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.