Peter Liu - Bald New World

“And keep the models waiting? You’ll crush their egos and I can’t allow that. Plus, I think I can handle it this time. Just keep your phone on.”

He ordered a car to take me home. I recorded a message to Rebecca thanking her for an interesting time. He zipped back to wherever it was that he was heading.

My cab arrived five minutes later and I jumped into the backseat. I dozed off and dreamt about a big python controlled by an Indian trainer for a circus. I got too close and the snake struck, biting my testicles. The pain from its fangs woke me up and I realized I was finally home. I hoped the dream didn’t symbolize any unconscious woes I wasn’t aware of.

V.

I hated recreating and resculpting violence on the camera as that was all I did during the African Wars. So I strayed from violence to the societal anomalies that invisibly lurked with us for my photography. The shoots I did changed depending on the propensities I was having at any given time. Recently, I’d been recreating American urban legends. I wanted to cover a gamut of smaller urban legends like the woman who got bit by an iguana at a supermarket, a cactus exploding with an army of tarantulas, and an AIDS Mary who infected hapless men and sent them letters welcoming them to “the world of HIV.” Most nights, for every ten thousand photos I took, I discarded 9900 of them. As I got ready to click away, I wondered, like love (as Shinjee put it), if a person could discard 99 % of their life and experience only the best 1 %, would they think life a grand and beautiful thing?

Those ten thousand clicks were a tricky affair. I had to imprint, then selectively discard the images that were no good, luridity and sensationalism ignored as passé, wiping the model down with body wax to produce a shimmer of sweat reeking of demystified lust. Ten models arrived of mixed gender and race. Jimi looked like she was 15 but she was 29. Darlene looked like she was 26 but she was 18. Neither suffered from anorexia. They simply didn’t like the taste of food. Once, it was poverty, war, and hunger that were the great evils of society. Now, it was white bread, carbs, and sweets.

I overheard three guys talking about how certain creams and soaps were good for tone and fleshiness. They exchanged recipes, talked about ten magazine covers that were like the Ten Commandments to them; thou shalt look like me or suffer the damnable fires of mediocrity . It was self-induced abandonment as they lamented the fact that they were two pounds overweight.

Zim Frog, as she called herself, encompassed a gallery of emotions; defiant, seductive, onerous, contemplative, indolent, rambunctious, and lethargic. She also smelled terrible as she refused showers. I had two assistants and three makeup artists to deal with her.

None of the models had tattoos as that would mean career suicide. Designers and photographers wanted to paint their own temporary head tattoos to match the outfits. I had to work with the designer to pick out the costumes and make sure the lighting fit. The makeup artists went with the typical statuesque look that resembled most shows and magazine covers. I hated it and had to show samples from my portfolio to indicate I wanted something with both less and more panache, the way Linda so masterfully balanced her talents.

I despised over-complicated cameras. Aperture, exposure, f-stops all meant nothing without the right model. Give the right woman jeans and a shirt, and she’d look a thousand times more striking than any woman in the most elaborate costume. Plus, post-production technology was so powerful, I could do anything after the fact except masquerade a lack of character. Swapping lenses helped, but a vacuous personality couldn’t seem interesting with the best lens in the world. I used to run shoots with Linda all the time, do freelancing work for a variety of venues. She used to regale me with the intense drama between models as they competed for photographers and face time. Sex was just the stepping point and insecurities abounded. Plastic surgery had changed the landscape of fashion. Anyone could be a model if they were willing to lend their faces and bodies to image facilitators. Magazines had to start posting disclaimers that said, “None of our models have been image facilitated,” when in fact many had, leading to a few scandals and editorial resignations.

I switched my camera on, then off, running about trying to capture a frame of a doctored moment that was really an embellishment in a chorus of discordant harmony. The world was a square frame and I played my part as visual scrivener, my fingers set to autopilot. This was the way I experienced most of my life, unable to change things, trying to maintain control through the visual canvas. I adjusted the level of flash to overcompensate for the monochromic palette that consumed the fake house set. Wine was being passed out to encourage drunk emanations in dizzying bouts of dazzling delirium. Phones of different shapes were distributed, a collection of old cell phones made into a costume on top of Jazz, a model who never spoke during shoots.

Handling the tarantulas was painful and the wrangler had to be particularly delicate as the two male models were terrified arachnaphobes. I used a Pinlighter 1887 for this scene, a camera that was slightly bigger than a pen that recorded images remarkably well. It was my camera of choice when recording Larry’s movies as it gave me complete flexibility. If I had one complaint, it was that it was too light, even with automatic motion-stabilizing, so that the footage had to be corrected in post. Conveniently, I could position it anywhere and have it feed directly into my eye scanner. Automated hover lights with shifting brightness moved into place and seven additional cameras recorded the scene in 3D, projecting it onto a digital environment which I could shift and mold as I pleased. Any tree I wanted to download, any famous site I wanted to shoot against would be automatically recreated. If I wanted to get especially fancy, I could use a printer to create the physical environments, though that was time-consuming and wasteful. The tattoo artists could either map their designs in 3D and project it onto the model or do it live, though the latter gave less flexibility. My current design was in a desert with a whole lot of cacti.

After that scene wrapped, I saw I had a few missed calls. Most were from friends who wanted to hang out (well, to be more accurate, they wanted to hang out so I could help them be a contact to Larry who they wanted to ask for money). I was surprised to see a series of sevens and twos that I recognized as Rebecca Lian’s number.

“Hey,” I said as I called her back. “How are you?”

“Busy?”

“I have time to talk.”

“Lovely necklace,” she said. “It was a kind gesture and totally not necessary.”

“You liked it?”

“My mom used to read me stories from Pu Songling about fox spirits who would seduce men and steal their souls.”

I laughed. “There was no hidden meaning in my gift.”

“I can’t accept it.”

“They had a no-return policy,” I said, not actually knowing if they did. “And I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Like I said in my message, consider it a thank you gift for lunch. We are business associates after all.”

She looked at me, then simpered. “I’ll be in Shanghai next week. Give me a call.” She hung up.

“Nick! Nick!” The designer ran to me. “We have a problem.”

In the dressing room, the mirror had been shattered. There was a male model that had been restrained by three others, his face a bloody goulash.

“I hate myself, I hate myself,” he kept on repeating. “I’m so ugly, I’m so ugly.”

“What happened?” I asked the designer.

“He tried to cut up his face, but the others stopped him,” she told me.