Alright y'all, back on the Havana sheeeeot. I have one of some kids playin' basketball and then I have 5 portraits. Here's the first one.

I says to her I want to take her pichure and she says, "OK, get it over with." and I says, "Could you stand in front of this here sawweeeeet gate?" and she didn't understand why I couldn't just take the damn pichure but she did it anyhow. Lemme just tell you now: ever one of these here shots is gonna have someone glarin' at me. I like it that way an don't pay it no mind, since most a what I got was lots of adoration.

Still working out the capablilites of my new scanner but I think I'm getting better mid-tones in my black and white negs so I'm gonna start re-scanning a lot of those. Here's a photo from Havana. I actually have another picture of the front of this car she's sitting in. I think it's an Edsel stationwagon.

One more Havana. Next to last shot I took there. I was in the square and setting up this picture when Squash and the musicians came by on their way to get some mojitos (again! for one last time!) and I said to wait but they didn't. That one kinda pissed me off 'cause it was only 30 seconds or something and they acted like they didn't need me if they had Squash but I sheepishly searched around for the bar they'd gone to and upon entering was immediately swept up into the "Chan Chan" one more time and laid it down for a round one more time and refused further payments for probably the first time (oh you can't imagine the frowns and dismay!) and got out of there feeling like we'd be squeezed for one last party by the locals. I was cool with them before that but that last time sorta turned things for me. I been squeezed by more locals than Squash I think. At the very point you're feeling great and people are being really nice to you, you have to distrust those people and I guess I have a talent for that. At least they're begging for a party.

School boys too. This kid was actually emitting a shrieking whistle when I snapped this.

Didn't scan these Havana shots last year. Figured the negs were too thin but I pulled a couple out. Here's one of my favorite subjects, school girls.

I just wanna say Jimmy Carter RULES!

He's in my beloved Havana this week kickin it and trying to calm things down between the governments of Cuba and the US. I don't usually get all excited about political stuff but I love Cuba and so should the US government. Forget all the rhetoric by Castro and Bush. I was all teary-eyed when I read about that sweet old grey-haired house-builder peanut farmer and his wife Rosalynn walking around in Old Havana. Plus, recently over 11 thousand people, faced with nasty dudes with AK47's hassling them night and day, signed a pettition calling for a national referendum on free speech, free assembly, political prisoners, private business ownership and democratic elections.

Aww, shucks. That's really nice. And brave. I hope they keep doing good stuff. Go World.

Here's Squash in a love-fest with our Cuban friends

I barely pulled this one. It's all grainy because the slide was dark. Too dark to be saved, really, but I was stubborn. The scan had tons of noise so I converted it to greyscale and thus, we get grain, which is really noise. See? Couldn't let this one get away though. Scared the shit outta me when I took it.

Ok, I usually try not to over do it on the photos. As I was discussing with Jim, the other day, I think that editorial restraint is the hallmark of great photography. But this one's getting some good feedback on photograhica.org so I'm gonna throw it up. Same woman, can't remember her name. She was crazy. working the whole street, playing with me, drinkin coffee, hittin stickball, touslin schoolkid's hair. I took 3 photos of her as she stood there and the one I'm not posting is her doing a shimmy-shimmy shakey dance with her hips which of course couldn't be captured by my single shot twin lens reflex Rolleiflex.

A saucy old woman gives me some attitude. Manrique Street, Havana.

Playing stickball on Manrique Street, Havana.

I can't take it any more. Please click on the slideshow to the left. It's the best I can do. For 2 days I've worked on a version of it that never came to be. You see, I just wanted to do something simple like put a counter and maybe the title up there but the way the damn thing's implemented it's fucking impossible. It uses a function to flip the images and I can't get other details on the page to update as the image loads. I've tried document.write from within the function but that erases the page and all the objects it had initialized. FUCK.

All day I work on stupid ass shit like this. It's not like I have to. There are plenty of other things a guy could do. Nobody even uses the slideshow that I have now and it works ok for everything except Nutscrape 4.x.

Part of this fix was to get it to work in netscape by writing the img tag every time with h and w variables. Problem is I need to use PHP or something to do that. I keep thinking as I write this that I just write a function that runs in the onload event of the image that goes and gets another set of image attributes from an array I initialize at the page load. Yeah. Fuck. I know that won't work. I'm so sick of this.

Shit I gotta try something else. I'm blowing off scanning images and returning that Mr. Rogers t-shirt I ordered.

The taxi stand in front of the Capitolio Nacional, Havana. I shot this photo and had a nice conversation with a guy during the half an hour I spent waiting for Squash to get out of the museum. They get a lot of tourists there and I meet a lot of people who talk to tourists all day. (It's common to meet an 8 year old who speaks 6 languages) This guy was different. This guy was pretty fearless, or else he had paid off the cops because when they came near he continued talking to me. I asked him why he didn't fear them and he said, "They know me, I am here every day. They've checked my papers and things many times but never put me in jail. Sometimes interrogation takes a long time but it's worth it." Talking to a tourist is against the law and aside from it being a horrible law, I actually appreciated how a tout would suddenly stop bugging me peel off and start walking the other direction. Policia. Mira. Vale, policia muy fuerte. I had conversation with about 20 people in the street that day. I can't express how weird that is. 20 people. Not just "Hello, where from?" but actual meaningful conversations where I learned something. It's really cool to walk about with a camera in a place like that.

Dragones Street. Havana. This is some of that "stand on the corner and shoot" stuff. I was trying to take a picture of the sign and this woman crossed the street into my depth of field.

Squash and I hung out with this guy (an architecture student working as the night museum security guard) taking pictures around the fort museum for about 45 minutes. He was so calm and quiet and we were running around snapping crazy shit. What I loved about him most was his brown U-Haul sweater. There is an amazing bar upstairs in this 450 year old fort. Nobody really goes there but I did my first night in town with a bunch of musicians. Squash probably remembers his name. I don't.

Neptuno at Manrique. Centro Havana.

Taxis parked in front of the capitol building. Havana. Again.

Phew, I did it. I got another scan of some guy in Havana in today. Had to fight through a La Rondalla margarita and another hot day in SF.

For god's sake kids, if you're gonna have nicotine stains on your mustache, at least try to wear a shirt that matches.

got an appointment for a haircut at 4:30 today.

Havana. 84°

Damn. What a busy evening. I missed a show at Southern Exposure "Anything goes as long as it fits in a container about the size of a shoebox" that I really wanted to go to. After a couple of hours at the hardware store I was just too loaded up with neat stuff to work on around my house. I built a contraption to hang my projector from an old piece of Victorian-era molding and then I set my new screen up and then I watched the Brazil DVD that I bought. Got wasted on a mongo vodka gimlet and passed out on my new couch half way through the director's commentary on the uncut original version. I love Discount Builders Supply. I even bought a cordless drill.

I'll always remember this as "one last shot at exploitation". We were racing around Havana about 1 hour from getting back on the boat and I was shooting in the Plaza de la Catedral and guess who Squash ran into! And guess what? They were thirsty! Squash was like, "You comin?" and I hesitated and futzed with my camera and before I knew it they were gone.

I didn't want to be a party to the party again but I chased after them anyhow. They were going to milk us for mojitos one more time but it occurred to me that I may never hear them play again.

That's Pedro -- Professor de Bongo, Paolo -- Mi Corazon, Squash -- Margarita, and Pedro's wife who's name I could never remember but who's kindness I'll never forget.

Parque Central in Havana. There was a huge shouting match going on next to these old guys -- one guy taking on a crowd of about 20. I think they were discussing politics. The last time I'd seen men shouting at each other so fervently it was watching monks debate in India.

OK, here's my favorite picture from my week in Cuba. This is on Calle Manrique in Centro Havana where I stayed.

There are so many abandon store fronts and businesses. It was really sad. This area of town, which was a glorious center of culture and commerce for 300 years, is a shell. I think of all the industrious people that would love to get something going but you know what, there isn't anything to sell. No products and nobody with money to buy them.

This is the most shocking thing that you notice walking around. Your average store has a couple of employees leaning over a glass case filled with soda, beer and cigarettes and behind them, beautiful carved antique hardwood shelves gathering dust. No signs for Coke and no Pepsi cooler and no football playing Budweiser bottles either. Everybody knows that their country can put food on the selves and they believe they can do it without the ads. The economy is in ruins and everybody blames Castro.