Transparency
Day 103
I wish every human life be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir
I’m an innately private individual. I also know the heavy personal weight of a secret. How it holds you down and blocks the powerful depths of your true self from seeing daylight. So my personal resolution for 2010 is for a more transparent life. It’s also my wish for the world.
Almost half my life ago, I told my mother my biggest secret – that I’m gay. For my first 23 years, I had carried a dark, seemingly immovable rock of shame inside myself. Yet, with one brief moment of transparency, it dissolved. I felt light and unencumbered, and the now fine particles of my former secret slid effortlessly from my being. Almost instantly though, habit reconnected me to fear of judgement. I looked at my mother and nervously asked, “So…what are you thinking?” She gave me a look of unconditional love. “I’m thinking that I finally know my son.”
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A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou
I met Audra Mae about five and a half years ago. A recent LA transplant from Oklahoma, she was working at a Hollywood tea store I loved. Audra made an instant impression with her warmth and lively personality and it turned out she was here to pursue a singing and songwriting career. But when, as I was leaving, she handed me a demo CD, I took it with polite dread. I’d been in this situation before, and started imagining how awful it might be and how awkward that would make future tea buying visits.
I played the track, Ruby Shoes when I got home. As soon as I heard the first note out of her mouth, I stopped in my tracks – there was a depth and soulfulness to her voice and lyrics that utterly belied her then 21 years of age. The song is a riff on The Wizard of Oz, and the difficulties of being so far from home and the ones you love (needless to say it tends to strike a chord with LA audiences). When the song finished, I just stood there, spellbound, and then I turned and saw my assistant’s face was covered in tears.
Fast forward five years and Audra Mae has just signed a record deal with SideOne Dummy records. “They’ve given me the kind of creative freedom that you just don’t get from most labels these days. The experience so far has been very, very supportive,” she says. “After years of meeting with labels who told me exactly how much I had to change my sound in order to be successful, it’s a relief to be able to be myself and have someone genuinely appreciate that.”
The five tracks on her new EP Haunt live up to the title. Most of the songs are haunting ballads with a strong narrative drive. The EP includes a cover of One Silver Dollar, a Marilyn Monroe song from the film River of No Return. “When people talk about Marilyn, I feel they don’t give her the respect she was due as a performer.” Audra says. “This was someone who really knew how to interpret a song.” My personal favorite on the EP is The Fable, a silky love song with a hypnotic chorus of wolf like howls, calling from one lover to another.
Starting October 24 in Cleveland, Audra is embarking on a 28 city acoustic tour called The Revival. Click here for dates and more info. And in a Lewis Likes It exclusive, we filmed an acoustic set with Audra Mae at a loft in the Hollywood Hills. I’m presenting three songs on here today – Snake Bite, The Fable and The Moon.
The HAUNT EP is available now on iTunes.
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Outstanding In The Field
Day 11
The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.
Wallace Wattles
Outstanding In The Field was created in 1999 by acclaimed sand artist and self taught chef, Jim Denevan. His mission was to honor the women and men who grow, nurture, catch and harvest the food that we enjoy each day, by staging communal dinners on their land. Denevan seeks to bring us back to the source of our food, turning the soil where it’s grown into the restaurant where we dine.
For the past ten years, Jim’s been staging his hugely ambitious culinary roadshow all across America. What started with just three California based dinners in 1999 grew to around 58 dinners nationwide in 2009. I first read about Outstanding in Howie Kahn’s James Beard Award winning 2007 GQ article and was immediately taken with the concept.
Last year I attended my first dinner, at Devil’s Gulch Ranch in beautiful Marin County, CA. My friend Andre and I were actually nervous about going, concerned we wouldn’t meet anyone to connect with. We needn’t have worried – Outstanding attendees tend to share the same ethos – the importance of sourcing and using locally sourced food and a desire to enjoy it in the company of others – all you have to do is show up and you’re guaranteed a memorable time. Our section of the table got very merry indeed (we all ended up partying back in San Fran together after the dinner) and our long table went down as the first in Outstanding history to drink them out of wine (it’s on their blog!). Jim even warmly called me a “Rabble Rouser” that night – I guess that’s his polite term for “shitfaced drunk”.
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It All Starts Today
Day 1
A possibility was born the day you were born and it will live as long as you live.
Marcus Solero
It All Starts Today.
Those four simple words have taken me on quite a journey. It’s the name of an extraordinary, low budget 1999 French film by Bertrand Tavernier, about a schoolteacher in a small French town economically devastated by the closure of coal mines that employed most of the residents. The children this man teaches bear the consequences of their parents misfortune and the film documents his daily struggle, against incredible odds, to bring some light and beauty into their lives.
The climax of It All Starts Today is a scene of profound beauty. Using old plastic soda bottles, water and food coloring, the children create an art installation that, for one evening, shifts the entire energy of the town. This act of using items otherwise discarded to bring color and light into a dark space is breathtakingly moving. This isn’t a Hollywood film. There’s no standing on desks, no massive redemptive moment that changes the town for the better. It’s a gritty, often harrowing look into the effects of poverty on communities. Yet it remains one of the single most inspiring films I have ever seen.
As I write this, unemployment in my chosen home state of California is pushing 15 percent. Myself and many of my closest friends have been dramatically affected by the current economy. Much of what I gained during the past six years working in Los Angeles exists now only in memory. And I am acutely aware that there are too many in America (and beyond) who are suffering far more terribly, barely surviving. My heart is filled with compassion for their pain.
Yet, today I feel an incredible sense of optimism. I’ve been threatening to launch a blog for years. And for me, there has never been a better time than now to begin. It costs nothing but time to write. Thanks to digital cameras, photography is no longer a rich person’s career. And the internet is a free canvas to create and share work upon.
Lewis Likes It brings my two greatest passions – writing and photography – together for the first time. And my aim with it is simple – to bring a little more beauty into the world. Not so much the models and celebrities I’ve been photographing in LA these past six years. Like It All Starts Today, I want to share the kind of beauty that comes from the simplest of ideas and most unusual of places.
I’m having a very small group of friends over tonight to celebrate Day One of Lewis Likes It. We’re going to crack open a few bottles of cheap prosecco and toast the somewhat miraculous birth of my new baby in the midst of less than ideal circumstances. These are people who believe in me, who believe in Lewis Likes It, and who have supported me during its early development. It’s a far cry from the celebrity filled launch party for 10, a photography collection I released with much fanfare back in 2007. That was an incredibly fun night. And those were different times.
There’ll be big launches again in the future, and I truly believe there’s many good times ahead for us all. For now, I hope you’ll dive in and enjoy this journey with me as we celebrate both the moments and things in life that bring us closer to each other and the beauty of this world that makes life so worth experiencing. And as I move forward with this next phase of my life, I carry the message of that small film with me.
It All Starts Today.
