One of the things that’s been on my to do list for far too long has been to update my photography portfolio and get it back into presentable form. And, ultimately, actually make roads towards paid photography work. I’m finally getting around to it thanks to a recent trip I took up to Churchill, Canada where I had the opportunity to photograph some of nature’s most amazing and photogenic creatures – polar bears. I’m not an overly boastful guy, generally, but I’m really proud of some of the shots I got and I’m really excited to share them with the world. Take a look at this one and tell me it doesn’t look like it was lifted straight from National Geographic!

I know! I can hardly believe I took that, too. It’s certainly one of the best photos I’ve ever taken and has served nicely as the kick in the pants I needed to get my portfolio back in shape. So look for some kind of online version (finally) integrated in this website and in the meantime, you can browse a lot of my photography, both good and mediocre, at my Flickr account, here.

Warning: This is a meaningless stream of consciousness writing. There is no point within this and no great truth lies at the other end. You have been warned.

Writing is a horrible, horrible existence. I’m into another period where I’ve convinced myself that I’m not actually a writer. Genuine writers are compelled to write, have ceaselessly wandering imaginations, and most of all, actually produce pages with some regularity. Lately, I feel like I’m 0 for 3. And of all the half formed ideas and potentialities I have been compelled to scribble down by my ceaselessly wandering imagination, none ever seem to make the leap into produced pages.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m still thoroughly jobless and completely out of money, relying upon the continuing but strained generosity of my mother. With a sizable To Do list but no obligations tied to specific appointments or even more generally, the outside world, with all the freedom of the day to write, I find it enormously difficult to focus my efforts on what I want to accomplish.

I feel like I can’t even make my point, regardless of the nature of the writing I’m doing. I just wander and ramble, stringing things together, hop scotching from one occasionally nicely worded idea to the next. Ideas are wonderful, but they need sequencing, they need order and structure to convey accomplish their ultimate mission, which is to affect the reader. And somewhere in the middle of that forest of words, I get lost, get frustrated, give up, and return to reloading my Twitter page.

Argh. I have been working on continuing development of the writer’s technique I learned in the screenwriting class I took earlier this year. And no doubt that class and its technique made the draft of the webseries script better by tenfold. Though the script still isn’t perfect, still needs one last polish in a spot or two. I think it’s an adage of writing, though it probably applies to much more of life, that the first 90% takes 10% of the work and the last 10% takes 90% of the work. That certainly feels the case here, where the last 2-5% seems to be a more Herculean task than all that’s come before, though in reality that’s probably just me feeling sorry for myself.

I think more and more often that I need a writing partner, a genuine soul mate of the page that would surely level these impediments and let my genius flow forth unblocked once and for all, washing away the old order of the corrupt and evil world with the brilliance of my ideas and talent. Though pegging a writing partner as the key missing ingredient in so egotistical a construction is, of course, laughably absurd.

Then, of course, there’s also this kind of divided opinion I have about my own writing style, at least when it comes to non narrative writing, which so often keeps me from writing blog posts. On the one hand, I think it’s pretty damn good prose, flowing and articulate, even if it’s sometimes wandering, muddled, and a little comma-happy. But on the other, it pegs me as a pretentious asshole, which of course, I am. But I don’t want to be. I hate pretension and I hate hypocrisy even more. And there’s nothing worse than being a hypocritically pretentious asshole who thinks he’s the shit but can’t even produce a decent blog post, let alone an actual script from start to finish and thinks his only problem is he doesn’t have a writing partner to fix all his mistakes and do all the work for him but thinks he’s some fantastic writer anyway even though he’s rambling and confusing and not all that clever anyway, even in vocabulary (seriously, “pegs” twice in the same blog post?).

But I don’t have a choice (right?). What else would I do? Where else would I go? I genuinely can’t picture any alternatives. No day job I could take and be satisfied with, despite my obsession with politics (DailyKos and Talking Points Memo being refreshed as often as Twitter) and my desire to teach someday (I have to understand something well enough to teach it, first).

So this was a complete stream of consciousness, as it turns out. That’s fine. At least they’re words, that’s something more than the lately usual. And even though this was procrastination – from rewriting the webseries draft, from looking for a job – at least I was writing.

Now if I can just produce some pages.

I need a job.

In a previous lifetime, I had just recently moved to LA and the 2008 presidential primary was fast approaching. My friend Tony and I decided to go to a rally in Pasadena, featuring Ted Kennedy. Trying to get to Tony’s apartment in Beverly Hills, I somehow managed to find myself downtown. Don’t ask me how I did it, to this day I have no idea. Suffice it to say, we made it to the rally pretty late, but in time to see the Lion speak and for me to snap at least a few photos. Not long after, the news came out that Kennedy has brain cancer and wasn’t facing a very optimistic prognosis. My photos, on my Flickr account and with a Media Commons license to them, popped up in a few different news articles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted as a DailyKos diary here.

Sometimes weird things run by.

When living in Los Angeles, things that happen on TV happen not on TV. At a coffee shop yesterday in North Hollywood, the Olympic torch ran by. It seems a little early, especially since the winter games will be in Vancouver next year. But I have absolutely no context to place this sighting in, since I haven’t seen any news reports before or since relating to it. And frankly, I kind of prefer it that way. The sight itself seems more significant on its own than whatever explanation likely accompanies it.

So the California Supreme Court has upheld Proposition 8, banning same sex marriages in the state, as constitutional.

While Prop 8 is a terrible affront to basic human rights and equality, sadly and unfortunately, I think this is the way this particular battle had to go. Rightly or wrongly, conservatives get a lot of mileage about activist judges making law and defining societal values from the bench. It, like most everything else, is a ludicrous and obnoxiously ignorant framing of how our system actually works, but in this case, had the court overturned a valid election result, it would have played right into this idea, prolonging and making this debate uglier and more difficult than it needs to be.

Sadly, Prop 8 won at the ballot box in a decision made by the people in a free and fair election. As a result, the only way to really defeat it is by going back to that ballot box. Quite frankly, probably more than once. A court ruling would have only made the opposition to equality more certain of their righteousness and more determined to fight on, making them fight harder and less willing to give up.

They will keep trying, over and over again to impose their bigotry on all of us, by any means available to them. To shut them up once and for all is going to take a repeated and forceful declaration by the rest of us, the kind that is inarguable and incontrovertible, the kind which can only come at the ballot box.

I know this is a tough pill to swallow, especially for all the people out there who just want the same rights as their fellow citizens, but the loss of this particular battle makes the next one (whatever initiative ends up targeting Prop 8 for repeal)  more defining – and that’s the one that we’re going to win. And when we do, opponents to equality will have no room to cry about activist judges and liberal agendas. It will only be the voice of the people demanding fairness and equality – the incontrovertable argument of our society.

In my screenwriting class today, we did a writing exercise. The results of which I actually liked, so I’m going to post them here.

The gist is to pull some significant event from your history, pick a moment from it, and visualize the setting and action in your head. Recalling as much vivid detail as possible, write out – stream of consciousness style – the scene as completely as possible. Think about the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures. Think about the light and color, about who was there, about what you were wearing and how it felt, about appearance, hair and posture, about everything you can remember.

Then, rewrite the scene out as you would write a scene in a screenplay. Here’s my stream of consciousness, minutely revised from my notebook:

Standing in the second row, crowded in the narrow aisles by the rolling chairs. Books and pictures stacked on either side of the front of the classroom, of planes, of war machines, of war.

The white board at the front, core values written on it, lessons of the day. Air Force knowledge. Backpacks on the desks. Books, notebooks, pens, pulled out, ready to go. Uncomfortable in my uniform, shirt stays pulling my shirt down and my socks up, military garters taut against my leg.

Kids, like me, standing behind me, a row and two back, over my left shoulder, cheerleading the tv screen pulled down over half the whiteboard at the front. On the screen, a city at night, fireballs erupting in the sky, shocking and awing.

That’s for 9/11! a kid cheers. They had nothing to do with 9/11, I respond. A short argument. At the front, the Captain doesn’t say anything. I look to him for help, for resolution, for I don’t know. He looks back, doesn’t say anything, maybe some sympathy in his eyes. Sunlight streams in from the windows.

A city at night, a world away, explodes.

And here’s the scene I wrote out, again minutely revised:

INT. CLASSROOM – DAY

A room adorned with military paraphernalia, mostly Air Force and aviation themed. Over half the white board at the front, a screen is pulled down, showing CNN’s view of a city at night. Regularly and frequently, fireballs blossom, lighting up the city on the TV.

A half dozen kids or so, all dressed in their Air Force cadet uniforms, take their places at desks and unpack their class materials. But their full attention is on the screen at the front. They’re eager and excited by what they see. One kid pipes up:

CADET ONE
That’s for 9/11, Saddam!

CADET TWO
Iraq didn’t have anything to do with 9/11,
this whole thing is unnecessary!

The kids don’t really have an answer, but that doesn’t concern them much. They go back to watching the carnage. Cadet Two turns to the teacher, an Air Force Captain, an imposingly built but friendly looking black man. He says nothing, but there might be some sympathy in his eyes.

Baghdad continues to burn.

FADE OUT.

So there you go, a translation of a stream of consciousness recollection into a screenplay format correct scene. Give it a try: make a list of important events in your life, pick one that you can recall vividly that stands out, and pick one particular moment (no jumps in time or place) from it. Close your eyes and recall as much detail as you can, writing it out in a stream of consciousness. Then, take that description of the moment and write it out as a scene. Decide which details are worth keeping, which should be dropped, and how to succinctly and descriptively paint the picture without wasting a word. Remember, write only what can be photographed and recorded; describe what will be seen and heard and make every moment count.

Good luck.

Friday was the one year anniversary of my arrival to LA. I have been here for a year (now, a year and three days).

I had made another in a long series of resolutions to blog more, to blog regularly, to write regularly. I had actually managed to claw towards some success, though still far short of the regularity I sought (and still seek). But I had made progress, until my blogging, even as insubstantial as it was, threw such a monkey wrench into things that it honestly scared me off of the whole thing for a long time. For awhile, there was a simple aversion to even coming near my website, an aversion that coexisted with my continued desire to remake it into something that I’m not embarrassed by. But the point of this post isn’t about that story. Some of you know it, and I’ll tell it at some point – probably with names removed. But this post isn’t that story.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to list, as completely as I can off the top of my head, what I’ve done this past year:

• I worked on maybe close to a dozen short productions, sometimes as a production assistant, sometimes as a second assistant director, sometimes as help for friends or teachers, sometimes as a job for money, and sometimes as a job but not for money.
• I worked on a low budget feature as a camera truck driver and watched well known actors and a professional film crew work on set, day after day.
• I did script coverage and typed hard copies of scripts for a producer.
• I got a couple of jobs and lost them, one which was my fault and one which wasn’t.
• I started taking an acting class and have gone from doing it for the hell of it until I got a day job to becoming part of a community and making real and (I hope) lasting friends.
• I’ve watched two friends leave this town and head home, one with the intention of returning and one without.
• I’ve gone back east four times, three of them within three months.
• I volunteered and worked my butt off to get Obama elected, making phone calls to and knocking on doors here in California (in the primary) and Nevada (in the general).
• I spent the last three weekends before the election in Nevada and was in a regional campaign office in northwest Las Vegas when they called the election for Obama.
• I took some photographs, most of which I still have to upload to my Flickr account.
• I did some writing and no finishing.
• I tried to get some projects off the ground and didn’t succeed.
• I think I’ve progressed, at least somewhat, as an artist, though until I actually finish something, that’s an unfounded assertion.
• I’ve had full blooded conversations with my nephew and met my niece.
• I’ve cut down on the amount of meat I eat, though not as much as I’d like and not as unfailingly as I’d like.
• I’ve generally started to eat healthier, though the exercise half of that equation is sorely lacking.
• I’ve wasted a lot of time.
• I’ve gotten older.

That’s mostly what I can think of at the moment. I’m sure there are other things, but those are the highlights and there are thoughts I don’t quite have my head around at the moment that go along with a list like this. But we’ll call it an evening for now.

• Home safe and sound. Now for the much needed vacation from the vacation. Thank god I don’t have a job to go to. Wait… #
• @MarsPhoenix Such a thing would be fantastic. I am sold just tell me when and where. #

• Saw the Midway ATC tower and go through the employee security line thanks to Ryan. It’s good to have friends in high places. Bad dum bum. #