An excerpt from The Memoirs of a Septuagenarian

"Grace was different from others in another important way. She was charming, kind and gentle, so much so that I kept looking for the other side of her nature to show up. Gradually, I came to realize that there wasn't any other side. She didn't have one set of ‘company manners’ to be used in public, and another set which she used in private. She was, like a pure gem, genuine all the way through."
- Maurice Mountain, Sr., writing about meeting the woman that would become his wife of over fifty years.

When my grandfather turned seventy, he sat down and wrote a memoir, which, over the past few years of my life I've turned to in attempts to get to know him as he passed away before I was old enough to realize what a gift grandparents could be. So often, I find myself caught in the traps of life, thinking long and hard, pawing through columns of metaphysical debates in the depths of the internet, only to find that the greatest wisdom that could be instilled upon me about life and love are right in front of me. I have always really liked that passage, but now as my skepticism towards the female gender mounts, I relax knowing that it will only serve to hold you back. Life may be a game of poker, but not everybody's bluffing.

The Stress!

Tell your friends, "Once, I lived!" And please, don't let your visions of tomorrow cloud the beauty of today.

We have all the time in the world

It's Christmastime, and I'm coming to the conclusion that some of the best love songs ever written were James Bond themes. Give 'em a listen and check out some shots from Saturday night.



Nancy Sinatra - You Only Live Twice (from You Only Live Twice)
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Carly Simon - Nobody Does it Better (from the Spy Who Loved Me)
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Louis Armstrong - We Have All the Time in the World (from On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
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Ira Glass at Syracuse University

In a moment of educational bliss, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, graced Syracuse University's own Hendrick's Chapel to give a powerful and educational talk on storytelling, radio, and the future of journalism.

Already a fan, I came hoping to be surprised and inspired. While he maintained his usual candor and demeanor, I left this talk with a bit more than from his usual weekly broadcasts. If you're interested in hearing what he has to say about storytelling and the methods he uses, you can search for him on YouTube and watch the videos- he basically repeated the same rhetoric he does on videos there. His methods, tried and true, are brilliant, simple, and beautiful. He truly is unique in his simplicity of mind and straightforward way of storytelling. He expressed well-thought ideas about how to approach the next wave of journalism - with a sense of humor, with a sensitivity to people, and with, perhaps most importantly, a central theme on the humanity of stories and how imporant stories are to people. Using Arabian Nights as an allegory to the importance of stories (they may save your life!), Glass briefly brought us into the world where words shout themselves, and the beauty of straightforward storytelling transcends into spirits that last longer than the sounds that carry them to our ears and rock us to our cores. The stories of heartbreak, awkwardness, hope, betrayal, and new beginnings are central to humanity, for within the stories of other people, we learn more about ourselves as we, if only for a few moments, are the storyteller too.

What touched me most about the entire talk, was that during the question and answer portion, a nine year old boy used his question to ask for a handshake. It made me a bit emotional, thinking that this nine year old was touched as equally by his talk and the weekly experience that is This American Life as it touches me every week. Whether you're nine or ninety, the stories on the show ring true to the human element that exists within us all, and I felt inspired to know that somehow, 1.8 million people per week (and 500,000 more on podcasts) tune in to share the silences and moments of sensitivity that break through to fits of laughter that Mr. Glass brings to the radio.

Deep Forest Green

China Town

I watched 500 Days of Summer last night. I quite enjoyed it, it's quite a story. I have one like that.


A shot from China Town this past weekend when I went home, best viewed listening to slow violin-infused indie folk.

The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

You know, Woodrow Wilson got a Nobel Peace Prize for founding the League of Nations, and that shit failed.

They gave Yasser Arafat one, too, for "the promotion of peace in the Middle East" which is arguably one of the many things he did not do in his lifetime. The list of laureates is varied and astonishing.

I'm not a political scientist; I'm not even a regular scientist. I do wax political from time to time, though. It should be said that I'm not a source of knowledge on these sorts of things. But, its my personal belief that the prize exists to say "Please keep trying to make peace, because with enough tries you may succeed" rather than "thanks for all the peace, man." If you don't think the election of the first black American President doesn't promote tolerance or hopefulness, and change the shape of global peacemaking, you're ignoring the other 7 billion people on this planet. Future elections, globally, will have new precedence and tone. Obama's presidency alone is a global step in the right direction towards peace.

But, I say, the prize should have gone to the American people for showing the world that the rules of life are still being written. America, as a country, promoted the kind of tolerance, change and forward-thinking that I personally feel the Prize exists to pay homage to. However, as Presidents often are, Obama is the face of the American people on an international scale for his tenure, and he will be the face of our successes, as well as our failures.

Fesko Farms

I like to put photos like these up so that Andrew Henderson can tell me they suck.

The Memories I've Forgotten

My computer is running low on memory. Not that I don't have extra storage space. I have plenty of that. I'm just low on space on my laptop. At roughly 15MB per file, my photographs, as well as my vast library of music, each eat away at about 140GB each, leaving my Finder screens with anything between "1.8 GB Available" to "4 GB Available."

So, in a desperate measure to download The Chi-Lites entire discography, I decided to boot up Lightroom and take out all of the photos I don't need. And, in the process, coupled with the music playing ("Breathe" by Telepopmusik and then "Feel Good Lost Reprise" by Broken Social Scene), I felt an enormous rush of emotion come over me as I perused, my finger held down on the forward arrow, the entire library of my digital photographic experience shown to me in fast forward like Ed Kashi's Iraqi Kurdistan without any talent. In a few short minutes, I brushed through the 10 thousand or so photographs taken in the past 14 months, and as I had initially decided to delete some of the "non-takers," I found that process to be ultimately impossible.

You see, in all of the imperfect frames and the poorly exposed photographs that just didn't quite make it, there was a reflection of myself. All of these memories I myself had forgotten, lost in my day-to-day activities that made me focus too much on the future and not enough on the past. I tried to delete some, but I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to delete a single file, save the pure black exposures (which escape me to this date why they weren't deleted at the time of their import).

All of these moments I had forgotten. Though many will never see the light of day (I am very sensitive about showing my own work, and only show what I like, which is very little), they exist and serve their purpose. Displayed, in a rush, you could watch my photographic eye evolve (or in some cases, devolve). So many of these images represent me. The places I have been. From Syracuse to Slovakia, Auschwitz to America; from heroin addicts to haircuts and all the way to the Inauguration of Barack Obama. They are what my eyes have seen. And I don't want to forget them.

My Life Resumes Meaning

After a week of working my ass off helping Martine Franck pull some Cartier-Bresson prints from the Magnum Warehouse and the final week of my Spanish courses at Columbia, my exhausted body collapsed and my brain stopped working.

Now, well rested, my life resumes proper meaning. For, in this week of madness, something miraculous happened. A track from Radiohead's new EP leaked. And with it, I present to you, with no commercial breaks, the future of the greatest band on earth. Title is currently being thrown around as "These Are My Twisted Words."

Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp

say my name, whisper it.

Felt Mountain, by Goldfrapp, is a very good album.

Dan McPharlin

Just look at this shit. It's amazing.

© Dan McPharlin

And now, check this out:
The Damned - Life Goes On (1982)
The Killing Joke - Eighties (1984)
Nirvana - Come As You Are (1992)

For a friend

A friend wanted more dubstep in her life. I give her this:

Erin Mulvehill

© Erin Mulvehill

He visto antes; en mis sueños.

Mi compañera Erin es un buen fotografo.

I am in Spanish class. I have been drinking.

Sometimes

Work drags on and seconds pass like hours, songs come at random, and for a few minutes, the world collapses like raindrops dripping from an oiled windowpane. I like these moments.

Jason Eskenazi

Whilst browsing what I consider to be the best blog for photojournalism, Lens @ the New York Times, I came across Jason Eskenazi. And, as can be expected, he blew me away.

The above shot is from his project Vanishing Points, a series of reaction shots from New Yorkers around New York City on September 11, 2001. This amazing series of images can be viewed here. Armed with what appears to be a single wide-angle lens, a Leica, and rolls of film, Eskenazi went out and made a series of images that showed veteran calmness and virgin emotion. All of the images express a sense of disbelief, wonder, and confusion. The faces of the people on the streets capture unbridled responses, reactions to the most horrific scene New Yorkers of this generation had been privy to. In each of the frame, I see a piece of New York's infinite and underlying spirit; it floods the memories of the days shortly thereafter of the similar feelings we all had. I, no more than a boy, remember moments of utter confusion and amazement coupled with too much information and not enough answers. Too young perhaps to fully comprehend the event at the time (I was 13, after all), these images allow me to re-investigate a situation that through flashes and winces, I remember vividly as a ball of confusion and a blur of disaster and fear.

Furthermore, he put together a pretty interesting mulitmedia piece with some interesting interviews for Time Magazine, which can be viewed here.

Lastly, this is the image that brought me unto his work. There is so much to say about this image, that I'll opt to say nothing. Just look at it. It's pretty damn good.

What make me happiest to come across Eskenazi's work is that this is all he's done. He's 49, and though I'm not positive, seems to have happened into photojournalism as he grew older. Last night, I was talking with my mom about how I don't want to finish college, though I will. I explained that there isn't a major for what I want to do, which is to be basically a vagabond for a few years and put together books. I plan to move to South America, bum around and just live my life, writing and shooting photographs as I see fit. Working from job to job shouldn't bother anyone, especially if they're not in the fields one plans to pursue actual recognition in. For me, it's so much that the journey is the destination, and I don't have any problem with being 50 before anyone starts to give a shit about my work, if ever. I feel you should be out there doing work for yourself, and no one else. Working here at Magnum, I see so much work of people that just kept shooting, shooting, shooting and then one day reviewed all of their work and was like, "Oh yeah, hey, I could probably make a book out of this stuff." Sebastiao Selgado, Danny Lyon, Chris Steele Perkins, Bob Adelman, Erich Hartmann; they all seem to have done this, and I admire them each equally. The point is to be out there shooting, and maybe one day, after years of doing something else, you'll turn out a book that people kind of like.

And, the Kings of Convenience - Mrs Cold, for you.

Dash Snow

Today, or probably last night, the world of modern art loses another to the Forever 27 Club, Mr. Dash Snow. A well-connected, well-to-do delinquent, probably with daddy issues and a fear of popularity, Snow was a bit of a downtown NYC legend of art. That is to say that people admired his tragedy, like Kurt Cobain.

© Dash Snow

All the things that always aggravated me about Terry Richardson, apply to Snow. Lack of talent or expertise was passed off as intent and the world of art suffered as another bullshit artist peddled their bullshit wares. I maintain that without a wealthy art-collector aunt, Snow would have remained out of the art circuit and thus off of this page. Akin to how Richardson really worked his father's connections and kept doing his own thing until it was attributed to be his "style" or how Andy Warhol was really a talentless hack thrust into limelight out of sheer adoration of his awkwardness; Snow was your atypical hipster hero, and the injustice of it all continued to inspire his rebellion.

However, while I don't necessarily maintain he was "an artist," he was however a creative, and equally tragic, individual. His work has shown in Vice magazine (which isn't really saying anything other than that the guy could party, given his published work), and he had a budding following, including reviews from Juxtapoz to the New York Times, and his death has garnered support for his work. A collection of his polaroids create a portrait of the man's life, and he appears to have stoked his fire and burned his fuel out long before we could really be presented his true body of work. And, like Arizona State to Obama, I am going to withhold any praise due to his current body of work.

I must admit, though, that he captured interesting moments in an interesting life at an interesting threshold of events. His journalistic intentions of capturing his life appear both pretentious and self-glorifying, and of the type that I generally despise due to the sheer onslaught and overabundance of said type of art, but I admire the situations he put himself in though I would prefer to have stumbled upon a shoebox full of these images ten years from now in someone's forgotten closet than on the Art Beat on the New York Times' website. When I first became aware of his artwork, it was via Vice Magazine's Photo Book. Amongst that context, his work fits in, but does not stand out, except perhaps for the humor. The above image is one of my favorites, for reasons I do not believe were intended (such as the cutoffs because the Polaroid camera he was probably using was most definitely not equipped with a viewfinder, so the composition was definitely just a happy accident). This worship of false idols angers, excites, and forces me to create and to justify not only my opinion, but my own body of work and set of skills. In this, I consider Dash Snow to be a powerful inspiration.

Pretty girls, Light leak, whiteouts, and Autotune

Don't impress me much.

© Hector Pozuelo

Para tí, el mundo.

A mix of lates and greats. Enjoy.

Dina Goldstein

This shit is awesome. Check out her portfolio.

Her series of images titled Fallen Princesses is so good. It is the exact type of humor and thinking I enjoy. I find all of the images to be pleasing, but this one of Jasmine is my favorite because it is really fucking funny.

And, to boot, she has one of the easiest-to-navigate and visually pleasing websites of any photographer out there. Do yourself a favor and spend a little bit of time on her site.