When it has to be really good and it has to be nailed, tonight, they call Meeno. The Cuban said to me between shots, ‘It’s trust.’ That was a huge and resonant compliment.
How many million more of the faith horde are now looking at my photo of the Black Eyed Peas. It’s a good high to know I’ve contributed a taste of my good “shit”, as Keith Richards would say, to the quick river of the Mass Media that is my canvas.
With the album drop an hour away, every music video from Ozzy to Gaga on YouTube right now has my BEP ad beneath it. That means everybody surfing the turf of music vidi’s tonight is seeing my new shot of the Black Eyed Peas. About a gazillion eyes. That’ss some kind of entry into the pantheon of Campbell’s Soup Can Pop Mass Art Media, right?
Lots of gifts this year, and lots of goodness won by plying the gifts. This is a simple religion I’m living. Bacchus meets Fred Flintstone meets Mohammed meets Thoreau or some such mash-up. Who’s a great father figure to admire? Herman Munster was a very cool cat and only wanted the best for his kids. I never watched Little House On The Prairie, but there was probably something to be learned there. The tomes I hold inside me are the ones I turn to for guidance and I find a very fine home for my identity in the essence of being a father. And the glow of our girls’ lives intones that we must be doing something right in our parentage and general children husbandry. Sing a song and tell ‘em they”re living free. They go by a mini Hell’s Angels ethic, it seems to suit them fine and it’s alright by me.
It was one of the first tree’s she had planted when we moved in 8 years ago. A majestic eucalyptus was promised in amongst the the hundred year old yuccas and the other big banana-boat leaved hardwood. But it couldn’t wait to get at that southernly California sun, so it elbow’d left at a young age and grew sideways. Ilse tells me now that it always had a crook in it, ever since it was given as a going away gift when we were thrown out of The Brewery. “That’s probably why that guy gave it to me, ’cause it took a turn.” There are many things in Ilse’s enchanted garden that grow free form, not the least of which are our daughters. But this tree always nagged her, it was not aesthetically interesting just because it grew up and then sideways and worse, as it had now gotten big, it was promising to do some real damage when it finally crashed over as it certainly would at some point in its crooked future. We had talked about it and any inference that we ought to get a professional tree crew up here was scoffed at. So when Ilse showed up this morning with 4 hours on a rented chainsaw at the end of a long stick, I gleefully jumped right in. Her adventures are always my favorites.
When BEP need their new visuals, they come to me. ‘Big mega radio smasher.’ We like this state of affairs.
Witnessed on a stroll around Downtown. The other day, while waiting interminably for a shoot to start when both Keyshia Cole and then Nikki Menage couldn’t nail down their looks for the day and thus kept production in a free falling wait, I took the opportunity to walk the November fresh streets in crisp Autumn light. I fell quickly exto-spective.
DosPasos and I struck out for the birth of color before another day of shooting on the bleached salt flats with Diddy.
It’s a week of a birthday party for our CHICKS who share the same birthday, four years apart. One of yesterday’s mini-extravaganzas was going thrifting, an endeavor in which the clothes get just that much closer to fitting. Another heart breaking indication of how they get big way too fast.
