More from Day 11-Echoes of Miming and Mimicry

 In these two shots from Day 11, I like how the abstract shapes within the shot of the damaged fence mimic the shadows on the gravel in the shot above it, which is not a shadow of a fence at all, but a row of individual triangular bicycle racks. These two scenes were found just around the corner from each other. The fence was in the alley of the bicycle shop that had the bike racks. Strange how close these two similar random and abstract shapes were to one another in this big old great big world. More shots and experiments can be seen here.

Goletaville-Day 11

Goletaville-Day 10

These seem to me to have more the appearance of strange monsters.

Goletaville: The Soundtrack Vol. 1

No Rain- Blind Melon
Bound for the Floor- Local H
Friends of P- The Rentals
Undone (The Sweater Song)- Weezer
Buddy Holly- Weezer
One Headlight- The Wallflowers
6th Ave Heartache- The Wallflowers
Beans- Nirvana/Kurt Cobain
D7- Nirvana
Opinion- Nirvana/Kurt Cobain
Fell on Black Days- Soundgarden
Black Hole Sun- Soundgarden
Unsung- Helmet
Stars- Hum
Pepper- Butthole Surfers
Longview- Greenday
Today- Smashing Pumpkins
Selling the Drama- Live
It's a Shame About Ray- The Lemonheads
Cumbersome- Seven Mary Three


So that's Volume 1 of 4 so far. These are the songs that are once again pervading my existence. I didn't choose these songs so much because I liked them or not. The criteria was more about the songs being in someway connected to a memory. Take for instance "Cumbersome", not a song I cared for at the time, but the rock radio station I listened to occasionally in Killeen, TX played them all the time. So like it or not I remember that song being on the radio on a warm Texas night (still my favorite nights of any place I've lived. There's just something in the air) as I drove home from my first job in my first car, a 1964 Chevy Bel-Air. So it is connected to that time of new found freedom and that looming sense, and uncertainty, of "the real world" being just around the corner. So memories like that.

I did have to draw the line at Alanis Morissette, Madonna, Janet Jackson, etc. Even though their songs were everywhere back then I just couldn't do it. These songs are closer to defining me in some sense, even if I didn't like all of them at the time. Actually, I'm finding that it's the songs I didn't like so much are the ones that take me back to the time of '93-'96 most, probably because they act as a sort of time capsule since I haven't listened to them since.

Of course I was discovering other music, too, during this time. I spent a lot of time combing through my dad's record collection listening to The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Roling Stones and just starting to get really into The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper at first, and then The White Album just blew me away and is still one of my all time favorites). However, those songs were not quite connected to the rest of my generation and that moment in time. So these songs are sort of a bridge between me and what was going on at the time in a larger sense.

Don't worry, there are still three more volumes to go, but this should be enough to get us all going for now.

More from Day 9

These are images I took before the clouds moved in. Here you can see the pier from where I took the shots in my last post.

Goletaville-Day 9

I was shooting the clear sun-filled sky at the Goleta beach and pier when these clouds came sweeping in. Pretty amazing how the environment can change so quickly. I'd been wanting to get some seascapes just like this for some time. Glad I was there that morning.

It should be noted that these images are an homage to Hiroshi Sugimoto and his series on seascapes, which can be seen here and many other places on the web. I highly recommend checking out all his work. This exercise was not about originality, but about emulating someone and something I admire so that hopefully somehow the experience would improve my work. Sugimoto creates his images using an 8x10 view camera, which means his negatives are 8x10inches big. Compare that to the roughly 1 inch 35mm neg! That also means his images contain a lot more visual information and subtlety. He also captures his images using long exposures. I did my the "lazy" way. I used a digital SLR and utilized camera movement to get my images. However, if these images were any bigger the quality would start to fall apart and you could see just how dusty my sensor is! His can be printed large and beautiful and they are real art, I'm still just practicing.

Goletaville-Day 8

This project is turning out to be a bigger monster than I expected. I'm 3 weeks into it and it feels like it's just getting started. It's turned into something completely different, and all in ways beyond what I could have hoped for. I'm not sure where this project is going, all I know is that I want to keep doing it. By now, the inmates are definitely running the asylum.

As always, more from the day can be seen here.