dear m,

invaluable

technically not a face, but still a portrait


5: FINGERS
7: DAY INTERVALS
5: STAGES OF ANTICIPATORY GRIEF

//

// 06.01.2023

forks beckon dignity
C-SPAN lulls tenderness
may the latter reap your former


// 05.03.2023


there’s tenderness and
there’s dignity. your former
still reaps the latter

testing portraiture 3

$haircut

My second-best hairstylist. Spoiler: the first one is dead.


REMEMBER: 135MM GOES IN THE 2ND HOLE
FADE: 2? 3?
AWAY: RUNNING APPARENTLY

//

05.20.2023


Notes:
1. On the Intrepid, 135mm goes into the second hole from the rear. Remember that before struggling to focus again.
2. Pay attention to fingers - could be interesting, could be distracting
3. Would have been ideal to get the full view of the hair wash chair

Thank you to Tito Glenn.

//

Also published on Substack.

3-year-old me knew when a haircut was real bad, worse than every bowl cut my mom requested on my behalf. We started with a barbershop, but after enough inconsistencies, we tried a cheap salon. I didn’t even have to look hard enough in the mirror to know. The weight of my coconut head felt hollow. It was objectively hollow in the metaphorical sense because I didn’t actually care. I remember it just felt off that so much hair was lopped off.

As soon as we got back home, I ran upstairs to the full body mirror in my parents’ room, turned away from it, and bent over forward to look at myself through my legs to see how short my hair was. After seconds of contemplation, I raced back down to my parents and asked if there was a way to “buy more hair”. Only until years later did I learn my dad raced back to the salon with some choice words for the stylist.

She may have been second-worst, but thankfully it only took another five years to meet the best: Chito. He deserves a whole separate entry, but for now it’s helpful to build context. It was a 45-minute drive to see him and his two dearest stylist friends that made up ‘Glamour Look’, Glenn and Edwin. But it was well worth the journey to see this trio of gay Filipino salonistas. Naturally, my mom’s request at the first appointment was the baby bowl cut. Chito responded by handing the scissors to my mom and telling her in tagalog, “Okay, you cut it then”. She was speechless. Everyone in the room laughed.

I knew zero tagalog then, but I don’t recall being nervous. I probably just wanted it to be done with. 8-year-old me would have to wait another four years before being self conscious about my hair anyway. That first appointment with Chito resulted in the exact opposite of a bowl cut, as if my hair was a medium for his petty but poetic spite, held together by gel, which began a decade of using hair product. I’d revert back to 7:3 part, but I do remember smiling like an idiot at the novelty of having spiky hair.

Chito was the best. He may have been perpetually late, but everyone enjoyed talking with him. By the time I was 12, however, he passed away due to brain cancer, but not after a successful surgery to remove the golfball-sized tumor and a celebration of his momentary recovery which filled a banquet hall. I remember after his passing that year, we had a project in art class for Día de los Muertos to draw skeleton characters with white crayon for the bones and whatever else to decorate the identity of whomever we were dedicating the piece to. How could I not pick Chito? He was the best.

Chito deserves to be more than just crucial context eventually, but the practice portraits I’ve taken for this entry are focused on Chito’s successor to cutting my hair: Glenn Rivera.



By now I’ve known Glenn for nearly twenty years. Where Chito knew what was best for me, what I’ve always appreciated about Glenn was the agency I was allowed (though it’d be unfair to preclude the agency Chito probably would’ve provided in a timeline without brain cancer). There was never a “bad” haircut from Glenn. He follows verbalized preferences and sample photos with clinical precision. He’d take stylistic liberties only if you let him. If I asked for the “same as last time,” he remembers the average of the last three sessions. To these ends, every appointment was a lesson in learning how to communicate for myself. Glenn is the lawful neutral genie. He is the hairstylist I’ll forever trust the most.

To be clear, I didn’t always see Glenn for my haircuts. During the recession around 2008, my family had to save on gas and find closer places for haircuts. We never went to the same person or place twice, and I remember every time I’d go somewhere, the person cutting my hair would remark how surprisingly thick my hair was. Glenn acknowledged this too, but where everyone else were lost in the Amazon Rainforest, Glenn had the layers of my hair mapped out in his brain like a Rainforest Cafe at the mall.

Even in recent years, I’ve had a gradually increasing anxiety about having to build a trusting relationship with a new hairstylist if I ever had to move out-of-state or if Glenn retires. So I’ve flirted with different barbershops here and there, but I keep coming back to Glenn because his consistency is unrivaled.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Glenn and Edwin are consistently part of the stylist crew that works on Filipino celebrities whenever they are in the Chicagoland area for some event or function. Their Glamour Look business doesn’t really have its own website or social media presence; they thrive off word-of-mouth among a deep network of suburban Filipinos, and all the tsismis (tagalog for ‘gossip’) that comes and goes from their salon.



Before emigrating from the Philippines, Glenn studied to be an architect. When I learned this from my mom a couple years ago, I was relieved somewhat about whether or not I’ll be an unsatisfied sack of shit at whatever career I find myself in after grad school. I’m privileged enough to be pleasantly surprised about how things turned out for me. I’m all the more privileged to know Glenn. Not having to guess what my hair will look like with each cut while still having the latitude to spice things up a little are boons I don’t take for granted.

bored

$0

in which ongoing quarantine and a winter storm reignites a hobby


WHERE: CHICAGO
WHY: BITTER COLD
WHO: SNOWZILLA

//

// 02.20.2021


// 04.27.2023 - WARMING UP

When I lived on the Northside of Chicago, it took me ten minutes to walk from my apartment to the lakefront trail. Living on the Southside, it took at least three times as long to do the same. To be sure, it was a privilege in either case. Maybe the real disparity was not so much the walk time as the walkability. Because I lived south of the Midway  — an ironically mile-long public park in the Hyde Park neighborhood — it saved me more time to risk the crosswalk across four lanes of traffic.

Walkability does not make as compelling of a case about the differences between Northside and Southside as, say, the life expectancy dropping by thirty years as one rides the Red Line train from north to south. Nor did walkability thwart any one of the dozen present at Promontory Point the Saturday morning of February 20th, 2021.

I can't speak for any of them, but I also can't deny that everyone there was unhinged to at least a tiny degree. We were all still waiting for a vaccine. We were all holed up due to snowstorms that week. The moment the sun shone through the previous Friday, we all must have looked at the forecast for Saturday morning and concluded: it's worth bracing the polar vortex temperatures to see a sun rise. (In this regard too, the northern state of Illinois is more privileged in its wherewithal for cold weather than, say, the state of Texas that week).

Four years prior was the last time I watched the sun rise over Lake Michigan, from Rogers Park on the Northside. I was unable to sleep at all the night before. Following any unintentionally sleepless night is usually the day breaking my spirit, but in this case, I was just relieved. The walk across my university campus put me at zero risk of being run over, except for the coveted stray golf cart that could earn me a settlement of free tuition. The wide slab of concrete provided a lakefront-row to a cold, sterile hue of hydrogen and helium. The weather was slightly chillier than perfect. I had the view all to myself.

How presumptuous I was to think that a polar vortex as well as the inequities of privilege and urban planning on the Southside would help me have such a view all to myself again. Still I earned that presumption, and maybe so did the rest of the dozen other people, waking up before 6am. We all braced the cold and dark and risked blue fingers and toes to see a brick red sun. We went to such great lengths to meet wavelengths of light whose warmth signified their own long journey before scattering; before a child tosses it inches above the horizon into pinks and oranges; before the Edward F. Dunne water crib remembers the flames that send it some feet further into rose golds; before the devil himself emerges from a hell frozen over and makes a deal with a cowboy to send it yards into its final yellows and whites.

Trees in turn cradle a couple in their crucial shade. A snow dinosaur contemplates glistening with sweat, but manages to just glimmer and listen. After witnessing the cowboy's blasphemy, child and parent retreat while dawn is still warm. Their backs are turned to the sun so that they might remember its kindness before reverting to a cold, blank, ceaseless stare. The rest of us followed suit and scattered into our respective journeys home. All of us stole that same memory, no matter how fleeting.

I admittedly came for golden hour, but I stuck around for the context. It’s a privilege that the context has stuck with me. I chose this early set of photos to first practice the infusion of writing with photography because this is the first (and currently only) set that felt like a story that was more than just tourism, even if it’s slice of life. I hope to take more photos like that, of more impactful contexts. That way I can write more meaningfully. Just as well I hope to write first and try to let my photography extend from my writing.