bazima.com: blog

Fuck, shit, piss.

Not that long ago I wrote about thinking of (what you feel are) brilliant ideas for projects and knowing that you have to make the ideas a reality because they're (you feel) the greatest ideas possibly ever and then lethargy, self-doubt, or just plain life (excuse?) gets in the way of making time to focus on your fucking fabulous whatever-it-is.

I'm not saying that my idea, or ideas, are the best ideas, but some of them are pretty fucking good and it's always the same way when you come across a really great idea and someone's already done it. You wish you'd thought of it first. It's possible that you might have been the first person to ever think of it, but you'll never know that. What matters anyway is making something out of it.

Sometimes I really do say to a friend, "I have the BEST idea for a __________." And when I say "best" in those moments I really do mean it. Although sometimes it turns out that "best" really refers to my best intentions rather than it being an accurate description of the actual idea.
["Note to Self" 12/17/03]

About three years ago I had an idea for a coffee table book. I told very few people about the concept, in part because I knew that if I'd thought of it, being no fucking rocket scientist, that at least one other person somewhere in the world had thought of it too, but mostly because I didn't want to jinx it. Also? People steal ideas. I mean, we all borrow from things that have gone before. There's nothing that's not derivative of something. I did some research on my coffee table book idea and found nothing like it. This, of course, didn't mean that no one else had thought of it, or was even actually working on it while I sat on my fattening ass, but the coast looked pretty clear.

Well. My idea? Are you ready to be blinded my brilliant brilliance? It was a coffee table book of medicine cabinets. More specifically, digital photographs of the insides of med cabs in the bathrooms of the houses and apartments I found myself in (places of sex partners, family members, friends of friends, strangers having parties, and hotel rooms, etc.) I'd do all the peaking in secret (the way we always do; don't lie) and then I would tell the owners of the cabinets afterwards and make sure they didn't mind having their private products publicized. Under each photo (one on every page) would be the first name of the person and where the picture was taken. I had a friend who was interested in partnering with me on collecting the material for the book, and I'd already had another established writer friend in mind to turn out the introduction. Though I'd collected a lot of pictures, it still only amounted to, well, a bunch of random pictures and THE BEST IDEA EVER floating around in the back of my head.

Meanwhile? Guess what? Someone's done it. Or a variation of it.

I knew it would happen. (What a stupid after-the-fact thing to say, really.) But, actually, the way I thought it would happen would be the result of telling a guy, a talented and sought after photographer with whom I was having special relations with a couple of years ago, about my idea. He loved it. He brainstormed with me over ice cream and cigarettes. A couple of weeks later I learned that he was the kind of guy who gets obsessed with a new girl, pursues her shamelessly, and then when he gets her and sleeps with her and realizes she actually does like him he freaks out, but can't explain to her the reason for it all, so he says, "Hey, let's go see 'The 25th Hour' tomorrow night," and then never calls her again even though he called her every day for two weeks and sent her two postcards when he went to Paris for a fashion shoot, and called her the night he got back with a T-shirt he'd bought for her. Am I getting too specific? The point is, it wasn't long before I thought, that fucker photographer who I let fuck me is totally gonna steal my idea. But it didn't happen that way so, I guess that's good.

Well, now that this project's been done, and I don't see much point in pursuing a coffee table book based on the same idea, I'm going to post just a few of the photographs I collected for it here at Bazima. I envisioned that they would be printed large enough in the book so that you could read labels on bottles, but what you'll see here are smaller versions.

I don't know. Maybe the idea is still viable. Maybe it was still viable until five minutes ago when I posted this.

Here, a few select remnants of a dream deferred. Moral of the story, blah, blah, blah.