the road home and mission records

on the way back from LA










mission records




the last two photos I took with the great olympus pen-EE half-frame camera. it has a fixed shutter speed (1/60) and a fixed focal length. The fixed shutter speed is pretty cool and makes it easy to use, but is obviously problematic in low light/bright light areas. it also has this light cell thing around the lens that set the aperture automatically for ISOs 200 and below. since the camera is about 40 years old (or maybe more) the light cells aren't that accurate anymore, but still not too far off. there was only one naked light in my shithole room in Mission Records, so that's all I had to use for these shots. I've never seen or printed these before I scanned them in. The last one is the only photo I have of Simon, Casey, and me together, and maybe the only photo ever.

I'm not really sure what camera I used for the other photos. I'm guessing it was the Yashica T5 since they're just some snapshots I took while driving home and gasing up on the I-5 back from LA.

"You don't eat the fish out of there, do you?"

polaroid shot by susan


bluefish

Finally posted the article on the Brooklyn Fishing Derby on FANZINE. It's a long piece, but a good read. Ever wonder what you can catch out of the East River, aside from arsenic poisoning? Dark days and hobo fishing at its most amateur, as well as the controversial new saltwater fishing license issue. Read it here.

the buff

anti-hero


arturo


porkchop


ed


paint mixes


keeping it safe and clean


atari and tens


ed buffing it out


HEART101


15th and mission


valencia and 16th


BS @ valencia street


boozer @ valencia street

When I was living in SF I did this project for the now defunct Web magazine WORK, which was a graphic design site done by Tony aka KEM from Philadelphia. I rode around the city with a few Public Works guys who just drive around and buff graffiti all day. It was part of an ongoing project I was doing for journalism school at the time, my thesis actually on the city's war on graffiti. These guys Arturo, Ed, and Porkchop were all kind of mellow, though Arturo was ostensibly the "boss" so he was kind of a dick to everyone. Ed and the guy who called himself Porkchop were both pretty cool though. There was another story these photos were supposed to go with, but the piece ran in the Bay Guardian without any images. I really can't recall how the piece in WORK Magazine looked, the site is no longer up and I didn't archive it myself. There were some quotes and stuff that went along with the pics, of which most are from my old neighborhood in the Mission. It makes me a little nostalgic to see those static, empty photos from Van Ness and Valencia and Mission Street. I'm going back in February for a wedding and to see how it all has changed. Oh yeah, I shot these on my prized Nikon F4, all with the 35-70 2.8. Great classic camera. (EDIT: I just realized I actually shot the last two photos with a Seagull 205A, a new-old stock find from China that Sam bought for me from the Lomography site years ago. Another great camera.)

Unfortunately for me I essentially pawned it to my dad when I was really broke, and still owe him a little money to get it back. It was the workhorse of the Nikon F camera series, all metal body, shutter rated to over 500,000 exposures or something; just a solid, reliable piece of equipment. They don't make shit like that anymore, as the old timers like to say. Mine was from 1989 I think. I bought it from Al at Newark Camera for $800 in mint condition back in 1999 and I still think it was a great deal. What was weird about that was the same day I bought my F4 from Newark Camera, somebody stole one from their store and stole another one from Cameras Etc. up the street. How the hell did that happen?

Anyhow, buy your stuff from Al if you're still in Delaware. He'll help you out. He sold my grandfather the Hasselblad 500c (1968) that I use now. Every time I go back there Al asks me how the camera is doing.

Also, my apologies for the delay in updates. I've been working on this ridiculously long piece for FANZINE on the Brooklyn Fishing Derby. Right now it's clocking in at 13,000 words and I feel like I rushed the last couple scenes in an effort to keep it from getting too long. I may need to make some adjustments in there. I'll post a link when the piece goes up this week/weekend.

xprocess

sam in LA


broken lock in Berkeley


wires in LA


cash money LA


venice beach


chasing birds in LA

No real backstory here; just a few cross-processed shots from LA and Berkeley. I shot these between 2001 (the LA shots) and 2003 (the Berkeley one) on a Yashica T4, the best point and shoot camera ever made. even though cross processing can be a little too easy of a cheap trick, some of these are among my favorite photos i've ever shot.

the pink house roof

this is buzz and shawn on the roof of the apartment where buzz and i lived, along with a revolving series of third roommates, for a couple years in San Francisco after we moved out of Mission Records. it was a faded pink building which jim, the landlord, eventually painted a dull gray. we lived between 24th St. and Cesar Chavez at the bottom of Bernal Hill. every so often we'd head up to the roof and have a few beers and enjoy the gorgeous sunsets. i remember once when the building was being repainted we climbed out of our windows and hung out on the scaffolding and drank beers over the sidewalk. buzz still lives there and every week or so, i wish i did too.

i shot these polaroids on an old Square Shooter Polaroid camera that my friend Sam gave me after i gave her an even older Polaroid Land camera with the bellows. those are a little tricky since the batteries they take are no longer made, but i knew an old Chinese guy at Mission Camera on Valencia who could convert it to take AAs. awesome guy too. i hope the place is still there; if so, buy your camera stuff from him.

mojave desert 2003

someone correct the date if i am incorrect. this is film that i obviously really screwed up. either i did something when i loaded it, or something is wrong with my 12-frame film back and it doesn't advance right because you can see how all the frames double-exposed on each other in those crappy triptychs at the top and the bottom. which is kind of a shame because i think some of them might have turned out quite well if i hadn't fucked it up, especially the ones of krishna sitting on the hill like a Buddha. even still, it's probably the closest thing i'll ever do to art.

i went to the Mojave Desert with my friends Krishna, who is from LA, and Emily, who is from Delaware like me. it's kind of a weird story here because i feel like i hooked them up via myspace or something... i somehow introduced them through the Internet and at that time in my life i had factions of friends on both coasts, and i thought with my best efforts, never the twain shall meet. but one night i got drunk and introduced these two; he liked the Fucking Champs and was moving to nyc, she liked the Fucking Champs and lived in nyc. suddenly they were hanging out, going out, she was bringing him to Delaware and meeting other friends from there and the East Coast. people from Newark were meeting people from LA and vice versa. the gates had been breached. my world, i thought, was collapsing in on me. part of my mission, going there with those two, was to break them up.

instead we all got super wasted on a bottle of absinthe kris's ex-girlfriend had brought back for him from Europe. we split a case of Budweiser and spent the night passed out in a shitty motel room in the desert. then we woke up the next day to a blinding sun, horribly hung over, ate greasy breakfast at a greasy diner, and drove out to some place off the highway and took these photos.

i took a few rolls of b/w film too, which i didn't screw up, but i haven't scanned them yet. eventually i will. kris and emily also shot photos that day; maybe if they see this they will show me some.

soccer sundays

andy


bochay


chris kohler


yuri

once upon a time i used to play soccer in Potrero Park at the end of 24th St. when i lived in san francisco. i used to live on 26th and Florida st. i was super broke at the time. i had figured out a way to live off a few bucks a day, buying $1 pasta and $1 tomato sauce (those little Hunts cans) from the store at the corner of 26th and Potrero. i would eat half for lunch and half for dinner. i'd usually go for some mike and ikes and mountain dew late night, or if i had some money i'd buy some beer. when i saved up some cash i'd treat myself to nachos at el farolito on 24th and alabama and eat half for lunch, half for dinner. it was a miserable existence in a beautiful city and a lively neighborhood. if you read my story in Fanzine then you have a pretty good idea of what i was putting myself through. that also spelled the end of my soccer sundays.

i shot these photos before i got super depressed, so this is probably early 2004 or 2003. i think i had a plan to shoot everyone we played with... there was probably 10-15 of us punks running around the park. most of us never played soccer, or if we did, the last time we played was years ago. for me at the time, it was probably 12 years since i played. it was a great time to be outside back then in SF, and i squandered almost all of it away.

i don't know where any of these people are anymore, although we were friends at one time. Andy i think may live in Bay Ridge, brooklyn. at least he did the last time i saw him at the Lock Inn on Grand St. Yuri used to be Andy's girlfriend, but they broke up and maybe she lives overseas now. Bochay was a great guy who, i last heard in 2004, was living on some island off the coast of Vancouver, and you had to take a boat to get there. Chris Kohler was a crazy kid who lived many years ahead of his time. He might still live in San Francisco.

anyhow my plan to shoot photos of all us soccer players didn't pan out. i ran out of money for film, but there's a chance i have more photos hidden somewhere undeveloped. even these i've never seen before i scanned them, so i guess it's okay to be a little nostalgic.

It's a sad and beautiful world

these are just a few of the many photos i shot on US1 (but i think the only ones with the Hassleblad) on the way back to San Francisco from LA for the first time. i think it was 2003. it took about nine hours total, with all the stopping on the sides of roads and navigating the winding, serpentine turns alongside cliffs that drop hundreds of feet. i remember distinctly slamming on the brakes and skidding off toward those cliffs when i saw something amazing, which was pretty much everywhere. when i got back to SF i started to make a habit of driving north or south on the 1 for hours whenever i needed to get out of the city or was having some kind of mental breakdown and just hang out on a cliff and watch the ocean or read a book or whatever. smoke cigarettes. it all seemed to do me a lot of good since i never took any medication for my mental problems, which were probably just as bad as anyone else's.

i remember doing a lot of driving those days, listening to tapes and smoking parliaments. it was a good car i had: 1988 acura integra special edition, with the ridiculous rear spoiler made of solid rubber which made the trunk hatch weigh like 50 pounds. black faded by the sactown sun. bought the car while i was living in sacramento for $300 off a japanese kid who was moving back to japan. it had 3 different size tires when i bought it.

this whole driving/motorist theme will come up a lot in future posts. this is just a start. also, burning and dodging is a lot easier in the darkroom than in photoshop. still trying to get the hang of it.

power up!

while listening to "Cindy Tells Me," i, for some reason, had the desire to bring this blog back to its state of zombie-like life, neither joyously alive nor fully dead. i like to think the blog was in a state of hibernation—not metamorphosis like a caterpillar in which i would emerge stronger and more beautiful and with a new sense of purpose—but rather how i imagine a grizzly bear crawls his miserable way out of the dark, comfortable cave: grumpy, groggy, a little rough around the edges. it's been a long time, a few passwords i had to recall from hazy memory. [also if anyone knows how to forcibly archive all my old posts below this one please let me know...]

this blog will however take a new direction and become mostly a photo blog. for my last birthday my girlfriend got me a new scanner and i've been trying to catalog and archive a ton of old photos, mostly from my time spent in California, from 1999 and 2000 to near the end of 2006. a lot of these photos are just being developed very recently after spending most of their post-camera lives in dark, cold film canisters tucked into a series of about four or five different refrigerators. a lot of the films are damaged in some way, mostly by heat from traveling around with me from house to house over many years and probably being left in a trunk or in the sun somewhere. much of this film that's already developed i've never even seen in positive or in any kind of size that didn't require a loupe and your imagination. i was super broke back then in California, had a bad habit of shoplifting film pretty much every day from the Vons on Mission St., although i had no way (or money) to develop any of the photos until now, when i've slowly gotten off my arse to process and scan them.

of course, the first photo is completely opposite of what i just said—it's a polaroid taken with the new (old) back i got for my Hassleblad this summer.

i'm going to try to update with old photos regularly... or at least once a week for starters... so look around and you might see some old friends you haven't seen or thought about in a long time, sunsets and empty roads and fields, and places we all used to know.