It’s been a few years since I photographed Bobby Tan removing glass from his eyebrow with butter knives.  A little time has come and gone, but the same enthusiasm and intensity that motivated the butter knife incident are still definitely intact.  Went over to his place a couple weeks ago to look through some of his art, mostly drawings and collage-mash books, all projects that have been consuming hours of his time each day.  He’s got a little corner set up in his house, a set of pens, and has been churning out work for several months now.  It’s quite a stack of stuff that really speaks to the time and energy he’s putting into it.  Pretty impressed by his trajectory and definitely a fan of the work.  Stepped out for a few minutes to catch his opening tonight at Double Daughters in downtown Denver.  Figured I’d post this for today and put the hunt images off until tomorrow.

MORE PHOTOS

Got home from photographing a deer hunt yesterday afternoon, caught the second game of the World Series at a sushi place and then detoured to Glob for a benefit Halloween show.  Strange how quick you can go from  Oklahoma border to sushi and hipster Halloween haunts, but I kinda enjoy the edges of the spectrum.  Snapped a few filler pictures at Glob, listened to a little music and called it a night.  Uneventful Halloween except for the bastard kids that cleaned out twelve pounds of candy that I left in a bucket on my front porch.  The doorbell broke a few weeks ago so I figured that the best strategy was to put the candy out.  I know that plan would have spelled sure fire failure if it was 12 pounds of chocolate, but the bag of candy that I had on hand was the cheapo bag of smarties and suckers and dried bubble gum.  You’d be hard pressed to eat 12 pounds of it in a decade.  Stealing the whole bucket, in my mind, would have been like shoplifting a tub of lard.  Far be it from me to underestimate the power of free stuff.  Cleaned out of candy in ten minutes.

Hunt pictures to follow tomorrow.

MORE PHOTOS

the 

Wrapped up my work late last night and went out to catch a haunted house party that some friends had been working on all day.  The house wound around through a maze of oddities, terminating at the back of the building in a little garage space where a few bands finished up the night.  Stuck around for Warren Bedell’s band, Spellcaster.  The damn Pharaoh hat thing made my night.

MORE PHOTOS

This weekend was marked by Denver’s first snow of the season, a blast of cold that came almost three weeks before its more traditional appearance on Halloween Eve.  For anyone not familiar with my bad winter attitude, I love the west.  I hate the snow.  Really, I hate the tiny snows, the little flurries that pass through town, freeze my green garden, cause people to drive at a fraction of the speed limit, and make the outdoors a less pleasant place to spend time.  I’d trade a winter’s worth of flurries for two or three days of real, honest blizzard.  You know, the kind of snow that reminds you how small you are, that packs your front door closed and shuts down the city for days at a time.  If Father Winter’s gonna hit you, I kinda feel like the only honorable way to deliver the disrespect is in the form of a knockout punch.

Anything less is a waste of time.

I’m just speculating, but I suspect Zach’s van may have shared my sentiments as it huffed its dying breath.  In its own quiet effort to rage, rage against the dying the of the (summer) light, it lit on fire yesterday.  Unexplained and spontaneous, it went out with a final fiery finger to the cold weather that had settled in on the city.  The fire consumed the front part of the van, the back part of Zach’s fence, and all the crappy snow that surrounded it.  It’s sad to see the old beast go, but good to see it go down swinging.

out·take (outtk) n.

The space is really what kills people out here.  The same thing that draws them in also turns them away.  It never ceases to amaze me how much effort is given towards filling it in.  Houses and strip malls, highways, trails, paved trails, trails with lights so you can walk at night, telephone poles and information kiosks.  The mighty hand of progress has decided that the west is a blank page to be filled, a canvas to be colored.  I’m pretty sure that the eastern artists got it right when they decided to embrace the white of the paper, to let the negative space signify the clouds, the oceans, those spaces so sacred that the hand of man could not reproduce them without risking blasphemy.  On those scrolls, the white is a resting point to contemplate the relationship between the things that are painted and the things that are not.

Tomorrow it looks like I’m off to Albuquerque for a couple days.  More photographs to stash away into my drawer, a quiet love affair with the great west.  The trip winds along the forward edge of the Rocky Mountains where the expansive, open ocean of middle America breaks against a geography that pulls upward nearly three miles into the atmosphere.  The journey will close out two weeks that have afforded me yet another trip to Colorado’s northern neighbor, connecting the dots along a span of highway covering nearly 20 hours.

The images that mark off the stopping points along that line fall into one of two categories: images that are part of the unfinished sentence of a work-in-progress or photographs handed over to editors for future publication.  In either case, not suitable for the blog.  What remains are the fragments chipped away from the bigger picture and left on the floor.  Interesting, but not  quite contextualized.  They are bastard pictures, outtakes, orphans, photographs with no home.  An art opening, a stop at friend and filmmaker Chris Bagley’s Cheyenne, Wyoming home (that doubles as a live-in prop house), highway, parking lots, and the frozen frames projected of old commercials, cult movies, and everything else in between.

Here’s to another week celebrating everything in between.

MORE PHOTOS

out·take  (outtk) n.

Christiné’s three legged cat hops onto the couch taking a perch in front of the channel changer, slightly off-kilter because of the missing back limb.  He has learned to play his cards well, I think to myself as she talks about her wedding, how the guests will gather around a bonfire next weekend for her camping trip nuptials.  It is not just the cat who is playing his cards well, I think as we walk to lunch to talk more about the photographs that will come of the event, the ways in which I will avoid calling myself a wedding photographer because these are friends and friends are people who you know, lives with images that shouldn’t traffic in cliché.  The pictures will be, by most standards, outtakes, scenes which are not exactly congruent with what we expect from an event like a wedding.  After all, the cake will be cupcakes, the dinner a potluck of sorts.  And we will all sleep in sleeping bags after the bonfire caves in on itself and the night will be the only air conditioning this roofless reception will need.  

Our lives are mostly outtakes.  Quiet moments, meaningless moments, the things you notice but forget to write down, the things you write down but can’t figure out why you did, the way your feet sound in an empty hall, the empty table littered with bottles and food scraps after the art opening, an artist’s space that has showings whenever they want to and not just on the first friday.  I find myself drawn to colors that I can’t even really see.  Red on the wall, green on the tablecloth but my eye doctor insists that I am colorblind.  I ignore him because it has no bearing on the colors I see, just a measure to which I can only break myself.  

Coming home after show, the gang-house down the street is loud.  I can hear them yelling, gurgled sounds being drawn in through the vents on my swamp cooler.  Yelling and they gunshots.  Three of them, I count them off one at a time not so much afraid anymore but angry at the stupidity.  I hear the sound of two cars racing up the street as I step onto my back porch in time to see the crowd all walking away into the darkness.  There are cops and a fire truck but in the end nothing happens.  Nobody got shot.  It was an outtake that won’t count for anything until someone actually takes a bullet.

The next morning, a friend is moving home to New Mexico, the last few years of his life in Denver have been outtakes too, missing pieces of a drunken life that he is trying to fix.  The doctor tells him that it’s not too late and that his body can recover and it is the proudest I have been of him in a long time.  We’re all getting to the age where we’re out of people to blame and out of places to go and the only direction that we have is really ours alone.  A sobering thought, I think to myself.  He is no legless cat, but at least he is learning to play his cards better.

MORE PHOTOS

[Exhausted after moving an organ]

I agreed sometime during the daylight hours to help friends move an organ.  It was something that I had done in passing while the sun was still out, full well knowing that I had meetings that would run through the evening hours and then some business to catch up on thereafter.  I arrived for the move late, close to midnight.  Tripp was busy scrubbing the baseboard in his room while Zach gathered trash bags to set out on the curb.  June 30th with a July 1st deadline to vacate the house.  Moving is something that is rarely accomplished with any time left to spare.  It is a sport for procrastinators.

At midnight, the house was almost clean.  The only things left were details.  A few boxes here and there, a little cleaning, and the chore of capturing one of Tripp’s semi-feral cats from the crawl space where it had barricaded itself against the impending move.  The basement appeared as a coal shaft, lightless, humid, hot.  At it’s narrowest point, little more than three feet separated the subfloor of the house from the dirt and junk that had been backfilled into the void over the course of decades.  Mining for cats, or so it appeared as Tripp drug a work-light into the dusty abyss.  

Within an hour, the cat had given up.  Tired of running tiny laps through its subterranean hideout, the kitty carrier became the easiest option for a beast inclined towards idleness.  With the cat back in the bag, the final task of the night  shifted to the original goal of delivering the organ to its new home on the other side of the city.

Musical instruments, like cameras, are things that change hands.  They are tools that creative people hate to see wasted such that when it becomes untenable to keep them any longer, they are not tossed out with the garbage.  These things are passed on to other people with the hope that, in their next life, they will no longer sit idle, rather be the channel through which masterpieces are moved.  Zach’s oversized church organ, a solid block of wood and electronics weighing in at only slightly less than a full-size upright piano, had sat broken in the back room of the old rental for a period of years before the move-out gave him the impetus to find a new home for it.  John, a musician and de facto dead organ junk-piler, had amassed a small heap of the bulky instruments in the back of his warehouse space.  A perfect fit.  He agreed to take it.  Perhaps he would be able to fix it or, perhaps, it would make an interesting prop to fill space between the cinder block walls.  Either way, it was better than dumping it in the alley.

***

MORE PHOTOS