I welcome me

Okay.  Here goes.  

This is something I was sure, I told myself, I was never going to involve myself in.  And, in truth, like aging - it is something that maybe I've been getting to in my own time, in my own way.  You aren't just old one day - you get there, slowly, inexorably, inevitably; so slowly that it just seems to be hardly happening.

And here I am with a blog.  I never thought I would.  But like all good ideas that have been made to me in my life, I have to thank a woman because it was my friend Ellen who made the suggestion.  Within fifteen minutes of her suggesting, I had done it.  But, again in truth and like aging, it didn't really happen that quickly.

I have been on facebook - the social networking website - for some time which, in the beginning was a wonderful experiment and I was put back in touch with so many old and dear friends, including Ellen.  I would use the site to link to images I had made and posted over at flickr and to post links to other sites or articles that I was interested in and I thought I would share.  This was fine for a while until the realities of the website (in fact it's too boring to list all of what I find wrong with it) and the fact that I summarily and without warning - despite the administrator's insistence that I had been repeatedly warned about my still-unexplained offense - had my account deactivated.  I was let back on a couple of weeks later.

In retrospect I see that facebook is a bit like 'blog-lite' - it's like the gateway blog.  It's if you want people to know the minutiae.  In fact it's fun.  Too fun.  That's why it's probably so successful in sapping the hours of time people spend updating their updates.  So maybe I can pick up here where I left off there and see where that takes me, takes us.

In the fall of 2007 I moved from Los Angeles, California to Hanoi, Vietnam after receiving a Fulbright research grant funding a proposal I submitted in my application to document contemporary youth culture in Vietnam.  In fact, the idea to move to Vietnam was my wife's.  She was born in Hanoi and we met here in 1994 when I was shooting a documentary and she was a young cadet reporter, fresh out of university, and assigned to write an article about the director I was working with.  Our next meeting and subsequent relationship is a long and involved and very romantic story and I will preserve the right to talk about it later.  Or not.

But the point I want to make in bringing up my wife gets back to the notion that the women in my life have always been the sources of the best ideas.  Initially I greatly resisted the notion of walking away from my 'career' in Hollywood as a cinematographer, leaving all that I had worked for so many years to create.  We lived in a nice, old house I bought shortly before we married in Echo Park and I had spent some years renovating it to it's 100-plus year old former glory and our daughter was born in it.  I had the mortgage, I had union membership in the cinematographer's guild, I had health insurance, car, trash pick-up every Wednesday, a barbecue pit - how could I possibly leave all that to move to the uncertainty of a life in a developing country, even one I had some experience in.  Alone one evening and in a great leap of faith, I knew that if we were going to have any kind of a life going forward, I decided it was exactly what we had to do.

I rented out the house, got rid of every inessential thing I owned, stored the rest, and committed myself to leaving LA.  In the midst of all of that I received the news my grant had been funded.  Sometimes the universe does follow you when you make a plan.  At age 50 and with two bags and a carry-on with my camera, I followed my wife's plan for us and arrived in Hanoi.

My friend Ellen is a film maker.  She made a wonderful documentary on the amazing composer and musician Quincy Jones called "Listen Up".  It's a great film.  See it if you haven't.  She is just now making another film on a 16th century painter named Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian woman and contemporary of Caravaggio.  Needless, perhaps, to say - or maybe still requiring emphasis - she was an incredibly strong-willed woman who had to battle continuously in the then (and still) male-dominated world of art and patronage.  Here's a decent link to some information about her life and work - The Life and Art of Artemisia Gentileschi.  Ellen's film is called "A Woman Like That".  I cant wait to be able to see it; to know more about both women - Artemisia Gentieschi and Ellen. 

I want to dedicate this very first post of mine to "women like that" - to women like Ellen, to women like my wife Nguyen Trinh Thi, to all the women who have always had the best ideas and maybe had to work quietly and diligently until they accomplished what they set out to and achieved what was necessary.  The best thing I ever did in my narrow life was listen to the women in it.  I listened to the woman who wanted to be my wife.  I listened to her when she wanted to have our daughter and to deliver her at home.  I listened to her again when she wanted to move here to Hanoi.  These are three of the richest experiences I have had in my life - without parallel, without peer - and, like the best of anything, ongoing and evolving.

The photograph above is of my daughter An.  She'll be five in June.  It is my deepest wish that she too become a 'woman like that'.  She is on her way.  I will help see to it.

SO - I welcome me to this - web log, blog.  Thanks for the idea Ellen.  I will keep it loose, informal, evolving, real, random and, probably, occasional.  Check it out from time to time.

Be right back.