Metro Rail

I don't live in Los Angeles. When I travel, I sometimes tell people I do, but then add the addendum "Well, I actually live just outside of Los Angeles in Long Beach." You can see their faces fall a little. They thought they had just met someone who had made it, who had arrived in the glittering city to the West, but then they found out they were just talking to another plebian like themselves. LA isn't far from me, 15 to 25 minutes in a car in good traffic, but I don't have a car which means it's 2 hours away on the Metro.

Ah, the Metro. Think of all the strange things you've witnessed on public transportation and then put them all together in one single trip. The homeless man who keeps dropping little plastic packages and then shooting across the train car to retrieve them and then breaking into deafening laughter; the smelly man sitting across from you who openly and ostentatiously picks his nose and then runs his fingers through his hair; the tall young man with the looks of an Adonis who regaling boards the car to hoots and whistles from the teenage girls, he nods at them only briefly before taking his seat like it's a throne.

J lives in LA, and I had yet to visit him up there. I have school every day, but Tuesday was Veteran's Day so I had no class. This seemed an ideal time to make the great trek up to the 7th and Flower stop, plus I was motivated by the opportunity to shoot with Lou O'Bedlam.



His friend Laura Taylor came too, and the above shot is by her. She, with a sleek digital camera, and he with a persnickety little double lensed antique punctuated by the rare use of a polaroid camera. It was fun, though I haven't really modeled for anyone in ages. Maybe I will be able to work with them again, given they're aowed love of hotel rooms and my easy access to one.



I returned home to Long Beach, again on the Metro, and finished printing the accursed thing you see above. I wanted to make something pretty for the print exchange Tyler and I set up to help fund a trip to Southern Graphics Council this March, because I wanted to make something that would sell. What I did not anticipate was that a great many people see someone drowning in that image. I did, however, finish another print on Tuesday that I am happy with which you can read about in the print blog. If you want one of these prints of a person swimming lazily/drowning, they are available for $20 and there are ten available for sale. Shoot me an email and we shall discuss.

Thinking about printing fills me with horror right now. I do not want to assist great hordes of undergrads on how to not destroy their awful poorly done prints today, and so I look forward with great anticipation to National Indiginous Persons Day, only because I can have the printshop all to myself.