Holy Clown

She can’t hide her joy in creation, her irrepressible delight in foolery. She emanates light and laughter. She is the trickster, the jester, the “fool,” the holy clown. 

After Sue planned and I helped to execute her #RemakeAMaster photo for this weekend, she let me make this portrait with her. In preparation for her photo, we studied a book of Annie Leibovitz’ self-chosen photos. In the conclusion Leibovitz writes, “I realized in this collection of pictures that most of them are far away. All these people, they’re more my idea of who they are than who they are…. There’s a lot of truth, you know, in a face. It’s like the ultimate picture to take—if there’s nothing else in it but the face, and you're telling a story. The face will tell you everything.”—Annie Leibovitz in Annie Leibovitz Photographs, 1983. 

This one is not just the face, but the canvas Sue made and the shirt she embellished: that’s also an important part of who she is.

One more paragraph about what’s going on in the USA right now: the young people are rising. Sue and I were watching live streams of the riots in Portland last night, and we saw a couple of thousand kids, most of them high school age, most at their first riot. Of those thousands, maybe fifty were breaking windows and setting fires. All are outraged by the way things are: the injustice, the corporate choke-hold on the climate, the rot and greed at the top of the power chain, the violence of the State and the Corporate State, the greed and corruption of both Democrats and Republicans. The kids are not looking the other way. They are not distracting themselves and going on with business as usual. They say burn it down! In this moment, let us not shake our jowls and say this is a sad and terrible thing, this is not the way to make change. Let us instead say thank you. Thank you for not being complacent. Thank you for standing up and saying NO. We, your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, share your outrage, rejoice in your refusal to accept what is unacceptable. We rejoice in your energy and your fire.