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.