GEOFF CORDNER PHOTOGRAPHY

Hippy Roundup

2011-04-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

Image courtesy of www.foodfirst.org

I've always assumed the lady next door was a hippy. She wears billowing Indian print skirts & tie-dye shirts, has pendulous breasts that flop about unimpeded, is overweight, under washed, and has excessive facial hair. Sort of like how I imagine Patricia Krenwinkle would have turned out if she hadn't joined the Manson family.

The hippy lady next door and her husband are in charge of yard work and handy-man stuff at my place.

This morning I noticed a couple of garish jugs of something sitting outside my landlady's laundry room. I thought it was some sort of Nascar brand anti-freeze, which seemed odd, so I took a closer look. Round-Up. Extra strength, long lasting.

Faced with these two garish jugs full of Monsanto chemistry I had to reconsider the whole hippy business.

The signs were always there. The husband has been repairing our fence, replacing the wood with this weird toxic putty that gets the entire neighborhood feeling a bit like we are huffing paint. He's always at his most redfaced, sweaty and happy when he's slapping around this toxic paste. Our fence now weighs several tons, is held together and mostly upright by a convoluted set of metal cables, springs, & braces, and I hope no one is standing near it when it inevitably collapses.

They probably think organic is that thing the dude in Emerson Lake and Palmer plays. I can imagine them singing their favorite tunes from Brain Salad Surgery to each other: "You see it really doesn't matter when you're buried in disguise, by the dark glass on your eyes, though your flesh has crystallized... Still...you turn me on."

Meanwhile, while they sit there all fat and sweaty and high on solvent fumes in their toxic wasteland cabin next door, I have these two jugs of Monsanto poison sitting outside my apartment. In my more paranoid moments I'm positive I can feel myself mutating.

Calico 50K

2011-03-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

2 weeks before the race, my friend Kista suggested I run Calico with her. I said yes.

It was, for me, the best 50K I could’ve picked for my first. I loved it. Yes, the trail was brutal and gave me all the challenges I needed. I ran though, looked out over, and descended deep into, a desert that was awesome in its beauty. I am not going to have a single majestic view running a road marathon with 25,000 other people. There was hardly a moment without majesty out there in Calico. This was especially true in the very rough second half.

I run to run. A 50K race through the Mohave is about the experience, and the experience is about what I see, and what I smell, and what I hear, what I feel… In order to have this experience, I need to be present. I’m always a bit startled when I read race reports that involve itunes playlists. I can listen to music at home. When I’m running through the Mohave Desert, in places that can only be gotten to by foot, looking out over these magnificent views that haven’t been seen by that many humans, and that I will never see again, not in this same way, not for the very first time, I cannot imagine why I would want to be any less than completely present.

For a full report and more pictures, see the Calico 50K entry on other my blog www.slowtwitchjournal

Bloody Knees #3

2010-12-18T08:08:00.000-08:00

Usually when I run at night, I run trails. I have to pay attention when I do this, feel the ground with my feet, piece that information together with fragments I see under the moonlight or might remember from having run the trail before in the daylight, and what I can see under a headlamp, which is usually just a spot immediately in front of me and in 2D.

It takes a lot of focus and being very much in the moment, and when I’m done on those runs I always discover I ran faster and easier than I do in the light, and had more fun.

Last night I ran the Silverlake Reservoir. It’s flat, I do laps, and I’ve never felt it required my attention. At this exact moment I was thinking about an attractive woman whose company I enjoy.

Just as I was mulling over whether I should ask her on a date, I did a face plant.

Lost & Found

2010-08-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been running trails.

There's nothing I can think of that feels more freeing than being at the crest of some ridge in Griffith Park, storm clouds above, wind blowing through the grass, mile 8 of a 14 mile run, knowing I got there on my feet, all alone, and that I need nothing. The city is sprawled out below me, a noisy, busy, aggressive, neurotic mess of crackheads, screenwriters, actors and assorted other wannabes...

I've been taking photos on some of these runs.

As a runner, I love these areas. As a photographer, I'm not quite so sure what to do with them. There's a groove that perhaps I've not yet settled into or even found. The shots that seem the most successful are also those that are closest to my urban scenes.

This particular shot is from Elysian Park, the oldest park in Los Angeles, a beautiful but sometimes gritty park surrounding Dodger Stadium. Chunks of it are empty. Chunks of it are full of hip young neighborhood dog walkers. Chunks are full of low-rider families picnicking. And chunks of it are notoriously full of mostly hispanic identifying-as-straight men cruising for gay sex on the trails and in the bushes.

More shots can be found on my running blog www.slowtwitchjournal.com

Labyrinth

2010-05-31T21:47:00.000-07:00

The labyrinth at Serra Retreat, a Franciscan Retreat in the hills above Malibu. I spent the afternoon there with an old friend.

I'm one of the many who confused a labyrinth with a maze, maybe because of the old story of the Minotaur (examination of that story, it is said, results in the conclusion that the Minotaur was indeed trapped in a maze).

Apparently labyrinths have been around forever, and appear in places that had no connection to each other (and thus couldn't have transferred the work) - at the same time as the classical Greek labyrinth there were nearly identical Native American labyrinths, and the same pattern appears in 2500 BC India...

According to wikipedia (the great source of lowest-common-denominator public knowledge) The medieval "labyrinth symbolized a hard path to God with a clearly defined center (God) and one entrance (birth)...Labyrinths can be thought of as symbolic forms of pilgrimage; people can walk the path, ascending toward salvation or enlightenment. Many people could not afford to travel to holy sites and lands, so labyrinths and prayer substituted for such travel."

Sculptor Robin Murez recently built a cute little labyrinth in the Venice 'hood. Churchgoers there do not see it as a hard path to God. They see it as some pagan thing that will cause people to walk around in circles instead of come inside and pray, says an article in the LA Times

Pasadena Half Marathon

2010-02-25T15:48:00.000-08:00

The idea, originally, was that I was going to run a marathon before I turned 50. And that was it. Eventually, though, I remembered how much I loved to run, and it became about much more than a simple, single accomplishment.

Around the time I realized that, my friend Buck said she was going to run the Pasadena half marathon, exactly one month before the LA Marathon. I liked the way the dates lined up: Feb 21 Pasadena Half. March 21 LA Marathon. April 21 my 50th birthday. I get excited in a sort of OCD way when numbers form patterns. It also seemed like a good idea to get a race in before the marathon. I wanted to feel the nervousness, get used to the crowds, wake up at 4:30 am to run a race, and just kinda test the process, in case there were any mental or maybe even physical adjustments I needed to make before Marathon day.

It was awesome. There was that glorious weather moment as we came round the Rose Bowl parking lot where the sun was shining through a light drizzle/mist; that’s beautiful weather to be running through at 8:30 on a mild February morning in Southern California.

My time? Nothing too exciting, really. A little over 2 hours. Not Kenyan material. It was, however, the first finish line I’d run across since some small town central Texas hill country 10K back around 1980, 30 years ago, when I was 19 or 20. I’ll call it a personal first.

A Warm Rain's Gonna Fall

2009-10-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

I was raised in the desert. I'm not so much of a rain guy. Yesterday evening, though, I was out walking down Sunset, and it was a really warm rain, so instead of dashing from under one awning to the next I decided to just stroll and get soaked. When I got to the coffee shop I was pretty much drenched, I guess - everyone kept commenting "Wow, it must be really pouring out there"...Not really, though. Just a beautiful warm rain. And this morning it feels like the same.

Here's what it looked like at my place up on top of the hills in Echo Park last year in the rain:

Venice Beach, Labor Day 2009

2009-09-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

Two cholitas on Venice Beach, Labor Day 2009.

Surfer Girl. Venice Beach, August 30th, 6:30 pm

2009-09-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

Venice Beach, August 30th, 6:30 pm. I’ve never before ridden the bike path through Venice - too much work dodging tourists and roller skaters - but there was no riding in town due to the toxic air from the fires.

Never having ridden the path I’d no idea how different Venice looked from the perspective of 10 feet further south than the boardwalk. It’s a completely different viewpoint, an insider’s viewpoint maybe, and I'm always thrilled when something as simple as a shift in position opens up what is to me a complete change in perspective, especially of something I've seen so very many times over so very many years from the earlier seemingly fixed viewpoint.

If you click on it you can see it bigger. It’s like magic.

Vancouver Island, 1994

2009-06-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

Long Beach, on Vancouver Island. 1994.

Opposite side of the island from my parents' house, which was right on the beach. That was my mother's deal. She loved the ocean. My stepfather was a prairie boy and hated both the ocean and all the trees. He preferred a flat and endless stretch of wheat fields.

My mother said that when she died she didn't want any sort of a big fuss with a lot of people. She just wanted her immediate family to wade into the ocean she could see from her porch and quietly scatter her ashes there. So that's what we did.

A day or two later I took a solo trip across the island.

Long Beach was a place I remembered visiting when I was about 12. I remembered it was cold, desolate, and really beautiful. I also remembered that hippies had built all sorts of shelters out of the driftwood.

It hadn't changed much from my memories as a kid in the early 70s. It was still desolate, beautiful, and the only signs of humans were odd bits of hippie detritus.

Miles of beach, middle of August, and I was the only person there.

Vancouver Island, 1994

2009-06-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

I've been to this place twice. The first time was during a family vacation in the 70s. I remembered it as cold, desolate, and stunningly beautiful. I remembered enormous driftwood - not just a piece of wood but the entire tree. I remembered abandoned lean-tos and other shelters made out of driftwood, by hippies, I reckoned.

And when I returned a little over 20 years later, it was exactly as I remember.

Night Surf

2009-05-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

April 26th. We headed out to Zuma around 5pm. The wind was blowing hard from the north and it was too cold to even bother. South on PCH traffic was jammed, one accident after another. We stopped off at Topanga. There was no surf. A bunch of ambulances pulled up. A helicopter landed. Some time went by while they worked on the victim. Once he was stable enough they moved him quickly into the helicopter. Even from a distance you could see blood on the sheets covering him on the stretcher.

We headed down further to little Sunset. High tide, mellow surf. Watched the sun set on our boards, and surfed into the dark. I didn't realize how cold I was until I got out and discovered I couldn't feel the ground. It took an hour before I got feeling back in my feet.

Topanga

Helicopter takes off with accident victim

Portajohn on PCH

Tere

Two boards

MS-13 has claimed this beach. From Pico Union to PCH - who knew they surfed?

MS-13 and the Mini Simmons

My Town & Country board

Long and Short: my Town & Country & Tere's Mini Simmons

Paddling out at sunset

High tide churn at night

Jose's New Teeth

2009-05-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

I stopped in at the old corner grocery store next to where I used to live. Annie and Terry the Armenian ladies who run it were very glad to see me.

They said I got out just in time. My old building has been going down hill. No more single folks living alone in apartments. It's either families of 4 in a small one bedroom or groups of drugs addicts, rockers and party boys turning singles into crash pads. The police are out there regularly now.

Jose the building manager has been wasting away. He's lost a lot of weight on this latest tweaking binge, which makes those weird oversized false teeth he got in Mexico look that much larger. His wife has left him. I'm not sure if she took the kid. His beautiful truck that didn't run is gone, as is his motorcycle.

I'm not sure why the owners keep him on. As he goes, so goes the building. They set up a conference call between them, me and Jose so that he could tell me (in between smacking on his weird false teeth) how I'd stolen the window screens, the closet door, the light fixtures, the carpet, and everything else I guess he stole out of my apartment after I left so he could trade it in for crack...The owners weren't buying it any more than I was, and after he ran out of things to accuse me of and just started prattling inanely they cut him off, apologized to me, and asked if it was okay if they keep $50 of my deposit just to make him happy. I was cool with that, but when I went to pick up the money, in cash, from Jose, he tried to short me $200.

I wrote about Jose's new teeth several months ago, before his crack or meth use had gotten out-of-control.

Jose the tweaker manager of my ghetto apartment building has new teeth.

I'm not sure where he got them or why he has them. He's a relentless scavenger. Maybe a tenant left them behind after moving. Maybe he found them on the street. There seemed nothing wrong with his old teeth. They appeared to be pretty regular, which is to say unnoticeable because the only time you notice teeth is when something is wrong, like they are unnaturally white or they are rotten or they are seriously snaggled or they are really stained or several prominent ones are missing...

Jose's new teeth are very noticeable.

They were made for a head much bigger than his, and the weird effect is exacerbated because he seems to be shrinking, maybe due to all the speed. Because they don't really fit, his speech is a little slurred and he can't seem to get his lips to cover them, so what he does instead is the sort of freakish grimace that I think is meant to be a grin.

Whatever drugs he's doing, it's a combo that has him at his most agreeable in the 6 years I've lived here. He's not looking so good, but he's happier (in a manic way) than he's ever been...

Malibu

2009-04-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

Early March at Zuma Beach.

I was still using borrowed boards. Tony Alva loaned me this.

Tere with his mini-Simmons. This board always gets a lot of comments.

Zuma Beach, March 1 2009, 11:00am

2009-04-02T20:32:00.001-07:00

The Salton Sea

2009-03-31T07:40:00.000-07:00

Rogues & Radicals

2009-03-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

My friend and surfing buddy Tere Karabatos is doing a show (presented by Tony Alva) in the Alva skate shop this Saturday, 6pm - 10pm. Tere's work is encaustic painting, which has its roots in ancient Greek religious art, only his is applied to more modern icons and iconography -- a series of broken down and halftoned images of surf, skate and punk icons...one of which is based on a photo I took of Henry Rollins with Black Flag back in 1983.

Rogues & Radicals
Tere Karabatos & Tony Alva
w/ DJ Al G.
Saturday march 18 6 - 10pm at Alva Los Angeles
1086 South Fairfax Ave, LA CA 90019
323.954.7295

Zuma March 21 2009

2009-03-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

This week's beach update splits between two weekends. The idea here is to try to convey what this experience is like for me...which is not about a bunch of macho young man's stuff in which one tames a wave and conquers nature and engages in Xtreme anything...it's more about the fact that you cannot conquer nature, you cannot will the ocean to do anything, it's not listening to you and really doesn't even know you're there. it's about some sort of sense of one-ness with the whole thing. It's sort of easy to get that feeling of serene awe when you are sitting on a board in the ocean with the dolphins swimming not so far beyond you, storm clouds building over the mountains...

It's like the Buddhist mindfulness/Vipasanna meditation, which is a meditation not of blissed out, what's-up-with-my-naval escapism, but of focus, concentration on specific aspects of the immediate here-and-now.

My board, Zuma, March 14, 2009

Tere, Zuma, March 21, 2009

Ninja Mag

2009-03-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

Ninja Mag is a very cool French magazine that just published a small set of my old Crotch Rot shots. For those of you who are not in the know about such things, Crotch Rot were Austin hardcore teen sensations circa 1984. Drummer Felix, (who was about 14 in this shot) went on to play with DRI. You can check out Ninja Magazine (and download copies in pdf form) at www.ninja-mag.com

Crotch Rot at the Ritz, Austin Tx circa 1984

Zuma Beach, March 15, 8am

2009-03-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

Zuma Beach, March 15, at about 8am

My board - a 6'10" funboard, made by a UK company named after the Welsh shaper, Zuma Beach, March 15, at about 8am

Zuma, March 2009

2009-03-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

Zuma Beach, March 1, 8am

2009-03-02T21:29:00.000-08:00

Sunday morning, 8am, Zuma Beach. Perhaps it was the time of day, perhaps the time of year...but I don't remember it ever looking more beautiful. Water flat and glassy past the break; coming down the canyon the ocean looked like a lake.

Zuma FOOD sign

Huntington Beach, Feb 2009

This Year's Theme

2009-02-23T07:39:00.001-08:00

Every year has a theme, it seems. Last year's was obvious: the election, and with it, inner city blues. This year the theme is likely gonna be the beach.

The rains have finally let up, or at least took a break. Went down to Huntington Beach Saturday am to surf. This is a shot from two years ago, up at Zuma:

Meditation on Death

2009-02-15T19:23:00.000-08:00

"Since death alone is certain & the time of death is uncertain, what should I do?"

A meditation in three parts. The first: the final result of birth is death. There has never been an exception to this. The miraculous organism that is a sentient being, formed out of an inconceivable number of interdependent parts, a delicate balance that changes with each heart beat; I witness my own aging.

the time of death uncertain...Anything can happen. Statistics are just statistics. I will die. You will die. But neither of us know when.

What should I do?There's not really a direct answer to that question. This could be the "what is the meaning of life?" question. Maybe it means we need to examine our attachments to almost all those things we are taught to attach to: physical health, financial independence, perhaps the striving to make a name for ourselves or find the perfect partner...worldly possession can't help. Relatives and friends can neither prevent death nor make the journey with us.

The idea is to stop taking life for granted, to recognize its value and maybe be jolted awake to the sensuality of existence. Every breath is an intake of life.

Impermanence. The death of someone upsets the illusion of permanence we strive to sustain.

This is the basis of a Buddhist meditation. I'm not there yet. To me, these thoughts -- parts one and two of the meditation -- are still too frightening and morbid, and so I cannot yet get past them to part 3.

Last Saturday I took one of my trips out to the Salton Sea. I never really know what I'll find in myself every time I go out there. What it always comes down to is whether it feels alive or dead, and how I respond. And then I returned to learn the next morning that an old, old friend had died.

Just South of Mecca

2009-02-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

“Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and cannot be found.”

Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost persons and things, has his own trailer park, just south of Mecca.

I’d guess a person living in the Saint Anthony Trailer Park is indeed lost, at least to the rest of the world, as is the case with pretty much everything near the Salton Sea.

North Shore, Salton Sea.

Ugly

2009-02-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

To master this vision of ugliness, people acted it out. Today, after more than [three decades] of punk style, when a purple and green Mohawk on the head of a suburban American teenager only begs the question of how early he or she has to get up to fix his or her hair in time for school, it’s hard to remember just how ugly the first punks were.

They were ugly. There were no mediations. A ten-inch safety pink cutting through a lower lip into a swastika tattooed onto a cheek was not a fashion statement; a fan forcing a finger down his throat, vomiting into his hands, then hurling the spew at the people on stage was spreading disease. An inch-thick nimbus of black mascara suggested death before it suggested anything else. The punks were not just pretty people, like the Slits or bassist Gaye of the Adverts, who made themselves ugly. They were fat, anorexic, pockmarked, acned, stuttering, crippled, scarred, and damaged, and what their new decorations underlined was the failure already engraved in their faces.
(Greil Marcus, Lipstick Taces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1989, pp 73 - 74)

Instructions

2009-01-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

Complicated delivery instructions on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park

Freedom, part 1.

2008-12-31T12:33:00.000-08:00

Freedom is never absolute; it is always relative to something else: freedom from constraints, freedom to act, freedom for others. The former prisoner is still constrained by the laws of society, the resources available to him, the limits of his culture, knowledge, and skills, and ultimately the state of his body and the laws of nature.

Similarly, the freedom of awakening is a relative freedom from the constraints of self-centered confusion and turmoil, from the craving for a fixed identity, from the compulsion to contrive a perfect situation, from identification with preconceived opinions, and from the anguish that originates in such attachments. (Freedom Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor, pp 93-94, 1997)

The Fence

2008-11-29T10:52:00.000-08:00

When my friend got married, he decided he wanted more privacy, so he built a large wooden fence between his place and the place next door. What he didn't realize (or maybe he didn't care) is that this gave his elderly Asian neighbors more privacy too.

While Brian and Julie are relaxing privately in their new hot tub, the elderly Asians are on the other side of the fence, pissing in their driveway.

Maybe it's the sound of bubbling water that entices them. Before the hot tub went in, B & J had a little bubbling Buddha fountain.

Grandma exits the house, hikes up her dress, squats and pisses in the driveway. Grandpa comes out a few minutes later and pees against the fence.

It seems to me they were peeing in the driving around this time last year, too. Maybe it's a seasonal thing.

I'm not sure I'll miss looking out the window and seeing this sort of thing when I move next week. The new pad is pretty much just up the hill, all surrounded by trees, a view of a different kind of nature. I won't be in the ghetto anymore.

There are things I like about my ghetto, things I'll miss. There's always something going on down here in the flats. But I don't think I will miss witnessing so much of humanity pissing and shitting in driveways, at bus stops, in alleys. I think I'm taking a step up, visual standard-of-living wise.

Gilbert doesn't want me to vote NO on Prop 8

2008-10-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

Today I got a handwritten letter from Gilbert Torgason in Glendale.

What Gilbert is worried about is that I might vote No on Proposition 8, which means voting against stripping people of their constitutional rights. (Not being a conservative but rather a progressive, I am interested in preserving our constitutional rights as well as the environment and a bunch of other stuff)...

Gilbert is afraid that a vote against proposition 8 (a vote against stripping gays and lesbians of the constitutional rights that only straight folks should have) is a vote against things like freedom of speech (since hate speech directed at gays is hate speech, not free speech, as long as we are deprived of our freedom to deny people their freedom), and a vote against freedom of religion when the foundation of that religion is God hates fags. Of course he phrases it all a bit more delicately than I am phrasing it.

I'm touched that Gilbert took the time to write me this handwritten note, even though I have no idea who he is or how he got my address.

But he can shove it up his ass.

I'm voting NO on prop 8.

Vote. Eat. Sweet Like Pie.

2008-10-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

Fascist Fargo Femme Fatales

2008-10-21T07:41:00.001-07:00

It's starting to look a lot like the leader of America's neofascist party is going to be an telegenic woman with a Fargo accent. Here is Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) on MSNBC’s “Hardball” Friday making the remarks that Colin Powell found so alarming. She says that Barack Obama may have “anti-American views” and that it needs to be determined which members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.”

Mimi

2008-10-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Summer seems to be ending...the water's still gonna be warm for a week, maybe two.

The election is a month away.

Now that the McCain campaign is imploding and the prospect of his election seems a little more distant, things aren't so frightening and Sarah Palin's good for a few laughs. I hope she gets appointed to some minor position so we can still hear her fumble around in that weird Fargo accent.

I haven't much to say and I am kinda happy about that. Existential angst seems awfully pointless when banks are failing (mine did) and 90 year old ladies in the Midwest are attempting suicide to avoid being evicted in foreclosure.

Darn right.

I'm kinda over my apartment. I've lived here 6 years. The building has become overrun by folks who are a bit more desperate than I'd like to have surrounding me, especially as I am feeling considerably less desperate than I have the past 40 some odd years...and I'm good with that.

I'm done with the tenement thing. Tenement has lost its luster.

Last Saturday we had movie-set fog, the stuff that swirls around your ankles as it moves down the street. Every other day had been hot and sunny. Zuma beach was the first place heading up PCH that offered any hazy sun. Here are some shots from there and a coupla others tossed in for good measure.

You betcha.

Color

2008-07-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've never really explored color before. Black and white served my purposes better, because when all elements and objects have a uniform visual weight in monochrome, it becomes easier to explore the relationships (or lack thereof) between elements/objects in a scene or situation.

That's not so interesting to me right now. I wanna see stuff strut like a peacock.

Tulare County, part 2

2008-07-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

More from Tulare County, this time a rare set in color. For those of you who don't already know, after a brief flirtation with digital photography a few years ago, I concluded that for my purposes it is worthless: flat, electronic, devoid of texture and obviously artificial; qualities especially ill suited to a place like this.

1986

2008-07-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

1986-ish. Punk was dead, unless you were a rich kid in the OC, in which case I have no idea what it was you were pissed off about. I'd been doing some work with one of those bands. The drummer went to USC. His dad was really rich, he had a hot girlfriend, and a bigwheel truck. The singer was going to Pepperdine. His dad was filthy rich, he girlfriend was super hot, and his truck had even bigger wheels. Were they angry because their girlfriends were too hot, or because their parents were too rich, or maybe because the wheels on their trucks were too big? I coulda helped 'em out with some of that.

Me and my old punk pals were in limbo. We were all involved in the underground, but these were the days of dynasty and Miami Vice. Stuff was happening. MTV was new and it favored us. LA has no shortage of ostentatious displays of wealth. It's all right there and in your face; you can't help but want to grab a chunk of it for your own. If those tacky fuckers can make it, so can we – after all, they are just white trash with money. We were in our mid 20s, and there seemed to be a lot of promise and potential if you had a decent hustle and weren't afraid to tell lies. At the same time we were still a bunch of fucked up punk kids, we were still doing way too many drugs and not exactly living responsible lives, but hey, there was no Hep-C, Aids was still for gays and Haitians…there wasn't yet an awareness of the consequences of our lifestyles...life was still a party.

My days and nights consisted of hanging out at the beach, going to clubs – mostly Rajis, the Scream, White Trash a Gogo, but also the Music Machine, Club Lingerie, The Palomino, the Anti Club…getting drunk, getting loaded, getting laid, 7 days a week, endless summer.

Here's some old shots I just found, from '86, and a typical story from the same year.

Addison asked for a ride down to Long Beach to pick up his car. I'd been out at the Scream the night before and didn't get home until about 5am. The night had been a modest success and I was nauseous with a sour hangover.

He said it wouldn't take long.

Venice Beach

Addison had a beautiful late 50s Thunderbird convertible he'd inherited from his grandmother when she died. Just about everything he owned he'd either inherited from her or had won on a TV game show. Consequently we had a lot of kitchen appliances.

I'd noticed the Thunderbird had been missing for about two months, but never asked. I wondered, too, about the Japanese hair-metal bass guitar that had turned up in the living room right around the time the car disappeared. Nobody in the house played bass.

I think her name is Amy. She was from Yorba Linda, down where they have the Nixon Library. This was in Venice Beach? State? It looks so different now.

Addison explained it all while we drove down to Long Beach. See, his friends had arrived 2 months back from Florida, and everyone knows how much people from Miami like coke, so Addison reckoned he'd use his car as collateral on a coke deal, figuring his Miami friends would buy it from him and he'd turn a nice profit. For some reason the dealer tossed in a Japanese bass guitar.

What Addison didn't figure on was that all the coke in LA probably came from Miami in the first place, where it was cheaper, and his buddies brought their own supply hoping to sell some to him. Between them, they ended up with way more coke than anyone had intended or imagined, but they did it all anyhow and everyone had a great time despite nobody turning a profit, and when it was all done Addison had a cheap Japanese bass guitar and the dealer had his grandmother's vintage T-Bird.

It looked as though the T-Bird was history, but Addison managed to score some cash on a record deal for a hair-metal band he was managing, and now we were driving down to the LBC to get his grandma's car back.

We spent a few hours in Long Beach at his step-sister Julie's place. Julie's claim to fame (and to her it really was a claim to fame) was having once been Brett Michaels from Poison's dealer back before Poison made it big on MTV. She still sold drugs on occasion to Brett Michaels, and this, to her, made life worth living.

Addison's sister became our roommate later on. Amy was her friend she was trying to set me up with. This is Julie at either Venice or State.

Julie's supplier was also named Brett. He dealt in quantity, so he was the guy with Addison's car. Julie told us she'd been trying to page him all evening but he hadn't gotten back to her.

We waited around in her tiny bachelorette apartment. She played some Poison records. Some folks came buy looking to cop but she was out. We shared a six-pack. She kept paging Brett.

Addison was getting anxious. Julie suggested we drive down to Irvine and look for the car. She'd seen it down there and was pretty sure she could find it again.

Irvine is not an easy place to find stuff in. It's an entirely artificial, planned community built almost entirely in the mid-to-late 70s. I remember my ex bringing back a brochure about this new city. She wanted to get out of Hollywood and all the newness appealed to her.

At the time this story happened I was "dating" a girl named Liz, from Torrance. Venice Beach.

The guy who built Irvine claims to have modeled it after Atlantis, which seems an odd and probably bad idea since Atlantis is a lost city buried under water someplace. His design consists of a bunch of nearly identical sub-Irvines which all meld into a larger Irvine. Each sub-Irvine has a specific number of churches, a specific number of schools, and a specific number of stores, not to mention a specific number of houses of about 4 specific styles, all evenly spaced. It's very hard if not impossible to tell when you've gone from one sub-Irvine to the next. To make matters worse, the streets are all circular, and have the sort of names popular with prefab cities built in the 70s: Quail Drive, Quail Road, Quail Street, Quail Blvd, Quail Lane, Dove Drive, Dove Road, Dove Street, Dove Blvd, Dove Lane…The point of it all is anonymity through uniformity.

This makes it not an easy city to find anything in.

We drove in circles for hours, up and down identical streets, looking for the T-Bird ("I recognize that house – I think it's just around the corner"), stopping every half an hour or so to page Brett from a payphone. We were the only people on the streets, and had to hide in the shadows near each payphone whenever the cops drove by.

Around 4 in the morning we finally gave up. Julie remained convinced it was just around the corner, but Addison was getting depressed and agitated and my hangover was not something I could deal with much longer.

Some weird 80s dude checking us out in Venice. No doubt there were chicks in the car.

Addison needed something to calm him down. Julie paged a few more people. All she could find was a friend of hers with some pot. We headed back to Long Beach.

Julie's friend came out to the car. She was cute in a sort of hard, thin-lipped, white-trash way. Walmart sexy. She was about 23 years old, hostile, aggressive, and all about sex. She was missing all her teeth.

We didn't have any money. She said she'd give it to us if Addison would let her suck his cock. Addison was spectacularly inept with women and as a consequence hadn't been laid in nearly 2 years. Toothless or not, this was an extraordinary opportunity for him. I was stunned when he got angry and turned her down.

Addison and the toothless girl started screaming at each other. The toothless girl stormed back into her apartment complex. Julie ran after her. After about 10 minutes Julie came back with a bag of pot. She tossed it in Addison's lap. "You owe me," she said.

We dropped Julie back at her pad and drove back to Hollywood, pulling into the driveway just as the sun rose on Monday morning.

Not sure which beach. You won't find these dunes or the grass anymore. There's probably a parking lot there instead.

Mixed Use

2008-05-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Mixed use: night time in Los Angeles.

Tulare County

2008-05-01T22:37:00.000-07:00

Saturday. New tires on the truck, and then a trip up the 99 to Earlimart, Tulare County: farms, sharecropper shacks, RV parks, discarded panties, lost coffee shops, dead snakes in the middle of the road.

Did You Have a Good Time Today?

2008-04-11T19:46:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I was shooting a lot of “erotic themed” stuff. The idea was not to make stuff I thought was erotic but to present things dealing with eroticism. Problem was that I didn’t frame it as explicit documentary and consequently nobody tried to think about what they were seeing. They just tried to jerk off to it.

Here’s a video from the end of that short lived period, featuring transexual Mistress and panty-hose encasement specialist/fetishist Yasmin Ling tickling a panty-hose encased Lena Ramon. It’s always been a favorite of mine because it’s got a whole lot of fetishes rolled into one, and I don’t necessarily understand any of them, except from an aesthetic point of view.

Enjoy

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

2008-03-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

I’m sifting through a pile of audio I’ve collected over the past couple of years for the film I’m working on.

Right now I’m listening to a bunch of drug stories.

They are nearly impossible to form into any sort of narrative. They ramble.

Every drug story is basically the same. It begins when the person runs out of drugs and absolutely positively has to get some more. The person then engages in some hapless activity or activities that inevitably meet four criteria:

1). illegal.
2). humiliating or debasing.
3). absolutely moronic.
4). dangerous.

Once this is done, they have enough money to cop and get them through until at least the afternoon, maybe even the next day.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Daily cycle.

The stories are always delightfully absurd…at least to someone whose been there and doesn’t find it even necessary to suspend disbelief…but they don’t make for good narrative because they never really end. They just repeat over and over and over again.

And while that existence is really very fundamentally linear, the narration rambles. You would think that after endless repetition an addict would get it down to a system, but addicts are sort pathologically incapable of linear, logical behavior. If they were, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t be addicts.

They also ramble because they really have no beginning and they really have no end. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Here’s a typical story. This girl is living in her rundown apartment with her sort of boyfriend. Her ex fiance (it wasn’t so long ago she had it going on; it wasn’t so long ago the ex fiance had it going on) shows up in a truck he stole from his brother-in-law, kicks in the door, breaks all the windows and beats everybody up. Then he leaves. The cops are on their way. The girl has managed to misplace an eightball and the sort of boyfriend is absconding from parole so they flee to the first place they can think of: their dealer, who lives in a motel near Dodger Stadium. The dealer is sympathetic to their story and replaces her eightball, free of charge.

The fiance knows he’ll find them at the dealers and shows up at the motel soon after. He’s not sure which room the girl, her parolee boyfriend who now has several broken ribs and is covered in blood, the dealer, and their Armenian hooker friend Kiki are all staying in so he starts pounding on all the doors. When he started heading to the motel he intended only to do more beating. Then he realized that they were with the dealer. He changed his mind about beating people up. He just wants some crack.

The dealer decides he is going to kill him and a tense scene occurs in the parking lot with the dealer holding a gun to the ex fiance’s head. Even though he has a gun to his head and is driving a stolen car the ex-fiance won’t leave until someone gives him some crack. Once he gets the crack he drives off.

Half an hour later he returns and pounds on the girl’s door. He wants to smoke some crack with her and with her sort of boyfriend who he beat half to death a couple of hours earlier. She thinks this is a bad idea. A fight ensues.

The manager of the motel never sleeps and is watching all of this unfold on the many security camera monitors. He never calls the cops. Having cops around is bad for business. The ex fiance gets more crack and he heads back to Orange County in the truck he stole from his brother-in-law.

Repeat Repeat Repeat.

This is actually kind of an explosive story. It begins loudly enough in what was only months ago a nice apartment in what still is a nice apartment complex in Los Feliz. The neighbors probably aren’t used to this sort of stuff and don’t really know what to do. They are yuppies who have mid-level jobs in show biz. They also don’t know what to do when the girl, her absconding-from-parole sort-of boyfriend, the dealer, who has somehow managed to break his leg, and Kiki the Armenian hooker all move back in a few weeks later, even though the place has no windows and no door. Surely they suspect something is amiss and maybe even are bothered by it ’cause it’s probably fucking with their yuppie tranquility.

Maybe they decide it might be good material for a screenplay.

Then there’s the business in the parking lot of the stadium way: a cracked out maniac pulling up in a stolen truck (what other kind of truck could it be besides stolen?) and starts pounding on everyone’s doors. It’s 4 in the morning but no cops are called. Then there’s the business with the guy having a gun to his head. That’s followed by the business of the guy returning in the stolen truck and banging on more doors. Still, no cops are called.

Bad for business.

Cops were called to the first scene, and presumably arrived to find an empty apartment in shambles with the windows smashed and the door kicked in…obviously a drug scene (I’d been in that apartment. Trust me. It was a drug scene). Maybe they even found the misplaced eightball. But no cop did a “note to self: Keep an eye on this place”…

Repeat Repeat Repeat.

There’s a secondary cast of characters who all do their best to try and ignore the obvious. Example: the brother-in-law in Orange County. The ex fiance had been doing really well and was a successful guy and then in the course of a year tops, everything goes down the toilet. And he looses about 60 lbs. And he is agitated all the time. And he doesn’t sleep for days on end. And stuff is always being stolen. “Gee, what do you think is wrong with Jerry?” “I think he’s upset over the breakup.” “Maybe there’s a job for him on your construction site” Brother-in-law gives the guy a construction job. Week goes by. One day the guy doesn’t show up for work. That same day a bunch of tools are discovered missing from the job site. Guy shows up 4 days later looking like he’s been on a crack binge. Repeat Repeat Repeat. “Gee it must be those crackheads” Read: “Those OTHER crackheads. The imaginary ones. Not my wife’s little brother who denies he’s a crackhead”.

The ex fiance sells the truck for crack. The brother-in-law reluctantly fires him. Eventually he hires him back.

Repeat Repeat Repeat.

The lady behind me in line at the corner market had two black eyes. There was a really cute white rasta girl at the lavanderia. I think she’s new to the neighborhood. I just did my almost daily run around the reservoir. I will be clean 11 years on April Fools Day. I am now going to listen to more crackhead stories and see how I might edit this audio into something with narrative. I’m glad I only need to listen.

Liberty

2008-02-17T23:19:00.000-08:00

Liberty

On Valentine's day, the Senate approved a prohibition on the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill. The Senate voted 51-45, largely along partisan lines. (Apparently torture is a conservative value).

Presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, himself once a victim of torture and an outspoken critic of it, voted against the bill.

When asked about this during a CNN interview, McCain explained that he voted against the ban on torture by talking in great length about what a terrible thing torture is, and reiterating the reasons why it should never be used, sentiments I and many others happen to agree with...In other words, he explained why he should have voted for the bill banning torture...but he voted AGAINST it.

One of the problems with the straight talk express is that it's just talk.

Liberty no. 2

You would think voting in favor of torture as a means of pandering for votes while being an outspoken critic of torture would cause a moral and ethical dilemma, but one of the things we've learned about politics, especially on the right, is that there are no morals or ethics.

USA, Inc.

One would think that this would make a difference to people. It probably would if they cared to know it, but Americans have an unhealthy distrust of knowledge. We are, for reasons I cannot begin to understand, willfully stupid, ignorant by choice.

There's an article about that in Saturday's New York Times. It's titled Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?. I'm gonna excerpt from it here.

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”...

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture...Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge...

Now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

The author of seven other books, [Ms. Jacoby] first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits...

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

Unbeatable Prices

A major part of John McCain's economic policy is to make permanent the Bush tax cuts he vehemently spoke out and voted against (and it is indicative of American ignorance and desire for instant gratification that we should opt for a $200 tax refund in exchange for lower wages and/or loss of jobs, foreclosure on our mortgages, a tripling of prices at the gas pump and the resultant increase in the cost of food and consumer goods, etc., even when the math clearly shows considerably less money in the bank account after the deal is done). McCain could explain away this contradiction as a function of time: he is human, after all, and humans change their minds and/or make mistakes, although you'll never hear a politician admit that. There is no way to explain voting for torture and then speaking out against torture in the same day, unless, of course, McCain were to confess to being a unethical hypocrite who will sell out his principles for a vote, (provided, of course, that he even has principles).

Hope

No hope.

Hate or Hope. Past or Future. Your Choice.

2008-02-10T19:17:00.000-08:00

This is what hate looks like:

Hate comes from fear. It is not always so crudely expressed as in these photos, but hate is hate no matter how sophisticated the expression. A politics that depends upon fear to stir up votes and consolidate power ultimately brings us this:

It's a politics that depends on the eradication of hope.

The Republican Party utilizes a carrot-and-stick approach in the desperate attempt to retain power. The Republican carrot is nostalgia. The stick is fear. The fear that results in the hatred depicted above, and a nostalgic yearning to return to an idealized past that never was. Even if it were desirable (and it's not), it's an impossibility. There is no way back machine. The only direction you can move in time is forward.

The Republicans' is not a conservative platform but a reactionary one. Reactionary noun: A person who vehemently, often fanatically opposes progress and favors return to a previous condition. adjective: Clinging to obsolete ideas.

Samples of the results of Reaganonimics so championed by John McCain:

We democrats need to remind ourselves not to engage in nostalgia. We cannot roll back the clock to Bill Clinton's presidency. All that we're likely to recapture of it is the next Newt Gingrich and the divisiveness that led to impeachment hearings over a blowjob.

We need to focus on where we go from here and not how do we get back to a time before all this happened.

My poor, naive, misguided 8 year-old-neice who doesn't know any better has this sign hanging above her door.

I think perhaps our children are telling us what they want from the world. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we listened to their ideas rather than those of some crinkly old war mongerer? Sure, McCain has plenty more experience than my 8-year-old-neice...but my 8-year-old-neice has better ideas.

I am of the opinion that spiritual principals cannot be applied selectively. Spiritual principals are not conditional statements.

There's the bit in the 10 Commandments that says "Love thy Neighbor". It's not qualified in any way. It doesn't say "Love the Neighbor provided thy neighbor is white, heterosexual and espouses conservative values". It's unequivocal.

I also suspect the word neighbor is not meant to be taken literally. I don't imagine it means "Love thy Neighbor but fuck the guy two doors down or all them n*ggers in the 'hood or those goddamn illegals." And, ya know, it wasn't written for Americans either. There were no Americans to write it for three thousand years ago.

I suspect it was meant for all of humanity.

Here's what that commandment doesn't say: "Hate thy neighbor, Fear thy Neighbor, Deport thy Neighbor."

Here's something else, too: If a spiritual principal is not conditional, it cannot be conditioned upon reciprocation. It doesn't say "Love thy Neighbor provided thy Neighbor loves you back." If your neighbor hates your ass, let that be his problem. Your job is still to love him. That doesn't mean you need to like him. Love is not like to the nth degree. In fact it's completely unrelated.

Will electing John McCain who preaches 100 years more unjust and unjustifiable war in Iraq and an economic policy that ensures more people will live in poverty and despair increase hate? Yes. These are politics of fear. Will electing Barack Obama eliminate hate? No. But of the choices offered us, it is by far the largest step in the right direction.

There is NO excuse for apathy.

My Obama Neighborhood

2008-02-07T12:27:00.001-08:00

This is the stretch up and down Sunset Blvd 3 block in either direction from my apartment on Super Tuesday. My polling place was 3 blocks away at the Sleep EZ mattress store. Surrounded by mattresses were 6 polling booths -- 4 Democrat, with lines in front of 'em, and 2 Republican, which were empty. I understand this story was repeated all over this part of town.

Between my polling station at Sleep EZ and my work 5 blocks away were two other polling stations -- one in the alley behind the Sumi Ink Club studio and another 2 blocks further down and across the street in the Salvation Army hospice and women's shelter.

My neighborhood is traditionally a Hispanic neighborhood although it has become rather hipster infested and the houses on my side of Sunset are not cheap. Census data has it 62.5% Latino, median income $28,651, 28% below the poverty line. Unemployment is at 7% (that would probably be the hipster musicians).

Barack Obama has not been polling well with Latinos, which is why Hillary won by the margins she did here in So Cali. Nevertheless, Echo Park seems very much like an Obama neighborhood. There are Latinos for Obama posters everywhere. I stopped to take a shot of the Hope poster on the electrical box outside the Lavanderia, and the burly Mexican guy who runs it came out and told me that it was better from the other side where the door handle didn't chop off the "H" in hope. All four sides of the box had the Obama poster; he'd proudly festooned his corner of Sunset and Coronado.

The guy at the fish taco joint with the Latinos for Obama poster behind the register wouldn't take my money when I tried to pay for my tacos because I was wearing my Obama button and told him I was photographing all the Obama stuff I could find in the neighborhood that day.

The only Hillary sign I spotted was a xerox flyer on a lamppost outside the liquor store reminding us that she'd voted for the war. The next lamppost down, next to the Escrow sign, reminded us that Obama didn't.

Here are a couple of important stats: about 71% of Obama voters indicate they'd be happy to vote for Clinton, and vice versa. And Obama and Clinton each won about 5 million votes yesterday. John McCain, who basically swept the Republican primaries, won about 3 million votes. The Democrats are voting in record numbers this year. That is a great thing.

The fact that Hillary polls so much better with Latinos than Obama is a bit disturbing if you are an Obama supporter because McCain also polls well with Latinos (he wants to recruit more for his proposed 100 year war in Iraq). But Obama handily won a number of traditionally red states yesterday, states that used to be democrat in the pre Reagan days, and the Democrats need those states to win a general election. Obama also does really well with independants, as does McCain, and Hillary does not. The independent voters have decided the last few elections, and they've picked Bush.

Whether it's Barack or Hillary, the next administration is going to have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Super Tuesday: Yes We Can

2008-02-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow we've got a chance to help elect the first African American President, which would make history, or to select the first female Presidential Candidate (and another old white guy for President), which would make history on a much smaller scale.

Tomorrow we've got a chance to put a Democrat in the White House, or not.

Now it's time to make a pragmatic decision as much as an emotional one.

I'm lazy, it's late, Brad Listi says it nicely in his blog and so I'll save myself some trouble and just quote him:

"Do you want the Dems to win in November?

If so, vote Obama.

Think about it for a second:

Hillary polarizes. Big time.

Obama does not.

Hillary wins the nomination, and what happens? She pulls the Democrats, the dyed-in-the-wool Dems, but who else?

Independents? Maybe some.

But McCain does very well with Independents. Indies are his bread and butter.

Republicans are fractured right now, and about the only thing that can unify them is the prospect of another eight years of Clinton. A Hillary candidacy will send the Republicans rallying around McCain, and McCain will defeat Hillary in the battle for Independent voters.

Obama is a true phenomenon, and the Dems would be foolish to miss the opportunity to nominate him. You can't manufacture this kind of thing. He is a once-in-a-generation candidate, and he is hugely, hugely popular among Democrats, Independents, and, yes, some Republicans.

Obama is the only candidate----the only candidate----with the chance of winning a landslide in the general election.

He can do it. We just need to believe it, and vote for him, and turn the page."

***************************************************************

Remember the last time a bunch of ya'll voted with your hearts and picked Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore? Gore won the popular election by a tiny enough margin that Bush was able to fudge it in Florida and take the electoral college. If 1/10 of those folks who voted for Nader in Florida had voted for Gore, we wouldn't have war in Iraq. We wouldn't have a mortgage crisis and the largest deficit IN HISTORY. We wouldn't have the right wing supreme court we now have, itchin' to take away a woman's right to choose. We wouldn't be torturing a bunch of people in Guantanemo.

If you wanna have a woman lose to McCain just so you can say "finally, we nominated a woman", like nominating a woman at the expense of Roe vs Wade is a worthwhile trade off...maybe ya'll should think again.

I'd be happy to see either Hillary or Barack in the White House. I also believe the only one who stands a chance in the general election is Barack. I would vote for the homeless guy on the corner over McCain. At least if you give him a beer he'll stay out of trouble.

LUST 4 LACE

2008-01-29T23:35:00.001-08:00

I don't trot out the dirty pictures much any more. No matter what sort of statement I tried to make, if a photo has nudity it seems the audience feels obligated to try and jerk off to it, and I need a better reason than befuddling a bunch of would-be masturbators.

Lust 4 Lace is a good reason. Yeah, it's dirty pictures night as LACE resumes their legendary Valentine's Day Party, but it's dirty pictures night in the place that brought us Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and has been at the forefront of new art here in LA.

Three of my short films will be part of a series curated by Margie Schnibbe (aka Vena Virago of Vivid.alt fame) and David Burns, and featuring films by Buck Angel, Skip Arnold, Franco Castilla, Charong Chow, Tyler Hubby, Selene Luna, Eon McKai, and a host of others.

My three films are "Hello" which features a naked, tattooed, very pregnant and somewhat confused girl doing pretty much nothing (it's minimalist porn), "A Good Time" which features a panty-hose encased woman being tickled by her transexual mistress, and, finally, "the Pig", which provoked one disturbed would-be masturbator to write "This is disgusting. Either that or it's an art film" and another happier one to comment "Finally! David Lynch has made a gay porn!"

From the press release:
Organized by artists David Burns and Margie Schnibbe (aka Vena Virago) with Peter Bolton & Carla Hart, Lenora Claire, Chad Clark, Robert Crouch and Christine Nichols, Lust 4 LACE celebrates the grand tradition of years past and all manner of delightful debauchery by creating a night featuring explicit, naked, juicy, tasty, slippery, slimy, crunchy, gooey, sexy, voyeuristic, fetishistic live action animated narrative squishy hand-made video, live art and musical performance (DJ sets by John Tejada, Henry Self and Robert Crouch), not to mention kinky crafts with JP Craft Captain sponsored by Babeland

ABOUT LACE
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), a nonprofit contemporary art center located in the heart of Hollywood, is internationally recognized as a pioneer among art institutions. For three decades and counting. LACE has curated and produced art and events that inspire the public imagination and engage with timely issues that shape local and global life. www.welcometolace.org

Additional support for LACE and its programs comes from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Getty Foundation, Jockey Hollow Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Morris Family Foundation, Stone Brewing Co., and the members of LACE.

Ya'll come down and enjoy the smut! It'll be a great way to celebrate Barack Obama's victory in next week's primary!

The neighborhood, pt 4: On the Corner

2008-01-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

The homeless fat guy has been on the corner just about as long as I've lived here. He's mellowed some over the years, which is a good thing, 'cause he was really aggressive at first, and that was a drag.

The homeless girl has been on the corner just about as long, and at some point over the years they became a couple. Other homeless people come and go. Some, like Tony Pony, die. Others end up in jail, or somehow move on.

They've stayed. They look after the corner. It's their home. They keep it clean. He sweeps it every morning. They've got their milk crates they sit on, and after he's finished sweeping the corner he reads the paper. At night he listens to ball games on the radio.

She's been drinking a lot more than usual this past year. She's pretty much a mess, even by her standards. He looks after her.

She disappeared in November. I asked him if she was okay. He was really worried. He'd called the jail (she had a couple of open container warrants) and the hospital, but no word. It seemed to throw off the whole dynamic of the corner. There were less homeless than before, but there seemed like more because the group was busted up and it was every man/woman for themselves.

And then after about a week he told me he'd gotten word she was living (and drinking) in an alley somewhere down by Kaiser. He was glad she was okay but felt like a fool, he said.

Pissing down rain a couple of weeks ago on a Tuesday night. She came into a meeting, sat quietly in the back. When it's over we walk back to the corner. She didn't really want to go there, but she's following me and that's where my apartment is. She said she is from the Carolinas. She's been in and out of meetings for 20 years. She used to have a place out in Highland Park. She said she didn't want to drink that night, but I think she just wanted out of the rain.

She's had it with the fat guy. Yes, he looks after her. Yes, she depends on him to an extent. But while his concern as expressed to me was very genuine, their relationship is pretty fucked. She says when she's trying to sleep, usually on the sidewalk, he keeps her awake all night talking about how big his dick is and rubbing up against her. They got into a fight and he stole her blanket. When it's two o'clock in the morning and they're all alone in their alley, he does not treat her very well at all.

She says there are no shelters or rehabs for her, 'cause she's from out-of-state. That's bullshit, of course. The truth is more likely that she's not really thinking about cleaning up. She'd like a roof over her head, but sobriety is not a price she's willing to pay. So she'll settle for a dry alley where nobody keeps her up all night telling her how big his dick is.

We get to the corner. She ducks into the liquor store. I said good night and continue home.

The next morning she's drinking. The next evening she's gone. The fat guy doesn't seem worried this time. He's still on the corner, says hello every morning. He has a new and better radio.

Hopefully she's found a new corner or an alley someplace where she can pass out drunk every night without getting molested.

It's a cold, wet winter this year. I'm glad I have a home.

Barack rocks my socks

2008-01-04T21:29:00.000-08:00

Finally, a candidate I can vote FOR rather than voting against whatever born-again wingnut the Republicans nominate. Obama led every category of voter, including women. Most importantly though, he brought new voters, young voters, people who are normally (and perhaps justifiably) apathetic about the same old same old. And what an inspiring speech.

Share this, people. And if you haven't, register to vote. There's a link in the sidebar to your right.

New Years Superstitions, karma, & the crabby lady with no chin who always gives me the evil eye

2008-01-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

The corner store opened late today (new years day), and I was the first customer. This pleased Terri, the Armenian lady who runs it and has become a sort of surrogate mother to me. I am one of her favorite people, so my being the first person in the door was a very good omen. However, I was there to buy Theraflu since I've been sick as a dog for the past 4 days, and having your first customer be sick is not such a good omen. So she made me wait until someone else came in and bought something, which was okay since it's beautiful sunny and warm outside and I've barely been out of the house since Friday.

A few minutes later, the crabby-lady-with-no-chin-who-always-gives-me-the-evil-eye came in and bought a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi, and then it was cool to sell me the Theraflu.

What I liked about this exchange was the implication that our lives affect one another in myriad ways. The bigger the city, the greater the sense of disconnection, isolation and insignificance, so an exchange like this that emphasizes the connections between us all becomes a wonderful way for me to start the new year. From Terri's viewpoint, it's superstition that she's adhering to. For me, it's something vaguely eastern about the connections between everything. And for the first time ever (as far as I am aware), the crabby-lady-with-no-chin-who-always-gives-me-the-evil-eye had a beneficial effect, 'cause her appearance allowed me to buy the Theraflu and come back to my apartment where I will probably spend the rest of the day alternating between reading Brad Warner's "Sit Down and Shut Up: punk rock commentaries on Buddha, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye" and Ross McDonald's "The Way Some People Die", both of which, so far, are awesome books.

Texas punk 1983: postcard collection

2007-12-08T16:52:00.000-08:00

Austin Texas, 1983. I was just a kid armed with an Olympus OM-10, taking shots of my friends and my life, which mostly consisted of hanging out, getting drunk and going shows. It was the birth of DIY, a brief explosion that really changed everything and made possible almost all youth culture that was to follow, even though the American punk scene was tiny and deeply underground.

I took some amazing shots back then, and who knew that any of 'em would ever have any legitimate cultural and historical value?

I've printed up a limited edition set of 10 black and white postcards on 4"x6" 14pt UV-coated super-glossy stock, beautifully presented in vellum packaging. Included are shots of Black Flag, the Meat Puppets, the legendary Big Boys, the Offenders (rest in peace Mikey), hardcore teen sensations Crotch Rot (whose 14-yr-old drummer Felix went on to play in DRI)... You can see some of 'em below and buy the set on my site. Click here. The perfect Christmas gift for all you crusty punkers.

Modern Times: Festive, Vibrant Color

2007-12-07T09:15:00.001-08:00

It has recently come to my attention that festive vibrant color is the way to go if one wants to keep current with modern trends. This summer I decided to embark on a stylistic revolution and photograph the world in all its resplendent, multi-colored glory.

Bunny

2007-11-18T17:54:00.000-08:00

Lately I've had this urge to shoot color.

The bunny hood was graciously loaned by JT's Stockroom.

Mikey Offender, RIP

2007-09-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

I just learned my old buddy Mikey Donaldson (aka Mikey Offender) died in his sleep in Barcelona on the 22nd.

Back in my Austin days in the early 80s, Mikey was the bass player for the Offenders, a brilliant and very loud hardcore band w/ a serious metal edge (although we didn't realize it at the time 'cause nobody was listing to metal back then). He also played in MDC (and continued playing for them for the past 20+ years) as well as Sister Double Happiness (Gary Floyd from the Dicks' early 90s SF band).

I attribute much of my hearing loss to those Offenders shows.

I remember hanging with Mikey at his place in Austin guzzling beer while we watched MTV. MTV was just a year or two old back then and they still played nothing but music videos; Michael Jackson's epic monster video had just come out to much fanfare and we were blown away by it. Those were the Toni Basil "Mickey-you're-so-fine-you-blow-my-mind" cheerleader video days & nobody had seen anything like this Michael Jackson stuff -- it even managed to get us punk kids off. They played it over and over and we watched it over and over.

Mikey and I had been in touch sporadically over the years. He contacted me when the Offenders did their reunion back in Austin around 2000 or so, a reunion that was short lived 'cause singer JJ couldn't manage to stay out of trouble and ended up getting thrown in prison the day of their second show. He got in touch again a while later -- I think he was back in SF -- and then a year or so after that -- he was living in Amsterdam. I sent a bunch of old photos to be used on a Dutch or German vinyl (!) reissue of We Must Rebel, the original album cover of which was designed by my girlfriend at the time and I had something to do with putting the record out or getting it distributed. The record label was MDC's R-Radical, which was being handled by a guy named Tabb Rex, a shady record broker here in Hollywood w/ an office he lived out of on Santa Monica & El Centro, right next to the pressing plant. I ended starting my own record label and doing a bunch of stuff with Tabb until his publicist warned me I was getting ripped off big time, which prompted my move out to LA. The publicist who warned me was Johnette Napolitano, later of Concrete Blonde. Tabb went out of business. The pressing plant became Macola Records, a shady record label that specialized in dance like Egyptian Lover and Stacy Q & put out the first west coast rap stuff. Macola was ripping off all their artists and I remember helping a little black guy steal a bunch of his own albums from the back of the plant to sell down at the Gardena Swap Meet. I didn't realize until 15 years later that this was Eazy E and that was the first NWA stuff.

This might sound like a lot of name dropping. It's not. None of those people were names back then. It's indicative of what a heady, intense time it was -- an explosion of what would become major youth/pop culture but was still deeply, deeply underground. The corner of Santa Monica & El Centro was a pretty seedy corner, and none of us there would've ever imagined that any of us or the people we were rubbing shoulders or sharing smokes with were ever gonna become anything more than angry upstarts.

It's all wound up together in a tight but tangled mess, and Mikey was a major part of it all.

These photos are from around 1982/1983, in Austin.

Rest in peace, Mikey.

I was talking to a buddy. We both lived and live these lives that seem full of folks who don't make it. It feels odd to us that the attrition rate amongst us is so high when we basically regard ourselves as really regular Joes.

We agreed it always hits us the hardest when it's someone from the old gang, like Mikey is to me -- guys you were tight with way back when, and while you've kept up with each other, you don't see one another often if at all, and so they remain fixed in our hearts, our minds and our memories the age they were back then, and maybe we remain fixed at that age too in those memories. As the youth and youth's optimism and possibility associated with them goes, a chunk of our own youth and all its promise officially moves into the history drawer. There's the sense, too, that in a finite life, as the past gets bigger, the future necessarily gets smaller and the possibilities narrow, if only due to the growing constraints of lessening time.

A bunch of us used to joke that we'd survived the punk days. Now that bunch is a lot smaller, and having survived is no longer a joke.

Anyhow, Mikey, hold down the fort up there. I imagine all of us will be joining you soon enough.

From Offender's drummer Pat Doyle:

Mikey "Offender" Donaldson passed away in his sleep on September 22 in Barcelona Spain where he had recently relocated from Amsterdam. The cause is unknown at the moment. He was 46. He is survived by his brother Joe Donaldson, sister Marie Donaldson Ward, and sister Sumiko Hakari, all of Killeen, Texas.

Mikey was the bass player for Austin punk band the Offenders from 1978-86. He also recorded bass tracks on MDC's groundbreaker "Millions of Dead Cops" and DRI's "Dealing With It." Mikey also performed regularly with MDC in the early 1980s. He moved to San Francisco in 1986 and went on to play and record with Gary Floyd (Dicks) and Lynn Perko (Imperial Teen) in Sister Double Happiness. After leaving the music scene for ten years or so, Mikey returned to Austin and reunited with the original Offenders line-up for a gig at Emos in March 2002. In 2003 MDC recruited Mikey and their original line-up, recorded a new album, and have been touring all over the world ever since.

Mikey is universally regarded as one of the most innovative and inimitable masters of the bass guitar. He played his Rickenbacker like it was a out-sized rhythm guitar. Taking cues from Jack Bruce and Lemmy, Mikey pioneered an agressive speed-picking style and liberal employment of bass chords that few have been able to emulate in the past 20 years. He will be sorely missed, certainly in Austin and his hometown of Killeen, but also across the globe. A memorial celebration in Austin is pending and the date will be announced soon.

Xing

2007-09-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

Xing. (pronounced ching): One of the Twelve Symbols of Sovereignty, the constellation of three stars is a symbol of the cosmic universe. The universe, as personified by the Emperor, is an unending source of pardon and love.

More information. Dockweiler Bluffs.

Permit required.

Xing.

Spectators.

Freedom Lights the Way

Exit

Michael Brewster @ AFH

2007-08-29T08:03:00.001-07:00

"I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, to believe in something which has no form and no color - something which exists before all forms and colors appear."
-Shunryu Suzuki

Think about it. The words are carefully chosen.

When someone says "I believe in nothing" we generally (mis)understand them to mean that they don't believe in anything,(and the way people generally misspeak, that probably is what they mean). But Suzuki does believe in something, which he makes explicitly clear in the second sentence: something that exists before all forms and colors appear. To him, nothing is a thing of great substance. Indeed it must be -- quite independent of Zen, physicists have determined that the universe originated from this same sort of nothing.

Standing on the sidewalk one Tuesday evening, Paul McLean asks me "Is it possible to photograph sound?"

My answer is no. I can photograph the effects of sound, or a visual interpretation/representation of sound, but not sound itself.

Paul accepts my answer and asks me to try anyhow.

Acoustic sculptor Michael Brewster came to Art For Humans Gallery the following evening. I am told that Michael is one of the unsung OGs of the Conceptual Art movement from the late 1960s. What he does, Paul explains, (as best I remember his explanation, which didn't make much sense to me at the time and so I might remember the explanation wrong), is he tunes a room, figures out the best frequency for it and then plays that frequency as a continuous tone.

This is indeed what he does. That is to say, those are the technical details of what he does that Wednesday evening, and Michael is not sure why anyone would want to photograph this because very little actually "happens" in the process.

The technical details of what he does are not so important as the effects of what he does. The effect, to me, is as good as representation of Suzuki's quote as I have experienced. Of course, any representation of something (of reality) is going to be inherently flawed by the need to impose concept and definition on something that defies conceptualization and is undefinable, if only because reality is perpetually impermanent but a definition is a statement of permanence.

What happens is this: Michael moves around the room, clapping his hands, stomping his feet, and determining the sound. It's interesting -- the sounds change dramatically depending on where he is. Once he's collected the information he needs, he plays a continuous tone. Because I've been asked to photograph this experience, I am compelled to move around the space. As I move, the tone, which is steady and constant at its source, changes. This makes perfect sense, but the thing is that listening is generally done passively -- we just stand there and absorb sonic information -- and I don't think its ever occurred to me that a continuous sound can be experienced actively; that my perception of it changes in accordance to my actions. Moreover, other people's experience changes in accordance to my actions, and my experience in accordance to theirs, as we absorb sound, reflect sound, form a barrier between the source of the sound and someone else who is listening...

Here's another zen quote from Suzuki:

"When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say 'inner world' or 'outer world' but actually, There is just one whole world."

If this is an acoustic sculpture, we are not only within the sculpture but a part of it. It's not a hollow form that surrounds us but a solid form that includes us. There is no inside, there is no outside.

Afterwards, we all talk. I'm fascinated by the experience of "oneness". Paul is more interested in the map the sound provides of the space. Maps, to me, are static and "permanent" (because I associate them with paper maps), and so I am inclined to reject this idea because it doesn't take us into account and seems limited to the confines of the space being mapped. Paul's reply addresses the first of those -- the map is impermanent & changes as we move through the space.

Paul is very interested in maps. His work is built out of intricate patterns. The pieces are hung very precisely. The patterns might be his maps, but they don't conform to my more restricted idea of what map is. Any pattern presented in a precise frame nevertheless expands infinitely beyond the confines of the container -- that's the deal with patterns -- and maybe that's the deal with maps, too. It's the deal with everything, actually.

That "oneness", the absence of "this" and "that", of "here" and "there" is my big interest these days, perhaps because I've been feeling especially restless the past year or so, not in harmony with what's around me and/or what I'm a part of...which might in part explain why I almost punched a guy out last week. It was not a harmonious situation.

Michael Brewster's acoustic sculpture was.

Freeway

2007-08-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

105 from El Segundo to 110 N.

Imperial Highway, El Segundo

105 Freeway, eastbound
110 Freeway, northbound

Pact

2007-08-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

"As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw." -- Shunryu Suzuki

Will Rogers State Beach

The day I realized the world had turned on its head

2007-08-19T12:27:00.001-07:00

Two weekends ago a friend and I were at Paradise Cove up in Malibu. There's a trailer park there. Trailer homes sell for $4 million. All you get is the trailer and the right to take over the lease on the space, for which you'll pay about $2,700/month in rent. You can't get a mortgage on the place 'cause there's no land involved.

The next day I was up at Point Mugu, just above County Line, a beautiful working man's beach, literally and figuratively outside of LA. Two cholos and a white trash chick with a minimal number of teeth were sitting in a dune behind me. There was nothing poseur about this trio. They were the real deal. And they were discussing art theory. They knew their shit.

Only millionaires can afford trailer homes and cholos discussing art theory. This was the day I realized the world had finally turned on its head.

And it all happened on the beach.

You've gotta get out of the city to discover where it's at.

RV with expando-matic kitchen at Point Mugu

Context 2: Pacific Coast Highway

2007-08-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

Following the Michael Brewster acoustic installation/sculpture experience (more about that later), we got into a conversation about information and substance. I said that there is an overwhelming amount of information being thrown at us nowadays. He said "But the information is really thin."

I'd never thought about that.

It seems there is this human compulsion (I wouldn't call it a need) to divide stuff up into ever smaller bits, and then look at each bit in isolation. Sometimes this is a valuable tool, like when you're faced with a situation (or situations) the sum of which seems insurmountably huge. Breaking it up into bite sized chunks and then achieving those individually gives a sense of incremental accomplishment that you don't get when tackling the whole, and sometimes that quantifiable progress is necessary just so you don't give up.

But we take this too far when it comes to things like information.

The truth is there's probably not any more information than there ever was. It's just that we've broken it down into such tiny little bits that there are far far far more pieces of information.

In the case of information, this micro approach isn't such a good thing. Often times those little bits of information are meaningless until assembled into a larger whole.

This is an image:

It's 650 x 427 pixels in size, which means a total of 277,550 individual pixels. As it stands, that's a pretty small image -- smaller than it looks. The internet is all about compression, which basically means taking something and removing substantial amounts of information from it, and then reassembling it out of what's left, creating the illusion of substance by making up what isn't there, sort of like George Bush did with weapons of mass destruction and the war on Iraq. Compression is big business.

If I break it down into 277,550 individual pixels, I'm left with 277,550 bits of individually meaningless information. Even if I break 'em down into 6 pixel increments, my individual bits of information are meaningless on their own. Try extrapolating that photo from this 6 pixel bit:

Sometimes, though, you can get some pretty amazing results by breaking something down into tiny parts and then reassembling those parts into something altogether different than its source. Here are a handful of video stills. These are from a 10 minute-or-so-long clip I shot pointing the camera out the car window while driving down PCH in the "city" part of Malibu. The video is kind of abstract -- cars, buildings, people randomly interrupt the view more often than the view of the ocean can actually be seen, and they're blurred 'cause I'm driving by at 50 mph.

Video shoots 30 frames per second, with means something like 18,000 frames exist on that clip, and I've isolated 40 or so individual frames that looked cool to me. Here are 12 of 'em, 12 semi random 1/30-of-a-second-in-time moments, combining to make up just over 1/3 of a second of real time (and, maybe, 100 feet max of real distance) pieced together from 10 minutes in time and 8 miles of actual road.

Context

2007-08-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things is when happenstance rips stuff from its contextual moorings and assigns arbitrary new ones.

The word "boss" meant something long before it became a brand name for detergent. Return it to its original meaning and toss it in the gutter. Is this a deliberate Marxist statement or just a trash mishap? I prefer to think the former. The world is much more interesting (and less confusing) if we consider the possibility that the apparently accidental and random is actually deliberate and intentional and the deliberate and intention is pure chance.

Boss: a secret Marxist message

Gain: the boss' reply.

Angelina: one size fits 90 - 165 lbs

Opening, pt. 2

2007-07-31T17:45:00.001-07:00

The Buster show last week was a great show, for me. The process got me thinking again about the sorts of things I should be thinking about -- things like why am I doing this? What is it, more or less, that I am trying to say? Does the world benefit from somehow from putting this stuff out there. Someone told me once that I think to much about the meaning of photos, at least of mine. I can't imagine why anyone would engage in the creative process without giving some thought as to meaning, unless, of course, they are in it purely for the money or to produce decorative work, in which case there is no meaning, only purpose.

When attempting a photo edit a few months back, I commented to a fellow photographer that I wasn't interested in an edit based on beauty -- that I wasn't interested in physical beauty. She said "You should only show the ugly pictures, then." Wow. I've never tried to take an ugly picture in my life. She really didn't get it. To be interested only in ugliness as a counterpoint to conventional beauty is to make conventional beauty as big a part of one's work (by it's deliberate absence) as photographing only conventional beauty would be. A wholly different statement on the same subject matter, it's true, but the same subject matter nonetheless.

The truth is I am interested in beauty, but not of the conventional visual kind. That stuff is already there; you don't need me or anyone else to show it to you. I am interested in a beauty of experience or sensation, or something otherwise overlooked or intangible. Despite shooting in a very realistic style, I've never thought of my photos as documents of the (tangible) things I've experienced, but rather documents of the experiences themselves (personal and intangible), experiences that (perhaps) happened to involve the things in the photos or can be represented by the things happening or appearing in the photos. I'm perpetually searching for visual metaphors, so it doesn't really do anyone much good to view my stuff as objective, journalistic statements of fact despite it being factual in the sense that nothing is staged for the benefit of a photo.

And this was why I was so excited to do the Buster show. I got to place one of my photos alongside work in a variety of mediums that represented, to Paul McLean, the same theme, and you were gonna have to look at it all with an open mind and search for the connections between them, which meant you were gonna have to look at the stuff in a non-documentary way.

Plus, I liked the other stuff a lot.

Painter Jesse Wiedel's piece was especially cool. (see bottom)

Here are some pics from (and around) the opening:. (I'll caption 'em later).

Art for Humans Gallery

Mehai of Kontainer Gallery across the street

Anna Julien's piece

Sculptor William Ransom

Geoffrey Russell Baird x 2, & Matthew Barney

Painter Jesse Wiedel

Geoffrey Russel Baird & Anna Julien

Jesse Wiedel's "Clash of the Titans"
"Clash of the Titans" is a painting I kept coming back to, not just because I really dug it but also because of the "There but by the grace of ___ go I" factor. I kept wondering which of those three characters I'd've turned out to be had things not taken a fortunate turn. I finally concluded I'd most likely have been the guy with the potted plant. My buddy Dave was drawn to the painting for the same reason and came to the same conclusion regarding himself. I suppose we both liked the anonymity that comes from hiding behind a potted plant. Whatever it is you're doing, you're less likely to get busted when there's maniacs nearby running interference.

The potted plant business can go awry without sufficient planning, however. I recently saw on the news a story about a guy who robbed a bank. He attempted to disguise himself by duct taping branches and twigs to his head (very inconspicuous). Unfortunately for him, one of the customers in the bank recognized his face through the shrubbery and the cops busted him at his apartment soon after. Perhaps if there had been some grandiose maniacs on the loose he'd've gotten away with it.

Opening, pt 1

2007-07-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

Saturday's reception for the Buster show was great fun, and the process itself a terrific experience. More on all that later. Meanwhile, here's a shot I took at some point outside the gallery.

I'll post more later.

Me, Group show, BUSTER: SUPER LUCKY 2

2007-07-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

BUSTER: SUPER LUCKY 2

Come on down to Chinatown this Saturday July 21 6 - 10pm to the Art For Humans gallery. I'm part of a group show called "Buster: Super Lucky 2", the theme of which is the lost American Dream, (more or less), except that the dream hasn't been lost so much as crumbled under the junk-food fed weight of, um, "progress". (Read the curator's statement below).

Along with my photography, there are paintings and installations by Laurent Chambert, Anna Julien, Jesse Wiedel, Shane Kennedy, Geoffrey Russell Baird and William Ransom. The exhibit dates are July 18-25, with an opening reception for the artists slated for July 21, from 6-10PM. Musicians David Mix (Friday 7/20 7-8:30PM) and Wayne Everett (Saturday 7/21 7-8:30PM) will perform at AFHGC in conjunction with “Buster”. For more information, visit www.artforhumans.com or phone the gallery.

ART FOR HUMANS GALLERY CHINATOWN
945 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, California 90012

My website: www.geoffcordner.net

Curator's Statement:

Buster lives at the Americano Motel in room 713. He had a dream, which I happened to drive through, just after sunrise on a July day in 2006. I was trekking from Santa Fe to Marfa, via Austin. I forget the name of the little New Mexican town. I just remember thinking, "Is this what happened to the American Dream? Is this what happened when the freeways and big box stores conquered this great nation?"

Buster is in love with Chevonne. He's never met her. Buster has only seen her in pictures. She's become a stencil sprayed over his eyes. She partially obscures everything Buster sees.

He thinks of Chevonne as living in a map somewhere he's never been. Her house is located in a grid that's shaped by the land beneath it. There are other buildings around hers. She probably lives in a big city. Buster doesn't think much about that, though he sometimes imagines her out on the town with friends, or shopping at boutiques and so on.

The village Buster lives in is devastated by drugs, alcohol, gambling, thieves and prostitutes. The villagers engage in strange rituals that, through a chemical filter, seem momentarily epic. The pathos for Buster, as witness, is usually onerous. He tries to maintain a positive attitude in spite of the uncertainty and dread that surrounds him. The villagers are Buster's lifelong friends, after all. Life in the village is often shortened by ailments and catastrophe, so Buster tries his best to take it in stride.

A satellite dish on the roof of the motel connects Buster to the rest of the world. Buster only watches the news, with the sound on the television muted. Buster's news soundtrack is a CD that his brother Dale sent him from somewhere. Dale was in the army. Dale never came back from Iraq.

Once Buster watched a program about Matthew Barney. Afterwards he watched a pro wrestling pay-per-view. The combination gave him bad dreams for a while, and that's why he only watches news, now.

If you meet him on the street, Buster always asks you, "What time is it?" He likes to sit under a tree sometimes, and watch the watch the cars on 285 blur past.

-Paul McLean
July 2007

Buster: Super Lucky 2
www.artforhumans.com www.geoffcordner.net

Week in Review

2007-06-16T11:51:00.001-07:00

Sometimes life is not so exciting.

That's usually when it's at its best.

There's a lot to be said for quiet, calm and simplicity

I took these photos last week.

Julian the cat I got from a rescue place down in Long Beach a few weeks ago. He was/is extremely shy and reticent, which is a lot of what made him so attractive. He'd been in rescue for about 2 years, and it was going to take some patience...

It took three weeks before he'd let me touch him. Now he is becoming a real pal.

As always, there's a lot to be learned just watching the process.

the neighborhood, part 3

2007-04-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

There was a shooting on the corner.

5 shots fired is what everyone says.

It happened 15 minutes ago.

The police station is 3 blocks away.

The cops haven't arrived yet.

****************************

If you park in the 2-hour-parking zone in front of my work for 2 hours and 5 minutes, you will surely get a ticket.

That's also 3 blocks away.

I guess the city doesn't earn money from shootings.

That's probably just as well.

Life is cheap.

Parking is expensive.

the neighborhood, part 2

2007-04-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

More glamour than you can shake a stick at.

The neighborhood

2007-03-29T20:32:00.001-07:00

A few months ago I posted a series of shots of some neighbors shooting heroin.

Some people got very upset. They said, in essence, (and sometimes in specific), that I was glamorizing heroin use.

Folks can and do say all sorts of stuff about my photos, but "glamorous" is a bit of a stretch, I think.

They agreed. They said I often photograph things that they'd really prefer not to see; that my shots are dark and depressing.

That doesn't sound glamorous to me.

Apparently, the feeling that I am glamorizing these things they find ugly comes from a notion that to photograph something is not to document it but to endorse it. Or, perhaps, it stems from a trait Susan Sontag ascribes to amateur photographers -- the notion that a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful -- and therefore my photos, which they might find beautiful, must be of subjects I find beautiful.

Sontag's observation is a criticism. Unfortunately digital cameras combined with the internet have led to a horrific deluge of amateur photos -- the digital camera is to photography what the karaoke machine is to music -- and maybe now that amateur aesthetic, confusing decorative work with "art", has redefined the perception of photographs.

God, I hope not.

Anyhow, here are some shots of my neighborhood.

The first thing you'll notice is how glamorous it is.

Drag

2007-02-05T21:19:00.000-08:00

A trio from a roll of film I shot in my apartment in Barcelona during Carnival, Feb (?) 1994.

the PIG

2006-12-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

As promised, here is a shot from the PIG, a video I shot recently for www.gaystockroom.com.

Unlike this judiciously cropped photo, the film is, well, basically a porno, with a sort of mid-90s Japanese cyberpunk horror movie feel to it. It's a story about somebody anxiously watching a guy in a pig hood and latex pig-shirt masturbating.

Now, I can't say this for certain, but I suspect that those of you who enjoy watching men in pig hoods masturbating find films of this nature in perilously short supply. Therefore I feel as though I am doing a public service with this one.

Enjoy.

Natalie

2006-12-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

Every now and then it's nice to take a break from shooting abandoned towns in the desert, junkies, burned down trailer homes, crack hotels...and shoot a beautiful woman doing beautiful woman stuff.

Here are some photos of Natalie Minx I shot a week or so ago for Syren Latex.

They're being used in a series of short films I'm working on for Syren and Gaystockroom.com. The Gaystockroom stuff features a guy masturbating while wearing a latex pig shirt and a leather pig hood. They are not as pretty. I'll post some r-rated shots from that set (if I can find any) on another day.

Junk

2006-11-19T21:49:00.000-08:00

My buddy says he and his girl are going back on methadone. They just haven't been able to kick this time around.

I ask him what he's gonna do with all his rigs. He asks if I need 'em for props. Yeah. I do. I need to shoot some rigs and I haven't had any laying around the apartment in a long time. 10 years.

I expect he's gonna bring over a handful. Instead, he brings over a tupperwear dish with maybe 50 or more.

The next morning he sticks his head in my apartment. There was a clean rig in that batch. Can he get it back?

They ran into an old high school friend the other day. Her boyfriend is a dealer. She offered her number but they didn't take it. They know where to find her, though. Walking distance. They head out on foot, find the chick, cop and are back in no more than 15 minutes.

Sometimes I wonder how a nice boy from a good family like me ended up living the life I've lived...and still live, I guess, because even with 10 years clean it remains all around me. Shooting pictures of junkies is not a walk on the wild side for me, not a descent into a murky darkness I feel compelled to explore but merely a step out the front door. It seems this shit is always gonna be a part of my life, and I suppose that makes perfect sense, really, since it is part of how I got from there to here.

Occasionally someone suggests that I should try to notice all the nice stuff around me, because, they tell me, it's there. And it is. But for some reason I'm more interested in pointing out the things that surround us all but most of us remain unaware of. I assure you there's a junkie in your midst. There's probably a homosexual or two. Someone on the corner will sell you crack. I don't care where you are. That girl-next-door porn fantasy? She might really be next door. Whether all this is good or bad is a matter of opinion, and that opinion doesn't change the fact that it is. Period.

Austin, October 2006

2006-10-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

I suppose I could also title this post "home". That's a weird idea, since I haven't lived there in 21 years. But it felt like it. And that was unexpected.

I was there because my film Hotel Hopscotch was playing in the Austin Film Festival. I was also there just to go back, since I don't normally (as in ever) go back, but it seemed time and the opportunity/excuse availed itself.

More on the festival and the trip itself later.

These are some shots I took. My motel room on the I-35 frontage road in north-central Austin, the back of a pool hall downtown, the freeway, and Big Chris Gates & Gatesville at Poodies out in Spicewood Springs. Chris is an old pal from way back when -- the Big Boys, Poison 13, Junkyard...Good tunes, good times...

Rip-off Ricky Must Die

2006-09-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

My ex, in our sharecropper shack of a house in South Austin, back around 1983 or so...and my toes, in the corner...

There's a story to go with everything. The story that goes with this, for me, maybe, was written a few years ago, when I could still work myself up into a good state of anger about the past.

Rip-off Ricky Must Die

End of summer 1985. I flew out to LA to confront a guy I'd been tipped was ripping me off. I crashed on the floor of this Canadian punk rocker who lived down the block from Chad the rip-off guy's office on Santa Monica and El Centro, a short block east of Vine. Chad was this effete curly blonde haired surfer dude whose office was decorated in weird African fertility art, an odd choice for a surfer fag doing business putting out punk records, but it and the uncomfortable wooden African fertility bench you'd have to sit on waiting for hours past your scheduled appointment staring at a huge abstract painting underneath which sat a Doberman that would snarl if you approached Chad's door to ask when he'd see you did the trick in intimidating people, especially young uncomfortable-to-begin-with punk rockers who knew that despite all our arrogance and feigned insouciance we had no idea what we were doing and were in over our heads. By the time we'd get in there we'd say "yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, just lemme sign that paper so I can get the fuck outta here."

His dad was a psychologist.

Chad lived in the back of his office with his secretary Doreen. They had a horrible little room back there, nothing like the African Fertility Goddess façade upfront, just a dark squalid little room, with a toilet, a utility sink, no shower next door. Chad would take showers at the Y downtown, looking for cock to suck or to fuck him and Doreen would come over to the Canadian punk rocker's and take hours long baths in exchange for paying a third of the rent, the evil Doberman standing guard outside the door. We'd wind up having to piss in the back yard.

Doreen was fat drab Texas trailer trash with stringy mouse brown hair, an incredibly bitter woman who was stuck living in a dark squalid room with a fake boyfriend who needed a fake girlfriend so that no one would know he was gay. This was the best Doreen could do because she evidently suffered from some sort of gruesome gynecological problem that Johnette told me resulted in her pussy being more or less sealed shut.

No wonder she was bitter.

I crashed a few days on the punk rocker's floor, confronted Chad, got some money out of him, crashed a few days on Johnette's floor, decided to move to LA, and called my wife in Texas with the news.

Johnette was the first girl I met who could drink me under the table. She turned me on to Oki-Dogs, the official food of LA punk rockers and male hustlers. Kosher hotdogs oily chili velveeta and pastrami all bundled up in a giant flour tortilla and served with greasy fries by manic tweakers who would shove your order in your hands before you were halfway through placing it, even sooner if you talked Texas slow like I did. The sullen sunken eyed shirtless in parachute pants street hustlers gathered round the place looking hungry for food, money, drugs, whatever they could get their hands on, especially if they didn't need to suck cock to get it. Their haunted stares encroaching provided an atmosphere that wasn't always conducive to fine dining, so we'd usually grab a 12-pack of beer and head back to her place.

I moved into the Tropicana Motel where Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and countless other icons of renegade excess had lived, now in the heart of West Hollywood across from the Sports Connection gym on the sidewalk outside of which were all these muscle-bound Freddy Mercury look-alikes preening and flexing in Daisy Dukes, army boots, and baby-tees.

"Oh honey, I just looove your shorts" the desk clerk would say every time I walked by.

All the gayness made me nervous.

I'd come back from my new job working in the warehouse of Soundsgood Record Imports in Santa Monica, stop off for an Oki Dog and a twelve pack, return to the Tropicana, slip past the desk clerk, lock myself in my room and watch latest updates on the new serial killer who was on a rampage in LA, quotes by AC/DC splattered in blood on the walls, soon identified as Richard Ramirez from El Paso, another guy like me who maybe shouldn't have left Texas, who looked just like my buddy Tony Offender. The police were nowhere near to catching him and finally a bunch of guys in East LA spotted him in a liquor store, chased him down and nearly beat him to death before calling the cops.

I was starting to question the wisdom of moving to LA, but I don't admit mistakes and so there was no turning back.

I found a ghetto apartment off Willoughby and Vine that reeked of cat piss. The previous tenants spray painted it black and left enema bags amidst the wreckage; "Rip-off Ricky Must Die" written in magic marker above the bedroom door, indelible ink that no amount of paint would cover up. The place was actually safer than it seemed because the cops were keeping a close eye on the building, stopping by often in the middle of the night looking for someone named Olga who did a brisk business in used auto-parts, which probably accounted for the ever changing assortment of cars stripped and on cinderblocks in our parking space in the alley.The big hit on the radio the end of that summer was X's Burning House of Love, big glossy bombast from a once great punk band. All-American sex symbol Rock Hudson was dying of AIDs. Every night, dinner for two, $1.69, a single quart of Burgie beer and Springfield macaroni and cheese from Safeway. The Safeway of the Stars. Welcome to Hollywood.

A year later. Halloween night, 1986.

My wife calls me at the office. "I've got something to tell you, and something to ask you."

"Go ahead."

"First I need to ask you if I can borrow your white shirt tonight."

"Alright."

"Then I need to tell you I think you should move out."

I acquiesced easily. It was, after all, what I wanted but didn't have the balls to ask.

She showed up with my suitcase. The Tropicana was full, so I checked into the Holloway around the corner, and then we went out to dinner next door. She was wearing my white shirt.

I'd already called the girl with whom she suspected I was having an affair. I'd been keeping Rachel abreast of the situation. We thought it was funny because we'd never so much as kissed even though Jane was hysterically convinced otherwise and no amount of denial would dissuade her, and so the fact that Rachel and I weren't fucking became our little secret, the thing we had between us that Jane didn't know about, the nudge-nudge, wink-wink little pact that made her feel so excluded. All of which changed that night. I had a friendly dinner with my wife I'd just split up with a few hours earlier, cut it short without rushing it, waited at the motel for Rachel, we went down to the Scream and saw some bands and then back to the motel and fucked our brains out.

Jane changed her mind about the separation. I didn't. I'd found a place to live and was still fucking Rachel. Jane said she'd packed all my stuff and would pile it up in the living room if I wanted to come and get it that night. I came by. The house was empty. There was a note on my stuff, something to the effect of if she were to come back and see everything gone she'd know it was over. I put the note back in the envelope put the envelope back on my stuff quietly left the house called her the next day and said I'd gotten busy and hadn't had a chance to come by after all. Maybe I could do it next week. Next week I came by. My stuff was still stacked in the living room, the note was gone, I piled my stuff in the jeep and left.

I was a chickenshit.

Jane managed to persuade me to return with her to Austin that Christmas. Her grandmother didn't know we'd separated, she was coming down from Dallas, Jane wanted to maintain the ruse, and for some reason I agreed this was a good idea.

It wasn't.

Austin was no longer home.

We went to the Continental Club to see the Doctor's Mob and had a thoroughly bad time after which we headed to our old place off 3rd and Oltorf right behind the Green Pastures restaurant, whose peacocks used to wander around our yard in amongst all the weird art that successions of previous tenants had left hanging from trees or resting on the luridly painted foundations of the burnt down house in the back, another art project gone awry and left abandoned. One morning shortly after we'd moved in I woke up to strange thumping noises on the roof, wandered out back and saw these peacocks strutting and preening all over the yard being stalked by our cat Atilla, panicked for a moment and then realized I was still loaded from all the drugs and alcohol the night before, "fuck it, I'm just hallucinating," and went back to bed to sleep it off. The peacocks were still there when I got back up hours later with a brain bending hangover.

Jane wanted to say hi to our old neighbor Doyle. I sat in the car in driveway in the dark in the freezing late December 2am cold, brooding over the business of my unwelcome at the Continental Club and wondering why I'd ever agreed to come back to Austin. Wondering and brooding and brooding and wondering and wondering and brooding until I realized that I'd been sitting in the cold driveway brooding and wondering for a long time, and then it started to dawn on me that they weren't just saying hello and I realized they were fucking and had been fucking for years, the whole time we lived there on the other side of the driveway maybe 20 feet away from Doyle's house which was obsessively decorated in posters and fliers I'd done for various bands over the years. My wife was fucking Doyle surrounded by all my posters that I no longer had and I was sitting in the driveway freezing cold and getting angrier by the second, planning on catching the next flight back out to LA, vowing never to return.

We bought a frozen pizza on the way back to her father's place and microwaved it. It was soggy. She persuaded me to stay through Christmas.

I haven't been back since.

The epilogue (there's always an epilogue. That's how life works) is that I will be going back for the first time in 20 years 'cause my short film Hotel Hopscotch will be playing the Austin Film Festival in late October.

America loves the Freedom

2006-09-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

This shot sorta speaks for itself.
Austin, Texas, circa 1982, on the walk home from work at the record store.

1982

2006-09-23T18:45:00.000-07:00

This shot was taken in my backyard in Austin, 1982 I think. Maybe 1983. Maybe 1981.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. My backyard was really big and full of strange stuff. I shared the yard with 3 other houses all built on the same huge lot, something that was not uncommon in the old parts of town. There had been a 4th house but it had burned down.

The kid with the spikey hair is Richard Mathers, soon-to-be-known as "Crowbar" after a group of rednecks chased him and his friends out of a fast-food joint and then attacked them in the parking lot of another -- a Shakey's Pizza, I think it was. Richard got smashed over the head with a crowbar. He ended up in the hospital for a month or so. He had to learn how to talk again.

The cops didn't press charges against the rednecks. They concluded the attack was justifiable, provoked merely by the victims' appearances. To be a punk in Texas in those days, even in a liberal town like Austin, was to invite tacitly sanctioned assault, sometimes of the nearly murderous variety.

Richard appeared to make a full recovery but I'm told about 8 years later he started to suffer from weird fits of violent rage in which he'd go completely berserk. Apparently these fits became so frequent and were so bad that eventually he became pretty much incapable of social interaction.

Toxic Reasons

2006-09-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

These are a handful of recently unearthed old shots of mine. The band is Toxic Reasons, whose album Independence I remember as being really great: big, thick, slower Brit-punk style, a nice change of pace in those early hardcore/thrash days. The show was at a place in Austin called Voltaire's Basement, which was (you guessed it) the basement of a used book store called Voltaires, which I sorta remember as specializing in a lot of anarchist stuff, poetry, and other things that good American citizens shouldn't read. It was not a posh joint.

The year was maybe 1983. Maybe 1982. Doubt it was earlier or later. And these shots capture well what the scene was like in those days, at least as I remember it.

Toxic Reasons formed in 1979 in Dayton Ohio and kicked around for a long time. Punk was taking place all over America, but the only bands anyone seems to remember came from the bigger scenes: Boston, DC, SF, LA, Austin/Houston, and the OC. That last one is kinda tragic 'cause the OC spawned almost nothing but bad jock-rock, real boy music, antithetical to what punk meant, at least to me.

Here's a coupla links I found on Toxic Reasons:

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/liveperformances/ToxicReasons.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Reasons

And there's a sort of slip-shod collection of my old punk stuff here:
http://www.punkerotic.com/austin/