next move. As the sheriff had suggested, I could try to make it through the river but the way the day had been going, it felt like the odds weren’t insignificant that something would go surreally wrong. Even watching these monster trucks make their way through, you could see steam rising from their hoods where the brackish waters splashed against the hot metal of their engines. Trying would be a roll of the dice in a game I had never played and didn’t know the rules of. Certainly, the van could not make it. Realistically, if we wanted to get to those dunes, it seemed like the move would be to load my truck up many times and ford the river many times and just hope that each time went perfectly. 

“Or, we could hire the Jerk Pirates to take us,” Lindsey suggested in a moment of clarity. The Kings of Pismo. It was so obvious. How could we have even stood here at the banks of this river, thinking we, city slickers, were equipped for this moment, to drive through the ocean? The simplicity of calling the Jerk Pirates highlighted the absurdity of the previous moments’ thought processings and the pendulum swung back toward possibility. 

Lindsey pulled her phone out and her fingers graced it’s glass with the focus of a figure skater who fell during the qualifying round but was now making an unprecedented run for the gold medal. Words were uttered that I only understood like a newborn understands its mother: I was safe, The Vision was secure. Everything would be OK. 

In fact, we could see the Jerk Pirates from across the river. They were making a descent from the dunes and headed for us. Their truck moved down the sand like a goat across rocks. The sun reflected off the sand, the sun reflected off the river, the sun reflected off everything. Everything was in a state of reverie. We opened the van, ready to start transferring the flowers into the Jerk Pirates truck bed when I heard an “Oh, no.” 

It was Lindsey. She saw it happen. They had slipped, and they weren’t moving. Their truck at an impossible angle stuck in the sand. And then her phone rang. Our recon needed recon and we probably weren’t going to see them on our side of the river anytime soon. 

My therapist has told me I have hypervigilance built deeply into my brain, which lets me handle stressful situations like a duck swimming across water. On the surface of the water, you see a serene animal gently making its way across the pond, but under the water, you see a storm of movement and action that betrays all the perceived grace.  The first thing that comes to my mind is I’ve never had a photoshoot fail in my life. I’ve never set out to take photos only to come up completely empty-handed. I’ve had photos I’ve shot that I don’t like and don’t promote. But never just a massive swing and a whiff. My ego wasn’t having it. I felt a deep repulsion to this idea and overrode the worry. Today wasn’t going to be a first and we were going to find a way to take these photos. The first steps were to leave this dumb beach, river, ultra-vibey sheriff, and our poor marooned Jerk Pirates.

“Okay, let’s turn around.” 

I remembered seeing on the map that there were other dunes about 30-45 minutes down the coast in a different park called Rancho Guadalupe Dunes Preserve. I had never been there, but all I needed was sand as far as you could see, and if Guadalupe could deliver that to me, I’d take it. We get off the beach, activated the caravan, and were on our way. 

The drive south was peaceful to a fault. Every five minutes Lindsey and I alternate between bringing up Bob and the river. I can’t believe Bob. I can’t believe I was about to drive through a river. I can’t believe that we should be wrapping our shoot at this exact moment, feeling the thrill of completing an ambitious, strange idea. Everyone high-fiving each other. Everyone yelling affirmations. Everyone saying, “Wait! Let’s get a group photo!” And everyone carrying flowers back to our cars, and then someone lights up and shouts from their phone, “I found a taco place!” I hope they have margaritas! “Margaritas!” Everyone would be yelling, wondering if we’d be lucky enough to find a place where they’re served like slushies. Sure, on the rocks would be fine. And someone would make a point to get theirs with mezcal. I couldn’t help but wonder if someone would have gotten a Paloma.  

Instead, we were driving to an unknown place, bleeding a trail of hope behind us. The sky was an in-between blue and overcast. The clouds were so low you could see through them, but so thick you couldn’t say it was sunny. We drove through a small town that reminded me of something you’d find between Houston and Austin, which reminded me of Jesse because she’s the only reason I know what between Houston and Austin looks like. 

After her second reoccurrence of lymphoma, our doctor in LA told us that we were out of treatment options in all of California. All we could do was pack our suitcases and family and uproot ourselves and get to MD Anderson in Houston as fast as possible to get on one of their clinical trials that Jesse might still qualify for. We were in Houston for four months, three clinical trials, and one Blue Bonnet season. The trials were a rollercoaster of brutality. Sometimes it seemed like they were working exactly like the miracle we were hoping for, but just as quickly the positive effects faded, leaving only behind a devastating toll on her body. But never on her spirit. And when we didn’t have to be in the hospital, and when she wasn’t feeling destroyed by the medicine, she wanted to live like she always had. Namely, she wanted me to take her to the Blue Bonnets. 

I was suddenly driving on two highways at once. One on the central coast of California, one in east Texas. One car had Lindsey and a sleeping old man in the backseat. The other car had Jesse and a sleeping two-year-old in the back. In east Texas, we were listening to DMX because he had just died that weekend. On the central coast, the music didn’t remind me of death. In east Texas, I pulled over because I had to pee, and when Jesse got out I looked over at her, and the whole backside of her dress was covered in fresh blood. One of her Nephrostomy bags (which had been there for only weeks at this point after her tumor had squished her ureters closed, almost killing her on an Ash Wednesday) had somehow come unattached. Because she had next to no platelets (the cells that clot bleeding) in her bloodstream at this point, we had to white knuckle it back to Houston out of terror she may bleed out next to me.

On the central coast, I pulled over because the road was washed out. It’s wild how you can go so long in your life never facing a washed-out road, and then just like that it happens twice in less than an hour. The rains, again. The Rancho Guadalupe Dunes Preserve wasn’t happening and it was feeling like realistically the whole day was washed out, too.

Still, other dunes could be an option. The flowers would stay fresh another night, and Lindsey seemingly telepathically confirms everyone’s available tomorrow. We could try it from the top first thing the in AM. But, the new plan glitches out when we open the weather app to see the predicted rain and wind storms in the Mojave desert that stretched all the way to Palm Springs. Everything was rainy. The rain had taken control. The app itself started raining washing out calendars like roads. We were sinking. The Vision wasn’t going to come to life. At least not today. Or tomorrow. Or in this plane of existence. We decided we’d call it a day and the caravan three-point turned and started heading back toward the 101 South freeway just in time for a desperate, stupid idea to lightning bolt its way to my brain.

“Lindsey, can you get the RV Park on the horn, please?”

My thought process went: What if I called the RV Park, reserved a slip, and just gave them my money? Once they take my money, who are they to still hate us? Once they take my money, we’re even. Sure, they told us earlier that they wanted to send us to jail. But, now they’re just hearing a polite voice on the other side of the line with no external body expressing signifiers for them to be revolted by. I heard an old woman’s voice pick up and asked if there was any chance I could rent two slips, preferably by the entrance to the dooms for this afternoon. Of course, she said. Do you take Amex? Of course, she said. And just like that, capitalism acted as the great equalizer, and we were in. 

“I have to tell you, we were there earlier, and I just want to warn you because there was a guy named Bob who was really upset that we were there. If you could just give him a heads up that we’re going to be back but that we’re allowed to be there this time, I would really appreciate it.”

“Oh, I heard about you guys. Well, if you guys hadn’t been trying to be sneaky.”

My instinct was to cut her off, to say, “Ma’am,” and explain that we were in fact not being even one degree of sneaky. But, in these instances, sometimes you just need to smile while you eat shit and submit to the flow of the moment. “I understand, I understand.” We let the caravan know the shoot was back on. 

We arrived back at the RV park like soldiers returning home from an unpopular war. We were relieved and ready to resume our lives as we had always imagined living them before violence stole us away. Everyone else stayed inside, looking the other way. Bob most notably was absent. No matter. We had just over one hour until the sun would be behind the dunes, and we’d lose our chance to take the photo that had been planted in my head a year and a half earlier. I literally ran out into the dunes and scouted a spot that was close enough to The Vision and planted a metaphorical flag and said this is it. It was about a quarter mile uphill through the sand from the parking lot. A half-mile journey there and back. It took almost the entire hour for 5 people hauling box after box after box of flowers from the van into the dunes to get all our flowers on site. Our shadows were impossibly long and the soles of our feet were beyond exfoliated. I could feel the light leaving and with each load the futility of the gesture growing grander. On my last trip back to the car to get the last of the flowers, I began talking to Jesse. 

“Bird,” that’s what I called her, “Why am I doing this? What am I doing here?”

And without any exaggeration, as if life and cinema made a baby, directly on cue a toddler that I had somehow not seen once in the last hour, probably 4 years old tops and with hair curly like a tangle of fishing line, pops her little head up from behind a crest of sand and yells at me, “This is fun!” I was so annoyed. This was the exact messaging Jesse spent the majority of our relationship pounding into me. Be grateful, she’d say. Enjoy this, she’d say. This is fun, she was now saying through some kid whose hair I was happy I’d never have to comb. 

The florist team started building the yin-yang as the sun was making its swan dive into the dunes. By the time the construction was finished, the sun had fully said goodnight. The sky was making its move from blue to purple. Venus was up there. Everyone was shivering. The old men were in their costumes and one was using a cardboard box as a shield from the wind. I went through the process of taking the photos like an ancient priest who knew the ritual but had forgotten the heart of why. The day was, the light was gone. The Vision had faded to oblivion. 

A part of me would have loved to shot put the camera into oblivion. A part of me was curious if maybe the computer could save the images and make them beautiful by adjusting this, raising this level, cloning this thing, removing that thing. But the me that was on the dunes was satisfied and proud of everyone around me if not extremely fritzed. The lengths everyone went to meet The Vision of a yin-yang coming out of the sand, the physical endurance of creating this sculpture of ephemera, it didn’t feel like a failure. The moment felt human and sweet. A moment not quite calling for a margarita, but safely a cheeseburger moment. 

By the time we had packed everything back into the car, it was fully dark. My feet were raw and the thought crossed my mind that we should be arriving in Los Angeles by now. No matter. The caravan stopped at the first In-N-Out we found and we laughed and scarfed like we were a high school sports team that just won districts. We made fun of Bob. We talked about the river. We laughed about things that had nothing to do with the day. We were still moving a million miles per hour. We were ready to say vows. We could do anything. 

The first thing we did was drive home, and that was that. I don’t remember there being a moon. I remember the darkness felt like a weighted blanket on the planet. We passed by two accidents that both looked like there were fatalities involved. Lindsey and I talked about how she and her husband fell in love. We talked a little bit about Jesse. We talked about our kids. The old man kept sleeping in the backseat, waking up occasionally to call his wife or watch a TikTok. My heart hadn’t slowed down yet, and it didn’t even when I was laying in bed. My brain rapidly trying to solve problems that weren’t there. Just fast synapsing that with no direction, no clear message, just to be on alert, just to see if there was a way to save the moment, yet.

The next week I had a job in Boca Raton, Florida. I swam in the Atlantic Ocean and was treated to expensive food all week. The hotel’s gym was nicer than my gym in Los Angeles and the cast was perfect for the script and so easy to take photos of. I went to the local AMC twice. And on my last day, the hotel forgot to wake me up for my flight and I had to scramble out of bed to a flurry of phone calls from my driver and brush my teeth while packing my suitcases. I had laid out clothes the night before but that was all the organizing I had done. 

Two days back from the job I realized what I had done. I had left a hard drive in my hotel room. And on the hard drive was the Yin-Yang shoot. I called the hotel every day for a week, and then once a week for four weeks, and then finally gave up. The shoot was gone. For that matter, every shoot from January 2022-March 2023 was gone. But the very presence of the Yin-Yang photos on that hard drive felt like a driving metaphor. Or at least a driving “Fuck you.” Now, not even a computer could save the photos because they ceased to exist entirely. 

The only thing that exists now is The Vision. I can tell you about the photos. I can tell you they were the most beautiful, poetic, dreamy images I’d personally ever seen. But in fact, they weren’t. I don’t think they were strong and wouldn’t have made much of an impact on any viewers or on my career. But I have never worked harder for an image, especially one that I can’t even point to say, “See! See what we tried to do here?” There are phrases that come to mind like ashes to ashes. Or metaphors of sand and zen gardens. Even the metaphor of the yin-yang is absolutely not lost on me in this instance. The art project might be been the art. Or, sometimes a failure is a failure. It’s a dealer’s choice of metaphors. Why did I get Wayne’s World II’d into this moment? Was the Vision a Trojan Horse of dark magic sent to bring destruction? Right when I was getting back on my feet, right when I was feeling like my creative energy was returning to me? All to set me back to zero, again. I think the further I peel back the layers of the metaphor, the closer to nothing I get. And at a certain point, I have to pull myself back from the edge and just accept it as it is.

Then, I think of the Bird’s, “This is fun,” and wonder if maybe the whole thing isn’t a metaphor and wonder if the whole thing was orchestrated by my wife’s technicolored ghost just so she could laugh at me, with me, and remind me the of how ridiculously amusing this whole stupid world is? For now, I’m landing somewhere in this area: We do these things because we’re pleasure-seeking creatures, and the seeking is what’s most sacred. Wayne didn’t need to put on WayneStock to find meaning in his life. He just needed to seek something. I was seeking Jesse. We were seeking Marigolds. We were seeking children. We were seeking her health. I was seeking purpose through art. I was seeking connection. I was seeking meaning and understanding as to why anything happens at all. And in each instance, the pleasure was always in the seeking. 

Shirley, one thing I’m always impressed with you is your ability to create a story with your costuming. Every time you put clothes on someone, yourself included, it immediately creates a sense of intrigue about the history of the person: who they are, where they’ve been, what they do. But then you also have such an ability to create these visual compositions out of color and shapes. Is there a particular project in your history that you can point to and say, “This is the project where I found my voice and hit a stride that set me on my path?”

I think maybe it was styling Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins for their Rabbit Fur Coat album cover and packaging and shot by Autumn de Wilde back in 2006.  I had recently watched Robert Altman’s “3 Women” and I loved the twins that were featured in the movie- they were dressed identically with matching outfits and purses.  Jenny and Autumn wanted the shoot to have a cinematic aspect to it- like they were film stills from a movie, so I took that inspiration and dressed the Watson twins in matching outfits and purses.  I also had this red vintage dress that I found in a thrift store that fit Jenny perfectly and being a Pedro Almodovar fan and knowing how red is such an important color in his movies, it felt right to put her in red.  For me this shoot gave me the opportunity to mix aspects of film into the music world.  That mixing of genres and inspirations is still an important aspect of my styling and costume design.  

You grew up in the Los Angeles area and you’ve seen fads come and go from the city. When you wax nostalgic on this beautiful place, can you describe what you see as LA’s golden era for you?

I think LA in the 70’s seemed golden to me, like my memories of it has a summery hazy golden feel to it.  Technology hadn’t taken over yet, it was a time for kids to be outside, make mud pies, ride bikes or big wheels, skateboard, rollerskate, go swimming in a pool, play in the park.  I’m kind of grateful to be able to have those years because I felt like we were living in the present more, and more connected to nature.   There were less things to keep you indoors.  LA has such great natural places to explore- mountains, beaches, canyons along with year round great weather, but it’s so easy to get pulled into staying home watching Netflix or being on the computer and oftentimes we don’t take advantage of the great things LA has to offer. 

If you had to move somewhere else, what city could you see yourself thriving in?

I think somewhere in Japan, maybe Kyoto or Osaka.  

Two-part question: Do you have any opinions on space tourism? In the future, would you ever consider taking a vacation to the moon?

I think spending the money on space travel when it could be spent on cleaning our planet up is kind of ridiculous.  I think humans would probably end up trashing those places too.  So no, I’m not really into it. I also saw the Challenger blow up as a kid, so that kind of traumatized me regarding space travel.  Plus there are so many amazing places I still need to discover on this planet!

What was the last thing (movie or just moment in life or anything) that you saw that made you pause and go, “Wow. That was beautiful”?

Hiking in Malibu and seeing all the flowers in bloom. 

Thank you for joining us, Shirley! We enjoyed having you here at Fudge Monthly.

With that said, here’s today’s exquisite corpse dump of inspiration images from around the internet. I don’t know who is responsible for a lot of these at this point, but I’m very grateful all these images exist and hang out with me when I’m at my computer. At the end, there’s a credit to everyone I can remember.

I love the poetry that gets created when looking at other people’s images out of context all at once. Enjoy. I’m calling this one:

Scratching the Surface

1. Amanda Charchian

2. Jesse Chamberlin

3. I don’t know

4. I don’t know

5. I don’t know

6. Carl Sagan on Cosmos

7. Chris Farley on SNL

8. a Mara Hoffman campaign photo

9. Alex Prager

10. Leslie Kirchhoff

11. I don’t know

12. I don’t know

13. Harley Wier (pretty sure)

14. I don’t know

If you know the other artists, lmk! Hope you enjoyed today’s inspiration exploration. Hope it created a beautiful story in your mind.

@jadeyyychen asks: Song to listen to when you’re feeling alone in the universe? 

I whipped up this graph to showcase by year when I’ve felt most alone in the universe. The year 2021 was a painfully difficult year for me where I lost my wife and mother within weeks of each other and I was left to be a single dad, raising a two-and-a-half-year-old. I wasn’t physically alone. I had a great community doing their best to support me every single day. But the fact was my favorite people were dead and I didn’t like my life anymore and spent a lot of time wishing I could leap out of my skin and land on a plane far away from here. The song I listened to the most that year, confirmed by Spotify in my 2021 year-end report was People, I’ve Been Sad by Christine and the Queens. An absolutely aptly named slow burn of a jammer.

The song lands in a genre I refer to as a Pool Jam. An ideal Pool Jam is a song that’s sad, but is also kind of sexy. That you can lay in the hot sun to and feel all the emo feelings you need to feel. In fact, it might be the ultimate pool jam.

There’s so much longing in the way Héloïse (Christine) sings, and the harmonizing vocals have so much nostalgia and feeling. It’s a song about being sad, but there’s a distinct optimism I feel in it. It’s not a call-to-action optimism that shakes you out of your funk and gets you out of bed. It’s an optimism that admits I’m feeling this way right now, but someday I plan to feel different. It shoots the optimism like an arrow into the future and stakes a claim at a later date to say, I’ll feel better then. 

When you feel the most alone in the universe, I think punting a sincere hope down the road is a beautiful and courageous thing to do. 

@meghanoretsky asks: When is your FILM poppin’ off?! 

I am assuming Meghan’s talking about my short film WHAT ON EARTH that I have posted about in my stories. Here’s a Polaroid from the set: 

The film stars Suzanna Son, who’s absolutely brilliant in Red Rocket and is going to also be in the new HBO show The Idol. 

The short is finished! We’re just waiting to hear back from film festivals now to find out where we’ll be premiering it. I’m so impatient with sharing things that are finished so it’s extremely difficult for me to not share this movie already. I’m so proud of it. It turned out so beautifully and all the performances are outstanding. Everyone who contributed did spectacularly. In the meantime, I can share the film’s poster! It’s not much, but it’s something! And soon I’ll be able to show the trailer! 

@ninamunk asks: What’s your favorite sleeping position?

I’m a side sleeper who favors my stomach. I like to straddle a pillow and sleep with my arms outstretched. I change which side of my face is on the pillow 2-4 times a night. I love to sleep.

@lautraralau asks: Why are vibrant colors so important to you? 

Since I was a teenager I always wanted to be a filmmaker. When it came time to go to college, I wound up studying creative writing and art history because I wanted to understand storytelling and I wanted to understand why we understand images the way we do.

I loved my art history classes, and in particular I loved early modernism. Something about the bold application of paint, the flattening of space, and the way the artists were using the medium to communicate the emotional arc of the piece rather than the explicit story really struck a chord with me. I can cite Henri Matisse specifically as a real genealogical source of inspiration. I remember seeing his painting The Dessert: Harmony in Red and thinking it was the most perfect painting I had ever seen.  

Harmony is the perfect word. It’s an homage to the color red. It’s the color red for dessert, for our consumption, for our hearts to face plant into the flatness with. 

Another example that I remember seeing as a teen and going, “Oh, that’s what I’m talking about” is Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon.

The dreaminess of this composition is outstanding with the foreground receding into the background creating that beautiful L of nuns. But that red floor is so excruciatingly evocative. It’s red solely to be an adjective of drama. It’s red just to go, “THE STAKES ARE HIGH, BABY!” 

About the same time I was being a nerd over these paintings I watched Tokyo Drifter by Seijun Suzuki and felt like all the dots got connected for using color as an adjective.  

I love to use color because it’s an instant mood creator. I use it because it reminds me of my heroes. I use it because I love the flatness it creates in the composition that makes the image draw attention to itself. I love to use color because it takes the moment out of reality and puts it in the realm of emotions and feelings. 

@shortyjeinberg asks: What’s your fave bagel in LA

++my favorite simple bagel: the sesame seed bagel and dill cream cheese at Courage Bagels.

++my favorite breakfast sandwich: the egg, cheese, and bacon at Belle’s.

++my favorite light bagel sandwich: the za’atar bagel with cucumbers and tomatoes at Maury’s.

Logan Polish is an actress, writer, director, model, painter, and human who completed The Artists Way while still in the womb. She lives in New York City, was raised in Los Angeles, and was most recently on Apple TV’s The Mosquito Coast. Let’s get to know Logan more. The photos were taken on a recent walk through the hills surrounding Malibu, CA.

JIMMY: Logan, when looking at your Instagram feed, the first thing I notice is you are a natural curator. Part of your charm is your elevated taste. I’m curious to know what’s one thing that you aesthetically or emotionally absolutely love, that most people would assume you’d be repulsed by?  

LOGAN: Formula one.

JIMMY: Follow up question, what aesthetic are you in fact actually repulsed by? Either visually or emotionally.

LOGAN: Low rise jeans. It makes me question why we were put on the planet… 

JIMMY: Continuing with the repulsion theme, you recently relocated to New York City. I find New York to be an overwhelming experience of dirt and peril, yet it’s full of the most unexpected, beautiful moments. What was one of the first heart-stopping moments of beauty you first saw in New York? 

LOGAN: Pigeons fighting over a slice of joe’s pizza. 

JIMMY: Who’s the greatest poet in the world that’s not a poet? 

LOGAN: “I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar. I am the son and heir of the nothing in particular.”

- Morrissey.  How Soon is Now

JIMMY: Give me a stream of conscious first gut reaction to the following words:

LOGAN:

Chew: Bacca

Spur: of the moment

Outtie: bellybutton 

Germaphobe: covid

Calypso: the cat 

Thank you for joining us, Logan. We enjoyed having you here at Fudge Monthly.

Domaine de Montbourgeau: A white wine that could clean a penny. Perfect for the end of the meal when all you want to do is slink a little lower in the booth while letting your talking get a little quicker and your secrets a little easier to give away. Sip it like Muhammad Ali is boxing it into your mouth.

Disclaimer: First of all, I was anti-apple-infused wines because I think cider is disgusting and was expecting everything I love about the wine to be bullied into submission by the cider. But this bottle was a gift, and I opened it because the color was incredible and I didn’t read the back to see what it even was I was bout to drink. And I’m so glad I did. My review:

Flrx x Nuki Apple Grape Wine: One night when I was a teenager and there was no moon I went skinny dipping with my friends in a remote fjord in British Columbia. From the dock the water might have been 3,000 feet deep, and above us was an eternity of space broken up by more stars than I’ve ever seen in any sky since. My clothes were at my feet and there was nothing in my way of the dark sea but a few feet of cool, dark air. I plunged in headfirst and found myself in a wash of phosphorescence. Diving down as long as my lungs let me, it felt like I had finally reached the stars. We floated out there feeling a total collapse of up and down, where we could create light by just moving our limbs through the cold Canadian water. In that darkness, everything sparkled.

Most sparkling red wines feel like they’re faking it to me. But if I could go back in time and put a sparkling red wine on the dock for us all to share right out of the bottle that night, I would choose this one. Drink it cold. Drink it in the dark. Drink it with close friends and enjoy all the sparkling.

What is a Fudge Monthly? 

When I was young and fun and extremely skinny and in college, my roommates and I were the recipients of our house’s previous tenants’ Urban Outfitters catalog. We were all typically covered in dirt, and I think collectively owned a few pieces of clothing that were new, and basically had no interest in the catalog and what it was selling. But what we did love to do was write FUDGE MONTHLY on top of it, and leave the catalog out and take turns scribbling dirty jokes and funny outfits onto the models to keep us entertained as the month passed. 

It was juvenile, but it was a form of self-expression that was extremely fun with absolutely the lowest stakes possible. It was creating for the joy of creating and for the joy of community. 

Just about a decade later I was no longer in college, barely covered in dirt, and living in LA with a newfound career in photography (which was largely an accident — a topic for a future stack), and felt like my work was feeling meh. I was craving something fun and something for me that could generate new work and new community.

So, In 2016 I did a photo monthly photo zine also called Fudge Monthly. Each month had a new theme, and I spent the month taking photos around that theme and then printed it, threw a release party and invited all my friends to come hang out and take a look. I made it through August, and then it folded as my fiancé and I started planning our wedding for October (again, another future stack). 

This site completes the Fudge Monthly trilogy and the fudge is giving me the old feelings it’s always given me. I’m excited to create something new, and something fun, and something that I haven’t ever done before. I’m excited for the new ideas and new expressions. 

I have a few ideas on how to get this show on the road. 

I want to keep a log of things that are going on in my studio, whether that’s projects or ideas we’re excited about, or crowd sourcing solutions to things we’re wondering about. 

I’ve been holding in a lot of feelings of extreme grief that I want to express, and have been searching for a way to express. I think this might be an outlet for that.

Probably going to do a lot of wine reviews. I’d also love to do a weekly Q&A to answer your biggest questions about the creative life and life in general.

I also have so many stories I want to share. Life has been weird and there’s been so many small moments that have stuck with me that I can’t just take to the goddamn grave. So they’ll be future stacks.

Might reboot my radio show Island Time here in some way.

There’s probably room to have an entrepreneurial discussion about future business ideas. For example, a restaurant called High Steaks that’s a steak house that cooks all of its meat in weed butter.

And SO MANY HOT TAKES! 

Welcome to Fudge Monthly, babies. When you’re here, you’re family.