1965 December 24, 2007 13:59

I know, I know, you didn't expect to see so many photographs on this site. Anyone who knows me knows that cameras are a huge part of my life. And so are pictures. Although you'll be seeing a lot of them here, I'll always try to keep them interesting. Like this one!

So here is my Brother and I posing for a picture with my sister Dorothy who arrived December 18th, 1965.   We both have guns because Dorothy exhibited early signs of vampire-ism and we had to be prepared to shoot her if she should hiss or lunge. We may not have been aware that a bullet wouldn't kill her, but simply knock her back momentarily until she shook her tiny body and let the bullets drop out of her. Then she would giggle and fly at us again. You can see her in this picture because she's half human still, so she shows up on film. She also cast a reflection in mirrors but would bite at her image and spit poison at dolls.

As she grew up, she would spend the daylight hours attached to the underside of the coffee table you see in the picture, or sleeping up in the corner of the ceiling.

Christmas scribbles December 22, 2007 13:02

Okay, so I'm trying to get a Christmas drawing done before Christmas, and this is the preliminary sketch. Why am I trying to do this so close to Christmas when it clearly has no use as a Christmas card or anything else? I don't know. It's just that I haven't drawn anything for a while and I really should. That and Santa is watching me of course, and I need to impress him.

To the untrained this looks more like a big mess. The untrained would be correct. The only part I like is the reindeer in the middle, and I'll need to see if I can pull him out and do something with him. I'm posting this as a way to shame myself into finishing this. If don't finish it before Christmas, then I'll remove it and pretend it was never here. And if you mention you saw it I'll just stare at you like you're crazy, but really you'll know I know you know I know you saw it and it will be really weird and all. So I should probably just finish it.

My first photograph December 17, 2007 12:17

The cool thing about going through old pictures is you can find treasure. This is the first photograph I ever took. Notice the low angle. It was using a Rolleiflex, so I was looking down into a viewfinder where everything is backwards. If you've ever used one, it's very disorienting. It's a wonder it's as straight as it is.

The other thing worth noting is my Dad's expression - you can tell he's in the midst of telling me how to take the picture, so he's not as relaxed as Frank, my brother. This is a theme in my photographs of today. If the picture was shot with my own camera, and I'm in the picture, then I'm most likely stressing about how the person using my camera is using my camera, and I'll be the only person in the picture who's not having any fun. This photograph is tilted because at the moment I snapped the shutter, a Shriner hit me with his tiny car. At first it seemed weird that he was all the way out in the desert, but then he explained he had just robbed a bank and was heading back to his hideout.

He was lying, of course. He and the javelina in the passenger seat had clearly been drinking.

PS. I'm pretty sure this was the infamous car that had a rattle somewhere on the port side. In those carefree days before seat belts were standard issue, my brother and I would crawl around the inside of the car trying to locate where it was coming from, while Dad drove around. I seem to remember a sunny afternoon playing on the front lawn while Dad took apart the doors.

Again? December 17, 2007 11:39

Oh jeeze, another mermaid. As a Christmas gift to all of mankind I'll stop drawing mermaids after the first of the year. I sketched this one a month ago, and liked her expression. After losing it and then finding it again, I threw some color on it. Almost literally, as I think this took three minutes. I just wanted to see it rough. I like her in green. I think she should be darker, but you get the idea. There are two reasons for this - the original Star Trek series convinced me girls should also come in either green or sky blue, but mostly I want to paint a girl in green because years ago in Maui I saw the most beautiful painting of a girl rendered entirely in green.

I went to see it every day, especially the day there was a jellyfish alert and no one could go in the water so I drank and visited the painting until I realized jellyfish couldn't kill a kayak so I rented one and went out amongst the jellyfish. I slid the kayak through and over their teeming selves. It was like being in a bowl of those glass-clear noodles that come in soup, all tangled and delicious looking. The point of all this is they crowded around the kayak and asked me to come play with them, using their tentacles like tiny hands to beckon me into the water. I knew their real plan was to sting me and pull me under and offer me to their Giant Clam Queen, who was their leader because she is really just one big mouth, and the jellyfish pretty much do whatever she tells them.

Christmas 1936 December 17, 2007 04:07

Went back home to Colorado for Thanksgiving, and came back with all sorts of scans from the family albums. I looked at them every week when I was little. Our family has always loved cameras - so there's no end to the pictures I can find. I'll post just a few here. No explanation needed, except to mention that it was shot in Colorado Springs.