few better men than this one

Robert Culp Memorial from Hughes Hall on Vimeo.

This is a fantastic tribute video for Robert Culp that was shown at a memorial for the man himself this past Saturday at the Egyptian Theater. I really wish I could have been there... farewell buddy.

the price I pay

More photos from that one trip I took back in 2003. These are a continuation of the film I shot with the Pen-EE. I'm starting to get the hang of color correcting in Photoshop, but nonetheless most of the photos I've taken with the tiny Pen-EE are better than the ones I've shot with the more elaborate Pen FT, which is a bit of a shame since the latter cost about 10 times as much. I'm still working on getting to know that one (the FT) as well, and one of the things I'm learning is that even when the handheld light meter and the camera's internal meter match up, the pictures will still be overexposed. I figure I'm going to scrap the attempts to use E6 with the FT for now since it seems to be too precise for the camera and I'll stick to shooting color negative with it, which seems pretty much fine. It doesn't make sense, but it's going to take some time for me to figure out what's the problem. On a slightly side-note, at least all the photos I took when I was in SF last weren't all f'd up by my own hand or by airplane x-rays, though the true cause is still a mystery to me and doesn't really ease the disappointment in losing all those scenes.

Anyhow, these move in somewhat chronological order: Topanga Canyon road just outside Santa Monica on the way to Malibu, to a ways up north. Check out those crazy green sneakers I had on and the motor-ing fuel (Mountain Dew—every road trip in those days was all about junk food. The first drive back from LA to Delaware consisted of 4 packs of peanut butter crackers and about 8 liters of Mountain Dew.) For a while I also added chain smoking to the mix of candy, soda, and punching the roof in time with the music, but in later years the smoking habit had gotten pretty foul. I still like to do it occasionally. There's also a photo of the Road Warrior Integra (the car I bought for $300 while living in Sacramento—even though it looked totally beat up, I totally loved that car) and the good luck charm I hung off the rear view mirror to keep me safe.

Robert M. Culp Aug. 16, 1930 - Mar. 24, 2010

Farewell, friend.

A short tribute on Fanzine.

motor away pt. 1

The first photos are from an unknown (meaning I can't remember which) beach while driving up the 1 back whenever I first did it. It must have been 2003. I posted some other photos from this same trip here and there and I'm starting to archive the rest of the photos but it's taking forever to scan and work on the images since my computer takes about 30 seconds to 2 minutes to complete any action these days, especially when I'm working with big files such as these. The later ones were the middle hours of driving up the 1, when I was beginning to realize I couldn't stop every time I saw something I thought was completely life changing, but was still trying not to crash my car. I was torn between hauling ass on those lonely stretches of pavement and stopping every third of a mile. I guess I tried to compromise with both until it got too dark to shoot any more. It's kind of strange, looking at these photos because it causes a sort of reverse nostalgia for the photos I lost (or more accurately, fucked up) of Susan and I driving along the 1 last month. It's not quite "reverse nostalgia"; it's more that the order of my emotions toward these photos and the ones I screwed up are reversed—the older ones are making me miss and regret the would-be newer ones more. I guess it's probably for the best anyhow.

par avion

A couple photos I probably took either flying to or from LA. I always wondered why I didn't shoot more slides with the Yashica, but then again, I mostly cross-processed them, probably for the worse. I dig the ghostly atmosphere these shots have, though it was mostly by luck than by virtue of skill.

Speaking of which, I got back the slides I shot with the Pen-FT while I was in San Francisco in February, and almost all of them to a one are completely washed out to the point where the transparencies are pretty much totally transparent. I shot a couple test rolls of color negative up in Maine with the FT and found the camera's internal light meter (the whole reason I bought the FT instead of the Pen-F) was pretty close to accurate for being 30 or 40 years old. I know slide film needs to be close to spot on or better, but the degree to which this roll was washed out was something I've never seen before. Kind of a shame because it was basically mine and Susan's whole vacation, including a pretty amazing drive up the 1 to Point Reyes, and none of the photos survived. A big bummer, actually.

I've since been trying to figure out what happened. Below are a couple shots that squeaked by, but are still overexposed. At first I wondered if the airport x-rays had damaged the film or washed it out somehow, but I haven't read anything about this particular damage happening to anyone else. I went out this weekend to test the FT's internal meter versus my handheld Minolta Auto V (which I use for the Hasselblad) and still found the camera's accuracy to be pretty close, sometimes differing by a stop to a half-stop. I don't know if that's enough to give me the results I got. Then I was thinking something ridiculous because I was wearing sunglasses at the time I was shooting maybe I was setting the camera wrong because the scene looked darker with the glasses on? Yeah, it didn't make sense to me a minute later either. Guess I have to keep testing it, or maybe just scrap the idea of using slides with this camera since the meter is pretty accurate and previous rolls of color-negative film came out mostly fine. Also, the photos I took with the Seagull (also using the Minolta meter) came out very nice. Weird.

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.