Goletaville Day 17- Nature Poised Like Godzilla at the City Gates

Obviously these are images that on one level evoke metaphors of the "man vs. nature" persuasion. But in my mind I see it as a bit more amplified than that. I see it like the people of Tokyo trying to keep out Godzilla. Or maybe it's some sort of John Carpenter or Stephen King movie where nature has developed an evil intelligence and the trees are poised to attack, but all we humans have time to do is erect these poor feeble barriers of wood and stone that are no match for nature's size and strength. It's only a matter of time before nature reclaims what is rightfully hers. Already you can see that the ivy is trying to strangulate the speed limit sign. Nature has no respect for the order society tries to keep with it's laws! And when you're up against an enemy that has no respect for the "rules" all one can do is run, run for your life!!!!!

Goletaville Day 16- Ventura Monsters

all monsters have moons
that grow radio silent
but their shadows still hum
with a future of electric dreams

Goletaville Day 15 Part 2- A Brief Period of Blue

Goletaville-Day 15 Part 1...and the Best Thing I Read about Photography Today

From an interview conducted by photographer Todd Hido on the influence of Larry Sultan:

"One thing he helped me articulate was that it wasn't my job to make total sense of my images, but to simply 'charge the air, so that meaning could occur.'"

I like it when people say things like that. "Charge the air"! Indeed.

Goletaville-Day 14

Day 14 was a gray and foggy morning, see bottom picture. Truth be told this is what Santa Barbara/Goleta looks like most times in the summer, but it makes for a beautiful soft light and there are still images to be found.

Goletaville-Day 13 and Thoughts on Photography by Ernst Haas

Some thoughts on the philosophy of photography by Ernst Haas:

"If truth is what we believe to be true, then every period, every culture has created its own truth, which has always been deeply rooted in man's concept of the reason for existence. But in extreme situations, such as pain, love or joy, man reaches from the narrower fact of truth into the broader dimensions of poetry to express better all that he feels, sees, and believes.

William Blake saw 'the world in a grain of sand.' It can be seen in many such things, for in the smallest cells are reflections of the largest. And in photography, through an interplay of scales, a whole universe within a universe can be revealed."


Ernst Haas

The Belly of the Buddha: Ruminations on the 20th Anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind

1991. I'm sorry, I wrote that backwards. Let me start over. 1991. It was a year of tragedy and triumph. It was the year we lost a young president with so much promise and potential. A president we now know most commonly as the Oliver Stone film "JFK". But, it was also the year, nine months later, that we banded together as a nation and honored his memory by fulfilling his dream of putting the first Russian on the moon.

It was 1991. I was 12 years old and obviously I was neck deep into LA's underground trip-hop scene. Those were strange and heady days. For months my only sustenance consisted of a caustic cocktail of pig hormones, ecstasy, and repeated trips to the plastic surgeon's table. All the while the unborn dreams of unwed mothers danced like heretics through my still developing and ether infused mind.

But one album from one band would change all that crushing the potential nightmarish future of suburbanite track housing plump with the flashes of late night television flickering ridiculous soap ads and ungodly white toothed smiles onto hard dark walls and peach fuzzed surfaces of frozen eyeballs. Only one album would reach into Michael Jackson's intestines and pull out a middle-aged white woman gripping a pocket sized Gideon's Bible in one hand and a larger than life King James Bible in the other shouting, "The Lord is your Salvation! All those who deny their Lord shall burn in the fiery pits of Hell!" forever changing the American political landscape for picket sign writers and altering the legacy of one Elvis Presley.

So what was a young unassassinated boy to do? Dismantle his psyche and leave the bloodied greasy bolts out on the curb for the vultures and badgers to pick apart? Or, disintegrate into the howling scratching growls of a plaid covered cuckold from Aberdeen on the way to his slaughter with a goateed grin and bits of Taco Bell tortilla stuck between his teeth? What were any of us of that time to do, really? He was the only one with any sort of light in a darkened dank din of thieves.

The Return of Goletaville-Day 11 Revisited

I'm never going to get caught up if I keep revisiting the days I've already posted! I was reviewing some past shoots and I liked these images, too, so I thought I would put them out there. All total there were 20-something days I shot for the Goleta Project. There's a long ways to go yet, but we got nothing but time!