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Nick Cave
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Grass Doe (aka John Levitt)

The first 4 years of my life were spent around Anchorage, AK. My parents had packed my 3 brothers and me, when I was just an infant, into an old green school bus and left the south for what they hoped was a new and pure frontier, the image of homesteading probably in their minds. We had 3 goats, what I remember to be a constant rotation of different dogs (which seem to pack up and run off with the wolves), faceless cats and a guinea pig named Peaches and Cream. Alaska was in my past before my mind knew how to store memories in a way I could draw from later. But as Faulkner says "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders". My memories are vague, fragmented, and dreamlike, so much so that I can't be sure of what's fact and what's fiction. What I'm left with is a wash of bits and pieces of scenes and sounds:
...hours old, wet baby goats skating on wobbly legs through the house...
.............mom chasing a perplexed wolf away from the goats with a broom...
..sitting in the steeing wheel of the bus spinning to and fro while it sat abandoned in the driveway...
.............................disappearing into the back of the piano...
.........my fingers in the curly hair of the face of a giant buffalo...
...running behind horses on a dirt road..(it was snowing?)
When I stumbled upon the blog Grass Doe I was immediately sucked into the images and then the mystery of where these images were coming from. There is no explanation of the images nor presence of the author of the blog. Over the the last few weeks I have been perusing the pages imagining the possibilities of their origin. I admit I was maybe a little disappointed to find that they were, in fact, someone else's life and not some(magical)how a stash of photos from my own memory.
On the other hand, photographer, Jonathan Levitt's website is a rich collection of gorgeous images from all over the nation (though, in fact, not AK, I think) including some lush food photography as he is a contributor to my favorite food mag, Saveur, among others. In the end, I am glad to have found out about him, but there was something lovely in the imagining.