someday: a website.

Someday, I’ll have a portfolio website and the splash page will look something like this. Someday. Why are portfolios so hard to figure out how to assemble? Photos. Artwork. Interiors. Maybe I’m just a little too scattered. Also, afraid of commitment. Bah.

Side note: it’s funny what a snapshot taken from inside a subway train, at the end of the day, absentminded, can end up being. 750 pictures. I guess one of them had to come out.

shoot the freak

So a while ago I made the big switch to a real wordpress account at an official domain (drawingpicturesofbirds.com), but because of 50megs’ crappy wordpress platform and my crappy IT skills, its been almost impossible to get up and working correctly. Then those bastards locked me out of being able to edit the site.

I haven’t decided yet what I want to do. Maybe try and revamp this site, get it going again. Maybe stick out the fight with 50megs, transfer the site, whatever. In the meantime, you can find me via the links to your right on other social media outlets. Stay tuned.

life, unexpected

So I’m still trying to clean up my computer – hundreds and hundreds of files (especially photos) all jumbled in the black hole that’s my hardrive. What’s fun about this is coming across pictures I forgot that I’d taken. Like this one. A day getting lost in Pasadena and the peacock that stood in my way.  Finding it, an unexpected reminder to expect the unexpected. (He looks to me like a showgirl on The Price Is Right – “And here, behind door number one, we have three lovely sedans…”)

I’m thinking of submitting it to the JPG Magazine theme: Which of these things doesn’t belong… that is, if I’m ever able to find the file in high resolution (as I frantically do a search on my C Drive)

searching for the invisible

Ah, the muse. I need really to get me one of those. Something or someone I keep chained in the basement (which I don’t actually have) to tap into for inspiration whenever I find myself dry – like blood for the vampire.

All summer, I’ve had trouble writing new scenes. Seeing them, as writer’s say. The how and why of it is nothing I could ever begin to explain. Why do we see made up worlds in the first place? If truth is stranger than fiction, with the abundance of wild and true stories in the world, the non-writer (non-creator) might wonder why anyone would devote years of their lives on the make believe. (And, so frequently, sacrificing time with our real-life friends and family to be spent with the people that live in our heads.)

All I can says is its because they don’t feel make believe. Not this far into it. Mostly, latlely, its as though I’m working on a documentary – or penning a biography. I know a scene or piece of dialogue is right when it feels in my head like a fact. When I can see every detail of the room and the characters go about their business like I’m not even there. Like I’m not in camouflage, tucked in the corner with my pen and pad, my video camera trying to take it all down. Trying to get all the facts straight. So that I can go home and write about it when it’s over.

So what do you do when they stop letting you in the front door? When they figure you out, catch the reporter listening in on their conversations, the paparazzi in the tree out the window making their picture. And they pull down the shades. Cut the phone lines. Stop big brother from watching before you get the real dirt on them. The what it is they have hiding that makes all the rest of your facts seem like just junk for the tabloids.

Here is what my book has so far: the bones. Scenes sprinkled throughout the storyline with these holes where the real meat goes. And all I’ve got are these clues. Little scraps of things taped in a notebook that I keep trying to make sense out of. And it’s not really working.

So the writer’s block continues.. and don’t nobody it’s because I’m not trying.

lovely past believing

Words on walls inside New York’s Central Park Zoo taken on a rainy afternoon last August, re-found almost a year to the day while cleaning up files on my laptop. This is what I love about pictures, the re-discovery part.

a light in the dark (now, vote!)

Go to JPG Magazine and vote for my photo essay (previous featured on this site) to be included in their publication. Please and thanks.

a light in the dark

These have been parked on my camera since October. Don’t ask what took me so long. (Note: Post updated on 04/28/08 with larger thumbnails. Click to see full size images.)

it’s just a house…

Neal takes the screwdriver out of his pocket, works at removing a glass knob from the door. The rotted wood gives and Neal yanks the entire piece out in one pull, leaving a splintered hole in its place. On Jude’s face is a cringe, like this hurts. Neal rolls his eyes. “It’s just a house,” he says, “Not something alive.”

“A corpse isn’t either,” Jude says. “Still, you wouldn’t rip a thing off one like that.”

A part of what I read in writing workshop on Thursday, after which, my professor said: “But it’s not something alive. I don’t get it.” And, until the next morning, he almost had me believing it. Until I went to work the next day, walking a job site for the first time – a “historic” apartment complex in Hollywood that we’re supposed to move down the street, completely gut and turn into shiny new lofts – my professor almost had me convinced. I can’t explain my love for old spaces, but I guess I’d better figure out how if I hope to salvage this scene.

a place I once was

There was a time when I lived in San Francisco. I was seventeen first, then eighteen. Then I left. Some years later I went back. This was new years, 07-08. And I tried to pretend I was eighteen again. And it didn’t work.

Here’s what I saw: