Day 178- Marley's hot on the box

See? I haven't stopped taking pictures of anyone but me according to my self-imposed rules.

Somewhere along the way I just got my priorities straightened out. It is more important, in descending order, to; Post everyday; ask a new person if I can take their picture; talk to a new person in a friendly way; listen to the people on the outskirts.

This is Marley, celebrating his fourteenth birthday on the literal outskirts of the Venice Drum Circle, where I was relegated after a rude and inebriated apparently homeless man motioned a bikini-clad member of the local nubility in front of his drum and simultaneously elbowed me and my camera out of the way.

"You're fat! You're ruining it!" he said.

Marley here laughed out loud at that with an endearing, and seemingly habitual, combination of acceptance and oblivousness.

"He was talking to me", he said, sadly and philosophically. Marley's dad, a hot dhol player, and I, didn't think so, but I agreed, so he would keep dancing for me.


"We didn't expect him to live. The doctors, I mean. My mom and them and everyone, they said the doctors said Marley wouldn't live and everything. Down's Syndrome kids die at a young age from freak infections and this and that like they always say on the t.v. and everything. Look at him. I brang him here every Sunday since he could walk real good, you know, just to let him mix in with all the other freaks and everything, and he loves it.

The thing is though, is like, we didn't listen to all the stories about don't get attached and this n' that because he's gonna die on you. We took him for checkups on my Blue Cross every year, shots and diabetes screenings and wellness tests and all that crap and everything. And now they're all, 'oh, that's why these Down's kids all died, because they're parents listened to all that stuff about them dying young and never took them to the doctor or anywhere or anything.

See how he walked right over to you? Kids are smart, man. He knows you're good people. Send me a copy of those pics, I want my mom to see them".

Day Out of Time - Hypohypochondria

Today's Anyone But Me subject was a closeup of the daintily splayed fingers of a diabetic guest helping herself to the spaghetti and garlic bread buffet at a Veteran's Hospital luncheon.

An uninvited guest.

She was perfectly iconic. As I stared at her through the awkward, too-heavy new lens on my new camera, I felt a new sterotype crystallizing in my vision. The middle-aged woman slumping towards senescnence on the arm of whoever is striding by, 'needing' more pillows, having a 'problem' with lights, glare, stairs, or noise, getting 'the shakes' from some quack nebulous disorder that necesscitates her serving herself first to any visible tempting mound of starchy sugars.

"I have low blood sugar" is their 'abracabra'. It makes food appear and makes it magically okay to make a virtue of self-centered cluenessness.

When my baby was underweight early in his life, I never never never left the house without some food in my backpack. Even my own mother, who could conduct seminars in self-absorption, has real chemical hypoglycemia, and she would pass out at the foot of the champagne fountain before blurting out her infirmity in front of honored guests. Plus, being Italian, she and I never eat bread and pasta at the same meal.

Raisins in the purse, trailmix in the diaper bag. It's not difficult.

Is that what these poor dumb cows want, someone to remember to bring food along and treat them like precious children? Because the resulting emotions are the opposite response. In spades.

"If I ever get like that", I said to Husband, "I want you to put a Glock right up against my brainstem and pull. 'Close your eyes, honey, no more having to live your poor pampered suffering life'".

"You wouldn't close your eyes", he said.


The really fascinating part about the Uncontrollably Hungry Faux-Diabetic/Hypoglycemic is that I always spot her in the crowd. And she always ends up sitting at the nicest table, in front of a pile of spaghetti with a hunk of garlic toast daintily held in one pudgy hand.



The moral? I shot myself into a corner with this project.

When I started getting some momentum with the daily portraits, Husband bought me the big confusing camera. It was like setting a plate of spaghetti in front of an invalid who sat up and asked for a second cup of broth.

My beloved little point-and-shoot used to fit in my purse, like a blood-sugar snack.
Now my husband has taken it.

And by the time I get my other camera figured out and set up, I resent the subject no matter who she is. Which is not what I was going for here.


By the end of the luncheon, I introduced myself to the volunteer co-ordinator and finally got myself into the system. I am now officially a Veteran's Hospital Volunteer.

So this blog has done some good. After all.

Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be the type of spoil sport who hijacks attention through blood sugar. Some people have real problems.


(This isn't the picture I was going to use, but I liked this website so much I spent about a hundred dollars here on clothes no one but myself, my mirror and my camera will see. Oh, and you. Hello.)

Day 129- The older I get, the better I was

Robert Therrien doing his Rat Pack-era Sammy Davis Jr. for my surprise party.


The more I use the new Nikon, the more I realize I need to learn. The more I start to learn, the more time I realize will need to be dedicated to studying the manual and making mistakes. The more I study photography, I realize, the less I feel like doing it.


I saw a dark and toothless Mechica-looking woman today selling cherries in front of St. Anne's Episcopal Church School with a newspaper coverlet over her babygirl's cheap plastic crib. The headline flapping in the wind was all about impending Swine Flu in Mexico. The sonofabitching camera jammed and refused to focus on the perfect shot appearing in my frame. My fault, my fault, all of it - not being in the moment, not learning the camera before I took it out, not having the Lumix with me as a fallback, being in a hurry, worrying about my stupid blog again.

I used to just bust with things to write and capture and review and comment on and say, over and over again, night after night.

It was new, there were a few of us doing it bravely together, and it was too fun to think about being 'good' at.

So yeah. We're still here.

Twenty years after I turned left for the Northbound bus and he stayed on Wilshire for the Westbound after our dance class, he shows up in costume and remembers all the things we realize together.


I just realized I say realize too much. If I were a Brit like one of those irresistable illegals I met on the westbound bus, I would say it with an 's' and it would sound ever so posh.

Day 125- Snarking Violation

I have never seen such a perfect representation of a blogger's odyssey through cyber-popularity summed up so graphically and on such a cellular level as this You Tube short subject called "Validation".


Flip it one way, straight, and it is a crisp, snarky, well-produced little one-note story of schmaltzy, give-the-slobs-what-they-want happy ending love.

Flip it upside down like a Manichean playing card, and it resonates with every day of my own personal trip through webrings, Buzznet Originals,Flicker testimonials, Yelp! votes, Twitter Favrd, back up to and through my own 365Day project, here.


Except for telling people to smile, this is what I've been doing. This is what I want to do.


I think it's working. And yes it does leave me less time to validate my cyber friends.


I think its okay.

Day 160 - Eyebrows are the new lips

Threading is the new collagen.

I spent a week last month in West L.A. where I noticed a duck-lipped 40-something sun her hundred-dollar pedicure next to a homeless veteran drowsing under a newspaper with economic-meltdown headlines.

Ostentation is so out. Even in L.A. .

The crisp, natural, alert and sexy look of the Indian and Middle Eastern girls streaming out of threading boutiques by UCLA, with their freshly shaped eyebrows, were the perfect opposite of the collagen-bloated personification of excess I had just witnessed.

I decided to try threading.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into Weberstown Mall last week and saw an immaculate little kiosk with a sleekly groomed and smiling lady explaining 'threading' to a group of curious shoppers. I noticed there was a wait so I waited for a weekday morning to drop by again.

Leila, (sp?) the owner/head operator, was working on a young woman with thick full brows when I came over. I got a chance to watch her work before I sat down in the chair thoughtfully provided for drop-ins. For the really interested,there's a dvd showing you how it's done, plus a few signs full of interesting threading details(it's not just for your eyebrows; men use it, too; Brad Pitt, Salma Hayek, among other celebs, are fans).

IT DOESN'T HURT, at least, no more than waxing. In fact, if your eyes are sensitive or if you're as much over 30 as I am, there is considerably less risk of damage to the thin skin around your eyes than with waxing.

It took about ten minutes, but I didn't feel either tortured or rushed. I was handed a mirror and then touched up with some silky brow powder that filled in and fixed my new eyebrow shape. It looked crisp, finished, but natural, and all for under 13 bucks.

Eyebrows are the new lips. The mouth demands, 'I am high-maintenance! Look at me!" The eyes say, "I am interested in YOU."

Nothing sets off your soul-windows like threading.

Day 156- Breathe Me

This project is paying off in scary, great, terrible, important, intangible ways.


I can't keep up with posting, ironically, just when the changes I began in October are rumbling up my April days.


I got a new camera.

I got the offer of unlimited help and a whole bunch of lenses from a real professional photographer.

Best of all, I've got the chance to risk my (safety? health? livelihood? complacency?) to see justice done, and I'm going to take it. It's taking all my time.


There will be pictures.
Just can't say when.

Day 147 - Pinkie Posers

Product-Advocate Spokesmodel mugging with a little girl's doggie, Santa Monica Promenade.

This guy was giving away photo-ops with himself in front of this Fling's Pavilion backdrop. I noticed a very cute, very shy little girl on the edge of the crowd cradling her white doggie, and both of them framed by the sinewy old-school-tattooed arms of her daddy.

"Can I get a picture of you with the dog?" I asked of the girl and father.

"Here! Did you get it all? Look! Here. Did you get it?"

Plaid Pink Fling guy here had the puppy out of its owner's hands and in front of a bank of tourist cameras before I figured out how to take the lens cap off the Nikon.

There's something so very L.A. about this. The fact that he just assumed anybody would rather have a picture of him than anything or anybody else; the fakey MySpace-faced mugging and contrived costumery of his hi-concept 'look'; the dark and diffident little mistress, her father, and myself, resigned to being on the edges, seeing what we can see.