MOVING TO MONTANA

Just recently acquired an iPad almost for the sole purpose of utilizing GarageBand. I’m actually amazed at how well it works using the ioDock from Alesis. This is a Gibson ES335 plugged into a little Vox Valvetronix amp. Mic’d by a SM-58 Beta. Channeling a little Frank Zappa from my youth here. I think I’m going to be doing a lot of that for the rest of my life. Someone has to, it might as well be me.

NIKKEI AVG

Remember the old joke about where babies come from? First daddy comes home drunk from a hockey game. That’s kind of how I made my first GarageBand for the iPad 2 tune.

Let me explain. I report on the Los Angeles Sparks of the WNBA for a national sports publication. I came home after a game and wrote my article, published it over a couple of glasses of some incredible and cheap organic red wine from Whole Foods.

Was feeling all Pacific Rim and shit. It’s about 3:00 AM and this is in the middle of the brief wild stock price roller coaster ride of this past late summer. So everyone was watching the Nikkei to see what the foreign markets were going to do. Did I say I’d had a couple of glasses of wine? Okay. Just checking. 

I’d been pretty intimidated by the iPad and GarageBand and using GarageBand was really the only reason I’d bought an iPad. Nothing like a little alcohol to break the ice I suppose. So I started plunking away on the virtual and smart instruments, with a hip hop beat, of course.

Later, I bought something called an iODOCK by Alesis, Google it if you want to know more. And then I plugged my 335 into a little Vox bedroom amp and added a smokin’ hot wif— excuse me… GUITAR SOLO at the end. Please enjoy frequently!

One Picture

I’ve been shooting street photography digitally in Los Angeles for about 10 years. I’ve amassed hundreds of images that express what I see and have wanted to capture in this city. I’ve recently taken to shooting film, however, with a Leica rangefinder and various lenses.

I’m not here to advocate some special magic around Leica. But film is another story entirely.  And even though not all the images here were shot on film, exposed film is such a fundamentally different object from a digital image that I feel like everything I’ve done digitally might merely be preparation for what I’m going to do with film. I hope so.

Regarding this shot. I think images should require something from the person who is looking upon those images. A photograph doesn’t or shouldn’t have to be obvious in order to be something that holds some significant value. I think this image should be taken as an example of that. I don’t want to say much more about the picture itself. It either makes a statement to you or not. It made a statement to me.  

My plan is to shoot more images like this that are attempting to make statements (even if only to me) that express the humanity of my subjects and hint at some of the complexities of their lives and their predicaments and the costs of their struggles as shown on their faces.

There are so many cliches surrounding the presence of what is largely a Mexican American immigrant base in California and the United States.

I’m not expressing a political perspective with what I hope to be an ongoing photographic project. But the Hispanic immigrant population, their families, their contributions, and their various ‘roles’ in what makes up Los Angeles is so complex that the cliches and the level of understanding around the country of their presence here amounts to an affront to true cultural understanding and progress.

The function and burden of being Mexican in Los Angeles, or El Salvadorian or Guatemalan, be it as an illegal or as a someone born of legal immigrants, is, with rare exception, to live a life that makes you collectively part of the cheap labor engine that enables so many here to live crisp clean unburdened lives. Los Angeles is a story that is built, not just historically, but every single day, upon the labor of this population base.

Thanks for looking, and long live FILM.

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