Pine Hill, Stump with Legs

It was a hell of a place, a heavily wooded hill between two lakes, a few miles from anywhere. We used to go camp there when I was a teenager, canoeing across the lake we lived on with marshmallows and vodka and sandwiches stolen from the summer camp kitchen.
It was filled with huge pine trees, big open spaces to sit and look out across the water as the sun set. I kept going back there for a long time, either riding horses or hiking. About 100 yards from where the stump in the photo was my horse once tripped and I broke both wrists and my back, spending the summer with two casts on my arms and one hell of a sore spine from the compression fractures. It bugs me more today than it did in the decade after the accident. Part of the price you pay for having a wild and often too interesting life.
We were out hiking the day I took this, sometime around 1978. I had only been shooting for a year or so, and it was one of those hot summer days where the air smelled of pine needles and swamp water, where the sun baked the horseflies and dragon flies into a happy frenzy of energy. I hated those horse and deer flies. They had a bite that felt like a napalm covered bee sting.

Nice Teeth!

Another coffee shop beauty! I think it's the coffee down at EVP, it tends to make the world look very odd to me.

Nude with Coffee, Sunday morning, around 1988

That apartment was huge and ancient, above a glass store, nine rooms for 250 bucks a month. Cheap even for 1988 money. I shared it with a series of people, one a lunatic furniture salesman and fanatic bike rider who screwed as many girls as he could, then an artist pal who did dark and wild paintings and drank heavily.

He got a bad Jesus virus, decided I was damned to hell and moved out, and on the way told two mutual friends they could move in over the weekend while I was gone.

The apartment was next to a door factory where machines hummed 24/7 and sawdust collectors exploded and the fire department would scream up every few days to put them out.

Across the street from a biker bar where drunks would stumble out to scream and puke on the street, or roar around on big loud Harleys and choppers.

The real kind of biker, not the pampered dentists and clean smelling yuppies who came later.

The two new roomies turned out to be new age roommates from Hell. They preached love and bought weird crystals and drank strange overpriced elixirs made from seabed minerals. And they fought like demons late at night, screaming and throwing each other around.

I finally had to move out, ready to kill both of them as they slept just so I could sleep a whole night. I found out later they had some new age guru who had "found a dark spirit in the old apartment".

They did some strange ass ritual/ceremony with a six hundred pound amethyst crystal to exorcise it. I think they were exorcising me. Somewhere, in between roommate madness I shot this.

I had a spare room, with great morning light overlooking the busy street below. I shot this one rare quiet Sunday morning sometime in 1988 or so.

She was my first nude model that I photographed, and we were a couple for a very long time. And she still looks great 20 some years later.

My Back Yard

It's taken twenty or so Toyota truckloads of mulch, burned out one rototiller, about a half a truckload of landscape timbers and seven years.

It also grows about two inches an hour after a rain.

Twentyeight tomato plants, six or seven Castorbean plants, too many morning glories, beets, cosmos, marigolds, cukes, and god only knows what else.

I'm happy with it. This is also my commute to work on the way home, all sixty or seventy feet of it. That is far from suck.

Torso, Early 80's

One from the vault, shot in the old photo studio I used to work in. Shot with a big, boxy and very nice Hassleblad on real film and printed in a real stinky darkroom.

I do not miss working in the darkroom. Not one little bit. I think 15 years or so of soaking one's hands in sodium sulfite and glacial acetic acid was long enough.

Photoshop is far less stinky and more fun.

My Homeboy Lucas shows his True Form

They barf, shit and cry among us, and I for one welcome my pal Christine's new rapidly growing minature Alien Overlord and Activities Director.

All hail Lukasss, Ambasador from the planet Haa'raxaloo Prime!

P.S.- His name pronunced Lu-cas, although given his ability to barf up curds from his mom's milk, maybe it should be Mucus. I'm sure all the little bastards on the playgrounds of his future will call him that.
Kids are really not nice people. I know, I live next to an elementary school playgound, and they swear more than the cast of Deadwood.

True pregnant beauty

Sometimes, the pregnant female form is about

the most wonderful thing in the world to look at.

Screwed up blog code

I have been away from the blog because Blogger has a "autosave" feature that pissed me off so much I walked away. It would save everything I wrote with a new entry, and I wound up with about three dozen posts for every sentence I wrote.

I hope it's fixed now.

And now, the sexual organs of flowers. Passion flowers from my deck.

I got a new camera. It fucking rocks. A digital SLR that has a really, really wide angle lens. Thanks Kori!

Prom Queen

SShe was the talk of the prom in that fine frock.

Kaboom, Tar Baby-Man with Malcontentia!

He pounds the skins

sounds sweeter than sin

he tickles and taps

knows where to rap!

The lovely dark eyed Pam

Does one become a sort of rockstar because they look like they should be, or because they rock out? Dark mysteries like this escape my puny primate brain.

T-Man, with crow

A photo from last night's band shooting. Scary, but damn handsome.

My New Loud Band

In all it's middle aged glory. Pam, Robin, Tim and that rude malcontented fake redhead.

This band's fun.

They don't give me dirty looks when I sing, ask me to play my songs instead of just telling me they're too dark, or ignoring them,.

They don't seem to see me as a tool to further their music and egos.

It feels really good, and like we're all in it for the sheer joy of playing music.

And we get to play loud!

We have two gigs coming up on June 2, too. More on that later.

Eliminate the middle man

Theology: the learning and developing of methods and practice in how to make people feel like shit about themselves, to make them scared of imaginary beings, also a method of middle man money extraction and a means to power and wealth filled with manipulative and needless speculation.
This madness is also tightly woven into religion, modern physics and political identity, and is both a curse and a source of endless wars, hatred and emotional abuse.

Spirituality: the day to day realization that there are things bigger than one's self, and that the huge and beautiful mystery known as life and sentience is bigger than our tiny primate brains could hold.
Being solidly connected to spiritual thinking in a world full of fundamentalist thinkers is a rare gift, and sensitive people who can rub more than a few neurons together are often driven mad by people practicing the often barbaric and ruthless methods of theology. Which have been all of them from where I see things.

My New Homeboy

My new pal Lucas. He's not much of a conversationalist, but sure has a loud voice. Mostly he just sleeps and farts a lot. Almost every time he stretches.

News Flash! The Pope sets pagan babies free! ( act now and we'll toss in a free bottle of holy water!)

Today the pope said he was getting rid of limbo, and all those pagan babies I worried about in third grade must be filing into heaven one at a time.
I wonder if heaven's got a DMV take a number setup, or if they just open up a whole new subdevelopment? There's gotta be a long line, going back to the neaderthal age of babies waiting to get in.
Then there's all those good hearted adult pagans that were supposed to be waiting too.
I wonder what the waiting room looked like, if it had horrible uncomfortable chairs, bad bathrooms, horrible coffee that tasted like cat piss filtered through broken and burnt walnut husks, with buletin boards on the walls covered in notices for things like the limboholics anonomyous group, and if the room had flickering flourescents and a strange pine disinfectant smell?
I knew the whole Catholic church and reliegon were horseshit by the time I was ten. And it was those poor pagan babies waiting in limbo forever that woke me up. I suppose I should be thankfull and not bite the hand that both blessed me and woke me up.

Cash money from the market gig

Right before we left on our road trip, my pal Bess and I played at the wintertime Farmer's Market. They liked us! We got fifty bucks tossed into the violin case, a great free organic breakfast, played two long sets for an oddly attentive crowd, and even had four people ask us if we had a cd and what our band name was. I told em' Led Zepplin.

It was good to play out again, I've been missing it since I got booted from the last band I was in.

Playing as an acoustic duo with Bess rocks. It's simple, organic and flowing, and really relaxing

to escape the weirdness that comes from playing with ego and insecurity driven singer songwriters. I sure love playing the loose instrumental music, and the crowd sure seemed to pay more attention than I expected.

The woman who runs the entertainment at the winter market wants us back again next fall when the big noisy, stroller and tourist choked market closes down again for the season.

What I Saw On My Trip To Cleveland

Sneaker, Atlantic Ocean, Wet Foot.

Kitty Hawk Sunrise, Again. April 2006