the carefree society manifesto

therighteous

2008-06-25T03:58:00.003-05:00

this is the first day of ramadan last year, a smallish mosque on nueces in the quiet of the day. this is the first photograph i ever shot for the texan.

i have been spending most of my nights at the bar at kerbey, with a constant flow of free coffee graciously offered by all the kerbey kids of whom i have become so fond; if not here, i am at the foundation with tibet, open sky and all of austin sprawling before me in the deep of night. or, as of late and in the case of an unfortunate rib, lay down with a beer and a clove on the still-warm drive of my house, dust in my hair and the earth turning upon my fingers upon ashen concrete.

it is terribly lonely here sometimes. it has been the worst lately. it is strange accustoming my body to only itself at night, when i spent my entire last semester with constant companions. i ceased living in my own room for some time. and now, i am left with only tibet and the wide streets of austin at night all to myself. this is strange.

and so, i have been musing over my art, or whatsoever you should wish to call the work that i pursue. since my arrival in austin some ten months ago, i know and understand now exactly what i want and where i want to be; also, what i want to do. my immense difficulty with galleries here, whether it is dressing snappily and trying awkwardly not to act the punk-ass to land a job, or else searching for a venue in which to show my art, has made me to wonder why i am doing all of this.

i know that my work at the texan is a meagre reflection of what i seek with my photography; that having been said, i do not neglect anything in my photography or art, whether i enjoy it or not, and i do enjoy my work at the texan. but i have come to recognize already that i will not end up at a newspaper. i do not know where i will go after i take my degree from this ridiculous school that is presently beating me over the head with its consistent stream of bullshit, if i finish school at all. i have begun again to turn over in my mind the idea of taking off for some time; i am fortunate to have the texas tomorrow fund and this is counted by hours, and i could come back and pick up what i left behind. but would i come back? i don't know.

before i lose my more important points in this sea of tangents which is carrying me, i should say this:

i am not a fine artist.
i am not an artist at all.

i am a person before all of these things, and i know this best in my conversations with dustin. he says that what we do is too profound to remain contained in galleries and museums. the art that we make isn't fine art; it's the most dirty, unpleasant, mundane, ordinary art. we do not begin with philosophical conceptions. we begin with people because it is what i've fallen in love with, people. we refuse to look like respectable and promising young students, piercings and body art, and we refuse steady jobs and fucking financial stability, and we refuse any other saviour but ourselves. we have our love and our art and this age at which we are very much indestructible, and who shall stop us? we are not afraid at all.

on fine art, the exhibit presently on display at women and their work gallery is slower still, by allison hunter. she takes photographs of animals at zoos and edits the backgrounds out of recognition into a dark, foggy haze, therefore taking the creatures out of their context. this is fine and admirable in its own manner, but i want to know: how is it pertinent to people? why should this matter, save to look beautiful in a whitewashed gallery?

the art that i create is my life and those that i love most. it is akin to stripping myself down in front of my audience, and there are those who are unrelenting in their critiques, and perhaps justly so. but in the photographing of these things, the photographing becomes a part of the happening and so, indistinguishable from that. i want to be alike to mike brodie, the polaroid kidd. this is a rail-riding punk who is essentially a drag person, only he takes polaroids of his comrades. his work is in fecal face online, in american photo in print, in m+b gallery in los angeles, in needles and pens gallery in san francisco. and oh, don't be deceived. if you read his interviews, he is a little bit bewildered that he has been misnomered as an artist. he's only a traveler with a polaroid one-step.

this is what i have come to understand, and i may very well disappear someday, if not before my completion of school, then surely soon afterwards. all this leaves me breathless, to be able to live righteously and religiously, joyously and exuberantly, fearfully and in such great trepidation of this knowledge.

no poets

2008-05-26T03:31:00.010-05:00

lily and chair, a soundless january morning unfolding upon my mother's birthday.

i suppose i have taken a sufficiently long sabbatical from posting here. in parallel, summer seems to have rendered that inevitable effect of sunlit days and softly focused lenses upon all photographers alike, and i will spend my nights refusing sleep and bicycling about austin with my usual armoury of holga and nikon. that having been observed, i am in want of a scanner with which to reminisce my bag full of negatives and prints, so in the meanwhile, i will proffer the remainder of older work which i have with me.

on an unrelated note, austin and the corresponding summer season have been witness to more lovely misadventures and miraculous transfigurations than i could possibly have anticipated. of these i am unafraid.

architects

2008-05-14T14:29:00.010-05:00

meet my brother, eric. he is five years older than me and in five days he will be moving to seattle for a shiny new job! i am really very excited for him, and in the city he will have all his rainy humdrum days to himself, but (as i sit in his apartment and write this) already i know that i will miss him when he is gone. everyone round me is swiftly scattering to their place, and i find myself wandering without any semblance of certainty or foresight.

this is my brother's volvo 850 turbo; he keeps it glassy and bright all the time. here, he is working in our garage at home. when i was just a little younger i used to finish my homework at two or three or four in the morning -- junior year of high school was really a beating, i remember -- and i would slip out barefooted into the driveway and doze in the passenger seat of my brother's car, music blearing and an autumn night's chill.

for some time and lately in particular, i have been pondering with childlike blitheness and naivety my current circumstances: how it came about that i am doing what i now do, and my desire for the most absurd way forward i could have chosen. is it strange that i revere mike brodie's photography and his accompanying itinerant philosophy, and that i want to do exactly what the polaroid kidd does at present? i will not even endeavor to think of what my parents would say to that. anyway, i am forcing myself a little painfully through school -- i've three years left at most -- and it has proven very difficult to elicit any great degree of concern for the remainder of my formal education.

these things do not worry me, really. if he has not yet abandoned me to the swallowing night, i have wholly left god behind in that curious thing of my past -- but even so, i have great faith in goodness and in the engineering of my own fortune. i refuse to settle down, because i've my closest friends and my camera and pockets full of film and the innocence of being young, and what more could possibly be of want? i do not know. the window during which the world opens its womb for your wandering -- and while you are just beginning to be a real person in all its realisations -- is so very small, and i am not going to miss it.

so, these are the things i have come to understand outside the hindrances of school since i have come to austin. i was not always ridiculous and unreasonable, but it is incredible fun.

epoch

2008-05-08T20:36:00.005-05:00

this is me and dustin and caitlin, shot by allison. we will all be too far away from each other much too soon, but summer calls for spontaneity and roadtrips and loves, as it should.

sunshine saviours and blush night. summer has not even really begun in earnest, and it promises unequivocal adventure and mishap already. in the meanwhile, i've a paper due in t-minus three hours and fifteen minutes, and i don't see how i could possibly write anything of use now. shit!

p.s., i got my black and white roll of 120 from marleyfest back from precision and it is damn good. not too shabby for a first run with my kowa six. fucking sweet.

no saviours

2008-05-04T20:47:00.005-05:00

this is scout niblett playing one of my favorites, will you be buried with my people? these are some the most remarkable words ever when in the end she sings, but who the hell knows which way the gods may pull us tomorrow? cause honey, we're writing our past right now, and fear will only beckon sorrow.

fuck.

among my favorite words also are these, sung by why: this goes out to dirty dancing, cursing, back-masking, back-slitting pranksters, kids. as all this earth grows i'm planted, that's some pull. in berlin i saw two men fuck in the dark corner of a basketball court, just a slight jangle of pocket change pulsing.

how dark and casual and fucking amazing is that?

and so, i have decided that you are a false messiah. until you find me in the manner in which i found you, i will wait impatiently and sighing.

no lovers

2008-05-03T22:54:00.019-05:00

caitlin with pomellos and skirts and skies amidst a rooftop picnic.

alex with magnificent afro and sunglasses, jovially carved pillar.

alex and ngan. love is watching, love is watching someone die.

taylor and dustin, vodka night and sharpie. debauchery is my favorite!

dustin and me, strange faces and bare bellies, rolling rock.

alex and his friend malcolm x, hanging out by the lounge with us.

aaron and me, feets and rocks, screaming bridge and trinity banks.

daily texan meeting, chris and peter, blue bras in the prather lobby.

caitlin and a camera, a little bit of heaven and looking glass of god.

i don't know what this means.

disappear

2008-05-01T13:28:00.005-05:00

oh, friend.
i love you.
i love you.
i love you.

sins and redemptions

2008-04-29T14:37:00.002-05:00

shit! sleep is so badly in want, but that is really very insignificant because i am going to a secret show tonight, where exactly i do not know but i will find out soon enough i am sure. lately and today in particular, i am being retardedly ridiculous and i refuse to stop it. this is the most fun, anyway. this is the carefree society.

we are our own redemption.

fight!

2008-04-29T06:05:00.006-05:00

everyone looks absolutely soaking wet and happy here.

me and taylor, making up after the epic battle. i jumped to dodge a balloon meant for me, managed to land squarely on a trash can, and smashed open my holga. consequently, these are a little bit murky, but i don't suppose that matters. these things inevitably happen in such battles.

so, we had a water balloon fight in denton. when caitlin and i arrived in the morning we obtained sandwiches with her friend nathan and had lunch in a sunny green by the art building, and sprawled on the grass afterwards and talked about everything that did not matter. when we went to peer round the corner to see what a very loud ruckus was about, we discovered a honk for peace war protest and also taylor. so we all set out together and found sarah doty and mostly sat around with cloves and english ovals and menthols in the smoking corner, and then walked to the dollar store where we purchased water balloons. the fight was a mess, everyone for themselves, and dripping smothering hugs afterwards.

this particular weekend was a little bit amazing.

morningnews

2008-04-26T17:03:00.007-05:00

shot by dustin, the same shitty sixty-nine cent bulk-loaded superia, and processed as slide film. i must have just woken up here, raining grey mourning.

in other news, the canon 5d i bought last night was retracted this morning. i guess it doesn't exist, but i should have seen that one coming a little bit. and so, the search for a digital slr continues. goddammit.

sunrise

2008-04-25T01:57:00.007-05:00

this is taylor and me at the beach house and we are probably not entirely there. he is one of my favorite people, and i miss him lots.

this is also cross-processed velvia 50, taken by dustin, which makes this picture exponentially awesome. dustin has gotten me into cross-processing, and even though the slightly absurd amount of velvia 100f we purchased from the united kingdom cross-processes magenta and red, it is still pretty amazing. i have lots of red photographs from scout niblett and similar adventures to scan, and they are all rather epic.

that is all. i am going to go pass out now.

summersummer

2008-04-22T10:44:00.007-05:00

i have forgotten their names, but these girls were at the human rights torch relay holding a banner that said, free tibet. they are still in elementary school, and they are very much adorable.

women holding picket signs in front of the capitol, protesting human rights violations in china. the demonstration focused on the persecution of falun gong and the alleged government abduction of human rights attorney gao zhisheng.

a flatbed scan by peter, due to crumpled negatives which would not cooperate with the film scanner. above my human rights torch relay photograph are caleb's filipino basketball tournament shots, complete with chemical stains.

i brought the last roll of superia i shot for film weekend down to the cvs on the far end of the drag, since the photo lab in the nearer one was shut down momentarily. they fucked my film up, light and chemical stains, and managed to botch a scanning job by missing the frames completely. i am going to go back there and yell at the lab manager, demand another roll of superia, and try not to throw anything at him. i suppose if there is anything i am particular about, it is very much photography, and the people at the photo labs at cvs do not even seem to know the difference between glossy and matte.

on another note, i have decided to stay in austin for the summer. i do not yet have a place to live, an actual job that pays more than fifteen dollars a day, anything in the way of an internship, or otherwise pertinent and useful plans of that sort, but i am staying here and worrying about everything unimportant later. mostly i am set on finding a fine arts photographer to assist, and if not that i will work at an art cooperative or a gallery, something like the lombardi or bolm studios or salvage vanguard, and if no one will have me i will find an internship or take classes. this means i will, of course, stay at the texan. maybe p-staff will offer something excellent and exciting over the summer, lots of photo stories and independent work.

i am so fucking psyched.

pinkhearted

2008-04-21T12:10:00.015-05:00

sunset with friends and cloves and cranes on top of the art building.

dustin, worn chucks and pink heart.

felicia, lovely as always among debris and colour.

taylor, bared feet and clambering on a massive metal beast.

dustin, talking to paulina above a lens flare!

dustin, looking petrified next to caitlin, at this moment seducing a stranger in the corner, and then rachael eating pizza unawares.

oh, love. you know me but you do not know how to take care of me, and i love you still. these are my friends and the absurd things we do.

awards and legends

2008-04-21T03:37:00.014-05:00

so, maybe this photograph will more accurately describe the tipa conference of yore. this is colby, janie, and andrew, all making very noble attempts to stay awake through the awards ceremony early sunday morning. janie came back with first for design, stephen second for news writing, andrew second for news photo, and caleb and i first for our photo story, and the daily texan took best of show as a paper for good measure. in any case, i think i may have done something imprudent if we had not taken first for our excellent show of wildart.

also, a note on this weekend: despite early misgivings, the daily texan has been gathering esteem in my eyes by blurring the line between photographic arts and journalistic photography, and as of late, it has been rather astonishingly living up to my ridiculous artistic hopes.

for the past few days, jordan and the weekend team plus me kicked it old school and went back to film. i went through two rolls of thirty-six exposure superia and also a roll of true black and white 120 at marleyfest, hazy with smoke and dusty heat, and then a third roll at the human rights torch relay at the capitol, protesting atrocities in china. all told, i must have spent at least eight hours at marleyfest, wandering wide-eyed with film, and in the end jordan lost the battle for a photo page. i came home to word that two pages of ap stories are running tomorrow. i hope he threw a pen at that budget meeting.

oh, and i have never seen jordan so close to losing it, but peter and bryant stuck it out with him and i did not stay to see if the rest of the newsroom rioted at our inexpediency. we just lay low in the darkroom for a while, hanging film, so that everyone would let us alone. all in all, i believe the count totals eighteen rolls of colour processed in our mouldering and likely cancerous but still functional darkroom at the texan, in addition to several more sent to cvs for want of time. after that, a marathon of scanning and a scramble for editing, and a round of applause to jordan and also peter and bryant for their excellent work.

the paper tomorrow is going to be nothing short of fucking legendary.

death

2008-04-20T13:25:00.010-05:00

caitlin, checking mail in jester and an incoherent shape behind.

dustin and belinda, somber conversations in the hallways of prather.

me and dustin, in the beginning of all these things before now.

dustin and caitlin, an escalator, and a glass man in a top hat.

do you remember what sarah said?
love is watching someone die.

caitlin,

2008-04-17T10:37:00.007-05:00

this photograph was not taken on either of our birthdays, but kisses are nice any time of the year, really. do you know what one of the first things you said to me was? i don't care if you're broken, friend. i love you just the same. and right after that, one of the first things i wrote about you was, where did we find her? our souls are friends.

happy birthday, friend. i love you.

intrigue

2008-04-17T03:04:00.009-05:00

this is caitlin tinkering with dustin's old kodak rangefinder, and betsy behind her. betsy's favorite phrase is, shit son! also, betsy has her shift at the desk thursday nights before thirsty thursdays, and she is real fun to hang out with. we listen to lots of m.i.a. and talk about ridiculous things.

dustin and i taught caitlin how to shoot a manual 35mm camera on a lovely fall afternoon just a few months ago. she takes real awesome pictures. go look at her photoblog and see for yourself.

mostly betsy very much dislikes having her picture taken. then, mostly caitlin lays around looking lovely. here, she is wearing a shirt we found at the creme vintage store that looks like the fabric was cut from your grandmother's couch in the seventies. is that awesome? i think so.

caitlin says her favorite emotion ever is being intrigued. also, it is her birthday today. caitlin says that back where she comes from, she and her friends had birthday kisses and they would just go around giving everyone they saw on their birthday a kiss. what an excellent idea.

oh, and scout niblett tomorrow. the last time i saw scout she stamped her foot and screamed most of drummer boy, which will make any person tremble to think of. also, i met the make-out hobo. i wonder what absurdities will befall us this time. i can't wait.

thebattalion

2008-04-05T00:30:00.015-05:00

this is stephen, casually crucifying an editorial article in the battalion. why a verb would ever have to be put in brackets is beyond any of us, but the newspaper staff at the battalion also seem to be overfond of italicized text, caps lock, and triple exclamation marks.

yesterday, caleb and i ran into some other photographers who said, 'you guys are from the daily texan? man, aren't you guys a daily?' and emily had a similar, 'the daily texan? i read that every day!' apparently we are celebrities here, and we decided to go to the tipa mixer for kicks earlier. we walked by the doorway and got an exuberant 'come in! come in!' so we promptly ran away and got ice cream instead.

quote steven, 'we're the texan! we'll buy and sell your ass!' describes the day pretty accurately, and so the night has only just begun.

freestyle

2008-04-04T03:34:00.020-05:00

a hammock! what an excellent way to spend time between classes.

jamming at the habitat for humanity shack-a-thon.

groundskeepers. raking leaves and talking weather.

these are the three images that i turned in for the two person photo story competition. caleb has the other three, so check his photoblog as well. tell me what you think!

so, i think we all got tricked into coming to this conference. caleb and i sprinted into check-in and then to our on-site two person photo story contest, and they assigned all the thirty-something photographers in the room to go out and capture the essence of a&m. that is not a photo story. that is a gallery of wildart.

anyway, we got bused to campus and were told to return to the rendezvous point in an hour and fifteen. caleb and i deliberated how to cover our assignment on the bus and split up upon arrival, and it was really rather dismal watching all the other photographers shoot. photojournalism is, by nature, people --and i watched twenty out of the thirty-odd photographers present shoot from a room's length away, wide as hell, and most of the same people rudely asking students for interesting events about campus to shoot without even bothering to introduce themselves or say hello. upon returning to the hilton, caleb and i had to edit our images on our cameras, no crops, and after that were admonished for shooting raw instead of jpeg.

andrew, for his news photo competition, was sent to shoot podium shots of a police conference. he said that they were told not to block the view of the actual photographers from local newspapers. i saw his edit and it is as badass as a podium shot at a&m will ever get.

emily, for her feature photo competition, shot a concert. meaning two guys on a stage, and in addition to that grievance someone decided very imprudently to allow flash at the last moment, and i can well imagine everything getting flashed to hell. emily said she had difficulty getting a shot without someone else's strobe in it.

janie returned with perhaps even more terrible stories about having to cut and paste stories in her copy design competition. i suppose that is why she was told to bring scissors and glue, but we said she should have brought glitter too. for the win.

consequently, steven, janie, caleb, andrew, emily, and i spent the remainder of the day ridiculing our competitions or the people here. getting to know other people from the texan is a definite plus, but this entire conference is so fucking outlandish i cannot quite decide whether to laugh or else to sit down and begin to cry. seeing that it is already four-thirty in the morning, we all just might stay up for some continental breakfast.

good times.

astoria

2008-04-03T05:43:00.005-05:00

just past astoria, right on the coast. cold and windswept.

an alleyway in astoria. london-dreary day, my favorite.

departure for the tipa journalism and photojournalism conference in three hours. i am not ready and i am not going to sleep, but if you put a camera in my hands i will shoot like a riot.

mofos

2008-04-02T22:47:00.002-05:00

for the 21st st. co-op motherfuckers:

photos when i retrieve them from the office. i am off to a photography conference tomorrow, so look for them next week.

love.

womenaslovers

2008-04-01T23:39:00.006-05:00

dustin and caitlin and i are going to see xiu xiu this saturday. dustin and paulina have concluded that you must return from a show such as that either traumatized or saved, and if you are traumatized then that simply means you have not been traumatized enough to be saved. hopefully we will come back saved.

then, we are going to see scout niblett on caitlin's birthday. caitlin says we are going to bring pom poms and spell out scout's name for her before the show, like in her song. we will be the cute girls with pom poms. once, when diana went to see scout, she took her bra off and got it signed by her. maybe we will do that too.

and p.s., dustin says this picture could suffice as a cover for the new xiu xiu album, women as lovers. is it disturbing enough? the actual album cover has a female all tied up on it. i do not know if i can compete with that, but i guess i will try.

thebeginning

2008-03-31T03:26:00.008-05:00

this is the first photograph i ever printed in a darkroom. it is rather dusty, but i think it is interesting that even work i produced two or three years ago still faintly resembles what i see through the lens now. i remember this flower. it was a faint purple, and i found it walking down the street barefoot with ilford hp5+ in my nikon fg. that was the first roll of true black and white film i had been handed in my life, and so here i am now.

really, i am not quite sure how i ended up in austin. i could be studying at the tische school fine arts at new york university as i write this, but i am here and i do not look back with doubt, mostly because i have dustin and caitlin now and they complete me a little bit.

i miss the darkroom immensely, but caitlin and dustin and i have been collecting reels and tanks and chemicals and changing bags piecemeal, and we are going to develop our own black and white film when we are not being harassed by schoolwork and other unimportant nonsense of the like. until then, sleepless nights and weary days.

goodmorning

2008-03-29T14:10:00.007-05:00

good morning, and what are we doing?

good morning, and oh your hair!

taken by dustin, of course. these sum up pretty much what we do all the time. this is why dustin is leaving school, and this is why i never want to settle down. i have decided that the first thing i will do when i graduate from this terrible place is disappear. i will just take off and hit the ground running, and no one will know where i have gone. i do not think i need much, and i will have my photography and i will come back to those i love when i am in terrible need of them.

really, i do not think i will end up with any sort of steady job for some time, and i am just fine with that. photojournalism is a job to me, and i can't live that. i need my film and art, and while i enjoy working for a paper immensely, i do not want to do that forever. certainly, some of the assignments that i cover matter, but there will always be people to shoot things like that. i want to take pictures of people because i think they are that which matters the most, and i want everything to change me unapologetically.

sometime when my weekends are not consumed with tests and essays and shooting assignments, i am going to take film and food and blankets and perhaps a good companion, and i will drive until i feel like stopping and sleep when i am tired and take photographs of everything i see, and it will be lovely, lovely.

rainrain

2008-03-28T02:57:00.005-05:00

i took this photograph two years ago. it was raining so hard you could wake up in the morning to flowers strewn across the concrete drive, and i walked out just after midnight without a tripod and shot on bulb, timed to the lightning flashes for any sort of hope at illumination.

look!
the skies are weeping,
rhythmic and even.
we fend the tears off
feebly--
sorrow must not partake
in any part of our lives.
hammering
blows to the head
and arms up,
fragile defense.