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Here are a couple images from a Raquel Olivo shoot I worked on Wednesday. It was pretty fun.

George W. Bush once said, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… you’re not going to fool me again.” Naively, I have been assuming all my commenters are who they say they are. Oh, the fool I’ve been! First, you posted as Lisa Gioconda Saint Aubin de Terán then Jenny Diski and now, just now, as Margaret “Meg” Drabble. This most recent comment was the give away, because, honestly, how could I get comments from not one, not two, but three minor contemporary British authors, all of whom have something to share with me about photography MFA program? Impossible! I’m dying to know who you are.

Kate warned me that you don’t go to the Getty for the art. She said it’s better to go where there’s some event or party going on. I didn’t believe her and yesterday made the trip in her car to the sprawling compound in NW LA, and guess what? That place sucks my nards. Great design, great view, pretty boring art. High on production, low on substance - shocking for Los Angeles. “That’s what all the people who don’t fully understand LA say,” one of the folks I’m staying with, Chad, told me last night while we were drinking near his house in Silverlake. No, I get it. I really do.

Here’s something LA related that also touches on my archtecture jones. The architect Michael Maltzan, who loves to design things for poor people in his spare time, is getting set to break ground on a boldly designed housing project on Skid Row. LA is really trying to clean this area up and I think this kind of project demonstrates a level of seriousness for the assisting the homeless not commonly seen by a major city.

I forgot to post about this before. But. I was on the early morning train from San Diego to LA yesterday trying to sleep of course. This old guy who’s probably like 4′9″ get’s on at like Santa Ana or somewhere, serious Scottish accent, bald, big glasses, brown suit wearing a Dallas cowboys ski cap, talking all the time. He sits down across from me (the seats face eachother, or course) and continues talking, even though my eyes are obviously closed.

So. These are the things he tells me.

1. His name is Gerald Scott. He is 82. He is Jewish.
2. He is on his way to make an Aliyah to Israel which means that he’s becoming a citizen there.
3. He used to be the head engineer (i.e. “Scottie”) on British Naval vessles.
4. His wife just died, handed me her death certificate.
5. He scattered her ashes from a Israeli battleship off the coast of Haifa.
6. He spied on Arab states for Israel throughout his career in the Britsh navy.
7. He recently had a doctor check his sperm count discovering he’s fit to have children.
8. He plans to “arrange a marriage” between himself and “a young, 18, 20 year old Israeli soldier” and he intends to “produce” his own babies.
9. He is completely fit. He “wakes up every morning with an erection” and “masturbates twice a week”.
10. Since his wife was ill for a long time, he hasn’t “had sex in 22 years.”
11. His new job in Israel will allow him to carry a machine gun with which he intends to bag himself a few Hezbollah before he dies.

This man asked me for my phone number so that we could keep in touch.

I got to LA yesterday morning on a 6am train from San Diego. The reason for the early morning departure was because I got a job filling in at Atelier Management for one of the owners, Lauren, who had to work on another project. It’s been pretty rad. I’m working with Brian Duck who’s awesome (and actually on the phone talking me up to Hilary Walsh at this very moment - what a guy). So I hope this turns into a permanent gig out of New York, cause it’s pretty fucking sweet.

This is my second day in LA though, and I’ve only seen downtown and Silverlake. Tomorrow, I’m going to see the inside of a studio in Glendale while I’m assisting Raquel Olivo and Wednesday the inside of some other studio assisting Zen Sekizawa. So all this work is great. I’m going to pay for this trip and I’ll be able to afford fixing my Hasselblad, which is beyond broken. That’s a disaster because my minigolf series is just waiting to be shot. All I do is fix this fucking thing.

Anyway, as soon as I get out into the city and take some photographs, I’ll put them up. More to come!

Here’s my pretty hilarious new tearsheet, hot off the press (not the cover, but how great that it’s Leslie Nielson). They really weren’t kidding when they said it was a magazine entirely about beer, which is obviously aweomse because I consider myself a beer enthusiast. And there’s this whole feature on the best places to drink in San Diego and I just happened to be going there tomorrow. Mad brews!

Here’s a post from Christian Patterson that relates to food photography.

Regarding the Paleolithic nature of Bush Era America and how it might have come about, Maureen Dowd once wrote, “The Womens’ Movement only lasted a moment, but the backlash has lasted three decades.” Dowd was not writing about art, but her point about feminism is a valid one. Feminism has, outside progressive circles, gotten a bad rap since its heyday in the 1970s, and the social baggage associated with the language of feminism could lead some poor, ignorant soul to diminish the contribution of the feminist artists of the 1970s.

I’m no gender warrior, so lets cast issues of gender, sexuality, equality and rights completely to the side, and still the feminist contribution to contemporary art is practically unparalleled. Reviewer Holland Cotter has zeroed in on the true legacy of the Feminist Art Movement in today’s New York Times. In a review of “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” a retrospective of the art of this period at MoCA in Los Angeles, Cotter says

Without it identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all. Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.

This relates very directly to a post on the Magnum blog that got me all fired up yesterday, which was National Women’s Day. The post posed this question, which strikes me as being completely without substance or value:

What has been the greatest female contribution to photography?

Photographers spent the first part of this century trying to prove their mettle as artists. In the 70s, the women’s movement came along and redefined art so thoroughly that nobody can ever think about issues of representation, form and content the same way again. So far there is only one comment on that Magnum post, and it’s from me.

I called Nayland Blake tonight to thank him for his phone call letting me know I’d been accepted to the MFA program at ICP. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting him to be in his office because it was like around 7:30 in the evening but he was there and I was kind of caught of gaurd. So I said all this gushing stupid stuff which of course was sincere but still stupid and gushing and I hope he thought it was funny because I sure feel like an idiot.

I was slow to pick up the cue, but now that Jen and Shane have both picked up on Alec Soth’s declaration of Portrait Week, I’m compelled to do the same. I guess we don’t really think of Eggleston as a portrait photographer or even a photographer of people (though his new book, 5 x 7, is primiarly portraits) but this image has long been one of my favorite portraits. Titled “Memphis,” it is one of the most memorable photographs from Eggleston’s Guide, at least to me. I’ve never seen it in person. I should make a point of doing that.