everythinggoodisgone.com

22.9.02

just beginning... life in new york means that somehow, vomiting on the subway platform is alright as long as you do it discretely... after stumbling up avenue b not even trying to walk in a straight line, i made it to the train and a lovely girl sitting next to me gave me a bottle of water. there are, in fact, good people in new york. really.

i've spent the last week going to fashion shows in which my sister is modeling. its a strange thing, really. because somehow we always knew she would be a model. It wasn’t just the “discovery” at some New York restaurant when she was 15. I think it may have been that time when someone asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, to which she responded, “I want to divorce well.” Then again having two photographers for parents, we all reacted in our own way. I still hate having my picture taken, because I felt like without a pose, it wasn’t going to look right. Our older sister managed to find her “angle” and without fail holds her head that way absolutely every time anyone points a camera in her direction. And the little one…who is now the tallest of the bunch…was always playing. There was a communication there, between her and the lens. A rapor that I envy still, but appreciate as some sort of skill much like my ability to write a four sentence paragraph or use editing symbols.

There are few things about modeling as an industry that make “sense” in a traditional way. The continual emphasis on “image” is something of which we as a post-post modern society are painfully aware. In that lovely double-bind kind of way, we are just as wrapped up in the presentation of those images as we are indebted to, and enraptured with, them.

But in spite of my desire to deconstruct every photograph she’s in, my younger sister is beautiful and I like seeing her successful and happy…even if it’s doing something the value of which I find dubious at best. Because for her…it is “work.” And it is, truly, “good work,” and “hard work.” For which I respect her sense of self, which is the cornerstone of any accomplished person. She wants it so bad she can taste it, drives herself hard by being satisfied by nothing less than excellence. It is these things, that more than anything else makes me proud when I say, “my sister is a model.”


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