Category: My Ramblings!

There’s a reason most self-published work is self-published. Sometimes it’s a vanity project. Sometimes it just isn’t “very good”. I get that. But I’ve been making pictures for a while now, and enough people have taken notice that I figured it was time to put more of my work out there—on my own terms.

Four Minute Mile is my first self-published photozine. It collects some of my portraits—though I’m not a big fan of the traditional definition of portraiture. Some of my favorite subjects are strangers, other photographers at work, sex workers, oddballs, and weirdos. People who made me pause, or made me nervous. People who truly earn their living. Some I know well. Some I met literally seconds before I hit the shutter. All of them terrific subjects.

I’m a big believer in Cartier-Bresson’s idea of a “decisive moment.” I also think about Eggleston’s “democratic way of looking around.” I probably think about stuff like this way more than I should. And in our digital world where everyone’s a photographer, the real challenge is getting someone to stop and do a little more than just glance at your picture.

Four Minute Mile is full color, short run—99 numbered copies and 26 lettered copies that come with a giclée print laid in. I made the pictures in all kinds of places: on the street, in flea markets, thrift stores, porno sets, red carpet events, backyard BBQs, hotel lobbies, and professional studios.

There won’t be any reprints. But Four Minute Mile will be a quarterly series—until it runs its course. I’ve got a lot of images I’d like to show you, so who knows how long that’ll take.

In the meantime, here we go.

I’m a sucker for vintage, underground newspapers—and even more so for their back-page ads. Sure, the content is great. Some of the articles in Berkeley Barb, The Oracle, and Open City are essential counterculture journalism. But the ads? That’s where the real treasures lie.

They’re flimsy things, barely held together if in collectible condition. Flip through and you’ll find offers for Super 8 adult films, pen pals from prison, rock shows I wish I’d seen—and the occasional rare gem you never knew existed.

Like this one.

Tucked away in the Open City First Anniversary Issue was an ad that stopped me cold. A hand-drawn offer for a long-playing record of poetry. One side: Charles Bukowski. One side: Steve Richmond. Each reading his own work. Send 3 bucks to Earth Rose in Venice, California, and you’d get it.

I’ve seen this record. I’ve heard it. I even managed to own one. But I’ve never seen this ad. And trust me—being both a Bukowski and a record geek, I would’ve stumbled upon it somewhere.

The record is mythical-level rare. Maybe a dozen copies survive. It’s so rare most Bukowski collectors don’t even know about it. Oh sure, they know 90 Minutes in Hell or certainly the few released later in his life. But this one? Richmond issued it himself under his Earth Rose imprint. And the story I was told? After releasing it, Richmond asked Bukowski what he thought about the record.

Buk’s reply: You sound like T.S. Eliot.

You sound like T.S. Eliot.

That was that. Richmond destroyed the rest of the pressing; only the handful he managed to sell survive.

And the ad survives, too. Maybe it was the only one Richmond could afford—I don’t know. But this is what keeps me thumbing through paper that feels like it might disintegrate at any moment—just to find one more gem.

Some mornings I stare at my phone, and it’s like being hit by an avalanche of greatness. Sometimes I think what’s so great about any of this? Substack, X, YouTube, Instagram, Blue Sky, Threads, Facebook. On a good day, they’re all kinda brilliant. On a bad day, they’re all fucking garbage. Or maybe it’s the other way around. One thing’s for sure—I’m overwhelmed.

This morning, I stumbled on a photo of David Johansen and Johnny Thunders on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen others…just not this one. They’re in front of Frederick’s, just chillin’ on a trash can in peak New York Dolls mode. Then I’m reading a tight little essay on Modernism that enlightened me on À la recherche du temps perdu (spoiler: not a wine). Over on YouTube? A Minutemen video from the ’80s I didn’t know existed. Then the New York Times app pings me: the 10-minute audio news roundup. Just news. No editorializing. Well. Kinda. My kinda editorializing! But wait—should I listen to Sherman Alexie read Carver’s Where I’m Calling From instead? My New Yorker app is open too.

So I text my NYC Crew: “How often do you guys feel overwhelmed with all the stuff we have access to?”

NYC Crew 1 replies: “It makes me feel ick. Manipulated.”

As I read that, I’m literally listening to Haruomi Hosono—never heard of him until Tosh Berman’s Substack post, like, 30 minutes earlier. (Hosono is so good. So weird. Very cool. Kinda like Tosh!)

A minute later, Crew 2 chimes in: “I feel bad when I get sucked into Twitter and can’t pull away.” But in 1990, if someone said they got lost in a novel for hours, we didn’t call that a problem. Unless maybe it was Danielle Steele. Wasn’t she ridiculous?

So yeah, maybe the algorithm’s feeding me crumbs. But mine? Only the cool crumbs, damnit! Sometimes they’re delicious, too. Other times, they’re a madeleine dipped in tea. Which—as I now know—is how you start remembering everything.

I don’t believe in reincarnation. But sometimes, I get this odd déjà vu when I’m rifling through a big box of loose photos at a flea market. Something stirs—part memory, part imagination. The “memory” seems to linger more than the imagination, that’s for sure. The memory? Why does it feel like I might have been at that parade?

I can spend hours digging in a single box of old pictures. I have, too. Many times. And discarded photo albums! Turning those pages creates a strange intimacy—flipping through the days of someone else’s life.

We make more photos in a single day now than were made in the first 150 years (give or take) of analogue photography. Today’s photos live on phones. Disposable. Delete-able. Quickly forgotten. But every analogue shot? Those mattered. You had either 12, or sometimes 24, and if you splurged, 36 shots in a roll. It made a photog to think. The photog had to slow down. I need to slow down.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing about all this. I guess it’s The Floating Gnome. That’s what I call this parade float photo I found. Four black photo corners, affixed to a comic book backer board, then slid into its poly bag and ready to find a new home.

That’s what I do with these pictures. I find them, and save them, then savor them. Eventually, I sell them. They deserve to be saved—from the city dump, mainly. They deserve better. They’re tiny little masterpieces in their own right.

But sometimes I wonder—did I see that gnome in another life, in some other city long ago? The woman holding the rifle. How do I know her? Those flappers laughing in front of the Model-T and showing a little leg. Was I married to the one in the middle — in a life I can only recall in some weird space in my mind? I don’t know. But some of these pictures feel oddly familiar. Actually, more than I’d like to admit.

Or maybe I just love weird, old photos.

Hey — don’t judge.

I’m no surfer. I tried it once—on tiny waves in Hawaii, the summer of 2006, while on vacation with a porn star. Vacationing with a porn star should be a whole other blog…but a vacation in which I managed to ride a few tiny waves is what you get now. Doesn’t matter if the waves were small, surfing them was exhilarating.

Closest you can get to surfing is skating, and I skated when I was a kid. A lot…on the street, in homemade, wooden half-pipes and in Phoenix’s one skate park  — Highroller. I even recall skating at this weird, temporary skatepark that was made out of blue, fiberglass pieces that were assembled and disassembled as the park moved from place to place. I’ve only suffered one broken bone in my life, and it happened in Highroller’s concrete half pipe. Which is about the time I called it quits.

It didn’t take long to realize I liked the culture of skating more than I actually liked to skate. Tony Alva and Jay Adams. The idea of trespassing into someone’s back yard to skate their empty pool (no empties where I grew up in Arizona…and if so, would I have had the balls to trespass?). Skateboarder Magazine. Punk rock. Dogtown and Badlands. Stacey Peralta and The Logan family. 360’s and hand stands. Memories of begging my dad for plywood and two-by-fours from the homes he built, so my friends and I could build our own half-pipe (he finally said yes!). Oh — and Big Brother!

All things I love to this day. And I love The Surfer’s Journal. It’s my only magazine subscription. Mainly because it’s one of those rare magazines that still feels like something. Embossed cover. Thick, toothy paper. It’s a quarterly, so it’s substantial. Gorgeous photography. Layouts I want to linger over. Flipping through an issue of Surfer’s Journal reminds me of why I love books and printed matter in the first place: the experience of the object. It’s very tangible…which, to me, is a thing.

The writing’s good, too. Lifestyle stories, mainly. Beautiful photography. When I read TSJ, it makes me want to surf.

In fact, in my next life I shall surf.

There’s a particular kind of magic that comes from forgetting where you are — not physically, but photographically. That’s part of why I love shooting 35mm film on my Kodak Ektar H35. (Boy, did that sound like a commercial…or what?)

The camera’s half-frame format splits a standard 36-exposure 35mm roll into 72 17.5mm images, and that simple doubling shifts everything. When I get my pics back from the lab, each one made ends up married to another — a diptych dictated not by concept or sequence, but by time, accident, and the peculiar rhythms of life. Separated by a thick, black line. I almost forgot to mention the beautiful, lo-fi quality, too — from the camera itself to the pictures it makes.

I’ll go hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months between frames. I’ll shoot one image and then forget about it. Life moves. I move. And when the roll finally finishes and I develop it? There’s often a surreal, poetic dissonance waiting for me: a stranger in hot pink fur next to a tiny dog in a red Adirondack chair. I made that picture hours apart in a day spent in NYC. But different moods. Different places. And the same frame.

What I love about this format isn’t the economy — though that’s part of it. It’s the randomness, the surprise. The way memory, film, and time get scrambled into something new. It’s like flipping through a stranger’s photo album and finding out it’s yours.

More soon (who knows when!), as I keep working my way toward another 72 in the can to drop at my local film lab.

Here’s how old I am: I grew up with exactly nine TV channels — and none of them ran 24 hours a day.

And trust me — nine stations was plenty. I was in big-city Chicago, after all — a major media market. My VHF lineup covered the basics: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Then came the two UHF channels, 32 and 44. I won’t bore you with the technical differences between VHF and UHF (ask ChatGPT if you’re curious), but trust me: UHF was where the cool stuff aired.

Channel 32 showed old reruns: Batman and The Little Rascals and The Munsters and Get Smart! But 44? 44 was sacred. Because Sunday mornings in the 1970s meant only one thing on every channel except 44: church. Seriously, every station was full of people praying and priests mumbling Latin and handing out communion. Except Channel 44…and Bob Luce Wrestling. I never missed Sunday Morning wrestling.

Sometimes tuning in meant wrapping foil around the rabbit ears just to kill the snow and static and to minimize “ghosts”. Bob Luce brought cigar-chomping Dick the Bruiser, his tag partner The Crusher! Baron Von Raschke and his “claw”! Big Cat Ernie Ladd and his thumb! Moose Cholak! Ox Baker!

Luce wasn’t just a promoter — he was a ringmaster in a plaid sport coat. His shows jumped from grainy locker-room rants to shaky in-ring chaos, always hyping “the wildest card of the century” at the International Amphitheatre. (Remind me to tell you about the time the roof caved in there during the Ice Follies.) Like all great promoters, Luce didn’t sell wrestling. He sold spectacle. Good versus Evil. And for a Chicago kid glued to 44 every Sunday, there was nothing like it. The only thing I hated? When they’d suddenly “run out of time” and end the show mid-match.

And why didn’t I beg my dad take me to the International Amphitheatre for Luce’s live shows? It’s a question that baffles me to this day. I guess it just never crossed my mind.

I quit paying attention sometime around The Rock, Stone Cold, Hulk Hogan as heel and what would be the end of Bischoff’s fantastic WCW run. But wrestling’s always stuck with me. Always. These days, I use vintage wrestling imagery as source material for my art. So when Dom Vitalli from Phoenix Championship Wrestling offered me a ringside spot to shoot pictures for his local league, guess who showed up two hours early with a couple of cameras hanging around my neck just to hang backstage with the wrestlers.

Let’s just say I was way more excited for tag teams, body oil, and shaved men than I should’ve been.

So, here’s the thing. In my last rambling, I took a very cheap shot at A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. I joked it was about as collectible as a used coloring book. And while that line still makes me chuckle a bit (I try to avoid laughing at my own jokes) — I’ve had a change of heart.

Because the more I sat with that book, the more I realized: it is something. I could find maybe six or seven copies online — total. Before the internet (does anyone remember AB Bookman’s Weekly?!), tracking down this book would’ve been really difficult. And when you actually read it — when you feel the illustrated cloth boards, take a good look at Ernest Shepard’s illustrations, or how about that Christopher Robin frontispiece?! — it is special.

Nope, it’s not a first. And it’s certainly not pristine. But so what? It’s nearly a hundred years old, and it’s survived wars, floods, a child’s careless hands, and who knows how many house moves. Maybe it’s not “collectible” in the formal sense. But it’s charming. It’s vintage. And it still matters.

I think that’s the part I forgot when I penned that blog: sometimes a book’s value isn’t in scarcity, but in how it feels in your hands.

And this one? It may not be rare by some definitions — but unlike a scroll or a screen or a swipe or a JPEG, it’s got weight, texture, that wonderful, slight scent of a used book…and a whole lotta Soul.

Look, I’ve made worse decisions.

I’ve bought more than one book that wasn’t a true first. I remember pulling a near fine, beautiful clothbound For Whom The Bell Tolls—its bright, unread spine screaming at me from a thrift store shelf during my early collecting days—only to later discover it lacked that Scribner’s “A”… and a dust jacket. Still, I skipped out of there thinking I’d scored.

Or, on the flip side, there was the time I bought a handful of letters (well, more like short, typewritten notes signed in ink) from William S. Burroughs to the editor of a tiny, obscure little magazine. The editor handed them to me and asked, “Can you give me $140 for the lot?”

This was 1997. I was part of a collective of booksellers in a San Francisco shop called Tall Stories, in the Mission District. I looked over the final Burroughs note while considering the price. It read something like (and I’m paraphrasing here): soon, the last pygmy three-toed sloth will be blasted into extinction from its tree by a white hunter wielding his shotgun.

Do me a favor and read that last line again — this time imitating Burroughs’ flat, nasal, sonorous delivery.

“Yes, I’ll take them.”

After The Editor left, I priced my six letters at $280—double my money!—and slipped them into the store’s shared glass case. Not long after, Alan Milkerit, a real bookman who’d been teaching me the ropes, walked in and noticed something amiss in the case. He looked closer. He opened the case and snapped my letters up. Then he tossed three $100 bills on the counter and said to me, sternly, “Haven’t I taught you anything yet, boy?”

Fast forward to my latest gaffe: A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. Yeah. I should’ve done a little homework. In my defense, it looked like something. I was on one of those lesser-known auction sites, thinking, this one’s being overlooked—especially since the listing and its description didn’t even mention “Winnie the Pooh.” But no edition check, no online comps, and was it originally issued in a jacket? (Yes, it was.) In the end, I went with a hunch and twenty bucks.

Turns out the auction house doesn’t describe books very well, either; which means mine might be as collectible as a used coloring book. (Okay… just a little more.)

We’ve all got blind spots. Mine, apparently, are English nursery rhymes. And the less-trafficked auction sites.

More soon—assuming I don’t fall for a mid-grade Babar next.