dr_lizardo

Hey

Lizardo here again. The self portrait above was taken with a 4x5 negative in an old polaroid pathfinder. Earlier this year I had the idea of shooting one photograph a day with that old camera. I did it for a couple of weeks before i concluded the project wasn't really feasible. There would be too many days I wouldn't have the time or energy or daylight left to go out and shoot a photo with that old camera, and I would end up just shooting a lot of self-portraits and the like at home. I developed the negatives this weekend, but unfortunately, as I am a trully colossal idiot, the container i was storing them in turned out to be about as light tight as wax paper and most of them were ruined. Anyway, in order to have a functioning 4x5 camera again I took the lens off my speed graphic and replaced it with the Pathfinder's lens which is working properly.

I also found some old pics of J. on a roll of 35mm BW film i had sitting around for a couple of years and finally developed this weekend.



I kind of have love/hate relationship with 35mm bw film. The images have a marvellous presence and presence of time in them, but the tiny negs pick up so much dirt and other imperfections that are tremendously magnified when you enlarge them. Now and then it occurs to me I ought to pick up one of the fuji 6x9 rangefinder cameras and do some real photography, to hell with three thousand dollar digital slrs. I have some 120 cameras already but generally they're too big and heavy for the field.

In other news the black guy who plays drums at open mic night on fridays, and basically mc's the event got a recording contract and is moving back home to connecticut, and he asked me to help the new MC with the setup next week. I didn't play this week because I was burned out from a couple of 14 hour days and when I got there the people playing were great and I thought I'd look pretty pathetic compared to them. I have this thought that work has a tendency to reduce you to someone who can do nothing else besides work, and I despise it all the more for that. It's true that I could maybe practice for an hour after I get home from work, but If i've just worked a 14 hour day and I've got maybe 2 hours to eat shower and surf the web a bit, I just don't have much left to practice with. I could practice instead of surfing the web, but after a day of continous noise and labor I really need to just chill as much as humanly possible.

Random aside. One thing that I've seen a lot of working for coke that I never saw or thought about before is people buying lottery tickets. I just never go to the little convenience stores for anything I need myself. Anyway, lottery tickets and cigarettes are both sold in the same places and under the same restrictions. I guess to me lottery tickets just seem a dirty habit like cigs. But it also tells me something about the hopelessness of working for a living. It seems to me that trying to become a photographer is trying to make my own hope. I disrespect myself when I don't try harder to make something of it.

Not too much else to report. I'm teaching myself a couple of CCR songs. Not having them is rather a glaring deficiency if yuu're playing acoustic opem mic sets. CCR uses perfectly ordinary chords but the strum pattern is a bit different from my habitual one.

Another random thing I was thinking about was Kurt Cobain. A while ago I was looking at a book of Courtney Love's journals and things and there was a contact sheet in there of a photoshoot of her and Kurt. Each and every photograph was superb and you could really see how much of a superstar Kurt was. But something that I rember was his eyes, and their unflinching gaze right through the camera. In my mind that ties in with something I read where someone remarked about how witty a person Kurt was. It seems to me, in my ongoing investigation into the nature of coolness, that one thing you might say that coolness, or wit is, is the abillity to handle anything that is said to you. Kurt, being witty, and being cool, could handle things that were said to him. And therefore he could look through the camera, as he could look straight at other people, because he could handle whatever other people might say to him.

I on the other hand do not have any trace of wit at all. I have no idea what to say to people in most situations. If I look someone in the eye, I quickly look away. Two of my girlfriends have said to me that they couldn't believe that they never noticed how handsome I was until they were with me. Which of course could just be them flattering me, but I tend to think that it's more that I'm half-invisible. My face is kind of opaque and my gaze flees the gaxe of others. I'm kind of not there for you to notice me. Or i might need you to notice me, as much as anyone else might, but I can't really handle it if you do.

Anyway, i think that's what i've got to offer for thoughts, for the moment.

Tchuss

Liz.