Congo photos

 

 

Some of the pics I took are up on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/threeleggeduck/

Whilton Camera

You can get any camera dis-assembled and framed for about $100 at Whilton camera repairs in Pasadena**. Here are two pictures I took of the frame box on display at the shop:

** phone number:(626) 449-8086

Star Trek

If you’re going to see Star Trek on opening night at an Imax theater, you’re going to wait in line, even if you have a pre-purchased ticket.

I went to the Burbank Imax with my movie Meetup group, and had a bit of a hard time finding them, but while I waited, I took futuristic pictures of the outside of the movie theater. Our line wrapped around the building on the top floor.

First of all, if you’re going to see Star Trek…wow. See it in an Imax. This one is ridiculously huge, we were halfway up into the stadium and still felt like we were too close to the screen. The sound is amazing, the faces are five stories high. It’s unbelievable.

Second: if you’re not going to see this movie you must be nuts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I loved everything about this movie (even with the two big plot holes, but I don’t discuss spoilers) from the casting to the humor, the action, everything. LOVED IT. LOVED IT. LOVED IT. It was just like I remembered feeling watching my very first Star Trek movie as a kid. Excited, scared, wide-eyed, kind of nervous.

I thought the casting was fantastic, I even liked Eric Bana, and that’s saying a lot. But really, Zach Quinto…what a performance. Oh well. I’ve gushed enough. I’m going to run off with a big old silly grin on my face. I’m so happy I saw this!

Small town, L.A.

I have always had these experiences in the big cities that I live in, and maybe it’s because I pay attention to the small details of my surroundings way more than I should. When I lived in Paris and London, I noticed the same people in vastly different areas of the cities, weeks apart. Once in London, I saw the same guy three times in one day, in three different places. I have total recall for details, and that’s how I got a guy arrested (rightly) in Istanbul once. I’ve bumped into the 7/11 clerk from twenty miles away in my neighbor’s elevator and remembered him.

So yesterday, I was at a piercing salon looking for new and interesting earrings. Looking at all the metallic jewelry behind glass panes, I thought how perfect this place would be for my next photo assignment, where we had to shoot for shallow and wide depth of field. I’ve struggled with this assignment, my camera broke, I ran out of ideas. While the employee was fetching a catalog, I wandered in another room and found a black and white photo that caught my eye for three reasons:

1 it was obviously a film print

2 it was exactly what my assignment needed to be: an example of narrow depth of field

3 it was dry-mounted, suspiciously like the ones I have to hand in are supposed to be.

Right then and then, I decided that I knew this was exactly what I thought it was: the depth of field assignment that I was supposed to hand in. Just to confirm my suspicions, I reached for the mounted photograph, and flipped it around, to read on the back, on a piece of masking tape, exactly what I thought would be there:

“student name: narrow depth of field”

doo-da’s

Why do people drive with their high-beams on lit city streets? I’m starting to think it’s just to cinge my corneas. That’s what it feels like.

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The other night, very late at night, I drove for about 7 miles with a car that kept flashing their lights at me. It was on the 110, a really windy freeway, the oldest around here, with only 3 lanes, so I couldn’t change lanes safely, and had to really concentrate not to keep looking in the rear-view mirror. Those were the longest 7 miles of my life, and I felt accident-prone at any minute. It’s SO unsettling. They finally exited, and I still saw their lights flashing, so I’m guessing it was a malfunction, but my palms were sweaty by that time.

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(for you!!!!!!) Ira Glass’s TV shows (from “What I learned from Television”) (he’s one of my very few celebrity crushes:

-The Daily Show with John Stewart (agreed)
-The Colbert Report (agreed)
-Friday Night Lights
-The OC (on my Netflix queue now)
-The Wire
-House
-Dexter
-Family Guy
-Project Runway
-Entourage (STRONGLY agreed)
-Anything with Ricky Gervais

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Overheard in the Gilmore Girls, from Kirk, the oddball Jack of all Trades and my new favorite filmmaker: “I’m so lonely, Animal Planet isn’t even cutting it anymore”

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I spent Saturday morning with mom running errands all through Pasadena, it was fun. We went to the Public Library to photocopy a Newsweek article on how exercising helps fight Alzheimers, and while we were there, we took read a microfiche of the LA Times for August 16-31, 1938. It was really pretty incredible, and tons of fun to read, (AND FREE: to all the Mike Meyers fans out there, this was the ultimate “No Money Fun” outing). Here are three things that struck me in that microfiche:

1. 8/16/1938: 30 Magnolia trees were planted on Chiquita Avenue between Beck and Troost. If you click on that link, and choose “Hybrid” you can actually SEE the Magnolia trees! this isn’t too far from my work, so I’m thinking of driving down there one day.
2. 8/20/1938 Front-page article on how the “The perfect specimen” boy was discovered in England, the son of two vegetarians, and a vegetarian himself (the kid is about 9 years old, and the doctor who discovered him would not reveal his identity but I copied down his diet: “The perfect specimen doesn’t eat meat, fish, eggs or bread, walks ten miles daily before breakfast, then sits down to one slice of pineapple. For lunch, he has baked spinach and an onion pie with a thin crust made of whole meal flour, cheese and milk, ten ounces in all. For tea, he doesn’t have tea, but two apples, one orange, and two small tomatoes.”
3. 8/20/1938 CHILLING article very very short, front page snippet “GERMAN JEWS ORDERED TO ADD SARAH OR ISRAEL TO THEIR NAMES” The article was a few paragraphs long, ordering all Jews in Germany to legally add Sarah or Israel to their names and mention these new middle names in any application they filled out. Any newborns had to automatically have them added to their names, and could not be given Christian names. Chilling omen.

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Here’s something a little more positive: For my photo class, I had to take portraits, and I snapped a portrait of a young man walking around the park on Raymond and Walnut in Pasadena. I asked him for his address so I could send him a copy, and mailed him one after developing the roll. Two weeks later, I get a two page letter in my mailbox, thanking me profusely for the photograph, asking for an extra copy to send to his mom in Mississippi, and wishing me well in my photo career. It was such a moving letter, filled with touching details, and truly one of the most precious things I’ve ever received.

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A joke from the defunct Democratic Republic of Germany, that I thought was profound and funny from the mediocre documentary “ZIZEK!” about the Slovenian Lacanian philosopher (I found his persona more interesting than his ideology, which I think is, in short, what the documentary was trying to disprove, unsuccessfully in my opinion):

A German factory worker gets a job in Siberia. Aware how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends “If a letter from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true. If it’s written in red ink, it’s false.”

After a month, his friends get the first letter:

“Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair. The only thing you can’t find is red ink.”

The point of the joke in the documentary was to convey that we are only free because we lack the tools and the language to articulate our “un-freedom”. But I liked the joke at face value.

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And the other thing I really liked from “Zizek!” was this:

On today’s market, we find a series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. The list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of war with no casualties (on our side, of course) as war without war, the redefinition of politics as expert administration as politics without politics. Today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism wishes to experience the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight). Along the same lines, what this tolerance gives us is a decaffeinated belief, a belief that does not hurt anyone and never requires us to commit ourselves.
Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint. It is no longer “Drink coffee, but in moderation!” but rather “Drink all the coffee you want because it is already decaffeinated.” The ultimate example is chocolate laxative, with its paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”-the very thing that causes constipation.
The structure of the “chocolate laxative,” of a product containing the agent of its own containment, can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape.

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And finally this: Slavoj Zizek’s recipe for writing: “I put down notes, I edit them: writing disappears.” It is the most concise writing advice I’ve ever heard, and so simple, it might actually work brilliantly.

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I know I’m probably boring everyone to tears, but here some of my favorite gleanings from the Einstein biography I’m working on (from the first hundred pages):

“God created the donkey, and gave him a thick skin.”

Of the traditional marriage where woman is the caretaker of man’s needs: “I have a low opinion of that view of a relationship
between a man and a wife because it makes the wife and prostitute indistinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract.”

” Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

of Besso, his lifelong friend: “an awful weakling…who cannot rouse himself to any action in life or scientific creation, but who has an extraordinarily fine mind, whose working, though disorderly, I watch with great delight.”

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“I suspect music is auditory cheesecake” –Steven Pinker

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Enough doo-da’s for one night!!

Photo class

After so much digital, it’s a pleasure to re-learn everything the hard way…including focusing, which is a challenge…

fragments of Redonkulous*

I was at Target a week ago to buy a personalized license plate cover. I wanted to put something funny on there like “Enjoy every taco” but they were out, or never had it in the first place. So someone taking over (inside my brain) got me to purchase a stupid floor mat with the closest thing to a pedestrian sign on it: a pink “ladie’s room” icon. Now I’m sitting here on a Saturday morning, contemplating my day, and I have to go return the misguided idea to Target. I feel I spend my entire life buying crap I dont’ want at Target and returning it. In fact, I’m getting so good at it, that I now can park in the strategic spot, return the crap and be out of there in 10 minutes flat, if not less. Sick thing to be good at. Anyway. I’m at the register, looking for a new brand of gum when I see…”Snickers Bubble Gum”. I audibly gasped and told the clerk: doesn’t bubble game with a flavor of peanuts and chocolate defeat the purpose of gum? she responded “people like it because the flavor stays a long time, but it’s really gross if you’re standing next to someone who’s chewing it”.

Since these are fragments, they’re just going to be all over the place. If I have to organize this I won’t write it.

Bits and pieces heard on the radio: The police chief in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, passed a school bus with red lights flashing because he was distracted by a truck. When he realized what he’d done, he pulled over, and wrote himself a $235 ticket and a 4-point penalty on his license! People were so moved by this all the way to Russia, that he started getting money to help him pay for the ticket. Some Saab owner in Wisconsin drove his car 1 million miles in 17 years.

Driving bits: on easter, I was on the 210 when I hear the traffic report (…”and a refrigerator is blocking the middle lane on the 210 East-bound past…” On the way to work the other day, and I hear “..and great news for banking! Finally (this bank) is open on Sunday for banking! So you’ll never miss a day of business!” and I’m thinking…this is GOOD news? Why!?!?! You don’t even have a valid reason for taking a break. No one already gets to take vacations, now weekends aren’t sacred anymore.

My boss is leaving work next week, she’s moving to…PARIS. Oh..the IRONY of the universe. why!?!

I’m taking an amazing photo class this quarter with a tandem professor team of Father-Son. They’re great. Except you all remember I went to Vegas and hated it? Well, I keep meeting these people who love Vegas. Student in my class: he spends 3 days a week in Vegas, drives 100,000 miles a year, and he’s the one who has done all the indoor and outdoor swimming pools in Vegas hotels since 1991. LOVES Vegas, says it’s an amazing place, the food, the night life, the casinos. Co-worker: “I’m going to Vegas. Can’t wait. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, baby. I’m driving out after work”. I’m meeting my cousin from Germany for the very first time. We meet at a restaurant in Pasadena, and I walk in, and they’re having a conversation with the manager. I hug and kiss her, her mom, politely say hi to employee, then we start talking. I say, “so, how long are you here for?” “well, we’re going to be here for a week, then we’re going to Yosemite, San Francisco, Vegas and back” “Oh, cool! You’re going to LOVE Yosemite! I wish I could go… Vegas is ok, I think you should see it once in your life at least…” Restaurant manager INTERRUPTS! “once in your life?!? What are you talking about?!? Vegas is one of the greatest places in the world! I go there three times a month! Everything’s there, best food in the US, best restaurants, best hotels, best entertainment!” I’ll spare you. He went on for literally 15 minutes. And of course, being part-French (which is like being part-bulldog) I couldn’t help but jab and make snippy comments about the tackiness of the place, which sent him on a wild rant even louder and longer than before. AWKWARD. He reeled cousin and her mom in closer, (away from me) and whispered sweet nothings to them, his insider tips about Vegas. So that was my first meeting with my cousin. Hijacked by a Vegas freak.

Redonkulous recycling. I have this amazing connection with Caltech, the university that’s in Pasadena. If you’ve never heard of it, it is one of those mythical places. Einstein used to come here and when he did, he ate at the Athenaeum, the campus restaurant. It is a very small campus, but exquisitely beautiful, with sun streaming onto the patches of grass, stately graeful trees, wisteria coated building walls. The campus is peppered with arches, and an eccentric mix of architectural styles that’s a pleasure for the eyes. So the natural and architectural beauty, the fountains, the perfect size, have made it my favorite place in Pasadena. Not only that, there is SOMETHING about it that just soothes me. I want to be there, all the time. Additionally, it is an incredible institution. It’s a university called nicknamed “the MIT of the West” and only has about 900 undergraduates and 1200 grads. 32 of its grads are recipients of the Nobel Prize. Anyway, great place all around. Great vibe.

I like being in Caltech so much…I volunteered to take the recycling from our flat (and we produce an insane amount) JUST BECAUSE the community recycling center is on the Caltech campus. Oh. and MOST ridiculous? Remember how I was poking fun at Germans for being so precise in their little recycling cubbies that were locked with a key?

Caltech recylcing center is locked outside of opening hours. We have () bins divided this way ( THIS IS NOT A JOKE):

-Newspaper ONLY
-Batteries
-Soda cans
-Cardboard boxes and brown paper bags
-White paper
-Colored paper
-Mixed paper (post it notes, envelopes, junk mail)
-Chipboard: most food containers and cereal boxes (milk cartons, egg crates, boxes…)
-Glossy magazines ONLY
-Telephone books ONLY
-Tin cans
-Plastic milk bottles ONLY
-Lab glass ONLY
-CRV glass (most beverage containers)
-non-CRV glass ONLY
-Number 1 plastic
-Number 2 plastic
-Number 3 plastic
-Number 4 plastic
-Number 5, 6 and 7 plastic
-Plastic bags.

Because I all love you so much (and because recycling methods and categories are one of my darkest hobbies) I’ve posted up a JPG of the layout of Caltech recycling center. Petey, feel free to tease me mercilessly now.

Predictably, once I get to the recylcing place, I have to sort through the trash because the bins are so far apart and eerything is so complicated. (click on the map to see it in it’s full-sized REDONKULOUS glory)

So many redonkulous things happen in the place of employment, but for fear of retribution, you will not hear of them. I’m out. Have to go buy film. And go to the recycling. And return the stupid pink bathroom-icon floormat to Target.

*Redonkulous = ferret word for something so ridiculous, it’s redonkulous.

arbus

I’d planned another kind of day, that day. I’d been running around all weekend, catching up on my errands, post office, dry cleaning, bank, well, driving around, which is exhausting. Because in between each stop, there’s the careful parking and parallel parking, and getting out of the car, and locking the door and walking into the store, and reversing all the steps.

Somehow or other, I’d picked up a copy of “Filmmaker”, the magazine of indie film, and read it pretty much cover to cover, including all the techy specs on cameras and lighting. There was a great piece about Little Children–which was haunting and stimulating when it didn’t go over the top–and a beautiful interview on Fur, the essay of a sort on Diane Arbus’s beginnings as a photographer at age 35. I like Filmmaker because it only selectively writes about what it loves. I hate film magazines that write about mediocre movies or tear down the work of artists. What good does that ever do?

So when I wandered around Borders, I just grabbed all the books about Arbus from the photography collection and read the whole liner notes, spoken in Arbus’s quiet, simple, unassuming voice. They were as haunting as her photographs. Little moments of thinking “yes…yes…that’s exactly how life is. That’s exactly what it feels like”.

I’d found it hard before to understand the reach and pull of Arbus’s photos because they’re not of classically beautiful things. I suppose it depends on the individual but they’re not an “easy wow” like Ansel Adam’s very pre-and post-meditated landscapes (which may not be everyone’s cup of tea either). Dwarves and hermaphrodites, transvestite prostitutes, homeless people, nudists, children with down syndrom, circus freaks. So particular, such utterly specific worlds are Arbus’s, true to what she believed, that the more specific you make a photograph, the more general it will be.

And they are. I found myself looking at the large prints of these photos that were uncomfortable, after having had a tour of Arbus’s vision, and seeing past their representation, deep into what they were saying to me, these people I’d never met or might never meet. She felt a tremendous responsibility, in a sense, to go out and see things and take pictures of them that no one would ever see if she didn’t. And these people who’d been through probably what people would never want to live through–disfiguration, prostitution, abuse–had emerged on the other side, so universal, knowledgeable to everything that is human.

Diane Arbus just gave everyone the tool to stare at the people one always wants to stare at but never dares to because it’s “impolite”. And what happens when you stare at them? You realize what you might have suspected all along, that where you thought it would be monstrous, it isn’t, and you relate to the human condition. You relate, that is the human condition.

What moved me even more was her gutsiness. At 35 she followed her unique, unusual, very quiet inner voice with so much determination. She speaks simply, I can almost hear her voice. Possibly one of the things that stayed with me, was her definition of her inner voice, or the closest she came to it, explaining how she felt she had a corner on something about the quality of things. Seeing them in her own brand of way, or seeing things that no one else in the world would see. And of sometimes, when she saw a picture, hearing a resounding “no, no” inside of her, that told her for certain, “that’s not the way it is”.

I’d never heard an artists voice being carved out so unglamourously. Usually they trace out a vision as grand as the starry sky, something real, something crazy beautiful and grandiose that they have to usher into the world as their great destiny, but not this short passionate woman. She just had this “no” inside of her, and this “private feeling (of) how different it really is” when she would look at photographs and paintings.

Anyway, it really just blew me away, in a quiet, unassuming sort of way, like being the only person who saw that once-in-a-lifetime rainbow, and when everyone else turned around, the sky was just blue, and you just couldn’t explain it.

Except I just wrote a whole post about it.

what people do with their lives

Someone else’s life.

I find it simultaneously daunting and crippling to find out about other people’s courageous lives.

I’m sure everyone feels the same..but when you find out about someone who is your age or younger and has published a best-selling life-changing novel, saved refugee camps, already had your dream career and excelled at it, and moved on (or in this case–died)…it is kind of a depressing/exhilarating feeling.

This photojournalist was also an extremely talented mixed-media artist and created personal journals (seventeen of them at the time of his death by stoning in Somalia, at the age of 22) that are touching, riveting, sensual, passionate, brilliant. His mother compiled pages from them in a hard-cover book called “The Journey is the Destination: the Journals of Dan Eldon”.

There are some annoyingly-flash-powered samples of his journals on the site. Worth a look, really.

This guy is really, for me, an ideal, in a way. A fantasy. I fancy that there are these individuals who walk around the same earth we do, but seem to not be limited or bound by the same laws. As if gravity didn’t somehow apply to certain people, or the need for visas, or mundane obligations.

At the age of 14, he started photo-journalism. At seventeen, he was interning for a magazine in New York, that same year he raised money for the hospital bills of a girl in Kenya through various ingenious and creative ploys. At nineteen, he drove down from Kenya to Mozambique and found a refugee camp he vowed to aid, then raised money for that cause. Around 20, he found out about rampant famine in the north of Somalia and was single-handedly responsible for bringing it to the attention of the world through his photos. He was stoned to death at 22 when trying to help document a popular uprising.

That’s what I mean…some people live in this world but are not bound by it. I think of all of us as plants, we all have roots, but some of us are firmly rooted in soil, immovable, stuck to one place, and grow upwards because that’s what we do. Some of us have roots but are freed from our environment, are UP-rooted, held triumphantly above ground, defying the laws of rooted-ness, overtaking walls, buildings, houses with our luxuriant vines, growing over water, over rock.

There are so many options for life. And I find myself yearning for a life infused with courage and daring, but not sure how to free myself from everything I tie myself down to. I just want to uproot myself and live the life I would love to live. Live a life I can admire.

the Cathedral of dreams

(this is an essay written about a black and white photograph taken by Negeen Sobhani, of a cathedral in a street of Florence)

Timeless.

Any epoch, any era, any moment in the past five hundred years, that is what recorded memory is for, to remind you of what happened, and what is possible, still, in waking dreams where you let your thoughts wander.

There is a moment when a particular image crosses that tenuous line between your personal memory and an appropriated past. Then you cannot decipher in the recesses of your own tumultous mind if you experienced it, or if you appropriated the memory after countless retellings, and reminescences.

The street in Firenze is sharp, busy but not hectic, and the clock indicates four in the afternoon. A man with his hands in his pockets takes a step away from me, his left heel barely touching the ground and I close my eyes…when I open them again, he has gone, and the sun lays its last rays along the side of the buildings on the left-hand side of the street, missing the bar, carressing the bakery and the butchershop and the shoe cobbler, further down a group of men shrink into the intersection and above all the awnings of the narrow busy street with the skinny four-story builings on either side, towering in the haze, is the Cathedral of dreams.

Looming quietly over a carefully synchronized chaos, she is the calm center, the heart to the artery I’m standing on. Powerful, magestic, gigantic, and yet practically invisible to those who won’t lift their head. The basilica, hazy with dreams, fades into the white sky above and I turn over, blinking, dreaming now of blintzes.

And as quickly as that, the snapshot vanishes. The perfect moment in time in the city I’ve never visited, and the stranger in mid-step whom I will never meet, the wet road and caressing rays of the afternoon sun disappear under a blanket of eastern European pancakes that I’ve never tasted.