The wind woke me today, howling to and fro as if a racetrack circuit ran through 50 year old screens in each screech corner turn of my house. It’s the rain-wind. There’s the rain smell. It’s the warm strong rain powered by a frenzied atmosphere, the clouds swirl and sail by hurriedly above while the wizened bamboo stretches and waves oceanically like some ancient angered spirit out of that one Kurosawa film. The lunar pull is so great the moon should be huge in my window, though it’s just now 6am. The sea should be splashing my thatched bungalo, but I’m housed by cement miles inland. The thick gray mass of sky slowly lightens to an ashy wet, lazily softening at the edges and moving toward the dark center, the black heart of the storm just above my house still writhing and thick. I roll over and imagine I’m in Contempt with Bardot, but we’ve moved to Nice and have a small hamlet on the Med. and, most importantly, she doesn’t hate me. She fixes me coffee.
Something about the smell of rain always gets me a fat dose of la belle Brigitte.
Or maybe it’s not the rain, perhaps it’s the faint phantom of too little sleep and too many Bloody Marys. Maybe it’s both. I usually don’t take Wednesday night’s to the bar, but something about the energy in the air yesterday just made my neighbor come over with a pack of cigarettes and a mouthful of gab.
She opened a bottle of riesling I had stowed and I grabbed the vodka, all nice and slow like. Frozen, it poured thick, like liquid ice. Easy, like warm whiskey in a western. Talk ranged from the day’s Spring weather to Korea, her rapidly approaching lover (currently en route from Honolulu) and my aversion to Wal-mart’s ruthless capitalistic pigs addicted to their bottom lines. Support Our Troops: Buy Foreign?
Angered at the fuzzy-edged memory, I call the interns Brigitte 1, 2 & 3 and we dwell on the rain, drinking orange soda from straws and tossing peanuts into our open, inviting mouths.
It’s not all so bad.
I am a documentary and portrait photographer, specializing in a raw approach to shooting everything under the sun. Though I travel abroad often, I am currently based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and am available for assignments throughout North America and beyond.
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All content © 2012 by Manny Santiago Photography