Terrence Takeover | Farm Dinner at Honeymoon Acres in Ramsey, NJ
Apollo Fields | Best Wedding Photos | New York Wedding Photographer | Long Island Wedding Photographer | New Jersey Wedding Photographer | Honeymoon Acres | Ramsey, NJ | Terrence Huie | Writer
How does a guy go from surviving on late night halal to cooking and hosting multi-course farm fresh dinners? From “extra white sauce, please” to garnishing butter-poached scallops with pickled apple and fennel? I’m convinced cooking wasn’t part of my DNA until the first time Heather and I made fresh pasta together in Harlem; and I don’t think Heather knew of her penchant for hosting until we held a casual picnic with a few friends shortly thereafter. But now looking back at our almost ten-year path to this pilot dinner at our family farm, every step of the way falls into place like silverware surrounding a place setting.
Heather and I first met in 2014 while shaking light pink cosmos in neighboring restaurants on the Upper West Side. Ever since then hospitality has always been and always will be a through-line for everything that we do. Being three-deep at the bar while the expo machine cranks in the background was the training ground for the weeds that we now navigate in our everyday lives. Whether it’s meeting the demands of our two under three, being the steady rock for our couples who just need to take a deep breath, or serving 20 guests five courses–we will always hold the line.
The orange wax cascading down the side of the candle is reaching the point of splashing onto the champagne colored tablecloth. Dessert is about to drop with a chilled amaro-coffee cocktail. I’m trying to call words to the forefront of my mind but only see a faucet running with a sink full of dishes that we need to turn.
“First off, I want to thank you for coming…” I begin.
My mind is black like the trees all around us.
“I also want to thank Heather, who always keeps me reaching…”
Still blank.
“When I think about hosting dinners I think about how I get into a flow state, how the whole world shrinks down to your candlelit faces, like nothing else exists.”
A spark is happening.
“And it makes me think of the phrase, “the grass is always greener,” how you know, a lot of us are always looking to the future or the past, and we fail to appreciate what is right in front of us. Well, I just wanted to say that if you look beneath your feet right now, the grass is pretty fucking green, so here’s to that. Cheers everyone!”
My mind is still empty as I scurry back to the house to start firing the dessert course. Orange wax is all over the table.
Our guests are wiping whipped cream from their mouths and it’s our first opportunity to sit down and pour ourselves a drink. I guess not much has changed since our bartending days yet everything has changed. I can trust Heather to make sure things never stay the same and she can trust me to make them feel like they are. It’s our secret sauce. Photography, dinner parties, we are the same people we have always been and always will be–and we will always keep reaching. I will never stop crushing a styrofoam container packed with halal but it’s no longer necessary for my survival.
Terrence Takeover - 2023 Wedding Season Check-In
Apollo Fields | Best Wedding Photos | New York Wedding Photographer | Long Island Wedding Photographer | Terrence Huie | Writer
By the end of every single day, my t-shirt looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. An orange-yellow smear of baby food and boogers up by my shoulder, a splattering of red marinara sauce across my chest, and a living museum of the day's activities everywhere else. Taking it off and throwing it into the hamper is the closest thing I’ll come to feeling like an athlete anytime soon. Part badge-of-honor and part a symbol of parental sacrifice, I throw myself on to a bed that has never felt so good.
The funny thing about my tattered shirts is that they are the perfect representation of what it’s like to become a parent–not only from a literal perspective—but also an analogy for my physical, mental, and emotional self. Everyday there is a messy confluence of factors that prod at various vulnerabilities: whether it is shifting my identity as a professional or creative to a parent; my parents exhibiting some benign (or malignant) behavior towards my children that triggers something about my experience as a child, or how each of Heather and I’s individual lives and relationship as a whole take a back seat to the family’s immediate and ever present needs.
We are fortunate enough to run a business that allows us to be present in our children’s lives, but it isn’t always easy for us to draw that line in the sand. I have a predisposition to overcompensate for the lack of attention that I got as a child, and Heather has a predisposition to provide for them as her family struggled in her youth. It is a cruel joke that parents are forced to grapple with these psychological hurdles when we are operating on the least sleep we have gotten in our lives–but I suppose true comedy is all about timing.
This entry is less about complaining about being a new parent and more about recognizing the framework of parenthood and setting up a plan for success. We will always have a pile of laundry to get to and no amount of detergent in the world will rid us of the stains. My generation is operating with a different relationship to work than our parents, where more often than not both parents are working. In our case, at least early in our 2023 wedding season, Heather is handling the business side while I am staying home more with the kids. It isn’t a clear 1:1 division of labor but we recognize that it is important for both parents to put on the other cap, realizing sides of their identities before they are lost in the maelstrom of parenthood. Sometimes time feels like a paradox, where days pass in a blur but every minute is a struggle, or “how they grow up so fast” but it feels like no time has passed.
There is no universal advice to offer new parents as every situation is unique, but here are a few observations. Right now, Heather and I only know how tired we are when we get good rest, when the bags under our eyes sag a little less. That means all of the other times we are operating on a razor slim margin, meaning that when one of us gets sick or our car winds up in the shop for a week, there will be blood (So that’s what that stain is). There is no way around parenthood, the only path is through it. The ultimate struggle is that if you don’t enjoy it then you are ungrateful and will regret it five or 10 years from now.
The best anecdote I heard to combat this is to pretend that you’re 80 years old and laying in a bed and you get to warp back in time to this particular time, where both kids are crying, or you’re trying to navigate a dirty diaper, and that there is no other place that you’d rather be. It sounds like a hypothetical platitude but it has helped me this week, and I hope it helps you.
Apollo Fields 2021: 54 Weddings and 1 Baby
For the most part, our job as wedding photographers is to blend in, not stand out.
To move throughout the day like inconspicuous flies on the wall, floating through rooms and in and out of moments like a steady breeze through an open window. We take great pride in being given the opportunity to navigate the intimate spaces of wedding days, playing off the principle that stepping on a truly genuine moment is a cardinal sin. Year-in-and-year-out we flutter from venue-to-venue, unpacking and repacking our camera bags as quickly and commonly as the shutter clicks on our cameras. I am writing this blog to give a glimpse of what it is like to document a commencement of love 50 times a year in the span of six or seven months. It is with great love and appreciation that I say—it is our time to stand out.
From Brandon and Lia’s Wedding in September 2021 in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
2021 Still Wasn’t “Normal.”
We try to avoid using the word normal because it’s one of those “non-words” that doesn’t really mean anything. What exactly does it mean for a person or a year to be “normal”? As it pertains to people: the quirkier the better; but as it goes for wedding seasons, we’ll take predictable. Like the idea of a wedding happening on a specified date and location. Of course we have empathized with every couple for the last two years but can you imagine what our Google calendar has looked like? Think Charlie Kelly in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia vibes. Now picture him in a wedding dress.
And yet, it was the best year of my life.
I like to joke that having a kid feels like you’re playing the game of life on hard mode. Every activity of everyday or every trip is just that much harder. Mornings feel earlier and nights feel longer, but in between extended bouts of exhaustion there are pristine moments of overtired bliss. Like the walk Heather and I took at midnight in Montauk after a wedding as we watched the crests of waves hover and crash on the coast over and over again in the bright moonlight. Or when I held Capa just above the surface of the rooftop pool in West Palm Beach, pushing him through the water like the dorsal fin of a dolphin swimming in the Caribbean. For everything that being a parent takes away from you it gives it back in moments of overwhelming joy.
And also the busiest.
Between our 54 weddings in 13 states plus an unspecified amount of family and engagement sessions we changed diapers, spoon-fed, walked, drove, and nursed our baby Capa. The crazy part is that despite all of the time Heather and I spent together we often felt like we never saw each other. We developed a workflow where I would take Capa in the morning and let Heather catch up on sleep after nursing him all night. Then we’d have breakfast together and one of us would take him for the next stretch while the other person works. It was like a game of hot potato if that potato was adorable and could poop and pee. And despite developing the habit popular to babies of rubbing my eyes when I’m tired, I have no regrets about how we handled everything.
Ron and Sunil’s wedding in August 2021 at The Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan.
a reminder to Change over time.
I was just talking to Heather this morning about how I can’t imagine both of us still bartending full-time like we did in our twenties. It’s not that we couldn’t or we shouldn’t but rather that we value the current iteration of Terrence-and-Heather (-and-Capa) over the one at the beginning of our relationship. In a funny way, our 2021 wedding season felt like a full bartending shift spent “in the weeds” where we never got to look up and kept going from one thing to the next. As the years pass I can’t help but notice the trajectory of our lives and how the previous events prepared us for what came next. Who knows what Capa will mean for our future but if this year was any indication of what’s to come, I can’t fucking wait.
NYE 2015 - One of Heather and I’s first photos together. Taken at a diner on the UWS at ~ 5:00am.
Processing Pain: The Legacy of Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain’s Death | Parts Unknown | Eric Ripert | Apollo Fields Photojournalism
Watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown with Eric Ripert offers insight into the turmoil behind Bourdain’s infamous irreverence. Around every corner of conversation Bourdain’s slinging some cryptic or grotesque piece of humor, landing upon Ripert’s matter-of-fact ears like juvenile jabs from a close friend. It is entertaining albeit haunting, to hear the words “death” and “I want to die” come from Bourdain’s mouth. Perhaps the saddest part though, is that the callous, cynical persona that we all fell in love with was slowly consuming the host of Parts Unknown right in front of our laughing eyes.
Hindsight is 20-20 of course, and now watching the show is an exercise of recognizing his blunt, unforgiving humor as the red flags of a man publicly processing his inner demons. Bourdain’s trip to Buenos Aires in one episode is particularly poignant as it cuts in and out of a therapy session where he explores and laments his character. Bourdain says that he wanted nothing more than to look out the window and think, “life is good,” but couldn’t see past what he considered an unfixable, untreatable “character trait.” The reality is that he was processing his pain the way he was accustomed to—using lewd jokes as bridges for cross-cultural conversations—it’s just a shame that we didn’t see these devices as explorations of his mental “parts unknown,” rather than hilarious quips.
Yet that’s exactly what our mental machinations are to each other: “parts unknown.” Bourdain knew he would find no sympathizers with his woes because, let’s face it, he had a job we all could only dream of. But I’m beginning to believe that our feelings, the things us millennial are infamous for, are perhaps the only knowable truths in our lives. Yes they are subjective, but no set of objective circumstances can make them invalid. Bourdain felt suicidal despite the objective reality of a world full of open doors. He told us his truth in his way and we loved him for it. His opinion on life is valid. If his unfortunate demise is to teach us anything it is to further explore and explain our own mental “parts unknown.”
I see a problem today is that avoiding our introspection is easier than ever. We dive into any form of social media and relate to each other or fictional characters with similar problems but never really engage with our “parts unknown.” We recognize social media as a problem in the same breath that we launch an hour long conversation about Stranger Things or Black Mirror. I do believe that we all want to be stronger, but few us of have the will power to shut down our apps and sit in uncomfortable silence. Just the other day, when I was asking a friend what he thought about a current painful event in my life he recommended watching The Good Place and American Vandal on Hulu and Netflix respectively. I called him out and couldn’t help but think that we are treating our “parts unknown” with a healthy dose of social media. But I don’t want to distract the pain away, I want to engage it.
And I think that’s exactly what Bourdain was doing. Let me be clear, the irony of me opining about social media consumption while learning a life lesson from social media is not lost on me—it is a reflection on a particularly honest man. Bourdain’s death is a representation of what can happen when we conflate our mental machinations, our feelings, our “parts unknown” with consumable pieces of entertainment. If we don’t learn to resist the urge to hide our feelings in our favorite characters and friend’s Instagram stories, I fear that we all increase our likelihood of realizing the same fate. In a nod to Mr. Bourdain and to all of the pain in the world, be strong and speak on it. Not just on social media, but to your friends and family, and more importantly, to yourself.
Photo credit: The Hollywood Reporter
Diversifying Your Set of Skills
2.23.18
I don’t know if the fort will ever come down at this point, it’s getting cozier by the day. Aside from that, I’ve been running around the past couple days, attending interviews, sending out resumes and trying to stay disciplined to a minimum amount of words per day.
My newly found ambition all stemmed from a conversation I had with Heather the first day I
decided to start this glorified journal.
For the past few months, I have been chasing full-time jobs like a drug addict chasing a high and each time I have gotten excited, thinking, “I’m going to get this one,” the job is pulled a little further, just out of reach. Heather has helped me see that this focus on one full-time job is too singular and because of that, the other things I devote my time to, i.e. writing, local politics, seem even more laborious. Rather than focusing on getting part-time work in all three fields I care about, I’ve been putting all my eggs in one basket, dividing my mind into a competition of my interests rather than developing each of them individually.
Diversifying your career path is a skill that comes easy to Heather as she has been doing it since she was a teenager. For her, it made a lot of sense to develop photography alongside her equestrian training because she couldn’t see herself risking her body day-in- and-day-out for an entire career. Thus, she came across photography, which is now the main source of income—but she kindly reminds me that it wasn’t always this way
At the beginning of Heather’s photography career, she was willing to work for free or for peanuts and accepted jobs that others in the industry did not want to take. It was difficult because she still needed to make a living wage, but she was willing to do what she had to do to in order to gain experience. Jim Carrey has a quote something along the lines of, “you can fail at something you don’t like, so why not try and fail at something you do like?” It would’ve been easier for Heather to stay as an equestrian, but she thought about her life 20 years from then and had deduced that while it may’ve been easier in the short term, it would’ve been crippling in the long run to rely on one source of income. Ironically, failure for Heather meant limiting herself to one full-time position.
Now as I chase several jobs in each of my respective fields I feel more whole, engaging in conversations that cover an array of my interests rather than constraining myself to one. As I commit further to the development of my writing, political, and hospitality careers I also envision it all under one unifying umbrella in the future that Heather had the foresight to see at a much younger age. Framing my future in the context of an attaining elusive single goal has been a paralyzing approach of mine for years, but thanks to Heather, I may just be breaking free. Instead of looking at what I need, I’ve begun to look at how I can develop my interests in the diversification of my time, personality, and ideally, the stability of my financial future.
Time is Empty
2.23.18 - 5004 Cody ~ 7:25 PM MT
Sitting down to write twice in one day, wow! Maybe Pressfield is making an impression on me. As I joke, it’s kind of true. His distinction of a professional and an amateur is incisively honest and accurate. As an amateur writer, I dedicate small portions of my day (sometimes no time of the day!) to doing something I say I want to do for a living. Pressfield also defends us writers as he says the most difficult thing to do is to just sit down and write.
He explains that the amateur: takes things personally; expects epochs the size of Homer’s Odyssey to drop into their mind and ooze out of your fingertips in some perfect, opportune arrival of immense inspiration; and clings too much to the judgment of his/her work. The professional for Pressfield: learns to separate themselves from their work, creating a thick skin, seating their criticisms in a space separate from their ego; has a regimen where they sit down everyday, rain or shine, inspiration or no inspiration and writes. This is so that when a moment of real inspiration hits, the writer has been at it, honing their technique, to now where they can lay it down as it comes. The amateur waits on inspiration to strike, the professional writes through it.
It is very hard for me to keep at it, given my history of complacency and litany of instantaneous gratification and distraction that lay around every corner. It is nearly impossible for me to stay focused when I have a phone that flickers every two seconds and a computer that grants me access to any piece of entertainment I can think of (all for free to boot). Living in the 21st century enables most of us in the western world to live at a level of luxury never before seen my humans—we can essentially get anything delivered to our doorstep with the click of a button. We live like kings!
Yet we feel like serfs. We feel like nothing is truly satisfying and we bury our discomfort deeper into the meaningless abyss of consumption. We turn our attention to products and entertainment rather than inwards because the passive approach is easier. In a country that is run by convenience there is nothing convenient about engaging with the unhappiness that lurks in your mind while you wait in the drive-thru line at McDonalds or skip the intro to continue your binge session on Netflix. When the inconvenience of the complexity of our minds comes to the forefront we find a way to conveniently drown it out. There is no time for self-reflection in a time of instantaneous satisfaction. We feel like serfs even though we have the world at our fingertips.
Even now I have an itch to go out, an itch to watch porn, an itch to throw a movie on and cook popcorn. Pressfield would call these urges ‘resistance,’ and I suppose that it is. The progress of technology has subverted our attention spans, decreasing the value of a moment down to a swipe of the screen. Time itself changes meaning over time; when I was a kid the phrase was “time is money,” and perhaps that’s still true, but I would now say, “time is empty.”
Time has been reduced to the passing of it—I still don’t get how people can be bored. When I say that time is empty I mean that we’d rather fill it up with the consumption of meaningless information than sit and watch the seconds pass like we’re back in grade school watching the clock, waiting for the bell to ring. **UPDATE** just got back from watching meaningless videos for like an hour. Time travel is possible everyone, and I’m not talking getting black out drunk, I’m talking turning your mind off to passively spend time.
Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers
3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT
It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor. Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words. Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally.
Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go. Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds.
There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter. On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us. But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist. It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.
As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward. Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes. The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work. It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush. When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it.
A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation. It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t. It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code.
There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media. But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences. A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.
Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth. Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives. It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives. Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life. Move forward, not laterally.
Happiness: A Focused Effort on Self-Improvement
It took me awhile to get in front of a keyboard today. I'm still putting up the same obstacles between me and my writing. A blank page forces me to come face-to-face with my potential and I sit and stare, like I'm waiting for a divine strike of inspiration. The thought of perfection paralyzes my hands and mind. The reality is that I just have to endure the pain if I want to be a professional writer.
I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace in an attempt to lure inspiration from the depths of my consciousness. It still saddens me that a man with so much intellect and insight into the human condition took his life. It saddens me to think about what else he could've contributed to the progress of humanity.
In the interview they spoke about the allure of drugs and entertainment and how they both provided a certain escape. DFW linked these concepts to the ideology of self-gratification that pervades U.S. culture, where this hedonistic pleasure-center is constantly fed. He touched on class as part of the problem as it is the privileged graduates holding Masters and Bachelors degrees that have the ability and affinity to engage in higher culture, while the uneducated are trapped in a cyclical poverty. Let's face it - the endurance and focus necessary to read stuff like Infinite Jest is going to lose 9 times out of 10, even in educated circles. The trick seems to be to expedite the transmission of self-developmental content in an engaging, inexpensive, and for lack of a better word, subversive manner.
A fulfilling life requires effort, discipline and thoughtful action, which are all products of self-development. The problem is that mainstream media undermines all of these. The passive satisfaction of our thoughts and desires renders the active life a laborious endeavor, devaluing the fulfilling process of work in favor of comfortable stupefaction. Work has been an adversary to humans for millennia, but its stigma has grown exponentially since the dawn of the industrial age.
What would the argument for a life of fulfillment rather than comfort look like? The Aristotelean aim was towards a happiness made possible by virtues like temperance, courage, friendship, honesty, etc. The world we live in now subverts these virtues in the name of capitalistic enterprise; which means that our current system of values stands in opposition to our actualization of happiness and fulfillment. We are given instruments enabling passive unhappiness and we are told that we are lazy, ungrateful leeches on the society. MAYBE if we were given empowering tools rather than those determined by economic and capitalistic ends, we would be a more effective generation!
This mostly sounds like entitled wishful thinking, but it's important for me to hash out these concepts. Self-development is critical for lasting happiness and we live in a culture that undermines it around every corner. Happiness and fulfillment require effort, discipline, and thoughtful action, which means that if want better lives, we need to make a concerted, focused effort on improving ourselves.