(6/365)

One of the interesting things about digital photography is the artistic experimentation it affords, both because of the lack of processing cost, and because of the instant feedback digital cameras provide.

In this instance, I wanted to make an image that could only exist on a digital image sensor. Pure binary light, as it were, and something I wouldn’t do with film. These are actually Christmas lights in the backyard. Decorative lights around the new pool that we’ve decided to leave there year round.

The photo in no way conveys it, but it was dark and freezing cold when I went out to shoot this. I defocused on purpose, and exposed to blow out the image sensor. The resulting images looked, to me, like astronomical phenomena, exploding frictionless nebulae, or like strange microbes swimming through luminescent medium.

In lieu of my non-existent January 1st pic (see below), I’ve decided to  choose my favorite picture from 2008.

My favorite picture.

That I’ve taken.

Which is really hard.

My photographic interests include religious artworks, portraits, candids, party shots, landscapes, architecture, and travel shots.  Friends and family. But I guess when I think about one picture I took that represents the most of those categories, it’s this one:

Jeff as St. Francis

We were in Hawaii–I took a trip with my parents, brother, and sister. My friends Jeff and Cami had coincidentally booked a trip there at the same time. When Jeff & Cami got to Oahu, we met up, and they took me on an awesome adventure around the island. One of the stops was the Byodo-in Buddhist temple, a beautiful replica of a 900 year old temple in Uji, Japan. At the gift shop there you can get food to feed the koi, but Jeff quickly realized the birds flitting around the grounds were also interested. He put some in his hand, and got the birds to feed from his palm. Cami and I both took snapshots, and after this one, I exclaimed, “Jeff, you look like St. Francis!” A tour group coming up behind us laughed in recognition, and one lady said “It’s true! It’s true!”

I love the look of joy on Jeff’s face. This picture reminds me of not just the good times I had with Los Hermanns, but with my family, too, and all the beauty and happiness that filled our time in Hawaii. That sounds like hyperbole, but really, Hawaii is just that great. You feel like a grinning moron trying to explain how wonderful it is there.

If it was just a pretty picture, or a reminder of fun times, there’d be competition. But on a deeper level, this photograph also reminds me of how the symbols of our faith surround us. Even, of course, on the grounds of a Buddhist temple. For that reason, it’s my favorite of 2008.

The idea behind Project 365 is a simple one: 1 photo, every day, for an entire year. This is an idea probably nearly as old as art itself, but still a worthwhile challenge.

You might say that I failed before I even started. Because I didn’t fully become aware of the concept, and especially its Flickr incarnation, until January 2nd, I failed to take a photo on January 1st. The nice thing about screwing up right in the beginning is that there’s nowhere to go but up.

I’ll be documenting my try in this ever-growing Flickr set. I’ll also be making daily posts here, because it gives me something to write about–that’s another goal I have for the year–and very possibly be posting bulletins on Myspace for any of the following reasons (Checkmark those that apply):

• The audience overlap is tiny, or perhaps nonexistent
• Studies have shown that repetition is the key to getting peoples’ attention
• Large amounts of text looks ridiculous on Flickr
• Myspace bulletins are ephemeral
• Photographs are meant to be seen
• No one reads this anymore
• Contrary to my grunge roots, I have developed a need for approval from others
• I’ll never win Her love if She doesn’t see my work
• I like to annoy my friends with self-promoting spam
• Studies have shown that repetition is the key to getting peoples’ attentionÂ
• Other (fill in via comments form)

Anyway, this should be fun! And if you’re reading this and want to try the project yourself, take it from me, it’s never too late! Let me know and I will totally check out your photos!

Listening to your ipod on the subway is great and all, but for us there’s still nothing that beats dropping the top off the car and flying down the freeway with some White Zombie cranked to 11. That’s why we were so intrigued when we saw (thrice named) Steve Luke Hanson’s series of rush hour photos.

Daytime joyriding has almost become an oxymoron, but in Hanson’s photos even the 405 at 5pm is blissfully free of traffic. With a tripod and a grip of neutral density filters, Hanson has revealed the spare forms hidden underneath our daily drive. Some find the pictures eerie; we find ourselves salivating. In our dreams, the imminent Carpocalypse has come, leaving the city’s concrete thoroughfares empty of commuters, minivans, and hippo-like SUVs. We blow our last tank of gas barreling through cloverleaf interchanges, fishtailing across 6 deserted lanes, and jumping ramps over K Rails. In the end we take the 10 to PCH to Malibu. On a deserted cliffside we lay down our last bit of tire tread and sail right off the edge, just like the Pixies song.

At this point things get hazy. Whether we end up flying away ala Grease or drowning like A Star is Born must depend on what we were eating. But you don’t have to share our admittedly anti-social gasoline-drunk dreams to appreciate Hanson’s photos. Check them out, at least, to see what things will look like after post-Peak Oil has turned the 101 into the world’s largest skate park.

Photo by (of course) Steve Hanson

Originally published on LAist

This is the memorial movie I made for my cousin’s service. It was and remains an emotional moab.

The video contained within it was nearly entirely shot by him, or using his digital camera. As I said at the memorial, it reflects Rudy as he lived his life: his thoughts and actions, his humor, his bravado, and, yeah, even his tenderness and his love.

He’d probably punch me for that last part. He was always trying to toughen us up; make the rest of us cousins as strong as he was.

The song is called Wake Up, by the Arcade Fire, off their beautiful and too aptly titled Funeral album.

It’s hard to do a Beatles cover well. Partly this is because of the band’s iconic (and exceedingly familiar) presence; but perhaps it’s also partly because they themselves performed and recorded so many amazing cover versions. The Beatles were, before anything else, unparalleled synthesists of Rock and Roll history. They knew precisely how differences in tempo, aggression, or vulnerability could change and renew old, familiar songs; and because of this knowledge they rarely, if ever, made mistakes with their own material.

Fiona Apple’s (new to me) version of Across the Universe is, then, one of those rare exceptions—the great Beatles cover. It might be even more: superior to the recordings on both the original and stripped versions of Let It Be. Lennon wrote Across the Universe during the disintegration of his first marriage; but the song’s feeling was buried, to a certain extent, under the novelty of the Beatles’ short-lived infatuation with Transcendental Meditation—hence the “Jai Guru Deva Om” mantra chorus line. By slowing the song down, altering the instrumentation, and simply enunciating differently that chorus, Apple brings out the emotional resonance of the original composition. And this is bolstered by the compelling accompanying music video, with its thorough destruction of an idealized past:

The removal of her headphones two thirds through the song, without any change of demeanor, is tacit evidence that she recognizes the riot ocurring around around her, but chooses to ignore it. Headphones are one of the quintessential modern symbols of disconnection—ubiquitous Walkmen and iPods block out the presence of the wider world. But Apple is not isolating herself by wearing her pair; she is asserting the primacy and eternality of her interior world over the thoughtless and ephemeral actions taking place around her. Again, the sudden removal of her own headphones reinforces this, as does the song’s refrain. Apple (who alone among the video’s characters is dressed in modern clothes) reaches back visually across time and space—yes, across the universe—to find something pure and beautiful, and to pull it, not precisely to the present, but into her (and our) everpresent. It is just as she did musically, with her selection and recording of the song. This continual renewal—and renewability—of an object of beauty is the source of meaningful, lasting art. It is also, incidentally, the mark of a great cover. That the object being renewed may have also once been thoroughly destroyed—that doesn’t matter at all.

I think my heart just exploded. She’s funny, gorgeous, creative, and DIY.

This girl is crafty like ice is cold. Her site is all photos and howtos for various punky, colorful, homemade art objects: sunglasses, bags, umbrellas, wallets. It’s an inspiration. I think I’m going to make one of these keyboard bracelets.

Don’t worry, Erika. She lives in Russia.

Was browsing through the lightly amusing Sugar Bush Squirrel site, which features the (eponymous) World’s Most Photographed Squirrel in a variety of current-events related dioramas and costumes—all created by her owner, the eerily Tammy Faye-like country star and military pinup Ms. Kelly Foxton—when I came across this super-intense memorial photo:

Damn.

Don’t Buy This Album

Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is a terrible album, listened to, by me, in its entirety, and not abandoned after the first track, only because of the near-universal critical acclaim afforded it. In this respect, it was the most excruciating act of media consumption I have engaged in since reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

This is the apotheosis of hippie music. Not because of its sound—Trout Mask Replica has nothing in common with the psychedelic records we associate with the late 60′s. No, Captain Beefheart has managed, here, in 1969, with guitars, vocals, drums, and the occasional horn to perfectly encapsulate the worst of an already inane and self-absorbed subculture’s precipitous decline over the next 30 years.

Trout Mask Replica goes beyond being an album; it is an old, dirty, hippie, with its drug damage, bad wardrobe, false erudition, self-serious “irreverence,” cringe-inducing manner of speaking, slight greasiness, and most damningly of all, complete and utter regard for its own supposed genius. After 78 minutes of playtime, I think I can smell the thing, if that’s possible, and it’s making me nauseous. I wouldn’t want to leave this record alone in my house, lest I come home from work and find it walking around in its unwashed purple tye-die tshirt, rifling through my fridge and hitting on my sister.

I don’t mind atonality, experimentation, artifice, obfuscation, and jagged rhythms; these can all be effective artistic tools. Captain Beefheart has here employed them in a musical document so atrocious that it serves not only as an incrimination of their band, but of a subculture—and, very possibly, of an entire generation.

She uses the word freak—sans scare quotes—repeatedly; she uses the word “aristocrat” to describe their kingly portion of trauma.

I can pretty definitively state that when I see someone different, no, I don’t have cruel thoughts. When I pass by someone who dresses outside the mainstream (your example), usually I appreciate their originality and drive towards self-expression, or alternately their daring (if sometimes unconscious) violation of societal norms. I was going to say, “Who the fuck does think cruel thoughts?” But I realized that, indeed, I used to be taunted a great deal for not fitting in. It’s why I left high school. It’s the story of every real punk, and it’s the story of every freethinker. I’ve always thought that was bullshit.

What I’m saying here is that I don’t see any “freaks” in the world. I see other human beings, perhaps with problems, but always fully deservant of the dignity which should be accorded to any other.

Arbus’ work revels in the same mentality that drove the old circus sideshows. It does not humanize the handicapped, it dehumanizes the rest of us. And I think the fundamental empathic disconnection that her work evinces is probably what brought her to commit suicide.