february girls

Michelle Chambers, my date for the punk rock prom i think in 2002 or so. I remember I had to find something to match her dress and I ended up with some peach-colored dress shirt from the '70s and I wanted to wear a skinny black tie, but left all mine back in California. I'm pretty sure I took a regular width tie, tied it backwards, cut the wide part off and spray painted the remainder black. Haha, so ghetto.

This pic was taken in Jude's Diner before we went to the party, which was on top of Newark Chinese Laundry on Main Street—which was doubly weird for me because I used to live there when I was very young, and then my grandparents lived there for a long time before, during, and after I lived there. We used to have Christmas, Chinese New Year, and weekly dinners there. Eventually they moved out and a succession of college kids I knew moved in. At the time of this photo, we went there and got very drunk. At the end of this particular night I ended up in the back of a police car with an open bottle of beer in my jacket pocket. Eventually I lied my way out of it.

Michelle is married now and has a son named Joey. She's going to have another kid soon too, which is crazy to me, but she's a real good mom and holds it down like I knew she could, even though I was apprehensive at first when I heard she was having a baby. Joey is a real good kid. I haven't seen him since he was just a baby, but from his choice of Halloween costumes I know he's got a good personality. Shamoe's birthday was this past week. Happy birthday Shamoe!


A photo of Samantha Culp, taken at her house off Sunset Junction (I think). Her parents moved so often and I visited so many of their houses it's hard for me to keep track. I'm pretty sure this was off Sunset Junction and was probably 2001. She was home for Thanksgiving break, around the same time my brother and friends Gary and Andrew Freeborn came to visit. Also the first roll of cross-processed film I ever shot, which is remarkable only in that nearly every photo in that roll was a keeper and each had a story to go along with it. I haven't had nearly the same kind of luck since, but have gotten some good x-process stuff here and there, some of which I've already posted.

Sam lives in Beijing now, and travels around Asia quite often. I get to see her about every year and a half or so. Very talented writer. It was her birthday this week too, so happy birthday Sam.

******

Christine in Sam's bed. Even though it's not her birthday this month (and I know "February Girls" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "September Girls" but oh well...) I tossed in this photo to go along with the above technical description. I haven't seen Christine in a really long time, but she was always very sweet and hospitable and gracious to me whenever I was in LA. She's sucking the juice out of one of those wax soda bottles. Hot.

I took all these pics with the great Yashica T5, which in case you're wondering is exactly the same thing as the Yashica T4; they just ran out of T4s to sell in America so they had to bring in their other market models, which they sold internationally as the T5. I've started archiving the film roll from which I took the last two photos, and there's a lot of them and they're all in LA, so I'll probably be posting more of those in the upcoming week. I can't remember how I shot the one of Michelle... it might be part of a different xprocess roll, but for some reason I don't think so.

Also getting film processed of my latest trip to SF. They should be done this week and I'll pick them up the next time I can run into the city.

One last thing, it's my cousin Jen's birthday today, February 28, so happy birthday Jen. I don't have any photos of her when she was living in LA unfortunately, but we always trade stories of great tacos at Tito's and ceviche down near Culver City.

LA County

Some photos I took outside LA County, the facade that was on the cover of Mike Davis's "City of Quartz," the great treatise on and history of Los Angeles. I used to go there occasionally to see a couple friends who got locked up for attempted murder or something. They were actually friends of my friend, but I used to hang out with them until they went to jail. I don't know whatever happened to those guys because my friend got out of the gang he was in (I wrote an article on that for this activist magazine Clamor, who used the incorrect title for the piece and I can't use it for clips because it has the word "fuck" in it... I guess it was a learning experience.) Going to LA County for the first time was pretty surreal as I was standing in line with a bunch of families with little kids who would grow up doing this as a regular thing. Growing up going to visit their dad, brother, cousin or uncle in prison was not a weird thing for them. There were some pretty hardcore dudes in there. I remember seeing this huge Latino dude with a full SUR X3 tattoo on his head and face. The culture of prison in LA makes me think my friends probably didn't make it out of there unscathed, considering they were both pretty young and from a small gang they probably had to do shit in there to survive that would pretty much keep them from living any kind of ordinary life outside of prison. It's pretty f'd up.

Anyhow, for a while I used to look for gang graffiti, which wasn't hard to find, but took a certain eye to decipher the important messages in them, the names and territories, the beef etc. It's weird how the style of writing incorporated itself into other aspects of popular culture: tattoos, graffiti, cheap T-shirts you can buy on Canal Street. I think it's beautifully done when it's on the wall, it only looks like a crude scrawl if you don't know what you're looking at. If you look at it enough you can really see the order of the letterforms and the stylistic rules. Kind of like if you've only ever seen West Coast writing and then go to Philly and see tall hands and whatever. Whatever.

back from the west

i'm back from SF. had a pretty good time, Kon's wedding was smooth and a lot of fun. i ate some good Mexican food for the first time in years, though Papacitas up in Greenpoint fills in pretty well. the weather was mostly good... much better than here in Brooklyn. i took a really cool drive up the 1 with Susan and got a bunch of pics from that, so i'll probably post those in the next couple weeks when i get caught up with the various jobs i abandoned while i was away. Got a chance to hang out with a bunch of cool people who are friends of Susan's, and briefly reunited the Team Louie Pit Crew with Buzz and Melissa over at Mission Bar my last night in town.

I went over to Needles and Pens on Sunday and saw my old friend Kelly there. I think she was one of the last people I saw literally hours before I left SF in 2005. She was working at St. Francis diner on 24th at the time. I bought this book by this skate photographer Jai Tanju at Needles and Pens. At one point in my life i wanted to shoot skate photos for a living, at least that's what I thought I'd do when I moved to California as well as writing. That didn't really work out, either because I sucked at shooting photos or because I didn't meet many people once I moved to LA and didn't have much of a (financial) means to keep up with the demands of shooting skate photos. I got to meet Jai up in San Jose back in 2001, when Martin (from Giant Robot) and I went up to interview Jerry Hsu for the magazine. I shot this portrait of Jerry under this bridge where we were all skating. In retrospect I should have tried to keep in touch with Jai since he was a real cool dude and probably could have pointed me in the right direction with photo stuff, but I was sometimes weirdly intimidated with doing stuff like that back then, and sometimes even now. But I guess maybe it could have changed something in my life. Who knows?

Anyhow, Jai has this cool book of photos called "with a camera from marc." It's all black and white, all shot with this same Pentax Spotomatic camera. Buy it from Needles and Pens. Or you can check out his site at jaitanju.com and his blog at filmporvida.blogspot.com. I'm not sure if the blog is a reference to his refusal to use digital (or if he even has that urge to take up that cause), but I dig it.

SF bound

A couple old friends hanging out in front of Mission Records. Must be the summer of 2003. The girl is Sarah Sparks. I used to know her real name but all I remember now are her nicknames, like Sarita Sparks and Little Sarah. The guy is this dude Ryan, and I just recently learned his full name after he hit me up on Facebook. I remember having a lot of really fun, drunk times with this guy. Lots of memories that only pop in my head when the right Carrie Nations or Bitchin' song comes on unexpectedly for some reason. He won the 21-Bathroom contest [EDIT: shit man, Melissa reminded me it was the "21-Toilet Ride." I knew it didn't sound right...], where a bunch of people rode around the city and had a beer at every public bathroom in the city. I remember we rode in this Critical Mass together and all the PC people were getting mad at us because we were drinking beer along the way and getting drunk and smashing the cans on the street behind us. We all lived in Mission Records at one point, but I think they both might live in Georgia now.

I'm heading to San Francisco for a few days for a wedding. I haven't been back since visiting Susan in December 2006, before we started dating. I'm bringing along my Pen-FT and the Seagull and will hopefully have something to show for it (also bringing my Canon s90, but I'll only post digital stuff on here if it's really good, or really funny). I need to buy some film cleaner—part of the reason I've been so slow in posting more photos is because I hate cleaning the images of all the goddamn dust and shit over every frame. It's a pain, but I'll try to work through it.

get lost

Getting lost on the 1 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I'd never driven it before, but decided kind of on a whim to do the drive after visiting a friend in LA and being beguiled by the sights on a short drive past Malibu. I've walked along the 1 before; I forget what it's called once it's past Sunset, but once I had this crappy bike and I was foolishly riding it in the pitch blackness of Sunset Drive from Gayley and Veteran toward the ocean, determined to make this fatalistic and ill-advised journey. I got a flat tire about halfway to the beach, and ended up half-walking, half-dragging the bike behind me. I don't know why I didn't just abandon the thing, but I eventually got to the 1 and saw the lights at Santa Monica Pier. I didn't know where else to go, so I started walking to the Pier, figuring at least there I would know where I was. All in all, I ended up walking about 12 miles along Sunset, the 1 and Santa Monica Boulevard back home.

I took these photos on my first trip up the 1. I'm pretty sure if I had the opportunity again I'd probably take just as long (9 hours) to do the drive as I did this time, since I was constantly stopping, taking pics, having a smoke, standing over the edges of cliffs overlooking the ocean, staring out into the sea, trying somehow to take all of this vastness in. There's a couple specific places I want to go back and shoot, but I don't know if that will ever happen. I took these photos with my Pen-EE and used a Minolta Autometer V to get the exposures. I had about three cameras on this trip and have a lot of photos to dig through. These were some that came first to mind. I wish I could go back...

Also, if anyone actually reads this, I've been a little absent lately in updating the pages. I've been increasingly overwhelmed by work, surrounded by books, magazines, articles and other stuff I need to read and not getting anywhere, watching hockey, working on Fanzine, working on a new fishing/cooking site with Ben, etc. Trying to pull it all together and hope to update a little more frequently than just once a week...