sun

After two weeks of cold rainy weather, today was warm and gloriously sunny.

Last weekend I took advantage of the not very nice weather and my curent break from travel and did most of a re-write on "Ephemeral Creation," my post-punk memoirs originally published a little over five years ago. I fixed a few errors, wrote some new bits and pieces, expanded a few discussions, added some additional photos, messed around with format. It's almost ready, I just need to re-scan half a dozen images that I'm not entirely happy with.

I'd been procrastinating this intending to update my desktop publishing software first, but decided to go ahead and do the re-write in Google docs, which I've been using a lot these past several months. It worked well enough that at least for now, I'm going to put it online that way, as a PDF e-book. Free software that's poised to bring the Microsoft Office monolith crashing down is somehow appropriate for self-publishing a second-edition punk memoirs; and it's fun to watch mega-corporations fight to the death.

Being on a roll and having a four-day weekend, I next went after the chaotic jumble of text files that represent the last five years of my alternative photography experience. Surprisingly, they fell right into place, almost 70 pages worth already. There are still a few more chapters to be written from scratch to fill gaps, to help the narrative flow, and there will still be editorial decisions to be made and photos to be scanned. But it's entirely possible that a beta version is only a couple of long hard days of effort away. I'm probably going to put that one out to limited peer review first on a small, private photography forum, and then edit a little more based on the feedback I get there. But it's possible that my next book isn't very far away.

Over the past few days I've been contacted by several fascinating models, smart people with unique looks. It's more at the networking and hinting stage than actual offers so far. Unfortunately they're in far-off places like Toronto and New York that I have no known reason to visit at present, and possibly not the time or motivation either. Hell, I'm already stalling on a couple of shoot offers that many other photographers would kill for. The passion is going into writing these past weeks, not into creating photos. Still, it's pleasant to think about.

spam

Spam is a fact of life for anyone connected to technology. Filter and ignore, basically.

For the most part, California's do-not-call list has effectively eliminated the telephone version of spam. There's the occasional alleged non-profit raising money for some police or fire association who seem to think they're somehow above the law, but usually a simple "no thanks, I don't deal with phone solicitations, send it to me in writing" makes them go away, quickly. After all, there's no way to know that voice on the phone is who they say they are.

But last night I got a call from Wyndham Resorts, one of those annoying things "giving away" a trip to Las Vegas. One of those annoying guys who ignores the "no thanks" and keeps talking. Then ignores the second "not interested" and the third.

I had to get extremely aggressive with him, he simply was not going to stop talking otherwise. Once I finally got him to shut the fuck up and listen, and told him I was on the do-not-call list, he said "there's a loophole." But he finally went away.

Now that's such brilliant marketing. I've gone out of my way to sign up on a list which basically makes it illegal for these guys to call me. So they claim to find a loophole, and call anyway.

It apparently has never occurred to them that this might annoy people enough to make them never spend money in that place again? Duh.

These guys apparently own Ramada Inns and a lot of other things, and they got my info from some hotel stay in the past. Guess what... there are lots of hotels to choose from. I won't be staying at theirs anymore. I'm even going to do the research to see who else they own.

Wyndham is hereby added to my list of annoying corporations to not spend money on. I've boycotted Panera Bread since they responded to my complaint about an over-active e-mail filter which blocked art sites with a form letter and then put me on their e-mail spam list (about one a month from them still gets filtered into my junk folder, four or five years later). There are a few others.

I'm still debating whether to report Wyndham to the Attorney General's office, or simply write their CEO a letter.

nasty

Usually, what passes for "winter" here is more like spring in the rest of the country. I guess that's even true today, even though temperatures are some 15 degrees below normal. It's 43 right now, windy and rainy and generally nasty. With occasional thunder, something that's pretty rare here. Cars coming down from the mountains are covered in snow.

I'm not complaining about the weather outside, considering that it's 14 in Chicago right now. It's suppossed to stay this way for most of the week, but we'll deal with it.

Except that today had to be the day that the heat gave out on the third floor of the office. There are only about half a dozen of us up there on the top floor, and we came in to find that it was 56 degrees inside this morning. Three power outages, probably triggered by everyone firing up space heaters at once, contributed to not a lot getting done before 11:00 am.

Someone is working on it. But he's still at it several hours later, so it's not an easy fix.

At the moment I'm in a nice warm coffee house, having a nice warm bowl of soup. After my 12:30 meeting is over, it might become a day to work from home.

dummy

My reaction to the arrest this morning of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges: No surprise. Except maybe that it was the feds who finally got him. The rumors I've been hearing thus far had been from state people.

What's really sad is that Illinois now has two back-to-back tainted Governors. I was in the room when George Ryan made his infamous "I am what I am" comment to the press. Now, he's a convicted felon (one of my buddies from the punk era, now a prosecutor, helped to convict him). Then, he was merely a business as usual politician, known for cutting back room deals.

I've never met Blagojevich, although I've heard some really interesting stories from people who knew him in his college days. They're hearsay unfortunately, and todays allegations remain exactly that so far, so I'll keep this to myself for now. All I'll say is that his administration has gutted IDNR, and that resource conservation has suffered as a result of political appointees replacing experienced and competent people there.

Oh for the days of the Jim Edgar administration, perhaps the only spotlessly clean one there in recent memory.

It's not my tax dollars going down the drain anymore, I've been gone for almost eight years. But the people of Illinois should be ashamed of themselves. It's time to clean house, throw the bastards out. It's time to stop assuming that corruption is inevitable, to take back the state.

As for Blagojevich, for such an allegedly smart guy, he's sure looking not very bright today.

choices

I've finally made some computer upgrade moves.

The decision had been postponed a while, partially just to be stubborn. Last spring when I started shooting digital again after a two-year break, this time with much larger files sizes, it pretty much forced some changes. But I preferred to do it at my own pace, not when dictated by decisions of manufacturers. My ancient laptop was rendered pretty much useless by the newer camera technology, it wouldn't hold enough RAM to run the current generation of image processing software, and the earlier versions of Photoshop won't read modern RAW files. But I managed to squeeze a RAW converter and up to date Photoshop into my desktop machine. Not with a lot of room to spare, but it ran. Slowly.

My laptop is an old Powerbook G4, the 867 mhz 12-inch machine dating all the way back to 2003. I still really like it, still works perfectly, and I have no intention of getting rid of it. Even today, it's a perfectly capable word processing and internet machine, and it's compact and light (4 pounds). It will continue to be my on-the-road machine, the one that goes in my bag for airplane trips, for the forseeable future.

The desktop machine isn't all that much newer. It's a G5 iMac dating from something like late 2004 or early 2005. I'm not nearly as attached to it as I am to the old laptop, the iMac is a reasonably good machine but it's basically another piece of plastic, and I'm beginning to need something faster, and it seems the hard drive is always almost full. It's the first generation of the newer design, but with an older chip, and there's some low-level fan noise that the next upgrade of the same machine didn't have. Not a major problem, just a minor annoyance, and a reminder to beware of first-generation technology.

I've been watching recent upgrades and had pretty much decided by this fall to make a move soon. I'd also decided to go with a laptop and external monitor setup to simplify future upgrades. The new monitor, a 23-inch version, is already here, a refurbished and fully warrantied bargain picked up relatively inexpensively.... one big advantage of not being in a hurry. It took about three months of patiently waiting and watching to snap it up.

The computer decision was harder. The Macbook Air was tempting because of the light weight, only 3 pounds. But the first generation model was crippled, with a slower processor and much smaller hard drive than my three year old desktop machine, among other things. The just-out 2nd generation version is better, almost there, but not quite. The new aluminum Macbook is also tempting, and powerful enough for what I need, but the high-gloss screen and the lack of a firewire port turned me away. Reflections are the norm in most wi-fi cafes or pretty much anywhere on the road. What are the folks in Cupertino thinking? How to work effectively when they make it hard to see? And the Macbook screen is now taking a rap as cheaper and not as bright as the other current Mac laptops. And firewire, losing that might not by itself have been a deal killer, although it would have meant finding the long-hidden USB cable for my scanner; but added to the screen issue, no thanks.

I'd intended to wait another month or so. But what I finally did was take advantage of the aftermath of the black friday sales, prolonged at some venues way beyond what was probably the original intent. Enough markdowns, and a rebate offer, combined with the fact that there are some just discontinued models out there... it all added up to an opportunity to pick up a Macbook Pro, the version just superceded last month, for $550 under retail, plus a $150 rebate on top of that. That's probably less than the average year-old used equivalent on the open market.

It isn't actually here yet, probably won't be for several days yet. But it's got the old matte screen, and way more power than I need, about a 30% jump in processor speed, four times the RAM, and 25% more hard drive space than my old desktop.... which will be retired as soon as I'm sure I've got everything I need off of it. The new machine will live on the desk except on the rare occasions when I need that level of power to be portable, which isn't often; the smaller ancient laptop will fill the mobility role in most cases. It's easier to carry a few extra 2GB CF cards when I need to shoot digital (especially with memory prices falling) than it is to lug around a 5.4 pound hunk of aluminum.

Especially considering how big and heavy and overcomplicated my DSLR is. But that's another story.

things

So on Friday night at the office christmas party I won the "living out of suitcase" award.

Maybe the fact that I recently spent six weeks "commuting" between California and Chicago contributed to that... on top of plenty of more routine travel earlier in the year.

In fact, they're right. My bags are only half unpacked. They hardly ever get completely unpacked.

In other news, it was a fun Arts Alive night in Eureka, on Saturday night. A mild, foggy night, a good crowd, some good art. I met a couple of new people, including a really good photographer who I hadn't encountered before.

I probably would have forgotten to go, if one of the guys from the office hadn't brought it up the night before. He asked if I was going, then said something about often seeing me with "attractive women" on arts nights.

Well, yeah. Models, usually. Typically not for very long, but apparently long enough to make an impression.

He should have been there this time, he missed out. As usual, a 20 minute interaction, a couple of five minute interactions. Just saying hi and catching up on small talk, random encounters in a gallery or on the sidewalk.

That's OK. It's fun to routinely be in proximity to beauty.

dark noise

I've been corresponding these past few days, by e-mail, with two people who were once in a band you've heard of, unless you've been aestivating these past 20 years. One of them I've come to know quite well in person, the other I've met only once, very briefly, a lot of years ago. I've recently pulled out and scanned some old photos of these folks, which apparently has gotten me thinking about music.

When I took those photos, they hadn't played publicly yet, that didn't happen til two weeks later. We were on different ends of the business; I was at the peak of my music journalist "career" and they ranged from locally well known musicians to complete unknowns. We were peers, all part of the inner circle of what was essentially a major market but cult-level alternative music scene. People look back at that band today, kids who weren't even born yet when it all began, and they must think it's all so unreachable, so mysterious and remote. Yet at the time, they were just another band, getting ready to open for a then-better known band now lost in obscurity for all but those of us who were there. Most bands didn't make it, of course, so no one in the scene ever took anything for granted. This one turned out to be one of two from that time and place who did break out nationally, a little later.

But I got so jaded in those times, when rubbing elbows with local and touring British bands was so routine, and so many of them are so well known now. It's strange, hearing songs on the radio these days, and remembering hearing that same song in a small club, with perhaps 100 people in the room, then attending the afterparty with the band, drinking with them til dawn. No names needed, it's all out there if you really want to know, it's all written down and documented elsewhere.

Tonight after responding to one of those e-mails, one of those random connections happened, someone I met briefly a few years ago popped into my head. She was born probably around the time I took those early post-punk photos, she's in her late 20s now. She has a band, one of regional and cult-level notoriety, not unlike some of the people and bands I knew so long ago; well known within a small and specialized niche market, completely unknown to anyone outside of that group. Not my taste in music, really; hard to describe, but the same issue I had with so many bands back in the old days. Too fast, too loud, taking themselves much too seriously; burying (an appropriate word, in a way) so much potential, so much talent, under layers of barely harnessed youthful rage.

I don't know this young woman well at all, don't even know her real name. We had an interesting conversation once, and she played her latest CD for me, and we learned that we have at least one common influence... a now well-known band that I played pool with once and photographed another time, in fact wrote a scathing review of their show for the 'zine; yet a band that to her is something remote, something possibly heroic. She has their bumper sticker on the back of her car (a black car, of course). I think of seeing them as 20-somethings, drunk at 5:00 am, and I smile.

Where was I... in that conversation, in that couple of hours, I learned a lot about some aspects of her. She's very open about some things. She guards other things very closely. I know that she had a very difficult childhood. I know that she considers that "not necessarily a bad thing." I know that her dreams, her nightmares, are dark, that what is in her music comes from inside, from her darkness. I know that she's hardened in a way that most could never comprehend. I know that she's afraid. I'm not sure if she knows that or not.

Tonight I went looking for her online, even though that conversation was quite some time ago, and our most recent e-mail exchange was perhaps a years ago. Of course, I found videos of her and the band, mostly live footage from one show.

I watch her, in a torn white dress and garish makeup and black boots, spin across the stage, throw her soul into her music. I listen to lyrics so dark, so primal, intended to frighten and repulse the ordinary person. I know that it's real, I know that there really is controlled hatred of... something... in her. I know that she's more real, more dangerous, than any of the scary-looking people I spent so many big city nights with so long ago. I know that she contains the rage, measures it out slowly, controls it.

And I look at her, and I see a girl fighting against her fear. For me, her edge is an artifact. She's let me see behind the shadow, just for a few seconds at a time.

She's a strong one, she'll make it. Even as she endures the flames of her own personal hell. In 25 years, I wonder who she will be, what will come of it.

shift

Today I spent a few minutes on Main Street, with some good coffee and taking a few photos. It helped remind me to keep things simple. It helped remind me that I enjoy documenting this time and place we live in.

I then scanned some of the things I've shot in various parts of California over the past year, in LA, in the Bay Area, in the central valley, and closer to home. And there's a lot to work with.

It's got me thinking about an in-state road trip sometime this winter to find and photograph a few new places.

holiday

Yesterday I slept late. Today, I ran errands, paid bills, all the mundane things; and read for a while. Didn't touch the computer until after dark, left my phone upstairs.

And I still have a weekend in front of me. The break feels good.

I'm feeling a desire to do some fairly straightforward and minimalist portraiture, but at the same time not in any particular hurry to make it happen. I have offers to shoot in San Francisco and Chicago, and the first thing is to decide when to be in those places next.

But first, I'm tempted to spend a few hours in the darkroom, pull together sets of related images and make prints, something I haven't done in months. Maybe it's almost time for another exhibit?

cold

I had found the location one day while trying to access a nearby location; a trail ran alongside the historic Illinois and Michigan Canal, and less than half a mile from the parking lot, I'd walked past the ruins of a late 1800s steel mill. Now, it was part of a county park in the far southwest suburbs of Chicago, a recent acquisition. Surprisingly, few areas were fenced off. Except for the steepest dropoffs, it was open and accessible.

Now, weeks later, I arrive with Claudine. It's almost an hours drive, so we have plenty of time to talk. It's late afternoon, the weak winter sun hanging low over the horizon. It's 36 degrees, but at least there isn't much wind.

We walk in, and begin with a set of concrete arches; actually, in a rear chamber I hadn't even found the first time. We're a few hundred feet from a busy commuter rail line, and even closer to a small road serving local industrial facilities, and no one can see us. The concrete walls shield us from prying eyes.

We walk through the structure, carefully choose locations, talk thorough sequencing, positions, angles. Those decisions made, Claudine drops her clothing into a neat pile. Here, in full sun and out of the light breeze, the cold isn't too bad. We spend perhaps 10 minutes on the first few sets of shots.

Covered up again, we walk to a second location, a few hundred meters to the north. This one is a jumble of concrete ruins, sunken below ground level, guarded only by a "warning, dangerous ruins" sign. Moving through this jumbled landscape without care could indeed be dangerous. We climb down slowly, choose two spots. The challenge here is to edit things out, to simplify the composition among the chaos of rubble. We work with two small openings in the rock. Again, we're out of sight. Trucks drive by and no one sees a thing.

The third set is a little more challenging, because it's in the open, fully exposed. The sun is also about to slip below the horizon, and now there is a distinct chill in the air. Claudine stands on worn and eroded concrete polygons and rectangles, carefully avoiding the glass of broken beer bottles in the depressions, her smooth naked skin contrasting with the cold, hard substrate. We work quickly, pausing twice when people bicycle past on the trail barely a hundred feet away. We almost don't see or hear the pickup truck that follows, and Claudine is caught in the open this time. All she can do is drop to the cold ground and not move. The driver is thinking of other things though, eyes straight ahead. He never looks in our direction, never knows what he missed.

We return to the car a few moments later. I've only brought three rolls of film, intentionally, to minimize the length of the shoot on such a cold day. 108 frames. The whole thing has taken only an hour, with easily half of that devoted to picking locations. Now we drive back north, talking about the experience, laughing about almost being seen, comparing notes on our past experiences. She says something that surprises me, something I need to think about a little.

We part ways, already thinking about what to do next time.

pause

I've just taken a few moments to file negatives from earlier this year, and I'm seeing a departure from my usual patterns of shooting.

For one thing, I'm only seeing about 16 models so far for 2008. I'm probably forgetting a couple, because the purely digital work isn't here, I'm looking only at film negatives. But that's about half the number I've worked with each of the previous few years.

A few of those have been unknown or brand new local girls, basically people I agreed to shoot with just for practice, not expecting too much from them.

One reason for the drop in total numbers is that I've worked repeatedly with a few favorite models this year: especially Inga and Claudine, about three times each so far, and twice with Iona Lynn. And I'm liking that, really finding the nuances, finding ways to get very different results from the same individuals over time. There are a few others from this year I'd shoot with again if the opportunity presents itself... Shae, Heather, Wenchi, Amy.

It may affect how I shoot from here forward. It's complicated because those faves are anywhere from 250 to 2,000 miles from here, as are most of the other people I really enjoy shooting with. And identifying the rare muse is a lot of work, both upfront in culling from all the online possibilities, and then in the actual shoots, finding the relatively few who have the talent, the compatible personalities and interests, the right energy.

halflife

I managed to squeeze in one very quick shoot before returning from Chicago. Claudine came out for the end of the day, and we worked for about an hour in the cold (36 degrees) and fading late afternoon light. About 12 hours later I was on the way to the airport.

On the ride back we talked about the usual photography related things, traded old war stories about past shoots. It suddenly struck me that I'd just talked about working, only four or five years ago, with models who are now pretty much gone from the scene. Of five in particular, two I'm certain are "retired" and I'm assuming a third is also, at least I haven't seen any recent images of her, or heard anything; and the other two are in transition, working mostly behind the camera as photographers these days and only rarely accepting modeling gigs.

There are plenty of 20 and 30 year veteran photographers around. It's so unusual to hear of a model who remains active for more than a handful of years.

paradigm

Last night we experienced a significant political realignment. This will rumble through society from now until January 20, and well beyond... and it will be a long time until any of us know what it really means.

In Barack Obama, I see a charismatic man who has defied odds throughout his political career. Things break his way in part because he refuses to believe otherwise. If he can convey his optimism to America, if he really can reach across different colors and classes and beliefs... if he can defy all the rigid boxes of modern American politics, all the special interests and ambitious advisors who would tug him every which way... great things could happen. Certainly, it must be an improvement over the past eight years; after eight years of an infamously dysfunctional administration, how could it be otherwise?

Some presumably fear change. How deep into the abyss must we plunge to open those eyes?

One of Obama's greatest strengths is his grounding in constitutional law, expounded on at length in one of his books. An essential skill, because part of the problem is that we've broken loose from the moorings set by the founding fathers... imperfect as they were, and even after more than two centuries of a changing world, those famous and powerful experiments in democracy continue to define us as a people. We must not forget, in fact we must re-learn. In a time when most accumulate a chaos of unrelated beliefs similar to those held by their peer group, molded by marketing campaigns and special interests... this is one path back to a core set of beliefs upon which to base important decisions.

For a little over two months this will be a nation, a world, in transition. Unlike Obama, many of us on the "down-ticket" part of the ballot don't need to wait. We can do our little incremental bits to change the world now, or at least within days. And I'm honored to have been a winner on that same paradigm-shifting day, one which will go down in the history books as a day of profound change.

new

Finally, I've uploaded the new web page. Actually most of it has been there for several weeks, but now the new index page is up. There are still a couple of minor glitches... some text that needs to be kicked in away from the margin, things like that... but everything works now, I think, except the couple of things that clearly say they don't (a couple of bits of writing still in progress).

I'll need to add to it. The above mentioned writing, which is perhaps another hour or two of work to add. More images in a couple of the galleries (some of which are already scanned). I need to clean up the punk memoirs, which are linked about two layers deep, they've been there forever and are starting to look dated and have lost a few images through accidental deletions over the years. Those pages get a lot of hits, so they really need to be fixed. I keep meaning to do a major re-write and expansion, but that will require time, something that's in short supply at the moment.

The biggest differences from the previous version: A lighter look, a bit less edge. More words. Changes in the way images are grouped and presented, less abstract than anytime recently. New images, some shown before in other places, some not. Old words, post-punk words, written a long time ago but only read by a very few people until now.

The old version is mostly still there, on blind links, although I'll probably delete almost all the old pages after a transition period. Got to keep all the kids who hot link images at least a little honest.

Usually I like to update the site once a year or so, as a very rough average. It's been a lot longer than that, it was overdue. Hopefully the next update won't need to be put off as long.

It's ironic that even as I tame down the site a little, I'm mulling some fairly extreme concepts, and corresponding with a Bay Area model who just might help make some of those concepts into reality.

home

... for a little while. it felt so good to get a full nights sleep, and then take a nap mid-day. I almost feel human again.

No more travel til at least Thursday afternoon...

craziness

I'm having fun, and I'm too busy to enjoy it. Make any sense?

The call came in from a new client a bit over two weeks ago: "how quickly can you get here, and how long can you stay?" A few days later I was in Chicago, on a very large and very rush project... can't say a whole lot more just yet. I've been home once since then, last weekend, for about 28 hours with a side daytrip to the Bay Area... and have a few more days in Chicago before being able to take a bit of a break. It's one of those work-eat-sleep-work again trips, with breakfast and lunch catered in to a dedicated project office, dinner with the large and ever-changing project team, except on days with meetings or field visits (like today). It's challenging stuff, but exciting.

But it means, for now, no time for writing, or photos, or visiting with friends, or almost anything else. Ah, the joys of consulting...

It slows down a little in just a few days, I think... although who knows, today has already brought two surprises and two almost immediate resolutions of those issues. But gotta go now... early meetings tomorrow.

web

The update of my photography website is almost done, it's mostly uploaded except for the new index page. I still need to work out a few glitches, fix a couple of internal links and some general QC. But I'm probably going to go ahead and put it out there soon even though a couple of the galleries don't have quite as many images as I'd like in them yet... it's always possible to add to those later, and after the next couple of evenings I'll be on the road for a week and with very limited time.

Almost all the images will be different. It's a somewhat different approach this time both in feel and in the way the images are presented; a little lighter look, and a less abstract presentation of subject matter, grouped in more conventional categories but also running together a little. This reflects the fact that I'm in a phase of seeing connections again, that each subject seems to lead to and fade into another.

things

I need to go back to Chicago later this week, had a call a few days ago from a new client and I need to take care of some rush things for them. It's going to be a busy 6 days, I'm getting off the plane and going straight into strategy meetings with project managers and lawyers, and probably working straight through the weekend. Not sure how much time if any I'll have to do anything related to photography. But I did take a few minutes today to think about what to bring, and so far I'm leaning toward keeping it simple. One Leica, a couple of lenses, a handheld incident meter. No digital except for my consumer level pocket-sized little point-and-shoot, and that only in case I need to do any project site documentation.

The reasons: At the recent shoot with Claudine, I took more digital shots (about 180) than film (about 72). And I fell into the trap of shooting quickly just because I could. End result: 40 of the film images made the first cut for editing, only four of the digital images did.

A line in the Weston movie last night brought it to the surface, a mention of the creation of 1,400 negatives (on 8x10 sheet film) during an entire summer of California travels.

I'll bet some digital shooters routinely capture more than 1,400 images in every shoot they do... and that not one of them has, or ever will, even remotely approach what Weston did on that trip.

Another issue has surfaced repeatedly, including in the last two location shoots. I like to shoot in low light, and the little rangefinder lets me get away with it. With no mirror to create vibration, and with the exquisite balance of the Leica, and with the precision of the split-image rangefinder for focus, I routinely handhold at 1/15th, 1/8th, even 1/4 of a second while shooting at dusk or at night, and almost all of the images are sharp. That's led me to try doing the same thing with digital, and... it doesn't work. Shooting at those same speeds results in lots of shots softened by camera vibration, lots of shots with the focus just-barely-off because of the darker, less-crisp DSLR viewfinder and no depth-of-field margin of error at f/1.4 and with the 1.5x crop factor. Yeah, I know, kick up the ISO... but digital noise isn't as pleasing as grain, and I tend to push low light limits anyway, give me more speed and I'll shoot in less light.

I've shot the two cameras side by side, gotten 95 percent success with the Leica, and 25 percent success with a brand new Nikon DSLR, both of them with top-end fast prime glass.

So increasingly I'm shooting digital when speed matters, which for me isn't often, and film the rest of the time.

Another bit of simplifying: Shooting film while on travel allows me to carry my smaller/lighter/easier to use/ancient Mac laptop.. a 12" Powerbook, only 4 pounds. It's too old/slow to handle the huge download files of the current crop of DSLRs, but functions just fine as a word processing and web machine. So that saves me a lot of bulk and weight.

Now if only other things in life were so easy to simplify.

timeless

About 4:30, taking a break from scanning, I grabbed the papers off the front sidewalk and skimmed them. Two days to look at, because yesterday had been such a busy day.

In yesterdays paper was a notice of a screening, a documentary on Edward Weston and Charis Wilson. It gave a time, 6:30 today, but not a place. Fortunately, the correction was in today's paper, the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka. I was there by 6:15.

Edward Weston died five months after I was born, but he was one of my early photographic influences. I'd known of his work very early, because my father often spoke of him. The real influence happened in the late 70s though, when I read the two-volume set of Weston's Daybooks. They were so direct, authentic, down to earth. They inspired a renewed interest in photography, one that very possibly contributed to the documentary work I began doing on the Chicago punk scene just about that time. There are references to the Daybooks in my journals from that period. I also first learned of Charis from reading the daybooks.

I'm not sure when I saw my first Weston prints. The first extensive exhibit was, I believe, one I saw in New York in the mid-1980s, but I probably saw a few scattered examples much earlier than that. I've rarely passed up an opportunity since then, and have studied those prints many times, enjoyed the subtle tonality, the beauty.

The Daybooks of course deal largely with the earlier days, the transition from pictorialism to modernism, the formal compositions. I always preferred Edward's later work, from the 1930s on. Not very many years ago I found a copy of the "California and the West" book, the one with the 1937 to 1939 Guggenheim Grant images, the one with the forward written by Charis. I've paged through that book so many times since then, and it sits in front of me now. It's so much more subtle than the earlier work, less idealized. This work includes death and decay, an acknowledgement of mortality. It's not easy work to look at, it takes many views to fully appreciate. And it gave momentum to my concepts already underway, my nudes in the human-modified world of disturbance and decay. It was the kiss of death for the already mortally wounded myth of pristine nature, at least as seen through my eyes.

So I owe Edward and Charis a bit of an intellectual debt. They're only one influence among many, and perhaps not the most important one, but they're still an influence. Both of them.

I arrived at the screening in time to grab a seat. The room rapidly filled, the final count was 238, more than four times what had been expected. The crowd was mostly older, refined, well dressed, with a scattering of younger artists.

The director introduced the film, then let it roll. The core was a series of interviews with Charis, 90 at the time of filming (now 94 and living in Santa Cruz). She's still sharp, and some things were easy for her to talk about, even fun; other were more difficult. The re-enactments of the shoots and various other events, with actors, were surprisingly believable. The authenticity... any experienced nude model, any experienced photographer of the nude, will smile, will recognize certain rites of passage, certain experiences.

The film really clarifies the importance of the model-photographer connection, really demonstrates that it's not just technique, not just a pretty body. The personality, the emotion, the energy, is so evident in these images. The creative collaboration requires two. The changes over time, these too become evident. The photographs mirror the relationship.

Charis as rebel also brought a few smiles to my face, given how many rebels I work with. The images of her unshaven, natural, at a time when postal regulations forced most models to shave because mailing an image which showed pubic hair was illegal... and the shift over time from in-your-face rebellion to just being who she was, authentic, with Edward's encouragement and as she matured. Then, the increasing distance as she came into her own, as Edward apparently struggled with that level of independence.

I didn't know until tonight that Charis lived in Eureka from 1945, after she left Edward, until at least through the 1950s.

I recognized the muse. I saw an earlier version of so much of what I've come to experience myself. In some ways, these two personify so many of the traits I've come to know among the many models and photographers I've met and worked with. It's no wonder that I keep crossing this path.

choices

Today began as a relaxing day. I rode my bike down to Main Street for breakfast, ended up sitting down with two of the locals, both a lot older than me. I very much enjoyed the conversation, as well as a few that followed on the sunny but windy sidewalk, warm and cool at the same time.

After returning home I dove into scanning some of the negatives processed last night. From the two rolls of Claudine, 72 frames, I scanned 40 images... many more than usual. One example is above, but I've barely begun to actually work on the images, it's going to be so hard to choose from all the keepers. What an amazing shoot.

modern myths

Yesterday I did a google search for some local demographic data, and found what I needed pretty quickly. While on one of the source sites, I saw a link to a forum, and followed it, and in turn followed a couple of links to threads about the Eureka/Arcata area.

What I found there was a series of responses to questions about this area, about what it's like, what the job market is like, etc. The responses were almost entirely from out-of-state people, some of whom had visited once.

Some of the responses were reasonably helpful. But there were several which commented on alleged trashed out front yards, abandoned cars, homeless people; and there were a couple of comments from locals about a "depressed economy."

Two things bothered me about those responses. Let's tackle the ones about the economic situation first, because the answer is simple: Those comments are untrue. They're speculative, none of them cited any actual data, and often they were based on 20-year old information. The "problems" they mentioned are smaller and more localized here than they are in the places those writers are from. But it's a misconception that I still hear sometimes even from those who should know better.

A lot of the problem stems from the 1980s decline that accompanied the transition away from a resource based economy. The logging industry sagged, jobs were lost, some people left the area. People who visited then remember that... I was here briefly in the mid-80s, certainly I remember. We're past that now. The glory days of logging are over, it's a specialty market now, the old days are never coming back. That's a good thing, because it's forced the economy to diversify.

The most telling and most recent sign of that is the beginning of service by Delta Airlines this summer. I was there for the arrival of the first plane, and had a very minor role in making it all happen. It means that we now have three major airlines (the others are United and Alaska/Horizon) flying into a county of only 130,000 people. Clearly, that would not be happening without solid economic justification, especially when times are tough for airlines.

And the airlines are right. The unemployment rate here is currently right around the state average. Median incomes are a little below the state average, but the cost of living is also lower... about 80 percent of the national average. The "Targets of Opportunity" report published a year or two ago by the county identifies six growth sectors, areas which are growing rapidly, and which in general are creating jobs which pay well. I've tossed my copy deep in some pile of paper and don't have time to look for it right now, but among those growth areas are professional services (engineering, architecture, etc.); niche manufacturing; and health care services. There are increasing numbers of telecommuters who have fled the big city (for six years I was one of them), and more information and management workers. Thus the need for those airplanes.

Growth is slow but steady and sustainable. At a time when many rural parts of the U.S. are shrinking, that's a good place to be. We're continually being named to some magazines "best places to live" list often on the basis of outdoor recreation and clean air.

The people who are whining are the ones who have missed the chance to ride opportunity, often the ones who have failed to notice it. The rest of us have been too busy to point it out.

Admittedly, I'm in a better position to see it than most. I sit on the local economic development commission, so I see the numbers firsthand. I know, at least casually, a lot of the city and county decision makers and policy setters. I work for one of those fast-growing professional services firms. Maybe most importantly, I've already watched a variation of this happen in Chicago, 25 years ago... and remember all too vividly the naysayers, the ones who saw the fading days of the rust belt, but never recognized the emerging opportunities... the ones who were left behind. Sometimes the Phoenix can't arise until the ashes have reached a certain critical mass.

The too-rapid growth in the midwest created both good and bad... too much traffic, too much shoddy development. Hopefully, with our more sustainable pace, we can avoid repeating some of those mistakes here.

The second disturbing thing about those comments is a bit more ambiguous. In sum, a few people saw only the fact that we don't all obsess over perfect lawns and shiny new things, and they just didn't understand that. We aren't as materialistic as many parts of the nation. And I need to think on how to really express this adequately... because they didn't see, didn't accept, that we've done some things differently here by choice; that we (or at least many of us) just like to live a little more simply, and don't need to keep up with or impress the Joneses.

That's helping us as the financial bottom falls out of so many other places. Our economic peaks aren't as lofty here. But our chasms aren't as deep, either.

rain

The rains have come early this year. Yesterday was a warm gentle rain. Today is less pleasant, not all that much rain yet but cool and raw and windy.

Still, I enjoy the rain. It makes for a more somber and thoughtful mood.

bail

Like so many, I'm following the bailout closely. As a management major in school, I took more than my share of economics courses (known as "the dismal science" for a reason). I've also met at least one of the major players in attempts to resolve the current crisis, and know members of his immediate family quite well, so there's a bit of personal interest.

Obviously, failure to find a resolution will have profound consequences. I have little sympathy for the Wall Street players, although there's plenty of blame to go around they certainly need to shoulder a major portion as the front-line participants. But the pain won't stop on Wall Street. It will also hurt lots of small investors, lots of people with 401(k) plans, and indirectly... in job losses and inability to get credit... a lot of people who had little or no personal involvement in the fiasco.

And yet, the unthinkable occurred to me the other day, and I can't get it out of my head: Maybe, in a perverse sort of way, a collapse of the financial system could be the best long-term thing that could happen to our economy. Maybe that's the only thing that will break us of our materialistic addiction, our binge of buying things we don't really need with money we don't really have.

I have one additional concern, one that I so far haven't seen much discussion of. As banks and investment firms fall like dominoes and some are acquired by larger banks, a significant consolidation of the financial industry is taking place. Banks like Wachovia (which got in trouble partly through acquisitions of its own) are now in turn being swallowed by titans like Citibank. Yet acquisitions and the dealings of mega-firms contributed to the crisis. Are we simply reducing competition and setting up at a minimum a future of distant dealings by huge impersonal and out-of-touch corporations with huge political clout, and which too often outsource jobs overseas? Or at worst, are we setting up the next crisis? In finance class, they taught us to diversify to reduce risk. Yet here we are, consolidating, creating oligarchies.

Maybe we'll draw back from the precipice this time. Yet it's important to remember that our current economic system is essentially a 150-year old experiment, that in it's present form dates back only to the post-WWII years. Even within the relatively short span of recorded human history, it's little more than a blip in time. One can't help but wonder how long a system predicated on never-ending economic growth can be sustainable. The cliff is out there someplace, we just don't know how far in the distance it lies; and we can't see much in the dismal darkness.

city light

Chicago: This trip happened on about 36 hours notice. It's short, only about three and a half days, and packed fairly full. I didn't expect to have time to shoot. But just hours before leaving for the airport, Claudine e-mailed and offered to shoot. I called her after arriving, we talked this morning, and squeezed in a shoot early this evening.

It was cool and rainy all day, so we shot in her lakefront apartment. It's well lit, windows on two sides, sparsely furnished, even minimalist. And it's... white. White walls, white ceiling, white drapes. There are three B&W prints in white frames and white mats, shots that Ralph Gibson took of Claudine. I'm flattered that she's asked me for two prints from our first shoot, to hang alongside those prints already on her wall.

Toward the end of the shoot we pulled back the drapes, shot with the adjacent high rises in the background. Since it was still light out, I'm not sure if anyone was able to see well enough to enjoy the show... they would have needed to look in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. We didn't care.

I shot enough digital to know I've got plenty of keepers; the black & white should be even better. The light was a little tricky, but worth the effort. More importantly, after the ambivalent feelings of recent weeks, this was a fun shoot. There wasn't much conversation while we worked, because there didn't need to be. Things flowed effortlessly.

in the headlights

I'm in discussions with two models at the moment about local shoots. Kind of surprising really, because I've made no attempt whatsoever to pursue anything recently. But they've been persistent, one of them may happen later this week, and the other is tentatively about 10 days out.

Neither model is very experienced, but they're both tall and thin, each with an interesting face. The first one, I think she knows what she wants, I'm feeling pretty good about that opportunity. The second one I haven't been talking with long enough to be sure.

But today, when I read her latest message and then clicked through her portfolio again, there were some new images. That's good I guess, because the others were basically consumer-level digital snapshots. The new ones are technically sort-of-OK but far from great, slightly washed out, some cheap zoom lens flare, but just at the minor-problem level.

What really strikes me is that while the newer images are marginally better than the older ones in a technical sense... she's far more expressive in those earlier snapshots. Maybe a better way to put it is that she's more natural, more relaxed.

The new shots are mostly implied nudes... that is, she's wearing nothing, but nothing shows. Hands, objects, etc. are strategically placed.

And she's obviously not having fun. She looks almost scared... what I call the "are we done yet" look. She's rigid, tense. She isn't ready for this. She's been pushed, or has pushed herself, right up to her limits.

The photos aren't credited, but I can guess who did them, and I know for sure who didn't. There aren't very many photographers who do people here. I'm looking forward to meeting her in person just so I can ask a few questions about that shoot.

Thinking about it a little, it's become plain that while at a basic level the photos could have been things of beauty, they aren't. It's not really about the technical things; it's more the intent, I think. My sense is that either consciously or unconsciously, the photographer was so fixated on seeing the girl naked that he forgot about taking the pictures, that became secondary. The resulting energy exchange was of course a less than positive thing. The connection isn't there.

It amazes me that so few photographers understand this... except that there was a time when I'm not sure I did, either. I was fortunate to shoot with some pretty talented people early, and my lapses into "photo-lust" were, I think, brief and widely scattered, so mostly it didn't slow me down. But so many fall into this trap of not thinking, creating superficial images that are about nothing but their own ego.

It makes me want to slap these guys. It's just so selfish, and in the end, such a waste of everyones time. Of course there are too many of them. Educate one, three more buy cameras. It's a losing battle if fought at an individual level. It's the social and cultural context that's messed up, the photographers are victims as much as the models are.

There's more I want to say on this, but it would mean straying way into conjecture and speculation. Better to wait a while and learn more first.

who

As I continue to compile images for my web site update, it's forced me to think about what my selection criteria are. In most subjects of course, it's about visually striking images which have something in common with the other images in the same series.

But putting together the portrait section, it occurs to me that it's not just the quality of the photo; or rather, it's partially about something that, within that genre, contributes a lot to the quality of the photos. And that, quite simply is: How interesting is this person?

I have an advantage, of course. I actually get to meet the subjects, I know more about them than most viewers will. Still, if I engage with the subject, if I find them interesting, that tends to come across in the photos.

I'm making a bit of a break from the recent past in that I'm thinking about posting a few images of fairly well-known people this time. Mostly, people from my punk years, people associated with infamous bands. Ironically, that was the first time I photographed people as art. I have lots of earlier photos of famous people from my photojournalist years, especially politicians, some of whom are still in the news. But those photos were taken as part of a job. I made no attempt to personally engage with the subject, even though I had opportunities. The most unusual example: Once, in (about) 1978, I was asked by a friend on a major campaign staff to escort Bob Dole (then a relatively young Senator) from a meeting to a press conference, because they were short on staffers that day. So I had five minutes all alone, including an elevator ride, to chat with him. Even though I disagree with him on lots of issues, did then and still do now, I came away from that meeting respecting his integrity. He clearly believed deeply in what he stood for, had thought it through. He just came from a different background, a different world, than I did. But the only photos I took of him were at the press conference, and they're bland and boring, not worth posting. It wasn't til a year or two later that I learned to wield my camera as more than a mindless literal recording device.

Of course it's usually difficult to guess, while we're still able to get close enough to someone to get a good photo of them, who will one day launch to worldwide name recognition. But what I've learned is that it's remarkably easy to get close enough to lots of interesting people, and then count on the fact that some of them, some small percentage, will eventually go places.

I thought of that tonight as I sat in a room full of people with some measure of local power and influence, people not now well known outside of Humboldt County. I looked around and wondered if someday I'd be reading about one of them in the national press; and realizing that I just need to keep taking photos of interesting people wherever I find them and whenever it's appropriate.

america

For about the third time in the past few months, I've started re-doing my web site. The previous couple of efforts died, because I just wasn't happy with the direction it was going. This latest effort is surviving so far, although I've still got plenty of work to do.

One of the dilemmas is always how to group the images. Usually I do it by concept, but this time I'm simplifying, just doing major subject groupings... portraits, nudes... and that's where I'd hit the latest snag.

I do a lot of street photography. I do a lot of cityscapes. I do a lot of natural landscapes, or at least mostly natural. Increasingly, I've not cropped out the signs of humanity, and sometimes I've made them the central element of the composition.

About 15 minutes ago, while doing a little minimal photoshop on the image above, I realized that it's impossible, at least for me, at least right now, to split those categories. They simply overlap too much.

As I've traveled across America on all these business and personal trips, I've looked at the beauty, the ugliness, the contradictions. I've thought about what de Toqueville wrote about this country, and what those who followed in his footsteps wrote. And I've documented.

The image above is of something I found last summer in Eagleville, California, on the return drive from Burning Man. It's a place of sharp transition. Look to the east, and see the browns and tans and grays of the desert, with Nevada literally visible about two miles away. Look north and south, see verdant green, where springs issue from the mountains and feed lush wetlands and an elongated, narrow strip of green pastureland. Look west, and cedar-covered mountains rise quickly to nearly 6,000 feet. And in this place, an abandoned lot, shadowy memories of games and laughter past.

I'll work on this particular gallery of images over the weekend, I've only chosen the first three so far but there a lot more to work with. If there aren't too many distractions, hopefully I'll get this selective tour of the national psyche uploaded before long.

fire

I woke up this morning to smoke rising above Main Street. One of the old turn of the century redwood buildings was in flames. Quick work by the local volunteer firefighters may or may not have saved the shell, but for sure the inside is badly gutted. A restaurant is out of business for the near future, and 7 young guys living upstairs are essentially out on the street.

I saw the owner of the restaurant on the sidewalk, she was crying.

I couldn't stay very long, because I had a meeting in Weaverville today... only about 90 miles inland, but more than two hours driving time because of the winding nature of Rt. 299, and because of localized one-way controlled traffic related to cleanup efforts from the recent wildfires in Trinity County. Actually they're still burning, probably will be until the first rains in a few weeks, but things are pretty much under control for now. Unlike two weeks ago, I couldn't really see any smoke from the road today, just a few crews cutting up and hauling off burned trees which were in danger of falling onto the road. But at the meeting we learned that about 260,000 acres have burned since June in Trinity County alone. Blackened ground is visible more often than not from Big Bar to Weaverville. The cost of fighting those fires, both financially and in lives lost (at least 11 firefighters) and in health risk (from particulate matter, or PM 2.5) is mind-boggling.

We debated the fires at the NCUAQMD meeting; I agree with my counterpart from Trinity County that the Smoky-the-Bear mentality of the past 80 years, the conscious policy of suppressing fire, has been a slow-motion disaster. I strongly diisagree with my counterpart from DelNorte County, who thinks that salvage logging is the answer.

That's because dead down wood and standing dead wood (known as "snags" in forestry jargon) are essential habitat components for everything from bats to woodpeckers to salamanders, and they don't contribute all that much to the fuel load. Instead, it's the even-age structure of forests managed for logging that's the problem. They're much too dense relative to their pre-settlement condition, and mostly the same size. So if fire gets up one tree, it jumps to the next, and the next. Soon there's a raging crown fire. A few years ago when fires burned in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the old growth... with its complex multi-layer canopy... escaped with little more than ground fires and an occasional charred trunk base. Adjacent second-growth stands of Douglas fir, even age, went up like an oversized bonfire. There wasn't a lot left in some places.

The inland forests are a lot more vulnerable than the stands in that park, because it's hotter and drier inland. I did see a few recovering stands today which looked healthy, widely spaced mature trees which had survived the fires, only grass below, all the once-dense saplings burned away. Run a nice safe controlled ground fire through there every few years, after the first fall rains when fire is easy to control, and it may be a very long time til catastrophic fire revisits those stands. But other areas are thickets of young shrubs and saplings, tinderboxes waiting for a flame. These are areas where fires were so hot that even the big trees died; now young vegetation fights for space, crowded shoulder to shoulder.

In even age stands, selective cutting may be a good thing. Take half the trees, or even more, out of there, leave the biggest trees and a few smaller ones, and then follow up a few years later with fire, and there's hope for those stands.

Fire is an essential part of the equation, for the simple reason that for thousands of years Native Americans burned the woods. Fire was frequent and of low intensity, and the ecosystem is adapted to that fire. Ironically, in that time before subdivisions, there is evidence that in southern Oregon fires were set by a lone woman as she harvested seeds from last years fire-dependent plants (the guys were probably waiting downwind, bow at the ready for that deer about to flee the fire... but that part is speculation).

Burn enough times, over enough years, and the presettlement open woodlands would eventually return. But modern humans are impatient creatures, unwilling to wait for the sapling that survives every 20th year when it's too wet to burn, unwilling to wait another 70 years for it to grow to maturity. Old-growth structure takes time to develop. I'm fine with helping it along though, at least in managed forests, even-age forests, by culling some of the trees, releasing the remainging ones to sunlight and more rapid growth. Once, or maybe at long intervals that is... because logging = soil disturbance = erosion.

The bottom line is that we can't do it without prescribed fire though. Selective logging by itself only postpones the problem (assuming the contractor doesn't just take the big trees instead of ther small ones they're supposed to when no one is looking, as was documented in one Texas study on Forest Service land... in that case, risk is almost immediately increased). Doing nothing doesn't work either, because that's what got us where we are today.

As is so often the case, the "solutions" pushed by the more extreme special interest groups won't work. What the loggers and their backers want won't work, or at least it's only part of the answer, done the right way and in the right places. And what the more extreme environmentalists want, the hands-off, myth of pristine nature approach, won't work either, because there hasn't been unmanaged land in this place in several thousand years. Hands off old-growth, most of the time, yes... although even there, in most woodland types, an occasional low-intensity managed fire is a good thing. But unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of old growth left. The rest, the disturbed stuff, needs a pretty serious push back toward equilibrium. We may not always get it right on the first try, but it's about time we get out there and start learning.

splinters

This weekend I had a guest in from out of town. I met her a few years ago, through one of my ex-punk buddies, didn't know her well.

After two and a half days of firsthand experience, it's crystal clear that she embodies everything we rebelled against in the late 70s and early 80s.

Which leads me, after a little non-linear wandering, to the fact that the original intent, the original philosophy and goals of any counterculture movement, these things tend to get lost pretty quickly. I was fortunate to experience the punk thing while it was still fresh and relatively uncorrupted, and in the pre-internet days it took more than 24 hours for the world to learn about out little rebellion. But soon enough it was diluted. Soon enough it turned into a dress-up party, and excuse to get drunk. Soon enough it wasn't about ideas any more. I probably stayed a few months too long, but that's about when a whole lot of us left.

It's harder today. The world learns of any new idea overnight, the corporate interests try to coopt or acquire anything with cachet (= marketing value).

A little more wnadering, and we come to Burning Man, which began a few years after my departure from punk (even that word "punk" no longer means anything, at least it bears no resemblance to what we were in 1978... it's mostly misunderstood, misapplied today... but that's another entry). Burning Man may once have been a TAZ (temporary autonomous zone), but not anymore. It's locked into the same place, the same time, every year. The law patrols it, three different jurisdictions at least. It's watched from a distance by the marketing types, and that only because it's too hot/cold/windy/dusty for most of the boys and girls in suits to handle, except of course the ones (like me) who go there to get away from the office, to forget it for a little while.

Instead, it's a bunch if mini-TAZs. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. because there's no predicting, no controlling what happens on any given few yards of ground. What was there this year may or may not be replaced by something else next year, and again the year after that. The anarchy and chaos layered over the structure is what saves it. Always, someone will do something unexpected, and then do something new in a different place the following year.

Always keep moving. Never stand still for long.

perspective

different worlds, different views
through the haze of pretension
the games she plays
tolerated, at first
but the field has changed
and not everyone understands
invisible lines
the storm brews
fly away
soon

silly model girls

Most of the models I work with are very bright people, very realistic and very involved in collaborating to create strong images. Because I don't do a lot of mainstream work, I rarely encounter the unrealistic demands that I hear about from some photographers. But I do occasionally stumble on them while browsing random portfolios. I just found a good example, one that I'll share to showcase a particular subset of what apparently happens a lot out there.

She says:

"I gained about 15lbs since I was released from the hospital so I'm now 135lbs and working on working it off"

"I will currently only be taking on paid shoots"

"Only other way I will shoot TFCD is if there is atleast 1of following -MUA, hairstylist, or wardrobe stylist. Or if its for a tearsheet. Sorry if that sounds harsh but it is what it is!"

"I DO NOT SHOOT NUDES UNLESS IT INVOLVES BODYPAINT!!!! ok got it? great!"

She's 5'3" and her avatar photo is so badly underexposed it's hard to tell what she looks like. I've never heard of anyone she's shot with. All 20 shots in her portfolio are technically uneven in quality, and... to put it bluntly... she looks like a slut in most of them. I assume that's what guys are paying her for, but those guys rarely happen to be talented photographers and they aren't doing tasteful, sensitive work.

She's far from the worst I've seen... no demands for all of the images on CD right after the shoot, nothing about bringing her boyfriend along, or any of several other standard items. And at least she's done a few shots, she's not a total newbie.

I guess I just don't understand why she gets any inquiries at all. Either a lot of guys are really desperate, or else there's a market that wants to buy what she's selling.

night

San Francisco... I'm in an adorable little boutique hotel on Powell Street, small but art-deco cute. I'm just back from grabbing a late dinner at a Thai place on the corner, where I was one of the few round-eyes in the place, and I saw mannerisms and heard words that were like a flashback to my winter working in Bangkok some 11 years ago. Unlike most suburban Thai places which are dumbed-down to cater to the farangs, this one is fairly authentic.

It was fun to walk back on a vibrant street at midnight, with shops and restaurants still open and lots of people on the sidewalk. This part of San Francisco is a bit of a mixing zone, all kinds of people from upscale to downtrodden, but it's... alive.

I'll probably leave the car in the lot and walk over to the office (on Montgomery) in the morning. My meetings aren't til afternoon, so I'll have some time to catch up with everyone I haven't seen in a while.

There are some other things buzzing... on the way down I had a brief conversation about temporary autonomous zones, androgeny, and chaos, among other things. But it's too much to attack right now, must leave some things for later.

growth and ideology

There are two "major" papers here in Humboldt County, neither of much significance by major market standards. One is a conservative rag started by a local wealthy businessman, the other is harder to characterize politically.... mostly because of a stunning lack of leadership or innovation, which results in an essential abdication of anything related to policy or ideas to the other paper. There are smaller, community specific papers doing more interesting things, but it's a shame that it's left up to them.

Today at lunch I was skimming through a days-old copy of the conservative paper, one of the issues I missed while at burning man; basically, it was the only thing to read in the newspaper basket by the front door of the restaurant. There was a column, not a particularly well thought out one by the standards of any paper (including this one), which went off on the standard rant against government "control." He specifically cited San Francisco and New York City as "liberal" examples.

Now I'm not a fan of command-and-control government. In fact, I despise bureaucracies. I have a deep-seated libertarian/anarchist streak, (depending who you ask), but at the same time know all too well that in an absence of oversight... people will be people, as witnessed by the recent credit implosion caused in part by lightly-regulated greed. There usually need to be some checks and balances.

So it got me thinking... is there any correlation between style of government and growth?

At first superficial glance, one would think that "conservative" towns might tend to grow more quickly, because of the theoretical relative absence of regulation.

As usual, a look at the numbers showed that it's a little more complicated than that.

San Francisco, like many cities, grew rapidly (+ 7.3 percent, or 53,000 people) from 1990 to 2000. But the 2000-2006 trend defied the projections, with population dropping by 4.2 percent. Without digging deeply into the statistics, my educated guess is that it's a direct result of the astronomical run-up of housing costs during that same period. I know a lot of people who want to live in San Francisco, and can't even think about affording it right now. To some extent the city is a victim of it's own success, in spite of a liberal government that can be... entertaining to watch sometimes.

New York is less ambiguous. It's been one of the fastest growing cities in the nation recently, in raw numbers second only to Los Angeles in 2006-2007. From 2000 to 2006, the city-wide growth rate was 3.0 percent, and all of the boroughs grew, which surprised me a little; Staten Island led the pack at +7.9 percent, Manhattan stood at +4.9, with Queens bringing up the rear at +1.9.

Looking at the table of 2007 fastest growing cities in raw numbers, it's a mixed bag. There are classic laissez-faire cities like Houston and Phoenix in the top 10, and indeed there are probably more "conservative" cities than "liberal" ones in the top 100. But there are some striking examples of progressive places too, for example Madison Wisconsin.

At the local level, much too small to make anybody's lists, it's similarly mixed. Conservative Fortuna is growing, as is liberal Arcata, as is apolitical McKinleyville.

What does it all means?

Again, it's an educated guess. But I suspect that it comes down to how much people want to live there. If building permits are dispensed like candy, that may, and probably does, facilitate growth. But if no one wants to live there, the regulatory climate is irrelevant. Reversing the slide of a dying ag town in Iowa or Nebraska requires major financial incentives and innovation, and even then it may not work. Conversely, in certain coastal areas or in the sun belt, government needs to get fairly obstructive to discourage growth. That's especially true in places like the one I live in, which seems to continually be on some magazine's "best places to live" list.

Not that it doesn't matter at all. When I came here seven years ago, it was for quality of life (and to flee the lack thereof in Chicago). But I passed on Arcata because it quickly became clear that government there can border on the irrational. Anyplace where signs on the plaza list six or more things starting in the word "no" is a little scary. Both ends of the political spectrum can be good at infringing on individual rights, in different ways and for different reasons.

So I found someplace nearby, someplace with a similar art scene and the same mild climate and a less intrusive style of government. Even there, in a town with alleged libertarian tendencies, I've had to fight some battles against irrational government. The difference is that I'm not alone.

The problem isn't necessarily regulation. The problem is irrational regulation, for its own sake, without a clearly defined underlying philosophy. Governments tend to copy ordinances from other cities, thus perpetuating mistakes of the past. Government, no matter it's ideology, tends to grow. We need to periodically review our government, ask on a department by department basis, what's the goal here, what's the objective, and are they meeting it, and if not why not, and if not what can we do to fix it. And occasionally we need to get rid of something, or combine some things. For the simple reason that times change, a mandate developed years ago may no longer be of use, and sometimes people settle into a rut and don't work as hard as they used to.

The only problem is that I haven't yet figured out how to make that kind of credibility stick.

gray

The fog lifted only for an hour or two today, it's gray and cool outside. It's refreshing after the desert. It's a reminder that the rains will return in perhaps four to six weeks.

I'm getting caught up on all those little mundane things. Laundry. Using the air compressor to blast the playa dust out of the inside of the Jeep before I take it in to get the window fixed tomorrow. Some reading.

Yesterday was the big town-wide garage sale that brings in tourists from down below, beyond the redwood curtain. They drive around in thing-lust, looking out their side windows, not paying attention, generally making life dangerous for pedestrians. I rode around town on my bike, since there was essentially no place to park anyway. But it was a high-awareness day, a watch out for others day.

Breakfast. Making the rounds of garage sales, more to talk to the neighbors than anything else... I already have too much stuff, didn't buy a thing. At 7, to Eureka for Arts Alive, and to meet with a model and negotiate a shoot. It may happen in the next couple of days, or maybe not til after the Bay Area trip. She works retail, and gets her schedule only a day or two in advance.

Arts night was crowded, but not particularly interesting, so I didn't stay very long, didn't see very much that caught my attention. We have a big exhibit opening here at the gallery in Ferndale next weekend... so I'll need to continue prepping for that.

San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit, in her collection of essays titled "Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics" says:

"To think of a figure in this vast western space of the Great Basin is to see a solitary on an empty stage, and the space seems to be about the most literal definition of freedom: space in which nothing impedes act or will."

A few sentences later, she touches on Burning Man as one of several places/events to have "realized this definition."

Even if it isn't very solitary.

But it's true enough that the inhibitions fall away, that people go there for freedom, defined in many different ways. Some, but not all, understand that with freedom comes responsibility, that in some ways responsibility is freedom.

For me, freedom came late in the week, in the second major duststorm. The heavy suspended dust filtered the sunlight, moderated the afternoon temperatures just a little, and I was finally acclimated to the heat and the 4,000-foot elevation. So I grabbed my camera, safely packed away in a plastic bag inside a case inside a pack, and my goggles and dust mask, and headed off the right edge of the city, in the general direction of the bit of playa-art called Babylon.

The intensity of the storm gradually built, but the path toward Babylon was so well traveled that it was signed, big psuedo-highway markers that said "BRC 69." The whiteout closed in around me, until I could see no one else, could barely see 50 feet. All but a few people had taken shelter.

That's when I felt that freedom, like walking around in a hot dry cloud, surrounded by tens of thousands of people, yet all alone. For a while I stood there and felt the sensation, felt the hot blast of the wind, the blowing playa dust. I stripped off what little I was wearing, to feel it all the better, stood in the hot wind, feeling like all I needed to do to fly would be to stick out my arms.

Eventually, bored with that, I climbed to the top of Babylon, all 10 or 11 stories of basic boxy steel construction, past two people asleep on mid-floors, and stop on the top in a white void, unable to see the playa, unable to see anything except the top floor upon which I stood. Bored with that too, I slowly wandered back to camp.

This began a series of explorations of the playa, all the way out to the bordering fence one day; around parts of the city another. Usually these excursions were in the cold magical light of dawn, ironic because I'm usually not a morning person. Sometimes they were later in the day. One afternoon I took my camera, in another whiteout, deciding to find some random attractive young semi-naked woman to photograph in the midst of the white out, just because I wanted to; as a way to spoof my own more controlled photography of models. Walking to the edge of the city, I pulled out the camera and walked slowly, like a predator stalking its prey; only to find, five minutes later, that the prey was stalking me. A young woman literally followed me, smiling, staying close through several turns as I tested her intentions, until I asked if I could take her photo. She rubbed up against me as she said yes. I looked in her green eyes, quickly realizing that her mood was more than a little chemically influenced, took two or three photos as her mood changed and changed again and flew across her face. Then just as quickly, as she began to ask the same questions for the second or third time, I turned her loose and continued my walk.

The night they burned the man... I found it a little annoying. We arrived early, staked out places, all 9 of us. For the next hour, people pushed to the front, packed in too tightly, until it became a distinctly overcrowded and unpleasant experience. I was seriously considering leaving, going back to camp, when they finally set the flame.

The next night, for the temple burn... more of the same. More late arrivals pushing to the front, too much loud talk ripping at the solemn mood. Why is it that people with nothing important to say, tend to say it so loudly? I listened to those present to mourn the lost ones shout down the insensitive ones, tried to feel sorry for those battling their substance abuse issues or their general lack of sensitivity, and not being in control.

I too was there to remember, to honor an artist who had done his part to create a community, who had launched a whole network of creative individuals. My photograph, a portrait of the late Hobart Brown, was stapled to the wall of that temple, as were words that others had written about him, about what he had done.

The flames finally stunned all into silence, at least most of the time. I heard sobbing behind me, felt a wave of energy from the crowd.

As the structure fell, the wind picked up, the wall of dust howling across the playa. With perhaps 20,000 people out on the open playa, a mile from camp, at night, visibility disappeared. We sighted on the green lasers of Opulent Temple before they too vanished into the white, walked calmly back to camp, and managed to find our way. I wonder how many took a wrong turn and wandered blindly for hours, fighting down panic or despair.

The winds were perhaps the highest of the week so far, from a different direction than usual, and they had gotten under one end of the cover on the dome, torn two or three grommets loose from the rebar stakes. There was never any danger of losing anything, the dome is very stable. But we had to work for about 20 minutes in the dust storm to keep it on the outside, away from us on the inside.

I had to leave early on Monday, to beat the mass exodus and get back to the coast. At that point I thought the LA trip might happen Tuesday morning, so was on my way out pre-dawn. There was hardly any traffic so early, but when I rolled down the window a bit going past the gate, it caught a moment, stuck in the accumulated playa dust, and popped off the track, slowly sliding down inside the door. It made for a cold ride through the early light of the Nevada desert, finally warming as I crossed the state line and pulled into Eagleville.

There, my Blackberry began to buzz endlessly as some 200 e-mails came rolling in (despite having had my out-of-office notification on), the first signal I'd had in a week. Scanning quickly, I found the ones about the LA trip, which I'd delegated to someone at the office to set up for me. Yes... not til Wednesday. Time to relax, no need to rush.

Breakfast in Alturas tasted so good. Including stops for gas, food, and a one-hour nap in a rest area, I rolled down the hill to the coast 12 hours later, about 9 hours of actual driving. Arriving home, I quickly unloaded the car and then slid into a very long and very pleasant shower. It would take a couple more of those to find the last of the playa dust.

The pile of dusty things remains in the garage, I'll finally have time this weekend to sort through it. I have an appointment Monday to fix the car window, fortunately there's no crime to speak of in my immediate neighborhood so there was no hurry; although I took the other car to the office today, because oldtown has its transient population. With a business trip close on the heels of a week-long "vacation" in extreme conditions, I'm tired. I'm on deadline at the office, with a major draft document due in less than two weeks, with a meeting in San Jose scheduled for next Thursday, with two other rush projects breaking. But for now, I feel good, feel like things are fun.

And this years crew, no longer virgins... they're already planning for next year.

180

Burning Man is a study in contrasts.

It's the planned city, laid out (literally) like clockwork; with streets from 2:00 to 10:00, and the cross-streets conveniently lettered. Center camp is... in the center, at 6:00. Medical and ice are at 3:00 and 9:00. Major theme camps are at pre-assigned locations.

And that's about as far as the urban planning goes. Anarchy overlays the grid, and works, sort of, at least it works a lot better than one might expect.

Maybe that's because the western concept of property doesn't mean much when the fourth-largest city in Nevada springs up almost overnight, and then a week later, fades away like a mirage, like it was never there. Then, a year later, it returns, but never quite the same.

People arrive, often in the dark, set up, find fuzzy boundaries. Sometimes, delineated by a rope or a line of cars. Sometimes blurred, unmarked, with strangers becoming neighbors and then merging into semi-affiliated camps sharing things freely. Large camps one year split off into clusters of satellite camps, visiting each other across the "street" and the vacated space being filled by virgins. In my case, I spent my first Burning Man in the Kazbus camp, and have at least stopped by to say hi every year since then, this year they were kitty-corner from us... I once learned things from more experienced participants there, and have since passed them on to others.

Sustainability? Yes and no. Everything is imported. Everything must be carried out (or burned). The "city" works because it only lasts for a while. Maintaining banks of porta-potties for a week is practical; longer term.... there's no wastewater treatment plant on the playa, and the porta's get pretty grungy by the end of the week. It's similar with water... possible to keep hauling it in from the outside, but only practical for so long.

One of the bits of genius of Burning Man is the ban on driving except for arrival and departure, and of course art cars or "official" vehicles. In a way it's proof that bicycles and feet are perfectly practical methods of transportation at a compact, high-density scale. Just when one wonders how to translate that to the outside world, comes the mass exodus on labor day, the endless traffic jam as 20,000 cars all try to leave at once. If only we had high-speed rail to the playa, turned on for one week a year, dormant otherwise.

The weather; more extremes. 100 degrees by day. Sometimes into the 40s at night. High winds, sometimes exceeding 70-mph; dust storms, white-outs, dust devils like mini-tornadoes. It's a harsh place, a place of extremes. if it weren't, there'd be 500,000 people there instead of 50,000.

Then there's the primitives-vs-RV war. Those of us taking pride in roughing it, doing endless battle with the elements, scorning those safely sheltered in the safety of RVs. I'm sure they're equally condescending toward us, the scruffy-looking ones coated in white dust. To each their own.

---

Back to the story. For the first two or three days, I took it easy, enjoyed the absence of a cell phone signal, not having any desire to check e-mail (although it's possible on the playa), not thinking at all about the office or my clients. In the calmness following the first white-out, my project manager background did come out, as we debriefed the event, came to the conclusion that in future we need to rein in the over-enthusiasm of the newbies who wanted to set everything up right now, and instead concentrate on getting a core structure up solidly enough to survive anything; then get some rest, be able to think clearly again, and stage from the shade structure to add to the camp complex over a day or two. Quality over speed.

Fortunately, we had a mellow and drama-free crew this year, and that was the only time all week I had to assert myself. Unlike last year, when I seemed to be spending way too much time keeping two or three people from damaging themselves or those around them. Two or three people who were off in other camps this year, aggravating someone else; or not present at all.

I began to spend a lot of time reading, jotting down notes. The connections began slowly, built, turned in unexpected directions. Connections between countercultures spanning my lifetime and a little more, a flow-state of rebellion over time, ideas about the next level of rebellion, about a quiet anti-corporate insurgency from within. A realization that my punk years were really, deep down inside, about rebelling against a suburban sprawl that we still only poorly understood, that wouldn't be well defined until later, by new urbanists who hadn't chosen that name yet. We rebelled against an absence of community, even an active suppression of community, an abandoning of common space and the center; we created our own community, in the inner cities at that time abandoned by most everyone else. Fitting, that it came to the surface in the community that is burning man, in the first half of the week when some said that the (initially) smaller size of the city made it feel like the older, more cohesive days.

That would change later in the week, as the crowd grew to record size (almost 50,000), as the shallow and materialistic ones descended on us for the weekend. We ignored them as best we could.

Breaktime...

247

My notebook lies open in front of me, playa dust embedded in the black covers. I can feel it, see it, smell it.

As usual, it took me a little while to acclimate to the playa. I don't deal well with extreme heat, so I've learned, those first few days, to just find a shaded and breezy spot and take an afternoon nap, to be nocturnal at first.

We'd arrived at 1:00 am, an hour after the gates opened to the general influx, set up our dome, with a crew of 8 (initially, to grow a little later on) it went quickly. A few of us caught some sleep , the virgins though (half our group this time) were so excited, they stayed up all night. I woke mid-morning to find them all passed out, everything set up, but not quite secured the way it should be, the tie-downs not quite done.

Just then Nevena, our Italian fashion designer, strolled into camp. She'd flown out from Milan to attend Burning Man, become part of our camp via e-mail exchanges, and now, after a bus from San Francisco airport with a group of burners, she walked out of the sun like an apparition.

Moments later, the winds picked up what seemed like half the Black Rock desert and hurled it against the emerging city; as if to say, what is this intrusion on my emptiness?

Our dome held, although I had to quickly throw a few ropes over the top to keep the cover from flapping excessively. The new easy-up that would be our kitchen, the one not adequately tied down... I watched it lean, heard the metal snap. By now several tired people had rolled out of tents, as we pulled it back from the brink of disaster. A random stranger walked in and handed us a length of angle iron... "here, you need this more than I do." We quickly duct-taped it to a corner support. A few moments later, with more ropes tied off to vehicle tires and bumpers, we were able to lay down and wait out the dry-storm without any further damage. Our virgins had learned a lesson about complacency in a place where, given half a chance, nature will gladly try to kill you.

Time to go get dinner... more later.

white

hot dust
naked heat
fly in the white
in the white
tens of thousands of people
yet all alone
in the white
in the heat
roads to nowhere
roads to the future
roads of now
sun tries to pierce the dust
like a needle
like a hallucination
crossroads 69
the eternity of now
the circle of now
the sound of now
the heat of now
the mystery
from the ephemeral city
from the ephemeral earth

triangle

I'm 48 hours back from Burning Man, and sitting in a fancy hotel in LA. Quite the cultural contrast.

I knew there would be travel right after the return, but the details weren't worked out when I left. So I had someone at the office set things up for me once the "go" came in from the client. That meant I didn't know exactly when I'd need to leave until I drove into Cedarville two hours out of the Black Rock Desert, and once again had a phone signal... and a couple hundred e-mails on my Blackberry. I spent most of breakfast in Alturas sorting through those and reading the important ones.

It wasn't that bad, I had a full day at home before needing to head to the airport. This is a fast track project, and this trip was for a meeting and a site visit, with the intent of identifying issues and writing up a memo to propose methods of addressing those issues. It's fairly complex, and this is probably just the start. I'm expecting to be back down here within a few weeks for agency meetings.

But first, there's a San Francisco trip next week, and another probable fast-track project breaking in Chicago. It's looking like a busy travel season this fall.

I'm hoping to find time to write about the Burning Man experience, but not tonight, not in any detail... I have an early flight to catch tomorrow. For now let's just say that it was a good crew, 9 good people, no problems, no drama. The event... as usual, I saw the best and the worst of human nature. But overall I'd say it was a better experience than last year, and I managed to acclimate to the weather/elevation/noise more quickly this time.

More when I can.

entropy

It's perhaps only because I'm on deadline at the office, working part of the weekend, not thinking about much else. Maybe it will pass after Tuesday. But there's no particular desire to pick up a camera at the moment. I'm getting residual messages from models, one local and one in San Francisco just recently, and I just can't get real excited about it.

Next week is Burning Man, which I'm looking forward to mostly because my cell phone doesn't work on the playa, and while there's e-mail at center camp, I'm never tempted to use it. For a week, I cut all ties with the outside world. They can't find me. Whatever it is, it has to wait.

This year I'm feeling a desire to bring a few political philosophy books along, and a notebook and a pen, and go back to basics, sort through core beliefs. We'll see how realistic that is, because the heat of the day tends to sap motivation. I don't deal well with extreme heat. And at night... if you've been, you know.

I do bring a camera to this event each year, and my style tends to go even more minimalist than usual. There's so much visual overload, it becomes essential to edit out almost everything, find very precise things of interest. Things, more often than people.

Maybe I'll deal with the models after I return. Right now, September feels like yesterday.

grrrrrr

I'm not in a good mood.

I'm on deadline at the office... that will pass, in a few days. And, someone has just failed... and I use that word consciously... to live up to a commitment they made to me just last week. By doing so, they've caused me a fair amount of extra work and stress at a time when it's not appreciated. And, I've recently had some additional unwanted responsibility dumped on me.

Once I'm past the short-term deadline, a few decisions will be made.

whirlwind

I'm at the Unicorn Cafe, in Evanston Illinois, about a block from the Northwestern University campus. This Chicago trip was a surprise, two days notice. I'm here to help an elderly relative who got into some financial trouble. The summary: 11 credit cards, and a bunch more they sent her which were never activated. She didn't even know how many she had until I asked. She tripped some credit report threshold, or else the companies are having cash flow trouble, and they all wanted to be paid at once. If I hadn't intervened, they would have grabbed her meager bank account, left a 76-year old lady with no money at all, no way to pay her phone bill, no way to buy food. They had pressured her into giving them bank routing numbers. What was in that account would have covered about one percent of the total.

Is anyone still wondering why there's a major financial crisis in this country?

For what it's worth, American Express was the easiest to deal with, very accommodating, very easy to work with. Chase Bank was the worst; transferred three times and still couldn't get a straight answer. Apparently the front-line people aren't trusted to make decisions, and the hierarchy is tangled and inefficient.

Oh, and Chase was charging her 28.99 percent annual interest. The prime rate is currently 5 percent... why is this legal? Even if it is, why is Chase charging nearly 30 percent?

I pulled my account from them more than two years ago, after they made three screwups in a few months. One wonders how inefficient companies stay in business....

Anyway, it's pretty much handled now, and I may even be able to get a shoot in this weekend before flying home. I'm back to traveling light, one 12.8 pound bag (just weighed it) with my laptop (4.8 pound 12" Powermac) and two Leicas. No heavy DSLR this time.