November 2008 Archives

Seemingly, we humans live our lives so that we can have a house. Well, and food.

Isn't that the way it's been since man opted to come down from the trees and stopped dragging his knuckles on the ground?

It is certainly not a new thing that when we are not collecting the best palm fronds for our thatched roofs or installing new, sound-proof, energy efficient, double-pane windows in our craftsman view home, then we're out hunting or gathering or, shopping.

Linda and I have managed to fall into line with the rest of the sheep, baaaaing our way to and from our jobs so that we can have toast for dinner in our own hut in a place called America.

Our hut not the worst one on our street. It's not unattractive and it's comfortable and relatively well-appointed. Yet oddly, although inside our hut we have a large piece of cushy, sectional furniture, a luxurious, leather couch and chair and a queen-sized bed with a goose feather filled comforter, we often spend a fair amount of our free time in the room usually reserved for an automobile.

When this hut was constructed in 1985 the builder added a large room, actually the largest room, just for automobiles.

All the huts on our street have similar auto rooms. Some or our neighbors don't use them for their automobiles. Some use them to stack up cardboard boxes filled with items that they once shopped for but no longer use.

Some of our neighbors stack these boxes to the ceiling and if they could they would stack them all the way out into the street. But if they did that they would not be able to close a door and conceal the fact that they live as pack rats.

The auto room attached to our hut has enough room for two automobiles to live. But we only let one of our two automobiles stay in there.

That's because we have a lot of cardboard boxes filled with things that we once shopped for but no longer use.

But like some other huts on this street we get further utility from our auto room. We have wooden cupboards installed in there that are filled mostly with things that we once shopped for but no longer use. There is also a wooden bench that serves as a place to put various items that may need some work done of them or some sort of repair or possibly a coat of paint.

Around this workbench we have also placed two tables that create a U shaped space that we use for a variety of things.

One of these tables is a drawing table that Linda uses to create illustrations using a variety of media. On the other table is a Mac Mini with a wireless connection to the network inside the hut. We use this machine to surf the innerwebs or listen to net radio when we are "working" out there.

In this space I've also put a drum machine and three electric guitar amps. If I'm going to plug-in and play electric guitar poorly, this is where I go.

In or around this space we've also added a high studio chair and a comfortable but old chair that once occupied the living room in Linda's old apartment.

We like this space in our auto room a lot.

For some reason we seem to like to spend Friday nights out there. We keep the over-sized, auto room door wide open, drink too much Jameson, listen to or play music poorly and yammer into the night.

The folks who live in the huts directly across the street from us likely think we're crazy. Which is fine with us because we actually think they are psycho. They have boxes stacked to the ceiling inside their auto rooms even though they have 4 or 5 cars parked in the driveway and on the street.

Last night, as Linda and I were drinking too much Jameson, talking too loudly and playing guitar poorly in our auto room, it began to rain.

This came as a completely satisfying surprise to us both and since we both worship rain.

Rain worshipping is something that happens to a person who lives in an environment where the sun may shine every single day for 8 or 9 years straight.

We love rain so much that we actually have a plan to eventually move to a different hut in a different place in America called the Pacific Northwest where it is known to rain every single day for 8 or 9 years straight.

We love rain so much that when it does finally come, we get out multiple cameras and start taking pictures of things we look at every day but we never see wet.

Last night, after a few hours of drinking too much Jameson in our auto room, we stood outside in the driveway. We bent ourselves over backward and felt the rain on our faces and our chests and our necks.

Then we came inside to one of the smaller rooms in our hut and crawled up into our queen-sized bed with a goose feather filled comforter.

We drifted off to sleep as the sound of rain poured through leaks in our deteriorating rain gutters and splashed onto our barbecue and deck box and other things that we shopped for and still use, in the backyard behind our hut, in America.

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging around in my freezer when it became painfully clear that I needed to free up some space.

The time had come when those two, half-used bags of Trader Joe's
chicken breasts covered with freezer burn needed to go. Oh, and the
four bags of equally freezer-burned edamame, two containers of chili
leftover from last Christmas and ... alright, all those yellow boxes.

I've acutally been storing these yellow boxes in at least 3-4
different freezers for years. Some of them from as far back as 1994.
How many people can say they have stuff in their freezer from 1994?

It occurred to me, finally, that I was never going to open up those
yellow boxes and consume the contents of them. Or the two cans that
were stacked in there with them. So I took all those yellow boxes out
of the freezer, along with the two cans that were stacked in there with
them, piled it all up on my workbench out in the garage.

After removing the two bags of frozen chicken breasts, four bags of
edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and all
those yellow boxes from my freezer, I found I had lots more room in
there to store some other items which used to fall out on the floor
whenever I opened the freezer door.

OK, now take a look at the above photograph and raise your hands if you know what it is.

Hmmm, a bunch of boxes with the word Kodak on them. Must be some
kind of camera thing. Maybe it's flash memory or a type of optical
storage disk.

Nope.

If you raised your hand and answered, "film," you get a gold star either for being smart or for being old. 

For those of you who didn't answer film, if you're over 20, you need to take some classes.

Film is a kind of cultural artifact from an era (oh, about 5 years
ago) long since passed. The word "film" is sometimes used to describe
an artform that is considered an important way to inform, educate,
entertain and indoctrinate the societies that make them. This is also
known as moviemaking or just movies.

For our purposes we'll refer to film by it's truest and more
technical definition, that of an ancient medium by which images were
recorded on thin, flexible sheets of plastic or other material coated
with a gooey, light-sensitive emulsion, using cameras through a process
called photography.

Photography [fəˈtägrəfē] Noun. The art or practice of taking and processing photographs.

The process of taking photographs didn't always precipitate the
instant gratification we've grown accustomed to. Long ago, it entailed
expending cash and fossil fuel to purchase film packaged in little
yellow boxes usually made by a company based in Rochester, N.Y. After
recording your photographs you had to expend more fossil fuel to
transport your film to a "photo lab." Up to a week later you then used
more fossil fuel to return to the photo lab, paid more cash to the
clerk, a good amount of which went to a company in based in Rochester,
N.Y., and your processed film was returned to you along with an
envelope usually stuffed with 12, 24 or 36 photographic prints.

Tragically, only about 3% of these photographic prints brought any
satisfaction at all. The rest exhibited blobs of orange or black or
white usually with some ghostly silhouette of human figures you could
almost recognize, proving that photography was not exactly
unchallenging. 

Just a few minutes after I took the above mentioned photograph I was
walking through the aisles at my local Albertson's store in search of a
bag of charcoal briquets which I would use later that night to grill
fresh(er), not freezer-burned, chicken breasts.

On the way to the check-out counter with a 25-pound bag of Kingsford
on my shoulder, I heard an announcement over the in-house public
address system that said if you were a shopper at Albertson's and you
brought your digital photos to the digital photo center located within
the store, you could go home with those digital photos stored on an
optical storage disk commonly referred to as a CD. This announcement
came right between REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling
Anymore" and the Eurythmics' "Here Comes the Rain Again."

What is the point of all this?

Maybe I'm grieving over the gradual and torturous death of a beautiful artform.

For many years I used to consume large amounts of film, most of
which came packaged inside little yellow boxes like the ones in the
photo above. On an average day, I probably made 200-300 exposures on
film.

Now, I might make 200-300 digital captures of little yellow boxes of film so that I have one for a blog post.

Ever since I piled all those yellow boxes on my workbench over two
weeks ago, I've been looking at them and trying to decide what I'm
going to do with them. I decided, that I just can not toss them into
the dumpster. That would lead to their being buried in a landfill
somewhere in Los Angeles County. I couldn't bear that so, I took a
photograph of them.

Now I'll probably stuff all of them into a box and continue to store them for many more years to come.

Just not in my freezer.

We live on Tupelo Ridge Drive, in a house we sometimes call 'Rancho de los Gatos.'

Two humans live here but the three felines who allow us to reside with them, collectively rule this place.

But it clearly wasn't always this way, and if the two humans and three
cats who currently call this small piece of property home did not
occupy it, many, many other critters would.

In fact, the critters who live around this place are constantly trying to evict us so they can move back in.

Regardless of what the Los Angeles County Tax Assessor or the County
Recorder or Countrywide Mortgage or Tom Gapen thinks, this piece of
property on Tupelo Ridge Drive belongs to them. The critters of Ranch
de los Gatos want their land back and they're never going to give up,
ever.

They're like little four and more legged insurgents periodically
amassing forces on the border and fearlessly launching raids deep into
enemy territory only to be fought back to positions in the rear where
they tend to their dead and wounded before regrouping and invading
again and again.

Some of them have defiantly never left and they live among us. We can scarcely tell the enemy from the friendlies.

Unlike them though, we don't think of most of the critters who live
nearby as the enemy. We would welcome many of them to take up residence
anytime they like and we even encourage it. Just not inside the house
and unfortunately, that seems to be where most of them seem to want to
be. At least those with more than four legs.

The critters who would most like us to leave include, but are not
limited to, ants, bees, wasps, flies, gnats and countless other bugs
that I can not identify.

And spiders.

I'm not going to say that our house is 'infested' but before I moved in
here I had probably seen maybe a half dozen black widow spiders in my
life. Now, I could find a half dozen in a half hour. Fortunately they
tend to keep to themselves mostly in the garage, the shed, the deck
box, the cactus plants, the bushes and around the recycling bins.

We have quite a few black widows around here.

Those critters that we would welcome more readily tend to be more of
the furry variety and are found in large numbers. These include but are
not limited to opossums, squirrels, raccoons, coyotes and little
gophers.

There are also plenty of hummingbirds, mocking birds, crows, owls,
hawks and a ton of other birds that I have no idea what they are.

Oh, and a gazillion lizards.

And then there are the bunnies.

Linda and I are actually quite fond of bunnies so it's always kind of
heartwarming to pull up in the driveway and have a couple bunnies
nibbling grass in your front yard, even more across the street in the
neighbors yard and dozens of them, their little ears sillohouetted by
the street light, having what Linda calls a "bunny sock hop" down at
the corner.

Tupelo Ridge Drive got it's name for a good reason. It runs along a
ridge line that slopes down to a small valley below. Rancho de los
Gatos sits at the highest point of the ridge and we love to sit out in
the backyard, drink Jameson and Cabernet and watch traffic streak past on Copperhill
Drive below us.

Inevitably, critters will enter what we like to call the 'Wildlife
Highway' through our yard. The property is surrounded by a block wall
that serves as a perfect onramp to a busy throroughfare for animals.

Since we've lived here I've been looking at Zillow.com or Google Maps
images and other satellite photos of this street. For the first couple
of years the best images available were older satellite photos taken
before this tract was built back in 1985. I thought that was kind of
strange since many of the neighborhoods around us are much newer yet
there were already high-res satellite images available of them to view
at street level magnification.

My street had older, lower-res images but you could still see that there were
no streets on this hill yet. There were simply paths made by off-road
vehicles which likely followed what were previously foot paths which
likely followed what were previously animal foot paths.

I believe critters had been following the Wildlife Highway for many
decades before many people lived around here. And so they still take
the same route to get to food stores and cocktail lounges.

Yesterday, I was carrying a bag of trash around to the dumpster at the
side of the house. I turned the corner from the garage and there, out
in the open, right on the concrete slab that could be an RV park if I
had such a thing, was a dead rat.

He was no small rat either. He (I'll just assume he was a male) was
gray and had a long rat tail. Just like a rat does. Actually he was
kind of cute ... if he wasn't a rat, on my property.

He showed no sign of trauma and foul play was not suspected. His demise is as big a mystery as the Black Dahlia.

I haven't actually seen a rat on the Wildlife Highway before but other
people have. My brother for instance, when he was here visiting last
summer, said he saw one getting on the onramp. I had my back turned at
the time.

So, we know they live here too.

And that's fine, as long as they don't want to come in, which would not be a very good idea for them anyway.

Having kitties rule your house has it's advantages.

My first couple of websites, extremely basic affairs which I wrote back
in about 1996 or '97, using SimpleText or PageSpinner, carried the moniker
of PhotoTerrorism.

This was, of course, before 9/11 and the threat of real terrorism in
this country and at the time was just a kind of tongue-in-cheek
identity that I thought described a small part of what was my
photographic 'style.

There was nothing I liked better than to, with a reporter, go knocking
on the door of some politico being charged with corruption or
solicitation and banging off a few frames of the palms of their hands
as they slammed the door in our faces or to push a wide angle lens up
in the face of the handcuffed perp as he/she was led from the police
car to the courthouse.

I kept the name PhotoTerrorism for a long time until I decided to
register the domain. Much to my dismay, somebody had beaten me to it
and worse, there was nothing of any real value there.

Disappointed, I just abandoned the whole idea of associating myself
with that name and by then, I was out of the photo stalker business
anyway.

But recently, I temporarily but gently revisited the style and I
probably don't even know how close I came to being arrested for it.

It was the 18th birthday celebration of my niece Chelsea and 15 of us,
geezers and teens, gathered at Buca di Beppo at Universal City Walk.

A lovely time was had by all and a fair amount of chianti was consumed by most, including myself.

Well, OK, I had too much chianti and occasionally when I have too much
of a given alcoholic beverage, I start having too much fun, sometimes
at the expense of those unlucky enough to be accompanying me. My wife Linda
will attest to this as she was the one who dealt with the bulk of my
self-centeredness that night.

Having said that, I must state that I was nowhere near belligerent or
obnoxious. I was not stumbling around annoying people, except maybe
Linda.

After dinner we all strolled through City Walk and at one point most of
us stopped near a store where some members of the party decided to buy
socks.

So I sat down and began taking photographs of the crowds walking past.
I was simply slowing the shutter down to expose for the abundance of
neon and florescent and popping a little flash as people went by. Not a
single person gave even a sideways glance as I did this for
approximately 15 minutes. I took about 10-15 images this way then moved
over to where Linda and her sister Susan were sitting and started
photographing them.

Just then a security guard in a white, pleated shirt, mounty hat and
utility belt approached and started interrogating me as to why I was
taking photos.

"I'm taking photos because I like to take photos, why would you ask?" I
replied, trying to tamp down the outrage that was immediately boiling
up, but still let just the right amount of it out so as to sound
confident and knowledgeable about what my rights were but not provoke
this want-to-be law enforcement person.

"Are these folks members of your family sir?"

"Why yes they are, why would you ask?" I said with a touch more acrimony.

"Excuse me miss but is this person taking pictures related to you?" he asks Linda and Susan.

"Yes he is!" they both replied, voices charged with their own indignation.

It was about this time that I noticed that this "officer" was not alone.

"What is the problem and why do you think it necessary to come over
here and hassle me about taking pictures with no less than one, two,
three, four, five, six SEVEN security guards?!"

I pointed to each one as I counted them speaking loud enough for passersby to hear.

I was already seeing myself being carted off with two guards holding
each one of my limbs while I screamed like Lee Harvey Oswald, "I'm not resisting arrest, I'M
NOT RESISTING ARREST!"

"We did not know the nature of the call sir," the little man with the utility belt replied.

"Oh please! I can not imagine how that radio transmission must have sounded!"

I was getting pissed and I was about to mock their lack of having
anything more meaningful to do with their lives when it kind of hit me.

Having worked as a press photographer for 18 years I know what my, and
anybody else's, rights are in this situation. I'm basically on private
property and these folks, overzealous as they may
be, are acting as the agent of the property owner.

They can tell me that I can not take photos here if they wish, as
absurd as that is being that this is a tourist attraction and there are
hundreds of other people snapping away with the Canon ELFs and
Kodak Easyshares.

Photography at CityWalk is OK unless you do it in such as way as it
looks like you're a professional and you have not acquired the
requisite clearances from the PR department previously.

I decided that I really didn't want to spend the night in jail and then
have to deal with the repercussions and expense of it all later so I
looked for a way to diffuse the situation and just walk away. Just then
the magnificent 7 were joined by an armed L.A. Sheriff Deputy.
The cavalry had arrived.
We walked away.

I learned later that as we did, these dilweeds were actually
high-fiving each other and chanting things like, "Yeah, you better walk
away!" like a bunch of street thugs having just forced a weaker foe to
back down from an alley fight. This of course only confirms the level
of "professional" security personnel employed by
Universal.

It may very well be that the over-confidence won by the job-well-done
of ridding City Walk of another photo nuisance, thereby rendering the
place safe for consuming again, combined with the muddled ineptitude of
the gang, that led to arrest later of another infidel.

Susan came into the micro brewery where we were later to tell us that
the same crew had just taken an insurgent to the ground who continually
screamed, "What did I do? Help me! What did I do?"

I could go on and on about how I think CityWalk is actually an
oppressive police state run by former members of the Stasi and that I
will never set foot there again but that would be boring and maybe even inflammatory.

The following day I think I may have discovered the reason that all of
this got started. Looking at the images I had taken during that fateful
15 minutes I found the photo displayed above.

This vision of pseudo authority was right in the middle of
the hopeless team with no future wearing the harshest scowl I have ever
seen on a human being.

I believe it was her who, after having a small amount of strobe light
exposed on her lovely countenance, went running for reinforcements to
harass and hopefully arrest the phototerrorist.