Blog About Photography

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.