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.

Day 145- L'ange Aux Aubergines

Belgian guest worker loading produce truck with organic eggplants, Grand Central Market, high noon.

"Can I take your picture?", some dude asked in English, and she vigorously shook her head 'no', simultaneously flexing her muscles to show off the tatts (one leek, one artichoke) along her legs.

She was almost done loading up by the time I had approached her after she rolled down her sleeves and pulled on her wellies.

"You have such beautiful...."

"Tattoos, I know", she finished.

"No. I was going to say you have nice posture".

She looked surprised and then burst out with a facetious laugh. Then she looked at the camera and said "Cheeeeeeese!" with a smile, so that I missed the really great shot I had before, but I like this one too.

Day 143 Not Fade Away

Couple dancing to Grateful Dead cover band at Ashkenaz Berkeley.


I have the softest of soft spots for people who dance, after and in spite of and sometimes in addition to, everything.


This dude had a beard like Bambi's daddy's antlers. The grizzled king of the urban underbrush, emerging with his mate down to the creek for a frolic.

Day 139- Rites of Spring - Young Girl's Dance

Today is the first day of spring.

I found ducks frolicking in the swimming pool. First day of spring.
Ducks just know.

This is a picture of one of my favorite models, who is constantly reinvigorating everyone and everything around her. Pay no attention to the rain coming down behind her - it's always springtime inside
H-Bomb's shop.


(The best part of Sonnyboy's recital was the Stravinsky, even though some cow leaned her Patou-stank'd pashmina across me to hiss to her herd-mate, "I can't stand Stravinsky" while the poor little pianist was still playing. I get him. Fuck off and shut up if you don't, mmmkaY?)

I have a new camera, and some new rules about this project and others, and it's all about cross-wind landings and dancing like a kite in spring winds.

Enjoy the breather. Let's take this little fugue space to enjoy our collective breath.



Le Sacre du Printemps- Young Girl's Dance

Day 135 - St Baldrick's Ghost

My stepbrother D. via photofunia.


He is bummed that he missed St. Baldrick's Day in his neighborhood, because he wanted to be a shavee again this year. D. is about six months older than me, but was rather wild in his youth, and is a total idol and role model for me in growing older after being much desired. In his fourth decade, he maintains an absolutely Peter O'Toole-ian what-the-fuck? sang-froid in regards to the evanescing of his boyish looks into something both older and new.

I am bummed because I wanted to go take pictures of the high school St. Baldrick's Day event and I had to stay home and clean up cat crap. D. went and got a regular boy's haircut from the cheap neighborhood barber today, instead of the $45 'image enhancing style' he used to get back in the '90's, and he is perfectly happy and content that way.

We both are going through a photofunia phase.

I made him Jack Sparrow, my other role model of a good man bravely and gamely beau-geste'ing through life after losing the best thing you've had.




A good example of what this site could be, if I had better equipment, if my models were willing, if I knew what I was doing


Character Project

Day 133- Organic Reality Television

Suddenly-unemployed older fellow busking on Valencia outside premiere of "Throw Down Your Heart".

How apropro.

He had the best attitude I've seen outside of that Prince-cover band playing in the London underground three days after the bombings. Only this current crisis will last even longer.

He got our attention by advertising himself as the world's first carbon-free, certified organic reality talk show, then dazzled us with a snappy vaudevillian political burlesque patter accompanied by a Felix-the-cat-bagful of visual puns.

It was raw and windy out there.

We gave him 5 bucks. We were the only ones who stopped.

Next time, I'm going to film him. But then it wouldn't be organic anymore.

Day 131 - Mother Love

Mother Love wants you to know that her trailer is for sale and she is ready to 'take it to a whole nother level' with her seafood place down by the port.


When her restaurant on the water in New Orleans went out of business after Katrina, she followed a handsome Californian down to the Stockton deep water channel.


"We have a delta too, you know."

"Nah, they want tacos here. I need to get back to catfish and gumbo land".

Day 123 "Are you taking a picture of the hummus?"

Pretty townie getting mehndi at my friend's one-woman show.

Two beautiful girls who wouldn't let me get any closer than a table's-length away and a persistent Romeo refusing to stay out of my camera range.


I really liked the light falling around the spa owner in the darkroom, too. She didn't like the close-up I took of her, but she liked this one okay.

Day 122 - Happy Girls' Day

Keiki and her cake.

Keiki's mother is a homesick Okinawan-Hawaiian whom I work with. She mentioned to me that she wished she could bake because her little daughter had a powerful obsession with heart-shaped cake. Keiki was born with a few health problems and doesn't always remember to eat...sometimes for days. She also has a complex and artistic personality of the type you just can't affect.


Being somewhat obsessive myself, and grateful to feel the slight stirring of inspiration, I came up with a cake for little Keiki. It involves over a pound of butter, fresh pureed strawberries,bourbon vanilla, and enough powdered sugar to make your floor dusty and sticky for days afterwards. Recipe available on request.


I got the heartshaped pan on sale for $2 marked down from $10, a week after Valentine's Day. I gave Keiki's mother the cake yesterday, by coincindence Japanese Girl's Day. They both cried, and her mother, being the sage spiritual guardian that she is, bade everyone wait to eat it until they had taken this picture to thank me.


Girl's Day

Day 121- Morris and Mischa

At the Junior Recital afterparty.

Somewhere in a deep recess of the most shallow subcultures of West L.A. there exists at least two young men who, on a rainy Friday night, put on dress shirts and hard shoes and party manners to support a younger friend's first performance for his peers.


"Why are they being so nice to me?", I asked Sonnyboy.


"You probably remind them of their mothers. None of my white or Asian band mates say that, but all the foreign-born dudes do. Plus, they're classical musicians. We're all nice".