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.

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!

Goletaville: The Soundtrack Vol. 3

Sucked Out- Superdrag
Mockingbirds- Grant Lee Buffalo
Everybody Hurts- REM
Debonair- The Afghan Whigs
Queen- Melvins
Talk Show Host- Radiohead
Down to This- Soul Coughing but this is even better!
Bull in the Heather- Sonic Youth
Down by the Water- PJ Harvey
She Don't Use Jelly- The Flaming Lips
The Distance- Cake
Live Forever- Oasis
Loser- Beck
Human Behavior- Bjork
Piggy- Nine Inch Nails
Hurt- Nine Inch Nails
Bulls on Parade- Rage Against the Machine
In the Meantime- Spacehog
Possum Kingdom- Toadies

I should maybe call this the "120 Minutes Volume". Many of the songs here remind me of that show on MTV which I watched pretty much every Sunday night in high school. 120 Minutes would always play the best videos, or at least the ones I was most interested in seeing, but they could not get a good host for that show! It was just painful. Matt Pinfield and Lewis Largent were responsible for some of the most awkward interviews and video intros ever recorded! But, that too, was part of the "alternative" rock schtick that was so popular at the time. It's "umbra" if you will, to use a recent Word of the Day.

This volume could also be "The Volume of the Riff". Many great riffs here, "Queen"(from the Melvins, the masters of the riff!), "Talk Show Host" (and here Radiohead was entering entering another phase growing creatively by leaps and bounds),"Piggy", "Possum Kingdom", all great riffs that were quite potent to my blobby teenage brain.

One of the interesting things that starts to arise when listening to these songs again are similarities I didn't notice before. Such as the songs "Possum Kingdom" and "Down by the Water", both songs which on a surface level are seemingly about the same thing, murder down by the river. Both songs are part of a long tradition of rock songs about murder at the river, see Neil Young's "Down by the River". His 1969 version, appropriately, follows from a blues and folk tradition of songs which was reflective of that era of song writing . But these songs, some 25 years later, are great examples of the evolution of pop music and the culture as a whole to an acceptance of art (or "art") to go to a darker and more psychological place, and certainly that is in part due to previous artists such as Neil. "Possum Kingdom" now takes us inside the head of the killer, which appears to be some sort of serial killer a la Silence of the Lambs. However, PJ Harvey one ups them all. Her tale of murder, takes a more poetic, symbolic, and possibly darker (depending on your interpretation) tact. She takes that common theme and turns it a little bit. Is it filicide or is it metaphor for the loss of innocence, or something else? Anyways, it would seem that pop song lyrics and themes were evolving and exploring new aspects of common themes during this time.

And, yes, "Everybody Hurts" may be the most depressing song (and video) ever written!

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.

Goletaville-Day 6

Some say God is in the details and others say the devil is in the details. Whichever it is, at this rate this could take a while...