I still do this:

Breakfast is my favorite meal. I have my reasons. One day, I would like to have taken enough thoughtful photos of delicious breakfasts to make a little gallery of them. I have so few currently because they are usually consumed before that can happen, as it should be. Yes, that's fake bacon. I have my reasons.



Ever since the dentist cleared all the stuff out of her side of the garage, I look like the one with a bit more of a stuff-collection. Granted, I live there. She just stores her printer paper and outdated machinery in there.


Fred's fur is iridescent in the sun.


Really, Mario? Really? That's clever...

Treasure...

Holiday photo-blogging:

My little "christmas miracle" (the 18 year-old, sweetheart kitty with no clue of her age) had some minor surgery but immediately recovered for her usual games of undercover-marimekko-eskimo in her follow-up role in "the world is not enough"... Wait what..? Didn't the ice castle set get destroyed..?


I did this for Christmas. It was fun/funny... lots of hilarious moments. I manned the beverage station.


When I got home from volunteering on Christmas, Fred was so happy about my decision to take the rare nap that she sat on me and purred... she's been doing this as she gets older because she's cold a lot... she weighs less than 6lbs now.


After the (non)nap, I headed to Dockweiler Beach for a bonfire, and my good friend's birthday... which is on Christmas... so his parents named him Jesus... he doesn't go by that...


I pet-sat for these little buddies over the holidays. Not together - the dog (Julie) for my cousin's family and the cats (Fat Boy and White Boy) for a friend. Every time I went to visit the cats, I would get the song "Waiting for my Man" by the Velvet Underground in my head. "hey white boy, whatcha doing uptown..?" It was hard to imagine Lou Reed was talking about this cat though...

mind control in modern society...

Humans have an electric charge - this is not news. And we are affected by all kinds of things in the natural world because of it like the sun and the moon, the way other people smell and feel, plus all the chemicals and electrical junk inside our own minds.

During the cold war, the US and our friends the Soviets found out that we are also affected by external sources of electric influences. And once we realized we were all brainwashing each other, it became clear that the tiny batteries inside our skulls which are spent doing very little (besides deciding what to eat or who to fuck) can be greatly influenced by things such as light, color, shape (or form), along with more complicated influences like sonic frequency, magnetic forcefields, and other things that sound like something out of the movie Weird Science.

Having grown up in a planned community where much of the city's electrical infrastructure is underground, I became very interested once I left in what seemed to me like an elevated skeletal structure in bigger cities. When I eventually moved back to Los Angeles, where I was born and my family lives, and when I started traveling somewhat locally, I was able to observe the way the electricity and it's support structures connected cities and states to one another. Even in the small suburban city where I grew up, I was able to see, in retrospect, evidence of a society saturated in light, color and shape in it's lamp posts, traffic signals, and in the simplest forms like stop signs.

And it all made me wonder, who designed all this? Who was the architect/engineer in charge of the very first street lamp? Who decided that traffic signals would flash red green and yellow lights? If we know that certain colors have specific effects on people in fast food restaurants, and we know that flashing colored lights have either helpful influences on children with ADD (phototherapy) or negative effects on epileptics, who's to say that the flashing red light signaling an approaching train has no effect on drivers? How do we know that the red octagon with the white letters "STOP" doesn't somehow limit us - isn't part of the reason that humans use a supposed 7% of their brain, or some equally embarrassing statistic? How do we know that the white street signs in Beverly Hills vs the blue street signs in Los Angeles don't cause different emotions towards these different cities or their authorities? (Yes, I realize the obvious hole in my hypothesis being location - if I were right - people in remote locations with no electricity or semiotic influence would be geniuses, but just for the sake of argument, let's just pretend...)

Obviously, I'm just posing questions which have probably been brought up and left unanswered by countless nuts before. However, before I get to my photo-point, I just want to note that the Japanese are on to this too, despite their passive approach:
http://www.seihin-world.com/s/2005/09/29_0119.php
Also, it's not an accident that Hello Kitty has no mouth. The fact that she says nothing or has nothing to say was a very careful DESIGN decision. If Hello Kitty had even a line for a mouth, Japanese girls would grow up thinking they could do something besides just pose pretty for pictures and would run their mouths like us American women. See? Mind control through form.

Now on to my point. When CVS took over Longs Drugs, as soon as I saw this new CVS sign, all I could think about was the sign it reminded me of: Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. I've spent about two months wondering how similar they were since there isn't a Krispy Kreme THAT close to me and I really didn't feel like looking the logo up online or searching out Krispy Kremes in a store - I just don't care that much. I even had a dream that my brother made us all (the sister, his wife, and I) stop at the Albertson's nearby to purchase some because they used to sell them there. Today, I finally was near a Krispy Kreme and got both a doughnut and a photo. Not as close as I remember but it still makes me question a) what company made these signs? Was it the same company? Is there a trend in polygonal shaped signs these days? and b) was it simply my hungry-little-mind that made the connection or was this really a case of subliminal mind control achieved through similar shape choice by the same sign-design company? I know... it ALMOST seems like a completely useless quandary but what if I'm... right...?

The men in my life, boss edition...

Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if I had to rely completely on the kindness of women who knew nothing of me, nor me of them. I have to admit, while my entire adult life has been meticulously engineered by no one other than myself, the only people outside of my family to come through for me, to offer me any kind of opportunity with no previous example on my part indicating my aptitude or abilities have been men. That is not to say that there haven't been numerous women who have come through for me, who have given me chances and job opportunities beyond my wildest imagination - it's just that they've never done it intuitively. They've never done it without overwhelming proof of my competence and I can't say that I blame them - it's taken me years to develop what I consider to be some "pretty decent" people-reading skills and I don't know that I would completely trust another person either (man or woman) without knowing much about them.

For some reason, in high school, I was one of those "chicks" that just got along with mostly dudes. I always had other chick friends but the guys I hung out with were predominantly either my buddies from the (almost) all guys water polo team on which I played or the sweetheart-burn-outs I had been friends with since elementary school. As I got older, I am pleased to report, it became easier to relate to other girls who (like myself) weren't exactly tom-boys but always seemed to find ourselves to be one of the very few girls in the boys' club. Photography is notoriously a "gentleman's hobby"; visual effects and film production even more so at times, as I came to learn. But, man, do I love a challenge!

When I interviewed for my last job on the recommendation of a shared former professor, the boss and I mainly just talked about photography for a good while. At the time, it was probably funny that we had opposite methods for arriving at the same conclusion - I loaded my 4x5 film holders with the notch in the upper right-hand corner, him with the notch in the lower left. Over the seven years we worked together, these polar opposites would punctuate our differences, much like our fixed cardinal birth signs - his mirroring my mom's (of all people!) and provoking some heated verbal exchange from time to time. (hilarious in retrospect!)

Over the years, on occasion, I've almost accidentally called him a variety names - dad, Fred (the 17-year-old cat's name!), my pimp (he's called me everything from baby to bitch) and I think he or his wife once decided that if he had an evil twin, that would somehow describe our relationship. Once, for what felt like almost a year (though it was probably just 3-4 months) I was in such pain from a shoulder injury that I was just the most horrible person to him on a daily basis. When I eventually started feeling better, I felt so awful that I sent him cookies on location which was immediately reciprocated with a charmed, drunken, free-postcard he penned from our little visual effects team while in a bar. I was just relieved to be exonerated so easily...

And now, after all of this, after finally being set free of any work-related obligation to me, this saint of a guy (and his entire brilliant family, I should add) still puts up with me for absolutely no other reason I can think of besides our shared taste in food, espresso, tea, gin and beer. I'm sure that must be it. That and photography... oh and fresh, local produce. Maybe gardening and exercise too but that's it. I always try my best to make it a reciprocal relationship but the truth is that there is nothing even close in my material life that could make the kind of impact on him that he has on me. There are old walls, deep within my core, that make it hard for me to accept even the kindness of family let alone close friends - I know if he gave me the choice rather than just being himself, I wouldn't allow such a person in my life and would lose out. Perhaps one day I will be fortunate enough to repay the favor but for now, all I can do is be grateful.

the things you keep when that's not your thing...

It was pointed out to me recently that Libras (people born between September 23 and October 22) are generally pack-rats. Being a Libra myself, and not possessing this characteristic forced me to examine the types of things I hold on to. Since I am a photographer, almost all of my collectibles are flat - negatives, prints, digital files and storage media. Even when I think back to my childhood, the only thing I ever remember collecting (Bazooka Joe comics that came with the gum which I eventually saved up for a glow-in-the-dark, scratch-n-sniff Trix t-shirt) was also flat.

With the exception of a lifelong t-shirt collection stored under my bed and a couple of gold necklace charms given to me by my dad and maternal grandmother, these smallish items are the only artifacts I've deemed worthy enough to make it through my frequent apartment purging every time I decide that I either have too much crap for a single gal or that there's no way I can travel light when my place is weighed down by too much useless material baggage:

Matchbooks remind me of the places I've been without taking up much space, plus they're functional and often unique.


Foreign currency from a few of the countries I've traveled to - sometimes I'll throw one into a bag to use as a screwdriver and then find it much later only to get pleasantly lost in my memories.


Some things I once believed in enough to support, vote for, consume. These things remind me that I was once 18, once and still am an artist, once a very different person who's lived a very good life so far.


It always surprises me how little I've kept from seven years on nearly 20 films. In the end, there's only a handful of items that really stand out and the memorabilia that means the most (jar of sand, tin of pate from the CZ with an image of a man choking down a sausage) weren't exactly crew gifts. Which reminds me, I forgot to photograph a Lenin candle that was purchased for me in a bar in Prague by a student from Australia on holiday - amazing how some of these things make it home.

Also, when you've had a black cat as long as I have, people start giving you little black cat things and suddenly, you're a collector.

A piece of candy symbolizing the weight of one of my favorite conceptual artists as he was dying of AIDS. Felix Gonzales Torres left instructions that every day, a gallery or museum was to display his weight in candy and his audience was encouraged to take a piece of him with them. He was long gone by the time I was able to participate in any of his work but it gives me goose-bumps just to have this piece of candy and the poster of his that is rolled up in my garage awaiting proper wall space. His "perfect lovers" series are my favorites in which strings of light bulbs all burn out at different rates or identical school clocks with fresh batteries slowly start to tick out of sync.


More flat things: fliers from events I've attended and postcards from friends.


Shells and beach glass from the other side of the world.


One of very few tangible things I have left from my dad's mom.


Shell shaped sandwich press and electric mixer - both were my mom's which I remember fondly from my childhood and her mother's flour sifter, all of which I still use.


A few of my favorite fortunes and an old Polaroid from a time and place in my life that was the very beginning of where I'm at now.


Looking over these things even now, they're still just material possessions. They decorate my apartment a little bit and make it feel (along with the photos I've got up on my walls) like someone with a rich and diverse personal life occupies this little space here. But I suppose I have a hard time really attaching myself to objects, hence the reason for this little exercise. Pack rat? Hardly! If I had to leave it all behind, the thing I'd actually miss is my photos - my life's work but I'd just make more. I can't say that I've ever collected anything besides those Bazooka Joe comics, and though I'm not always the MOST sociable person (though never the least either!) there is nothing more important to me than the relationships and personal experience one accrues over time. And how, really, do you catalog that?

apartment for rent: masochist a plus

I first started photo-fixating on these church marquees maybe five years ago when I noticed just how many there were in my local area. I stopped almost a year ago when I tried to edit, print and exhibit them and instead realized how void the images were of any real sentiment.

The irony was clear - the historic purpose of the marquee is to announce or advertise the featured event or performer. Some of these church signs simply do just that, stating the time and leader of the upcoming Sunday's sermon. The others, however, usually try to use humor to do what - lure the unaffiliated or perhaps wayward soul into a specific denomination through comic relief? "Let's meet at my house Sunday before the big game! - GOD", "Swallow your pride, it contains no calories", "Trouble sleeping? Try counting... your blessings", "God answers knee-mail", etc.

Like many of my fine art photo projects, I went to the same churches, week after week as the signs changed so I could photograph them at different times of the day - the same thing only slightly different, over and over again in still photographs throughout an indefinite period of time. Just writing that long, run-on sentence-fragment makes me excited.

Early one morning, I stopped at the store between churches to grab a package of cashews and as I sat in my car munching on them, I barely noticed a man coming out of the store with a chrysanthemum plant. He got into his car and drove off. I did the same and when I arrived at my next church, I saw the same man walking from his car with the plant. As he set it down in front of the church before that Sunday's service, I realized it was the actor Morgan Freeman looking (in my opinion) a little annoyed at being (accidentally, in my own neighborhood, mind you) followed. I wanted to get out of my car and calmly explain to him the coincidence; that this was my church too and I had been photographing it, not him, for some time. Instead, I drove away without taking my photo nor explaining to him the difference between me and the paparazzi.

There is one of these signs across the street from where I live now, across from where a neighbor of mine is raising a fresh baby boy. I can't help wondering each time when I see a new message, "A wise child hears his Father's instructions", "A child brought up in church is seldom brought up in court", "In the dark? Follow the Son", "Christians are not perfect and innocent but guilty and forgiven", what kind of impact these suggestions will have on this young, impressionable fella.

(sub)urban-mythology amongst other things...

ready-made...

the kind of thing you just can't make up...

A while back, I expressed some overzealous excitement about all the crazy old junk on the other side of my shared garage belonging to the dentist, who uses it just for storage. Well, I discovered another "treasure" yesterday while cleaning out my side of the garage for another project. This must be new because how could I have never noticed until now the DECONTAMINATED SOLID MEDICAL WASTE sitting right in front of the old box of syringes??

the thing I use it most for...

My point and shoot, that is. Sorry, what I meant to say was, my Canon PowerShot SD 850 IS Digital Elph (wink wink!).

Yes, it obviously shoots good macro photos of the bugs in my garden, and it certainly is much more convenient for sneaking photos of my cat under the covers or throwing in my pocket to capture random oddities than, say my Canon AE1 35mm film camera (love you Canon! Mama needs a 5D ok?), but the thing I've come to use it most for is shopping lists.

I got this $1 "The Office" themed dry-erase board from Target a while back and now when I need to go to the store, I just take a photo of the list on my fridge and head out. I know it sounds smart but you end up paying the price when you find yourself wandering around Trader Joe's, staring at your hand, wondering how stupid you must look to other people.

The ol' cracker factory...

I've always thought of my office in these terms because of the TV show, the Simpson's - Millhouse's dad worked at a cracker factory. Plus, this always makes me think of the episode where they go to Japan and Lisa looks out the window at the Hello Kitty factory just as a bunch of muffled cats cry out and a burst of smoke emerges from a smoke-stack - hilarious!

I like to think of this constant stream as the souls of young, bright-eyed artists as they graduate from Stanford and M.I.T. only to be consumed by the corporation for which I work and the greater good of entertainment, just like those Hello-Kitties!

I, coincidentally, work in the quirky little building in the foreground to the right.

what to do when you're blue...

Sometimes on the weekends, when I don't have any plans and I'm feeling kind of lonely, I go to the pet store to get supplies for my cat. They always have animal adoptions on the weekends and, while I know all the cute little critters with no homes should bring me down, it always cheers me up... I know, how selfish. Last weekend there was this:



I know SOMEONE must need a pile of kittens or a father-son pair of chihuahuas?

lose yourself...

this summer... packages for every price range...

album of the week...

The History of the Real Billie Holiday, because a lady's gotta right to sing the blues...

Blapricot...

Sometimes I like to buy a whole package of a single kind of fruit at one of my (many) neighborhood Trader Joe's rather than picking out a variety of solo fruits because it's easier. This example is called a Black Apricot but I've renamed it the Blapricot because my sister had been combining words a lot recently - any that may form a slightly cohesive and, therefore, more efficient new word. Frankly, I find this practice to be hilarious.

I pondered for a moment the possibility that this was just a plum with another name, for either marketing or biological reasons, but after getting these babies out of the package, I realize they have a fuzzy apricot feel to them and none of the tartness of plums these days. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you (well, Trader Joe's does anyway...) the Blapricot...

you can take the girl out of the OC...

...but you can never take the Del Taco out of the girl.

The straight-edge vegan kids got one thing right... bean-fries. Their version was just beans on fries with guacamole but I always liked it with the works since I'm not a total wuss and only skip the chili concoction instead of also missing out on the wholesome goodness of Del Taco's dairy-related products like the sour cream that comes out of a tube. As far as I'm concerned, this is one of those guilty-pleasure/vegetarian-cult-food-faves that far surpasses In 'n' Out's "secret" grilled-cheese.

The cat's not-so-secret guilty pleasure? French fries.

OPP's!

You remember... other people's pets?!? This cat has no fur but is perfectly soft, nonetheless! Fascinating!

take me out to the ball game(s)

I somehow managed to go, not just to my first Dodger game of the season last weekend, but to my second also. That seems like a reasonable amount of time for me to decide that the Dodgers kind of suck this year, right? What a bummer. At least there's always the view, the nacho cheese (and nacho cheese footprints!), and the beer to rely on...

scary things in the dentist's garage:

I feel very lucky to have a 2-car garage, basically to myself in which I can either park my car, shoot up-n-coming bands, or spray-paint my latest domestic creations without the annoyance of someone else's car getting in the way; or worse, a lifetime's worth of their most important junk like my neighbors who share the other 2-car garage.

I share my garage with the dentist who occupies the commercial space at the front of my building, and she uses it mainly for storage of items which (I assume) she just doesn't know how to dispose of properly. Anyway, the dentist herself seems perfectly nice (as in, she doesn't mind/know if I use her miscellaneous items for photo shoots and generally leaves me alone), but lets just say I'm glad she's not my dentist...

The Catching Up Blog!

It seems that when you have so many of these unhealthy obsessions/healthy addictions (cooking like 90% of the food you eat and growing some of it, talking to your cat, dogmatically debating between contact lenses and new glasses) well, you tend to stay pretty busy. Here's what I've been up to that I can take photos of - you'll just have to imagine the rest (swimming a lot to firm up my already-nice ass, mouthing off at work and planning my upcoming trip to the most geographically isolated country on earth!)




the cat gets pissed when my new laptop sits in her spot. she marks her territory during a recent movie night by leaving her chewed popcorn all over my couch.


music mission - biking to spaceland with georgia and megan, plus some new (for me) records... because a gal can never have too much Billie.


there's all kinds of things growing in my garden these days...




it all tastes better than it looks, I swear.


I sliced my thumb open while making yam chips a couple weeks back - the photo of my hand is after 2 and 1/2 weeks of healing! I thought it was an interesting coincidence that I hurt my hand the same week I had a very important hand to photograph at work - I was just totally stupid with hand-job jokes for like 3 weeks about it! The chips were delicious, by the way.


I think I may go with contacts if I can ever get the right fit...


This is a combo. of a blank sign and a word-bubble shape that was cast onto my floor one day by the light of my office window being partially obstructed by my desk. I have a couple of these word-bubble shapes in my collection but can never really find a good use for them.