notablog

4/17/05

My memory has never been particularly good. When I was younger, and up until a few weeks ago, I thought this was related to my ADHD. I mean, if I can't pay attention to things, how can I expect to remember them?

Now I've began to wonder if it's more serious than that. I can't remember anything I do when I'm on my Ritalin, which is supposed to make my mind work better. Sure, I can get stuff completed, but I can't remember the time I spent completing it. It's no better when I'm off the meds, either. I'm seriously worried my brain might be dying.

Unbelievable. As I'm writing this I've fucking forgotten the tomatoes in the kitchen. I can hear then burning. Now I gotta go in, throw away that food, and put on more tomatoes.

Socrates once said that writing things down is a bad habit, that it merely weakens the mind's ability to learn. He's probably right. For a while I made pictures to help me remember what I'd been up to.

I just now experienced a devastating moment of clarity: my photographs are nice pictures but they fail the burning building test miserably. I just looked at them for the first time in a while and realized they come nowhere close to achieving the things I thought they did, which included getting to the heart of their subject matter. They embarrass me. They are artifice. They are pretty.

Janet Delaney once told me that no one will ever care about my work more than me. I used to accept this, but I can't anymore. It's been my goal to make work that art experts and art novices can appreciate equally. But appreciation is merely risk-free; I want to make pictures that somehow matter. And really very few of my pictures matter at all. Art may be essentially useless, but this does not preclude someone from really giving a shit about somebody else's work.

I'm not sad about it, just embarrassed. It feels like a growing pain. I am, though, a bit angry at the world for lying to me about itself for so long. It says to me, "Look, I'm good, do it now" and I do it and I'm pleased with the result. But the world apparently never considered people who aren't predisposed to art. That, I now realize, is the proper response to this moment of clarity: I must appeal to novices exclusively. If someone who does not care about photography- or one of the subjects of my pictures- is suddenly strangely moved by what I've made, then I can, if just momentarily, be proud of myself as an artist.

I have thus at last admitted to myself that I am bored with making decent pictures. I want to make pictures that matter. I hope I'm not setting myself up to fail, but who cares, that's how I always do it.

1/19/05

8/15/04

Hawaii is the third most popular vacation state in the US, despite how much it costs to get there. As you can see, the sights are worth the money.

I was in Hawaii once before in Waikiki (a Japanese colony on Oahu) when I was twelve. Kauai is a lot different, with only a few resorts and a lot of mountainous topical farmland. However, most of the island's beauty is inaccessible, a fact your in-flight magazine reveals after you've been on the plane for six hours. Luckily there are no shortage of advertisements for helicopter tours.

It's amazing how tourists behave exactly the same no matter where they go, spicing themselves up hot for whatever party they think the locals started without them.

My family owns a timeshare at the Kauai Marriot, which is basically a yearly reservation for a hotel room, and which James and I are apparently going to inherit someday. Our room overlooks the resort's private beach. When we went on the balcony, my dad looked out and declared, "Son, someday this will all be yours."

7/20/04

7/13/04

Yeah. So I golf. So what?

I do understand golf has a very unfortunate social history. But to boycott the game for discrimination would be like protesting a wall by refusing to find a way to get over it.

Actually, golf teaches its players a lesson that ought to work against its use as a tool of discrimination. Unlike faster sports that force you to react to a moving ball, golf gives you all the time in the world to think about your shot. This puts the impatient and the ill-mannered at a well-deserved disadvantage. Golf is thus (fashion aside) a game that requires dignity to be played well: you have to become a better person if you want a better score, as well as people to play with in the future. It's like a kindergarten activity for adults.

But if that's true, why did England, the country that invented golf, think its stockpile of dignity obliged it to colonize India and countless other places? I don't know. I said ought.

6/30/04

My last meal before becoming a vegetarian (again) was an al pastor taco from the El Grullo taco truck on International Boulevard in Oakland. If you've never had a taco from here, imagine the best In-N-Out you've ever had, and then imagine it costing a dollar.

My basic problem with meat is that it comes from slaves. Animals are born and raised in horrific conditions until it's time to die like pigs. These animals taste so incredible after their marbled muscles are carmelized by thin deposits of surrounding fat. Al pastor tacos are made from tiny strips of pig muscle soaked in salty Mexican marinade.

All of the profits made by El Grullo support Mexican culture. The meat is served in the middle of a parking lot. Not that it really makes a difference.

6/24/04

5/18/04

As most of you know, I do not get this upset very often. But May was a tough month. Three seminars, plus learning of Emily's kidney disease, and what really got me was the beheading of that guy Nick Berg. I don't know whether it was because he was from Philadelphia or not, or because it was too much to think about it on top of the prison abuses. I couldn't stop imagining myself as Nick Berg. Sitting in that chair, being pulled to the floor, screaming as a machete sawed off my head. I couldn't stop wondering, worrying about what I would be able to think about. My family? Christine? Emily dying of kidney failure? I wanted to be able to be think about Christine, how much I love her. But would I be able to do it if I didn't know I was going to be beheaded first? From watching that video I got the feeling Nick Berg had no idea. He was calm when speaking to the camera, and started screaming when they started sawing his head off. I would die without thinking of Christine. Or my family. Or Emily. I would just die. I couldn't stop thinking about that.

5/7/04

Emily was diagnosed with kidney failure
yesterday. She is only three years old. She
had been tearing up in one eye and losing
weight, and so we brought her in to the vet
for what we thought was going to be a fairly
easy visit.

Eighty percent of her kidney function is
gone. Hopefully she will live another year.
The doctors don't know what happened.

Emily is one of the greatest beings who ever
lived. She brings only good into the world.
She loves love. She purrs so loudly when I
hold her and rub her feet. But now we have
to give her fluids every day with a needle
under her skin. She squirms violently and
Christine has to hold her down.

Finally I get to go back to the east coast and see my family and friends. Actually (I found out something I already knew was the case- that) the only people who really wanted to see me at all were my family. Pomranz aside, I ran into some old acquaintances and half of them, having not seen me for seven years, were just like, "yeah, I remember you." You might think I was a real asshole seven years ago, even more so than today. But that wasn't it. The problem is that I wasn't born in Philadelphia. And so without that "since-the-beginning" personal history shit, my leaving and returning was nothing for anyone to be nice to me about. In the west coast we've got the golden rule to govern our interpersonal relationships, which works better.

People in the east coast just look different from people in the west coast, too. Take my cousin Sarah, for instance. Blonde and beautiful. And here we are, in a car- that is, in neutral coastal territory- and she seemed foreign. I hadn't seen someone like that in the back of my car in a very long time.

One of the millstones of the Dorothea Lange Fellowship is the publicity. Most artists actually do want it badly, and before I started getting it I was the same way. Deep down you want people to think this thing you uselessly do matters. And the publicity proves it does.

But when you get it you're immediately confused by how banal you turn out to be. You thought it would make you feel more important for having done your useless thing. You begin to think, "There's that guy Andrew Moisey, he's buying bananas. When will he eat them?"

I'm over that now. One cool thing about the publicity is that with the Internet, tons of people find out about you and talk about you behind your back. Recently I discovered that there's a Greek chat room that had chatted about my frat project briefly. It was the first time I'd ever read anyone's opinion about my work. It was, for me at least, my first published review. Click here if you're interested. And click here if you want to see Berkeley's press release.

10/27/05

Emily isn't dead yet, for some reason.

I believe that pets are people who went to heaven when they died. The best people get owners who love them as much as I love Emily. I tell my cat how much I love her many times a day. I touch her head and tell her about how she stinks. In reality she smells good, but she usually purrs when I tell her she doesn't. Every morning, she likes to decide to leave the house and spend the day in the garden with the squirrel, or to sleep all day on my desk or on the couch. When I come home, I give her food, and she purrs while she eats it.

Emily's kidney's are still as bad as they were a year ago, but she doesn't seem to be getting any worse. To look at her you wouldn't think anything was wrong.

I have a good idea where Emily is going to go when she dies. I am going to get a vial of her blood so I can clone her when I can afford it. I'm also going to get a vial of my own blood. The gates of heaven will be propped open with a syringe. Neither of us are ever going to die.

11/10/05

If abstraction is valuable because it excites the eye into play - and not for any other material reason - is it possible that it is an art practice unto itself, like architecture, or scultpture, or photography?

If their material differences are undetectable, an "identical" abstract painting and photograph will, to the same viewer, ellicit identical experiences.

Do we at last discover the differences among our established practices in the moment we recognize just the slightest hint of figurative representation within what seemed to be a pure abstraction?

11/16/05

The ease with which photographers discover they can, inside their cameras, switch between their own feelings and others' feelings eventually makes them skeptical of the importance of their own concerns.

If the camera opens up new versions of the world to us (the most, I think, we can ever hope of a photograph), and if the theorists among us could begin anew with the experienced photographer�s skepticism, then we would at last admit that the photographer has too many worlds available at the push of a button for us to talk about photographs as declarations of any kind.

Why in the world do we talk about photographs as if their perspectives were statements? Even worse: as if the statements were unmalleable? Why can�t the theorist pick up the camera, experience the groundlessness of perspective, and start over?

Emily has moved on. About a week ago she stopped eating, and she stopped drinking water a few days later. Then she stopped moving. The doctors said it would end this way. We called in a specialist to put her down. We did it on my bed and I wept with my brother and Christine.

I thought it was going to hurt to look at my pictures of her. I also thought it was going to hurt that I have only one picture of her and I together. But neither of these things hurt. My pictures of her make me so happy. Because in them I am me, and she is the cat.

She is the greatest.

2/15/06

10/13/06

Ahhhh! I have had the worst week. Last weekend threw me off and i have not been able to recover. I'm not sure if you got my e-mail sunday pm, but i did not write my network/being there paper last weekend. It turns out that come this afternoon i still had not finished it (though i made a lot of progress) and i was planning on sending it to derek by 8 tonight (my peer-editing partner who i have kept informed)but my computer fell on floor and now it is not working. I'm not going to lie...i still had half the essay to go but it fell when i was on a roll so i am really mad and also my paper was turning out to be really good in my opinion.. but back to the story - i was working on a table in my suite's common room and this table's fourth leg broke off, but it is usually pretty steady because we put some cardboard to prop it up on the splinter that is left of the 4th leg. anyways i was leaning down to get my outline that was on the floor when the table tipped over with my computer and glass of orange juice. the compter has a dent in it from falling but i'm not sure wether the damage that is causeing it to go black before i turn it on is from the juice, which got all over it, of the fall. Im going to call apple to see what i should do...Not getting it done earlier this week or before my parents came on friday is really biting me in the bud now..but i tried i dont know what my problem is. I had this problem in highschool - the longer i think about a paper the more I am hyper-active when i write papers I seriously can spend a two hours on one sentence. i have realized this problem for a while now but have gotten along (mostly because i had a teacher who didn't care if it was late as long as it was good..which also bit me in the bud in the end because i had three papers to write the last week of my fall semester (I actually got out of one by just by verbalizing my argument and by pleading insanity and also becuase he (my english teacher) was a family friend)I have just barely gotten by though.. i also finished my UC app the hour that it was due online. I guess what i mean to ask is how much trouble am I in? Right now i am just planning on being able to recover my paper .. i haven't even thought about what i would do if i cant..sorry for the lengthy e-mail just dont know exactly what else to do because i ahve nebver really been in this much trouble before. I can still peer-edit derek's paper so i will do that for tomorrow, but he wont be able to do mine..so you can dock points off my class participation if needed. I will bring in my computer tomorrow in case you need proof (there is a big dent which is really sad because it was my brand new macbook pro) and my essay was really good and i worked a lot on it over the week so please please understand. however if you dont thats ok too. even though i am kind of scared to go to class tomorrow i will suck it up.. i know it is not the end of the world. well see you tomorrow hopefully i will be able to retrieve my paper in the works of my computer.

La personne au gauche ici est "M�m�re," ma grand-m�re fran�aise-canadienne. Elle �tait une grande mauvais-faisante, mais pas maintenant. Maintenant elle est morte.

C'est pas dommage. Elle n'adorait pas ses enfants, ou son mari, ma m�re, mon p�re, mon fr�re, ou moi. Et elle a v�cu avoir beaucoup d'ans, je pense quatre-vingt treize. Elle a continu� � vivre pour vingt ann�es apr�s la morte de mon grand-p�re.

Elle �tait qu�b�coise, et donc elle aurait �t� la personne, l'ami, avec qui je pourrais avoir pratiqu� mon fran�ais. Mais elle ne m'adorait pas, et elle toujours parlait anglais. J'�tais la seule personne l� quand elle a parl� ses mots derniers. Ils m'�taient chuchot�s en fran�ais, et je ne pouvais pas les comprendre.

10/25/06

In May, Ken Light over at the Graduate School of Journalism asked me if I would contribute a print to his auction. I gave him this one because I though it was the one picture of mine I like that I thought might resonate on the photojournalism vibe. But in September the main guy here died of a drug overdose. His name was Fre.

After people die, the pictures they aren't smiling in become pretty spooky. This is because when people who are still alive see them, their own fear of death looks back.

I went to the auction with my ever-supportive parents. When I arrived, a girl approached me and told me that her friend had made a memorial video for Fre's parents, and he was coming. I said I would love to meet him. Soon after I did, and the auction started.

Nothing was selling. Not enough people had come, and valuable pictures were selling for one or two hundred dollars. But when mine came up, some woman immediately bid $150. I couldn't believe it. I mean, what was she going to do with it?

Then suddenly my dad bid $200. I would have given him a print for free, but he wanted to make sure his son's picture was not undersold. I was both grateful and embarrassed. But then that girl's friend, the kid who made the memorial video, bid $250. So my dad bid $300. And the kid bid $350. And so my dad bid $400. And the kid bid $450. So my dad bid $500. Sold.

"Jesus Christ," Dad.
"What?"
"Dad, I think that kid over there was bidding for the dead kid's family."
"What dead kid?"
"The dude in my picture, Dad. The guy." My dad thought about this for a minute.
"Huh," he said.

After ten minutes of silence had passed, my dad leaned over my mom to talk to me. "Your mother and I need to get going. Now if you want, you can go tell that kid that if he really is buying it for that kid's family, then he can have it for $450--because that's what he bid for it."

I walked over to the kid and, in a much more sympathetic voice, relayed my dad's offer. The kid thought about it for a long time.

11/5/06