I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump. Zora Neale Hurston
The broom thing, this gorgeous, stolen-back piece of history that slavery couldn’t kill, sitting there at a wedding where half the guests have sleeve tattoos and the other half are wearing dashikis from Ashby flea market, where there’s no church, no traditional anything except this one deliberate moment when they choose to reach back and grab something that means resistance. That means we’re still here. That means to hell with you, we decide what’s sacred.
Now maybe the couple met at a noise show or a protest or some coffee shop on Telegraph, and maybe their vows mentioned anarchism or healing from capitalism, but when they take each other’s hands and jump, really jump, not some polite hop, over that broom, there’s this electricity, this connection to something that television and Pinterest and the wedding industrial complex can’t package or commodify or bleach clean.
“To Honor Surfing” Statue by Thomas Marsh Lighthouse Point, Santa Cruz.
“Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say.”
There’s something about a joint that refuses to die that makes you believe in America again, or at least in the stubborn, beautiful refusal to give up on what matters. Peninsula Creamery sits there on that corner like a middle finger to everything Silicon Valley pretends to be: all its disruption and optimization and whatever fresh hell they’re calling progress this week.
This is a place that understands the radical act of staying the same. Not because it’s cute or retro or some Instagram ready nostalgia trap, but because it knows what it is. That sign, those windows glowing against the dark: it’s not trying to be anything other than what it’s always been. And in a town where venture capital turns neighborhoods into algorithmic exercises, where every storefront becomes another artisanal whatever the fuck, that’s not just quaint. It’s defiant.
The composition here captures that strange American loneliness: the Stop sign, the empty street, the chairs waiting outside like they’ve been waiting since Eisenhower. But there’s warmth bleeding through those windows. Life. The promise that if you walk through that door, somebody’s gonna treat you like a human being, not a data point.
This isn’t about what they serve. It’s about what they represent: continuity in a world obsessed with the new, authenticity in a landscape of simulation. The creamery doesn’t need to justify its existence with a mission statement or a Series A. It just opens the doors, day after day, and that, in Palo Alto of all goddamn places, is an achievement.
Some things should last. Some places deserve to survive. This is one of them.
Look at this magnificent anachronism, this relic standing there like some burned out roadie who missed the last bus out of town. A payphone in 2019 might as well be a fucking dinosaur bone embedded in concrete, except this thing’s still breathing, still offering that beautiful possibility of anonymous communion in an age when every goddamn sneeze gets catalogued and cross-referenced.
And those cameras. Jesus Christ, those cameras hovering overhead like mechanical vultures, cold eyes recording every pathetic soul who approaches this thing, probably feeding some algorithm that’s already decided what kind of person uses a payphone these days. Drug dealers, cheating spouses, people dodging warrants, or maybe just someone who remembers when connection didn’t mean surveillance, when reaching out didn’t require surrendering your soul to the digital panopticon.
There’s something beautifully contradictory about it, this monitored instrument of privacy. It’s like poetry written in rust and desperation. The establishment gives you this tool for secrecy while simultaneously documenting your every move toward it. They’re basically saying: “Yeah, make your call, whisper your sins, tell your secrets. We’re just gonna watch you do it.”
But that handset still works. You can still lift that receiver, drop your coins, and speak into the void the way humans used to: raw and unfiltered and real. It’s obsolete and surveilled and probably smells like piss and disappointment, but it’s still standing there, this stubborn middle finger to the age of transparency, offering one last gasp of something we used to call freedom, even if freedom now comes with cameras attached like remoras on a dying shark.
Shooting this production felt like documenting a beautiful corpse. And I mean that with all the love and heartbreak that implies.
The students were great, of course they were great. They always are. Committed, sweating under those lights, believing in every goddamn note. That’s not the problem. The problem is watching a department that once made me question what theater could be, what performance meant, reduced to mounting competent, perfectly adequate productions of shows that third string touring companies do better in their sleep.
TAPS, Theater and Performance Studies, for fuck’s sake, used to be the place where the lunatics ran the asylum. Where I’d walk into some repurposed basement or courtyard and have my understanding of what constitutes theater completely dismantled. Site-specific work in toilet stalls under the Quad that made you feel something genuine and strange. Experiments that failed gloriously. Graduate students doing weird, uncomfortable, necessary things with their bodies and voices that I couldn’t unsee.
Now? Now they’re doing Cabaret. Which, fine, Cabaret’s a masterpiece. In 1966. On Broadway. Directed by Harold Prince. But here, in 2019, on a campus drowning in student theater groups doing the exact same thing? Ram’s Head has been cranking out musicals with bigger budgets, tighter production values, and more joy for decades. They know what they are. They’re not pretending to push boundaries while playing it safe.
And yeah, I get the institutional defense: “We’re not a conservatory.” No shit. Nobody’s asking you to train the next generation of Broadway belters. But you’re not supposed to be the goddamn English Department either, analyzing texts from a safe academic distance while the students do all the actual making somewhere else.
There’s supposed to be a third way, a place where rigor meets risk, where scholarship informs practice, where the question “what is performance?” actually matters enough to pursue it into uncomfortable territory. That’s the whole fucking point of a research university theater department. Otherwise, you’re just running a shittier version of Juilliard with better reading lists. Making mediocrity your selling pitch is pathetic while coasting on institutional prestige; producing work that’s indistinguishable from every other community college theater program in America. “Perfectly adequate” is not a mission statement. It’s a surrender.
And sure, I’m capturing beautiful composition. The lighting’s moody, the choreography’s solid, the costumes kinda work despite being so busy Timmy’s going to have an epileptic seizure during one of the light changes. But where’s the danger for everybody other than Timmy? Where’s the thing that makes you uncomfortable, that makes you think? The whole fucking point of Cabaret, the Weimar decadence, the creeping fascism, the willful blindness, feels neutered when it’s presented as just another musical, another entertainment, another line on a someone’s resume.
I kept thinking: this is the department that gave us directors and performers who went on to reshape American theater. What happened? When did institutional survival supersede artistic risk? When did the fear of empty seats trump the possibility of revelation?
Every click of the shutter felt elegiac. For what was. For what could have been. For the raw, messy, vital work that nobody asked for but everybody needed.
The saddest part? The production was fine. And that’s exactly the problem. TAPS settling for “fine” is like watching Coltrane play “Happy Birthday” at a kid’s party. Sure, he can do it. But Fuck me, is that really what Stanford theater aspires too?
I left with a card full of images that’ll look great in someone’s portfolio. Professional. Clean.
Utterly forgettable.
Just like the future of theater as a living discipline at this place, apparently.
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. Leonardo da Vinci
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world. Patti Smith
These Polaroids of bodies caught mid-leap off Reunion Island’svolcanic rock, they’re not documentation, they’re evidence of a crime against physics. In those original packets you got twenty shots, as Patti Smith says, so each shot becomes a world, and what world is this? It’s the province between what is and what might be, where dancers hang suspended in chemistry and light before gravity reasserts its authority and drags everyone back to earth.
That frontier country, that’s where the real shit happens. It’s not the pirouette and it’s not the photograph. It’s the half-second where the dancer’s weight transfers and the shutter opens and the chemicals start their slow crawl across the film stock, turning light into lie, turning motion into monument. The physical body, all sinew and sweat and the brutal mathematics of momentum, colliding with something else… call it spirit, call it the ineffable, call it whatever lets you sleep at night, but there’s a transaction happening in that space that commerce can’t touch.
Polaroids know this better than any medium. They develop in your hand like a secret revealing itself, unreliable and gorgeous and already dying the moment they exist. Perfect for dance, perfect for that in-between country where artists make their stand. Because what is a dancer but someone who’s decided that being earthbound is negotiable? They’re provincials who’ve set up camp on a border that shouldn’t exist, trafficking in moments that can’t be sustained, building entire careers on the half-second between launch and landing.
The metaphysical isn’t some gauzy abstraction here, it’s as real as ligaments tearing, as concrete as the white border forming around these images while they’re still warm. It’s the space where intention meets execution, where training becomes transcendence, where you stop asking “how did they do that” and start asking “what the hell just happened to physics?” That’s the province. That’s where the artist doesn’t live but exists, perpetually caught between what the body can do and what the spirit demands.
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Standing on top of a volcanic ridge in the middle of the Indian Ocean, watching two impossibly flexible humans contort themselves against a backdrop that would make Defoe weep with envy, this wasn’t on my bingo card. But here we are. Mafate. Réunion Island. The kind of place where you half expect to find the remnants of some doomed expedition, all gone Lord of the Flies by week three.
Babatunji and Madeline DeVries, these LINES Ballet dancers? They’re not just talented. They’re weaponized elegance. And I’m here with a camera, sweating through my shirt at altitude, trying to capture what is essentially the impossible: the human body defying physics in a place where most humans have no business being.
The thing about mountains on tropical islands is they mess with your head. Wells would have understood this, that sensation of being utterly removed from the known world, of existing in some pocket universe where different rules apply. Down below, there’s civilization, wifi, overpriced cocktails with little umbrellas. Up here? Nothing but wind, rock, and these two dancers moving like they’re channeling something primal. Something that predates prosceniums and theaters and polite applause.
This is what contemporary dance needs. Not another technically perfect performance in a climate-controlled theater. This. Artists doing what artists are actually supposed to do: pushing past the comfortable, shattering the boundaries of what we think is possible. You want to take it to the next level? You drag your art to the literal edge of the world and see if it still speaks. You risk everything: your body, your safety, your sanity. Because that’s where truth lives. On the precipice.
I watch Madeline extend into an arabesque on a ledge that drops away into literally nothing. My palms sweat. The photographer in me is thinking about the light, about the composition, about this once-in-a-lifetime moment. The human part of me is wondering what particular brand of beautiful insanity brings people to mountaintops to dance.
Babatunji moves like water. Like he’s been marooned here, all Crusoe-style, and adapted, evolved, become something that belongs to this ridge more than to any stage. That’s what great performers do, isn’t it? They colonize space. They make it submit. And in doing so, they break through every safe assumption about where dance belongs, what dance should be.
This is boundary-breaking in its purest form. Not conceptual. Not theoretical. Physical. Real. The kind of artistic risk that makes your pulse quicken because you know, you absolutely know, that if they fall, if they fail, there’s no safety net. There’s just rock and void and consequence. That’s integrity. That’s what happens when artists refuse to be domesticated.
And I’m the witness. Standing here with my gear, completely aware of the absurdity, the beautiful, necessary absurdity of documenting grace in a place this unforgiving. The island doesn’t care about art. The wind doesn’t pause for perfect composition. But these dancers? They came here anyway. They brought civilization’s highest achievement, disciplined human movement, to the edge of the civilized world, then pushed it further still.
Réunion Island Volcano with Alonzo King LINES Ballet.
You stand there in front of someone else’s vision, whether it’s Diane Arbus showing you how broken people are beautiful or Cartier-Bresson with his decisive moment horseshit, and it gets inside you like a virus, like Burroughs’ language virus, and suddenly you’re not seeing anymore, you’re remembering how someone else saw.
These dancers on this volcano, and Christ, what a sick, gorgeous metaphor that is, they’re doing the same brutal math we all do. They’ve learned every position, every line from Balanchine or Graham or whoever the hell broke them in, and now they’re out there on volcanic rock, literal fucking magma underneath, trying to make something that’s theirs. Trying to burn off the scar tissue of their teachers.
Because that’s what the quote’s really about, isn’t it? It’s not some zen koan about finding yourself. It’s about the violence of becoming. Nietzsche didn’t just “read” Schopenhauer, he was infected by him, colonized by pessimism so profound it could justify suicide as a reasonable lifestyle choice. And then he had to tear that infestation out of his brain with his bare hands, had to savage his own intellectual father figure to death just to hear his own voice again.
My photography, hell, my anything, is always going to be contaminated at first. I’m going to shoot like the people who made me want to shoot. I’m going to see their ghosts in your viewfinder. And that’s fine, that’s necessary even, like learning chord progressions before I can write a song (never done this) or getting drunk before you can write honestly about sobriety (never done that either).
But eventually, and this is where it gets ugly, you have to murder your influences. Not ignore them, not thank them and move on like some gracious commencement speech. You have to kill them. Because if you don’t, you’re just a cover band, and nobody needs another cover band.
