My friend Michael died on April 10 of this year.

This came as quite a shock to me as I saw him on April 12. Before I could get my hopes up about actually having a zombie for a friend, I realized I was in an art gallery and the dearly departed friend was only conceptually dead. Not this kind of conceptual, but the kind that doesn’t suck.

Here is Haduken’s first art review, proof that we are growing more sophisticated with each passing day.

This show, unfortunately, has already been taken down and all you poor suckers will only be able to enjoy is a few images given to me by the publicity whore artist, himself.

I missed Michael’s opening because of this big “to-do� at work and ended up getting over to the Anderson Gallery a few days before this first part of the MFA Thesis show came down, during my lunch break. It was a shock to see his happy little obituary, and even though I was privy to the knowledge that he was very much alive and painting my office while listening to This Way Out, the international gay and lesbian radio magazine, I still got a tiny twinge of goosebumpy sadness when I stared at his notice of death.

But he lives on! In the photographs he has taken of his friends and his family, which atest to the fact that he loved and was loved throughout the course of his shortened life.

There is a kind of raw intimacy to his of exhibition that frankly was not captured in the collection of oversized bean bags accented with hand sewn diagrams of kama sutra positions that was shown opposite to Michael’s show.

When my uncle died, I helped my cousins comb through huge boxes of photographs that he had taken and had been taken of him over his lifetime. We sat crossed legged on the kitchen floor until three in the morning laughing and crying and staring at the artifacts of his life. We put together an album and laid it out at his wake. For the almost 100 people who attended, that was the thing that they seemed to find the most meaningful.

Since his death we’ve all gone back to that book a million times, we’ve shown it to younger family members who have trouble remembering him. I know I’ll share it with my own children one day.

Michael collection captures the most fundamental function of photography: to record and remember. And with his work he has expressed how heavy each image can be. It is laden with the weight of first loves, of disappointments, of change and evolutions, of loss, of success, of failure, and grief.

We wait, often, to fully celebrate the whole catalogue of experiences that is one’s life until it is final and complete. But then its essence is filtered and manipulated, however unintentionally, through our own memories. And we lose the voice of the eulogized and once that is gone we never get it back.

I gave a eulogy at my uncle’s funeral and, looking out over a churchful of people I loved, thought that I should go home that night and write their’s, tell them that make me love them so there would be no doubt, in life, as to the depths of my feelings for them.

And, as I spoke of him, I wondered what my uncle would say about me.

While Michael may have been the deceased, he offered each of his subjects a prehumous eulogy - let them know how they had helped to complete his catalogue of experiences. What a gift and an honor.

Unless I got it all wrong - maybe this was just another one of those God is dead deals. Perhaps we’ll never know.

Authors note: I had trouble uploading photos and will add more later. Conspicuously absent from the jpgs I was sent is one of the artist taken before his senior prom, where cascades of curls frame his face with a glorious mane. Sorry!