Blog About Photography

This is tak­ing forever.

A lit­tle later today I’m get­ting on a plane to go back to Hous­ton, which is where I’m from. I’m going to be there for 8 days and I’m really excited about it for a cou­ple of rea­sons. The first is that I haven’t been back there since May and it’s going to be good to sleep in my old room and all that. When I go home, life is easy and action-​​packed. Mom is always thrilled that I’m back and loves to be a host­ess. It’s going to be great to see her and also to eat well. Ha. I’m totally out of money right now. Ex 1,Tonight’s din­ner: Mug of instant oat­meal, two cups of apple sauce, Coors. My friends are usu­ally stoked to see me since I stay away for such long stretches and they don’t have time to get sick of me, so it’s a whirl­wind of activ­ity. And then there’s this guy.

Going back to Hous­ton is also turn­ing into more and more of a cre­ative endeavor. I have use of a car there, which makes indulging a pho­to­graphic whim pretty easy. Plus, I have months to think of all the stuff I want to shoot when I’m down there (it’s going to be churches this time), make lists, and then exe­cute them with mil­i­tary efficiency*.

So, the next few posts will either not hap­pen or hap­pen from Hous­ton. It should be a good time for every­body, except for, say, the peo­ple who have to clean up after us.

*The use of this idiom hear­kens back to a day when the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary was, in fact, effi­cient. There was a time in this nation’s his­tory that it’s mil­i­tary prowess actu­ally saved free­dom and did so in a mere four years. This phrase is quite obvi­ously anachro­nis­tic and I apol­o­gize for any con­fu­sion my use of it may have caused.

I’m sure by now most of you have either seen the pre­view for or oth­er­wise heard of “Death of a Pres­i­dent,” the fake doc­u­men­tary about the fic­tional assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Bush. The film was con­tro­ver­sial for about a milisec­ond; then it won best film at the Toronto Film Fes­ti­val, and I think maybe some oth­ers. It was sup­posed to come to the­aters, I don’t know if it did or if it didn’t, but it has made its way onto Google Video, and is free for the watch­ing. I also have the tor­rent for you if you pre­fer, cour­tesy of mini­nova. Man, has the inter­net got­ten great or what?

I want to men­tion some­thing about the fake news pho­to­graph, which is pretty inter­est­ing. it really is a fan­tas­ti­cally iconic image, instantly rec­og­niz­able and well done. I imag­ine that it wasn’t all that easy to coör­di­nate such a shot; it has the spon­tane­ity of a true news pho­to­graph, one that would be the go-​​to image for this would-​​be vio­lent turn­ing point in a sad period of America’s his­tory. The assas­si­na­tion, how­ever, is staged. So rather than being ele­vated to icon, this pho­to­graph is merely fan­tas­tic mar­ket­ing for a con­tro­ver­sial film.

My good friend Molly, who is won­der­ful and amaz­ing, just sent out this email:

So, the dra­matic story goes like this… my deci­et­ful land­lady ille­gally rented her apt to us. Now she got kicked out of the co-op,i.e. voted off the island, and she has to sell the unit.

I am look­ing for a sub­let or 6 month lease start­ing Jan 1-​​ish. Every­thing is flex­i­ble. The only issue that mat­ters is rea­son­ably cool housemates/​roommates.

I’ll tell you what the real tragedy is here. The apart­ment Molly has to vacate is really fuck­ing cool. But that’s life under a co/​op board, I sup­pose. Please let me know if you are in Wash­ing­ton, DC and you have some­place for her to live. Thanks!

This is some­thing I hope to make kind of reg­u­lar, since, as it turns out, we’re still hav­ing reg­u­lar elec­tions in this coun­try. No, but seri­ously. My good friends Kata­rina Jerinic and Bryan Schut­maat (some­times) both work in video and they’re really on to something.

I’m not sure how to do this prop­erly quite yet in terms of the feed and all that (email me if you do) so for now, just down­load the pod­cast and I guess play it in quick­time or what have you.

UPDATE: I would appre­ci­ate any and all feed­back on this thing. I got three people’s responses in the past cou­ple of nights, and have incor­po­rated much of what was said into a sec­ond cut, which is now what is on view here. So post comments!