View And Response: Kate O'Brien's Portrait Of Amanda Palmer

This portrait of Amanda Palmer by Kate O'Brien reminded me of a little Valentine's Day incident last year wherein I was lured into attending a "Happening" in Ft. Greene with the promise of exotic and swarthy companionship (shall we say).

The location: It was seemingly a squatted factory of the kind that was so popular Pre-9/11 with poor college students and reprobate young adults; red brick and crooked floors and exposed beams. Paintings were on the wall in a fresco style and they were poorly done, garish and ugly. There were several floors of the party and several rooms per floor and at least one corner of each floor had a makeshift bar with tiki lamps, christmas lights and cheap off-brand liquors and cans of watery, warm beer. Also on each floor was a stage whose boundaries were marked on the ground with reflective tape. Naturally, there was a band playing each stage in a different musical style. The crowd was young -- perhaps underage -- and enthusiastic in the way that young people are when they are allowed outside of the house and horny and drunk and drugged.

So the Girl I was with (who shall remain nameless) and I couldn't figure out what to do. Some of our more resilient traveling companions (the idiots that took us there) went off in search of booze or weed or both. Some of the others lingered against the furthest wall from the action in hopes that death would come swiftly and painlessly. The Girl and I looked at each other and slipped off past the throngs of sweaty, bepatchouli oiled college freshmen and we stumbled downstairs to dance. And we danced close... very, very close... to swingin' oldies and sweet soul music for what seemed like seconds but was more like hours and the room stopped spinning and our buzz wore off and we both realized that -- hey -- we were both huddled for comfort because we were fascinated by each other, true, but also because we were trying to protect each other from sweaty, bepatchouli oiled college freshmen. Time to go.

I grabbed her hand and we headed back upstairs from the room we had left hours before. As we fought up against the current of stumbling girls in awkward heels I heard the sound of a broken piano and a female voice singing in a strange affected English contralto.

"Fucking bitch thinks she's Amanda Palmer!" I turned and said to the Girl.

"What?!" She didn't hear me.

I turned back to find the exit. Of course it was Amanda Palmer playing a solo show on a broken piano on Classon Ave. with about sixty rapt post-teens sitting cross-legged on the floor like kindergarteners waiting for story time.

I turned and whispered in the girl's ear, "We need to go. Now."

Retroactive Post to June 23, 2007

I've been offered travel jobs in the past that would take me back to California before, and they've all been canceled shortly after informing my parents of the possibility of my arrival in the state of my birth. This has led me to not talk about jobs before they happen, or at least to wait until the very last minute to tell people where I'm going.

In this instance, I got confirmation from Dan in quick order that the job was going to happen, and he had the tickets to prove it. So I called the folks and they drove the hour down to Westlake to see me, and I was happy to see them and we drove another hour south towards Dodger Stadium where it just so happened The Police were playing. This ate up another hours' worth of time and delayed our arrival at Philippe's, purported origin of the French Dip Sandwich (pictured above, with lemonade and pumpkin creme pie). It's a landmark of sorts, and is covered in Dodger memorabilia and artifacts from the nearby Union Station and features $.09 coffee (I like the way nine-cents looks when digitized like that).

The waitresses aren't allowed to handle money, mostly because of disease, though I'm sure at some point someone's pilfered the till -- you put the cash on the tray (left of frame) and they take it to the register (not pictured) and bring the tray back to you. You can see the plastic safety gloves on her hands. The sandwich is turkey (I'd already had a roast beef). The waitress in the picture started crying for some reason after she took my check over to the register. I never found out why. She had an eastern-european accent.

Tomorrow the crew will fly to Denver, weather permitting. So far the actual shooting has gone off without a hitch.

Neko Case, 4/6/06, Webster Hall

Even as I tool around with the new 5D, I'm still trolling through my negatives -- the recent ones -- and re-scanning them myself. As with anything worth doing right, it's best to do it yourself, and it's sort of astonishing just how lousy the lousy low-res lab scans are when compared to a high(er)-res scan done to your parameters. I'd written off these pictures from last April (April 6, 2006) as an example of poor lab-processing wisked together with my rustiness with film stocks, but further noodling shows them to be basically what I intended. Of course, I always say that it's no longer whether my pictures 'come out' or not, just whether they're 'any good' and as I struggle for constancy it's nice to find that I've kept true to that idea of goodness winning out over a base-level outcome.

I've linked to this post and this version of the picture off the Flickr site because my aversion to having larger images swiped or manipulated is suddenly less important than having the image seen at a viewable size. The idea of a proper viewing distance isn't new, and I'm discovering that dimensions 500px by "X"px at 150 dpi aren't going to get the job done, even at a viewing distance of 1'-2' on a computer monitor. Add 'Vanity' to the post labels.

Unhappiness Is An Invented Thing

Dominique



Dear Dom,

So sorry. You've become one of my favorite people to photograph. I should have warned you that this might happen.

--RG

Archiving

A couple of oldies while I wait for the Powers film to come back:





I was scanning some negatives and trolling through my archives (which is no small task considering how poorly organized they are) and happened across these two. I have the second one framed in my apartment, and the other I always meant to, but never got around to it.

I took these in 2002, I think, and never printed them myself in any form, so any sort of work I did with them at the time was limited to the quick prints from the lab. These are about as sentimental as I get when it comes to photography (see previous discussion here) and about as sentimental as I get about California and Santa Barbara in general. My pithy comment is always that Santa Barbara and I have "...reconciled [our] relationship" and I guess that's more true than not.

A side note: For whatever reason I didn't notice the biker riding away in the 'Jesus y Selena' picture until 2005 -- or three years after I took it. Sometimes you can see, but you may not observe.

Bad Things Happen In Threes

Dominique



I've been on this kick for a while now, possibly just to make myself feel responsible when it comes to editing my stuff -- restrict it to a 3-image set. This gesture is empty and pointless and gets me into trouble when I do event coverage and I give the client three times as many selects as they really need... and they decide they want them all. Anyway, there are two more for this set on the Flickr site.

Back to the subject at hand -- I remember one of my professors (whose opinion I still trust) mentioning that one of my short films was 'shot spot-on, but... I don't know about your pouty friends in it.' Now in their defense I'll claim that it wasn't that my friends were particularly pouty but rather that I shot and directed them poorly. Then there are the subjects you can't direct, like this one, that you can wind up and let go.

Another, for old times' sake

In a further effort to get things going over here, I'll add an oldie from 2002 (I think) of Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney.