nana

My great-grandmother. It's a picture of a picture, manipulated with a glass lens while I took the photo.

railroad spikes

Earlier today I found these railroad spikes arranged exactly how they appear here, while walking down the train tracks in West Concord. They were on an old cement boarding ramp, the last remaining part of an old train station (besides the old rails). Here's a picture. It's that thing on the left:


There's a project I've been meaning to do for the past two years, but have never gotten around to, and that's to take the train outbound from Boston, get off somewhere and start walking back with my camera. You see so much interesting stuff from the train. Stuff you can only see from the train. Once in a while I'll be riding the train past roads that I've driven down many times, but I'll see things that I'd never see from a car. Even things I can see from the road, I see from a new perspective on the rail. Even something as simple as the back of a building that I've walked into from the front a thousand times. It's weirdly mind-warping sometimes.

Also, there's often a lot of just really strange debris lying along the train tracks. I've seen junked-out cars half-submerged in foggy bogs. I've seen a ramshackle Cinderella pumpkin carriage made out of metal and wood. Last year I saw a bunch of dudes fighting pitbulls behind an abandoned warehouse in Baltimore. P.S. never go to Baltimore. The entire time we were going through there I thought that any second it was going to turn into that scene from Children Of Men where the people are throwing rocks at Clive Owen while he's looking out the train window.

P.S.S. I look a lot like Clive Owen.

P.S.S.S. Sorry if you're from Baltimore. Sorry that your city is horrible!

folk punk

Eric made some barechested new friends during Bread & Roses' set at BratFest '06.

restoration

My grandparents at their wedding.

deconstructures pt. three

I've been working on my photos for The Mansion Show. Here are two negatives I scratched out. They're intended to fit together. Like this!


I scanned the negatives and then combined them in Photoshop. There's no digital trickery, except for lowering the opacity so both images are visible, and fixing the brightness and contrast a little bit because the exposure of the negatives is really bad. This is the first time I've done this digitally, and I think it looks really good, even if it doesn't look quite the same as if I had printed it in the darkroom. I actually did make a print of this in the darkroom today, but I just couldn't get it right. The image above is what I was going for. But with the crappily-exposed negatives I'm working with, I don't think it's even possible to darkroom-print it as well as this.

bigfoot

Back in this entry, I posted a piece I made starring this here little girl. I had found her picture on some strips of film in my grandmother's basement. I just recently re-found those negatives, and I scanned them. Here's that little girl in color, and only slightly less scratched up. I wish I knew who she was.


I also mentioned that on the same roll of film there were some pictures from a monster truck rally. I wasn't joking...

AWESOME

AWESOME

AWESOME

AWESOME

rogues gallery pt. two

I was amiss when I didn't include Eric in the last post. Here he is taking a load off on yonder stoop, looking penny-wise and hoity-toity before an eventide's dose of carousing.



Meanwhile, our newest hero, Roger, looks more gussied up than a speakeasy harlot. But don't be hoodwinked by the looks of this insufferable dandy; he's a whiz on that keytrumpet.

rogues gallery

Way back when, this fella by the go-by Paz had it in his noodle to conjure a portrait of hisself looking dapper and rakish, and clasping a banjo at a jaunty slant. It was a capital thought, but that idear soon opened up a whole can o' worms. And that can was a biggun. And all those can-worms started a-wigglin' something fierce til they was like a twister on the plain, makin' a royal mess of things the magnitude of which weren't seen since Teapot Dome....



After catching a gander at what Paz had done, this scrappy gent by the name'a Michael, flush with the spirit of oneupmanship, presently followed suit with a photo-graph of his own. As you'd reckon, he portrays hisself with an ill countenance, as a ne'er-do-well is wont to do.



Well I tell ya, that got my dander up, sure as tarnation. I followed posthaste with three of my own pi'chers, illustrating the breadth of my imagined musical acumen.



Madder'n a boiled owl, Christian set to with this gem, a pithy rejoinder if ever there was one.



"Poppycock!", hollered Melanie, ragamuffin that she is, and sent us all runnin' for the dinner bell with this inspired tableau.



Spry ol' Michael, ever the cock-of-the-walk, would not be outdone. Sure as Samson, he heaved the old one-two with this humdinger. Our humours besmirched, I figger'd that this donnybrook had all but hit the hay like a milkmaid after a barn dance.



But forthwith a strapping young buck entered the fray. Justin, never one to wither in the face of fisticuffs, pulled himself up by the bootstraps and exclaimed, with vim and vigour, "I'll have my druthers too!"

And he did, by and by.
And sweet those druthers were.

home front

Like the last post says, I'm going to be in a show in June. If you want to come to the reception on June 6th, the Beebe Estate website has driving directions.

Directions by MBTA:
1) Take the Orange line outbound to Oak Grove.
2) Catch the #136 or #137 bus towards Reading or Wakefield (not Malden Station, which is the southbound direction). Take this into Melrose center (about an 8 minute ride), and get off at Foster St. (YMCA stop).
3) Walk two blocks west on West Foster to Beebe Estate, which is a large Greek Revival style white house on the north side. There is a sign for it. Take a look at the website, beebeestate.org for a photo of the estate.

I'll have 4 pieces in the show. They'll be mostly skyscrapers, with a few smokestacks thrown in. The image above won't be in the show, but it's along the lines of what I've been working on lately; more deconstructures.

I made this yesterday, probably the quickest one I've ever done. It's a 35mm negative, scratched up, then scanned with a negative scanner. Negative scanners are pretty much the best things ever invented.

The Mansion Show

flip car

A flipped-over car in Bridgewater, MA.
35mm

village rooftop

I guess there's kind of an architectural theme around here lately. This picture was taken in 2001 in the mountains above the village of Carpineto della Nora in Italy, where my great-grandfather was born and where I still have a good number of relatives.

deserted room

Inside of an abandoned house in Maynard, MA.
35mm black and white.