Can’t remember what Miguel and I were doing in Vegas..Oh yeah, the porn convention and we were going to his friend’s wedding reception. It was in a casino and I had nothing to do so I started walking around through the deserted ballrooms and I took Miguel’s camera with me.
Ballroom Chairs
Ok, I sent out some email about a show to friends here in town and then I was told I had to take it down and I didn’t want to send out another email just to tell people that but now a few people have been confused so I will post this page. The background is approximately the color of the paint on the walls at Terrafazione Italia.
Los Angeles, Cahuenga and Sunset I think.
Las Vegas is a lot of things to a lot of people.
On the road up from Half Moon Bay. I’m thnking about redesigning my website around this image.
New Orleans
More Wood. I didn’t know I was taking this picture for the second time till after I got the slides back.
New Orleans Louisiana. Bywater. That be a shotgun house.
In
the grand primco tradition of taking pictures of molded plastic chairs, I give
you, “St. Claude Laundromat” taken a week ago in New Orleans.
I’m going to call this series, “Unhappy Moments”. I got the inspiration for this when I was showing these photos to Rose and she laughed really hard. Basically, I didn’t like (and still don’t) to have my picture taken so any picture of me over age 5 where I had to pose was generally an unhappy moment.
These are some of my favorite family photos. The first one is a very special Christmas when my brother Jeff showed up from who knows where. I hardly ever saw him and I think he was a drug dealer at this point. It’s Christmas Eve, my dad is drunk and passed out. I’m pissed (I think I got a stupid t-shirt that I was forced to put on for this but I can’t remember what it was. Maybe a whale breaching or something.) and my step-sister Robin is trying to be nice. Jeff (in a what I’m guessing at this point was a subtle hint by my parents that he should be more clean cut), has just receive a Gillette hot shaving foam system. Very popular holiday gift item in the 70’s.
Our next photo, and Rose’s favorite is I think a birthday but I’m not sure. Sheila and I often got presents together. My mother used to give very strange gifts. For example, every year at Christmas she would fill our big stockings with walnuts and oranges and totally worthless 5 cent toys. I emptied the bulging stocking out onto the floor and out spilled walnuts. Not only did that suck, but I had to clean them up. My mother would always say, “That’s what we got for Christmas when I was a girl. If you’re not happy then, well, you’re getting coal in your stocking next year.” So, this photo captures that moment in my mind perfectly, complete with my ass-kissing sister holding her can of olives aloft and posing prettily for the camera. Can you believe it? Cans of black olives.
Anyhow, onto the next one. We were a car vacationing family. I saw almost every state in the US by the time I was in 8th grade. My dad loved to take panoramic roadside shots and he usually made his kids get in the picture. I think we’d had a big row about my refusal to participle in his stupid photos and contrary to the last photo, the family friction has obviously gotten to little Sheila. I’m either ready to cry or in the process of crying. Noticed the hunched shoulders. Textbook simpering.
In this last one, it’s a little hard to see the pain and distress on my face because I’m so damn small but basically I had to pee really bad and I was forced to stand in front of our vacation trailer for a Polaroid. Polaroids were anything but instant in those days, involving complicated folding bellows and film loading. I’m approximately 3 1/2 and I remember quite a few things from this day, particularly, finding a garter snake down a hole and reaching my hand down deep into the hold and grabbing the snake out blind. Pretty tough. Also, a helicopter landed that day. Also, on the way home I had to pee really bad again and it was raining something fierce and we couldn’t find anywhere to stop and my mom and dad were yelling about whether it was appropriate to take me into a nudie bar to go pee. Finally, my dad got his way and I put on the brown jacket you see here, and as I was being escorted by him into the back, a naked woman up on the stage screamed and said, “That man has a bear”. I looked up from my hood at that point and saw her. That’s all I remember about that.
A house in downtown Renton. Trick or Treat?
Here’s another one of an elevated freeway. This is the same place that I shot that train. It’s West Oakland. I didn’t know what it would look like because it was totally black under there but if you point a camera at something long enough, all kinds of weird colors come out.
People keep asking me if I took any pictures at burning man. I had forgotten that I did. This is the toilets at 135 and mainmast. Except a loving photo of my minivan, and a digital photo of my sunburned back so I could see where to put on sunscreen, it’s the only photo I took.
After looking at my friend Dave’s really nice pictures of burning man I questioned my disinterest in taking photos at burning man. I don’t give a shit about photography at burning man, but why not? Well, I generally don’t think there is anything interesting there and worthy of a photo. I tell people, yeah, there’s lots of crazy shit going on but there’s also tons of photographers running around capturing it. Why do I need to do it also? But then I saw all the cool photos that Dave took and I realized that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to take pictures of burning man, its that I like to take pictures of things that aren’t usually in photographs. My beloved subjects are the ignored and the mundane that for some reason are spectacular to me. So in a festival where everything is screaming for attention and painted up like a gaudy whore, I see no photos.
Under the overpasses of West Oakland. Tuesday night. I had opened the shutter on her Sinar and gone on about my business, futzing with other cameras, when suddenly Lyndsey screamed something like, “Oh my god, the fucking train’s moving! You lucky bastard”.
So far, I’ve been in LA two days and this is the best picture I have. It’s somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley.
Your standard arty highway shot.
One bhang’d out Varanasi street dude.
This is a log crane on highway 120 in the Sierra foothills. I was eating my Sourdough Jack� on the way up to Yosemite and when I saw this beast I laid down on the roadway and handheld a 4 second exposure. I kind of like all the noise that my digital camera generated. It aint tryin to be somethin it’s not!
I visited Eben in Oakland today (hmm, that’s funny, ‘cause he lives in Seattle) and rode the BART home.
I saw the most beautiful thing I’d seen all week last night driving home from Yosemite. I’d climbed Half-Dome and gazed upon a sky-filling sunset at the top, but fuck that shit. I was driving north on some stretch of 880 or something and a BART train came up on the right at about 60mph lit up and looking like a space station cornering on a ribbon of concrete. As I was watching, awestruck, it moved toward the highway indicating that it was going to cross above me toward the west. I sensed the point that we would meet and I would go under but then another train came and swallowed it whole going 60mph in the other direction. You remember that ride at the carnival that was second only to the Zipper in its ability to make you puke that had two pods that twisted and swung around on arms pendulum-style? That’s the way it looked. That was causing my balls to shoot up into my neck but I held the wheel steady and looked behind me to see the train again moving toward the west and then the eastbound train shot out of its ass and darkness spread.
I made videos out the window of the train going through West Oakland in the late evening sun in commemoration of last night. I have to go to an art opening of some Polaroid artists right now but I’ll work on the vids and post them.
This was a mistake. I was using my Holga. That’s my friend Squash floating above the valley.
Nothin to say about this. Just a toy in the dirt. But notice the flash falloff following the inverse square law: Light output is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Susannah in the snow. There was a big green lazer shooting out of the Emerald Castle and it wasn’t really that dusty but my camera saw things differently.
Here’s another picture I took at my mothers house.
Mom’s backyard berries.
Eb on New Years: “No you can’t have none a this. This here’s too hot for you. Gonna have to look elsewheres.”
Milkjug
I don’t think it was like this all the time. She’d abandoned the house for her condo. And to her credit, looks like she’d done most of the dishes.
The oven which contained within it, many horizontal surfaces; and thus, was fodder for compulsion.
The back patio.
We got these chairs from my Aunt Margie. They were child sized. I painted them green to match our house. Those are bags of beauty bark.
Ok, I got some black and white photos of Mom’s back patio. For example, this is the barbeque.
Porter Ricks was a character on the show “Flipper” and also the best electronic music I’ve heard since Aphex Twin. The bass of “Polytoxic 1” from Symbiotics bounced off the walls of David’s meat locker apartment as we ate Blue Dolphins. I filmed him playing upright bass and I filmed his dentist’s chair and we went to the party.
yadda yadda
nother party
yadda
We wanted to make some good stuff for ourselves. Something to delight our senses. I started driving toward Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard. I was sure we'd get stopped or pulled over but we just drove on in. A truck patrolled in the darkness but didn't seem to care about us. Looks like the hours of 5am to 6am are wide open if you want to catch the sunrise. That's what we did, parked at the end of a long pier -- right in between that crane we got from Germany in WW2 that nobody knows what to do with and the seagulls. And we dreamed of having the energy to break into that beautiful glass building with a crane coming out of the fifth floor. David slept while I worked the area with my digital camera.
Mom’s sink.
A genuine, honest-to-goodness, pile of junk.
Mom’s picnic table.
Mom’s canning jars.
The lamp that used to be in aunt Florence’s house.
Shifting gears a bit, from the wreck of a country that is India to the wreckage of my mother’s house. First off is a series of pictures of my mother’s backyard. I took them a couple days after her funeral. Now it looks like a normal yard I guess.
The faucet under the back stairs.
Love is like a bottle of gin,
But a bottle of gin is not like love.
A sweet little cactus gargen where people go to smoke in the Singapore airport.
I know I
Can’t take your love
As her memory drifts in
Like a samba
The Tower of London. Gemma and I paused our audio commentary of the beheading of Anne Boleyn so I could take this picture. She went out like a champ.
Today turned out to be pretty fun. I just hung out with David but I got a lot of things done and I had enough face time with him to reassure me about the theater. He came over to help me carry my old couch out onto the sidewalk. I talked to him about the modifications I would like made to the Primco couch and he seemed agreeable. I showed him my projector and we’re gonna watch a movie tomorrow night at the store. We checked out the huge screen that the guys down the street at the shoe store found in the basement. It was covered with mildew but we’re gonna clean it and then we’ll have a 30x40 screen. A whopper. I have to go to a party at Mica’s house in Berkeley now. I’m excited because I haven’t been to a party since London.
If you were actually reading this realtime, you’d probably be wondering where the pictures are. I’m gonna work on that tomorrow and add about 3 day’s worth. I just didn’t have the gumption to turn on my scanner. If you’re reading this sometime in the future, you’re seeing the photos before me.
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Blackfriars Tube
London Blackfriars Tube
I was just watching the feed of World News Now and they had Declan Curry on from London to give the outlook on European financial markets and Jim, the guy that’s filling in for Alison, tried to make some jokes with him about Indian food in the UK and Declan squashed them. After the segment was over and they went to commercial Jim said, “Jeez, who pissed on his Wheat-a-Bix?” Which was totally hilarious and then Declan came on and said, “I can still hear everthing you say.” and the whole newsroom broke up. I couldn’t tell you what the news was today. Don’t really care.
All part of the magnificient senery you can look at when you ride the train from the airport into Barcelona.
This is in Highbury. I really liked London. I gotta give thanks to Laura and Gemma who, in addition to putting me up while I was there, convinced me to go. It was all their idea. I actually liked it better than Barcelona. Even though everybody raves about Barcelona, I think I was in a better frame of mind for London. Oh, and they speak English there.
Just down the street from the Arsenal Grounds in London.
London Tube with Gemma.
Jellyfish sting like a motherfucker. Monterey Aquarium.
