Snapshots

I bought a Polaroid camera for two bucks. It came with 9 pictures in it already, but each one I took came out distorted and mangled and barely developed. Awesome.
Seeing as most film companies are ceasing production, such as Kodak and Polaroid, I figured film would be cheap. I stupidly forgot my economics. Film is so expensive now it's ridiculous. $20 for ten Polaroid shots and not worth it.
An average roll of film is $5 plus the cost to get it developed and onto a CD which is $4.50, almost ten dollars total.
I'm anxious, I guess. I like taking pictures with film, but one day, Target will remove their developing machines. Wal-Mart, CVS and others will soon follow. I'll have to buy film online and develop it in my dorm. Augh.
All artists are willing to suffer for their work, I guess.

---

I started taking pictures of homeless people as a photojournalistic thing. This always makes me nervous, that they will attack me or get insulted, which is worse. I don't want them to judge me for judging them.
I got two shots of unsuspecting homeless people, but then I went into a ditch and saw two old men drinking 40's and talking about how kids have no respect. I took snaps of all the graffiti in the area and then raised my camera to them.
"Don't take my picture. Get that fucking camera out of here! No respect!"
I asked the guy why not.
"You'll steal my spirit, like a native."
I reluctantly put my camera down and left. I still wish I had just taken the shot and I felt angry at homeless people for the rest of the day.
"Why are you upset about this?" My father asked. "They were psychotic. Who cares?"
J.R. was right when he said the camera is this generation's handgun.

---

I went with my father to Safeway to buy dishsoap. At the checkout, the cashier gave me a strange feeling of Deja Vu.
"Did I go to school with you?" He asked me.
"Ethan?" It clicked. He had tattoo sleeves and gages, but it was him.
"You in college?" I asked.
"PVCC."
The school we attended was a mile down the street. He probably never moved anywhere else.
Outside, my dad said, "Small world, huh."
"No, that just means nothing has changed."

---

My father told me about some guy from Boston he got in his cab who came all the way down to Phoenix for the Red Socks game. Someone who has that much money to blow.
My father recognized him as a kid from school, since my father grew up in Massachusetts. He used to beat my dad up for his lunch money.
Too bad this guy didn't realize who my dad was. And so my dad took the long way around and cost this guy an extra $20.
"I got my lunch money back plus interest." He told me.
"How is that interest?"
"Well, shit, lunch money back then was only a quarter."
This guy told my father all his problems, ironically, and my dad still listened. Poor guy tried to solve all his problems with alcohol, his wife was in the process of leaving him, etc, etc.
"When he got out," my father says. "I told him, payback's a bitch."

Heroism is Simple II

5 Sentence Reviews of 5 Movies

5 Sentence Reviews of 5 Movies
Mene Tekel

Sleepy Hollow (1999) - Lame. Way to ruin a perfectly good legend, Mr. Tim Burton, with your fancy special effects and immature Gothic storytelling. Even Johnny Depp can't save this terrible retelling or make the horror believable. This is as bad as From Hell, only because it's another film Depp latched onto, that bastardized a classic element of culture (and both involved serial killers, in one way or another). Burton always adds too much to something simple.

Australia (2008) - Terrible. Nothing but a tawdry romance novel for lonely women that love the dildo and lust after burly men, dreaming one will swoop in and bed them. Nicole Kidman is a whiny brat and Hugh Jackman is dumbass twit and everyone else is an imperialist, racist douche. Oh, and not to mention the irritating little kid who I wanted to smack. When people died, I cheered, such as when a fat woman drowns and an alcoholic gets trampled by cattle.

The Air I Breathe (2007) - Beautiful. Many lines that floored me, many scenes that were astounding. Needed much work, but for first time full-length directing, Jieho Lee is incredibly insightful and performs miracles, not the least of which is making Brendan Fraser act less like a tool. Really reflected on the life choices I have. Haunting and poetic, but still lacked something as a result of a weak plot.

Milk (2008) - Powerful. Despite drooling for an Oscar, Sean Penn does a decent job of portraying how chaotic history can be. It's no coincidence that Milk is portrayed like an Obama-wannabe, especially after the passing of Prop 8 and 102. Parts of the film are preachy and at the core, the politics are just sickening, but it still worked. A bit too optimistic and the death never moved me.

Pride and Glory (2008) - Awful. Edward Norton's acting is the only pleasure in this dry film about corrupt New York policemen. By the end, I was rooting for the drug dealers and not sympathetic to the cause of the protagonist, despite how great a character Norton can be. Weirdly, he had a scar on his left cheek that moved and changed color throughout the film.

Fruits

It is the end of the semester here, the tests are over, the shit is done and now I am packing to go home. To burn some stress, my roommate and I have indulged in chaos and also caused some of our own.
On Monday, there were some candles lit in bags for a mile around the university. A months ago, I had found a giant PVC pipe candy cane in a dumpster and left in my roommates car until I found a use for it. Suddenly I had an idea.
Yes, Kyle drove down this stretch of road and I leaned out the window with my giant candy cane and bashed every single candle I could, leaving a trail of hot wax and torn paper bags. We laughed until we cried.

That's the magic of dumpster diving. You find incredibly useless shit, but if you're openminded, you can find a use for anything. So since this is the end of the semester and since many people are leaving for the semester or for good a lot of useless shit was thrown out. Kyle and I drove around and took as much as we could.

Here is a short list of what we found:

a hooded vest (I don't understand it)
biodegradable tampons (not just any tampons, mind you! These make mother nature proud!)
Vans skates shoes, mint condition (gave to Kyle, they were his size)
First Aid kit (very old)
design DVD
sunglasses
a nice thin jacket from Target, great condition
skirts for an anorexic girl
a nightie
a Target shopping basket
an exit sign
a Renaissance costume w/ shoes and a tiara
prescription eczema shampoo
a Bible
a baseball bat
a pro-life v. pro-choice poster

We divided up the goods among us, threw away the useless crap (such as opened food) that somehow got inside our finds and donated the rest. We found a use (or will) for everything most people found useless.

Each dumpster we visited made me more disgusted with this campus. At one dumpster, we found an entire slab of ground beef with a $9.19 pricetag. I found an entire waredrobe worth of Abercrombie and Fitch clothes, which is inexcusable. In each dorm there is a box for people to donate clothes to the homeless. If you're going to spend $60 dollars on a t-shirt, not to mention a boring t-shirt that makes you look like a preppy douchebag you should at least have the decency to give it to a needy family or shivering homeless person. I was seriously mad, very mad that someone would do that.

But then I remembered the discarded Bible, brand new, barely even cracked open. I wonder why that didn't upset me so much. I have plans for it, I guess, I'll give it to someone because it's very nice and it's small. Still, maybe I need my priorities straight.

We were taking in our fruits, our arms full.

"You better hold that bag better," I said. "Or those tampons are gonna spill out and someone's gonna say, what the fuck."

He laughed, but ignored my advice. Sure enough, when we reached the door the bag split open right in front of several guys.

"Hey," one asked. "Why do you have a baseball bat?"

"Um," I said. "I found it."

"No, dude," another said. "What I want to know is why do you have tampons?"

We laughed, but couldn't think of anything to say.

"Hey, one of you," Kyle said. "Say what the fuck."

"What the fuck."

"Awesome."

As I was taking out my own trash an hour later, some punk rockers came up to the dumpster with flashlights. We talked about dumpster diving, one of the three dudes was from the local band the F-Holes. "Yeah, we were just doing that."
I watched as they went through the shit I tossed out, including an old photograph and some papers that said "Deface please".
One of the guys held up the photo and said, "Dude, how could you miss this?"
The irony was killing me, so I said nothing.
"I'm gonna take this home and frame it!"
"And look at this! Some papers that say 'Deface Please'. What does that mean?"
"Dude, it's poetry."
I smiled, still silent. It was an awesome night.

You can watch the terrible video I made of the candy cane v. the candles here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSWWakfZXOU

Picture Book - This is it!

My girlfriend and I are going to make a book together. It's going to be pictures of ours taken of decay in America. Gean is designing it, mostly. Sweet Urban Decay is the title.

It should be done by January or February. I want to be able to collect some more images during my time over winter break.

Cost will be about $30 per book. You may be able to buy it off the website we're using cheaper, but I don't know how to work that yet. We'll see.

Images will be like the pictured example, the fringes of society and the act of decomposition. It will be full color 7inches by 7 inches and nice and full of pretty pictures you can get for free on my flickr. Knowing that, who would be willing to buy a copy? FYI the cost is not to make tons of money, it's just to cover the cost of printing and developing film and stuff. Any extra cash would go towards making more art, not cigarettes or any of that. Honest.

So are you willing to buy this book that I am publishing myself? Self-publication runs the risk of not being able to sell the book, so I was going to only order ten books (about $300.00) but that would put me in a lot of debt. It would help if you would pre-order it. Especially in this economy.

So this is it. And that's it.