Rock Star Daughter

My face is still partly swollen and in pain from some sort of allergic reaction; either to a phantom spider that ate its way across my forehead and then down over my right eye, some nasty and slightly infected mosquito bites but that just doesn’t seem possible or, some other type of strange Latin American bed dust that has really done a number on me.

Speaking of strange, I went to an Emily the Strange (1) café the other day with one of my models for the Cartonero photo project (more on this later). Suzanne, a twenty-three year old six foot tall strapping Aussie girl with legs like butter, living in BA for the love of Tango greeted me at the bottom of her apartment building in barrio Once and we rode the elevator up to her penthouse apartment which comes with a 270 degree near panoramic view of our magical city. Touring the labyrinth-like palatial pad, me salivating all the while at pretty much everything, we stepped out on the last and final balcony as she said, “I’ve never so much enjoyed hanging my laundry before… OH LOOK – THERE’S AN EAGLE!” What…?

I had yet to see an eagle in all of my travels here in Argentina and was sure that she had it confused with some type of other bird. I followed the direction of her finger and sure enough, there was some kind of HUGE South American eagle, gently flapping, slowing wending its way through the tall hot buildings on this sunny afternoon. OH MY GOD! “Yeah,” she said. “Isn’t that just wild? It belongs to some guy that lives in the building across from us and he lets it fly around our building when the weather is nice.” Now that’s a story to follow up on…

Suzanne lives with an Argentine fashion designer in the coolest apartment I’ve ever been inside of. In addition to all of the cool windows and views and balconies and plants there is a design workshop strewn with fabric and pieces of clothes. I had talked to her on the phone about the project and she got it right away and was eager to contribute. She made me some coffee and we traded our live stories and then did some test shots to figure out the theme for our shoot next week, arriving on some sort of space dominatrix here on earth to steal the Cartoneros trash.

(1) Two friends of mine started a small t-shirt shop several years back when we all lived in a warehouse South of Market in San Francisco, California. And then they created a cute but strange little daughter aptly named Emily. Recently they suffered a pretty severe divorce but Emily lives on happily all around the world, showing her shy but not innocent face here and there. I’ve had several Emily sightings since I’ve been here - QUE VIVA EMILY! I hope that Matt and now Rob are proud of how little Emily has grown up instead of feeling like they are being pirated. The funny thing was I asked the owner about the history of Emily and he told me that she came from Alaska to California and then moved over to England (and then to Buenos Aires!)