fishing derby

First Annual Brooklyn Fishing Derby from Brooklyn Chowder Surfer on Vimeo.

this is the final version of the first annual Brooklyn Fishing Derby video. I originally met these guys as a journalist writing a piece for Fanzine, but i've since gotten more involved with them since i finished the article. Ben does a lot of work with traveling, fishing, and cooking, and has a substantial background in documenting all of these activities. Check out his site at brooklynchowdersurfer for more of his work. He meets some great characters and cooks up some amazing food. In fact I had one of his famous "road side" lobster rolls on Friday and I'm going to get more tonight.

here's a video of Ben's secret lobster lair:

The Underground Lobster Pound: A Purist, An Apartment & The Perfect Lobster Roll - *food curated* from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

More photos coming up later today.

cars

a couple of weird cars i saw in LA and happened to have my camera on me. i'm pretty sure i planned at one point to have this as a series of photos, but it still hasn't happened. i could resurrect it, but is it really worth it? i took these with the yashica t5, which, around the time they were still made, was one of the best and most affordable point-and-shoot cameras around. i can't remember where i got mine from, but it was in LA and i bought it for around $125. zeiss lens! waist-level view finder!

Auburn

Auburn is a small mining town 30 miles east of Sacramento. It had a really fun small concrete skatepark, which became a lot less fun after some kid fell off his bike there and then the town made everyone wear full pads, which I hated to do. Pat Ewok and I used to go to this skatepark at least once a week. Auburn was a town on a hill; overlooking evergreen-wooded canyons and snowy mountains in the faraway distance. They had rodeos there every weekend. I shot these photos of an abandoned house with the Olympus Pen-EE when I was living in Sacramento, sometime in 2002.

mission records part V

last one. josh in the mission records pool during the summer of '88.

mission records part IV

car wash hair


dominatrix from brazil




i don't know what that weird thing is around the mike either. it's on all the shots with the mike in it.


this bike is a pipe bomb


clarion alley


greg rice harvester and buzz




pipe bomb


allergic to bullshit






ok no more fisheye shots for a long time.

a quick one while he's away

slideshow my friend Ernie made for a song by my brother. these photos were taken by Ernie when he and his now-ex came to visit me in San Francisco in 2005. good times driving up and down the 1, my favorite thing.

more mission rex stuff coming later this week.

mission records part III

sarah sparks


haircut time. sarah and joey alone


double sarahs. sarah sparks and sarah sandberg


sarah sandberg's room


little sarah giving homemade tattoos to tom


ken williamson from philly stopped through


david dondero. i couldn't fit craig d in the frame. sorry craig.


the pine hill haints, this hillbilly/moonshine band from Alabama. They call it "Alabama Ghost Music." i have their record still and it's pretty good.




an adoring fan. i think i know who it is, but i need some confirmation.


TK: i've been digging through the negatives and found a few more band photos. i noticed there's a lot of bands i didn't shoot though, probably because i was too drunk or too lazy or too busy getting down to grab the camera from upstairs. i have a few more band shots for this series of posts, and then some clarion alley photos from 2002. i have a bunch of other photos from hanging out in the record store; i'll try to get most of them in.

mission records part II

bathroom graffiti


probably closer to the mission records bathroom floor than is advisable




show seating




cashier sitting


hey remember this guy??? chris pink looking dapper.


melissa and cinque adams working the door. cinque is the best chef you've never heard about. melissa is one of the best people i've ever met in my life.


this fan would shock you if you touched it.


adoring fans during shotwell. in the background from left to right: Ted from Pipe Bomb, brontez, tom, and anandi. i don't know who the girl in the foreground is (edit: melissa told me her name is lisa mancini), but Brontez is pretty much the best dancer in the Bay Area. Anandi has cancer really bad now. it's pretty sad.


in the background to the right: adam white and kat case, watching Shotwell. This show had Iggy/Eric Scam on backup vocals.


Shotwell playing. Buzz's head is in the way. Craig D. and Terry from Pipe Bomb to the right. Bunch of other Mission Records regulars in the crowd. Good times and good memories.


Another pic of Shotwell. Terry from Pipe Bomb is rocking out.


Next post: more shots from Mission Records and some Clarion Alley 2002 block party photos.

mission records part I

adam white and buzz


buzz will probably be mad at me for this one


melissa with the beers from across the street. these count as one beer each.




band room during quiet time


You remember Mission Records. It was the last all-ages show space in San Francisco and it closed in October of 2003. I lived there for almost two years, which was pretty much the end of Mission Records as it once was, or at least it was during the time when Mission Records was no longer Mission Records anymore, as owner Adam White would have said. We had shows there pretty much every weekend, and sold a few records during the week. Mostly Mission Records was a beacon in the neighborhood. At all and any hour you could walk in and see a friend hanging out listening to records and drinking 40oz. Miller High Lifes we'd buy from across the street. The record store basically kept that place in business.

The record store was located in the middle of the Mission, between 18th and 19th streets. This was the only area where the southside kids hung out, meaning La Emé, which makes sense seeing as how Mission Records used to be a Mexican Mafia bar in the 90s called El Siete de Oros. When Adam and others first moved into the space they found the bar dusty and cobwebbed, fully stocked with drinks still on the bar as the owners had just up and closed one day, leaving everything behind. They found bullets in the walls when they pulled out the drywall to put in soundproofing in the band room. They found handscales and baggies in the ceiling, and in the back corner of one upstairs room they found a square window with a rope and bucket hanging out of it to the alley below. They told me the place was haunted.

I wrote a piece on Mission Records and all of the rest of the hauntings and significance of the space for Maximum RocknRoll #258, November 2004. I don't think there's an online version of it anywhere, but I suppose if you really wanted to read it you could backorder an issue from them. I shot these photos mostly while living at the record store and they were all taken with my Nikon F4. I got a little crazy with the 15mm fisheye lens I had, which is kind of annoying to me years later, but you'll see as I add more photos later this week. For now these photos are set up shots to give a sense of place to something pretty much everyone I knew in SF had a connection.