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Taylor
believes he's looking for the same thing the surrealists were searching
for, the answer to the mystery of the Venus of Willendorf, that
peculiar, abstract little nude woman who held our attention for
thousands of years at the dawn of our culture. "The brain is no more
capable of recording life over the long term than a movie is capable of
recording anything but single images that we then use to fool ourselves
into seeing movement. Think back, what do you remember of your
childhood? I see a girl on a beach, the sun and the water behind her,
she's in mid-step as she walks toward me, I can smell her skin, I can
feel the warmth of the sun and the sand, but I don't see her hair move
in the wind, I don't see her breasts bounce up and down like a slow
motion sequence on Baywatch. It's a single image that has shaped my
life ever since". Taylor claims this image isn't an average of all the
girls he ever saw walk across the beaches he grew up on, but the
single, ur-woman, the instantaneous image that we all carry in our
genes and through our culture. It is not just a girl, it's THE girl,
the one he saw the instant he was conceived.
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