I'm being forced against my better judgement to take an "alternative portraiture" class at school, which mostly annoys me because I don't see how it's useful to teach "alternative" portraiture without first having a class on what is "mainstream" portraiture. But hey. I don't make the rules, I just pay the tuition.

So this teacher likes to start out the class with self portraits. I had him once before and he had everybody do a nude self portrait. It was interesting seeing all my classmates' solutions for either exaggerating or hiding their genitalia, but it resulted in a lot of really, really bad lighting. Mine was less traumatic than expected, but I'm not uploading it. There are really quite enough asses on the internet already.

This time was thankfully not a nude self-portrait, but rather an interpretive self-portrait, both of myself and of an inanimate object that I feel represents me. This is me. These are my glasses.

Yes, I'm that geek kid you beat on in elementary school. Yes, that's a Merck index (the same one in which I actually went through and underlined all the interesting chemicals back when I did that sort of thing), and yes, I took the picture without my glasses on. And no, I don't know how I managed to get anything in focus without my glasses on.

I'm taking yet another class from Ann Cutting, one of my favorite photographers even before I started at Art Center. I sent her fan mail once. Well, twice, actually. She's one of those people who just seems effortlessly creative, all the time. She snaps a picture and it comes out art. She's also wicked smart. And really really nice. I hope she doesn't read this, I'll get embarrassed. Anyway.

She gives some one word assignments, mostly because it seems like a lot of editorial and stock uses need metaphorical images to represent a relatively simple concept in a new way. Last term I agonized through "connection" and came out with some plug people. This time, it's "potential". Does this say potential to you?

I shot this digital, like the last one, and I have to say, the Nikon 990/995 sucks. The camera probably has the worst UI of anything I've ever used, and really bad gradient banding I fought with (mostly unsuccessfully, as you can probably tell). I spent a lot of time adding noise and switching back and forth into LAB color mode. Not happy. I also had to reshoot the whole thing because I couldn't tell on the tiny LCD back if anything was in focus. It wasn't. Michael was a very, very patient head. I still like the fact I could shoot it and then open it on my computer 5 minutes later, but I am fantasizing about the day that we are suddenly presented with digital cameras that pop out 80MB files and act just like regular cameras. Using that Nikon gives me the same feeling I had futzing with my Apple II. It's so cool, but I know there's gotta be something better coming really soon. I just hope it'll be less than $20k.

Rob's latest blog-related obsession is combing through his referrer logs to see what strange searches have brought people to his website, so in a fit of enthusiastic procrastination this evening, I thought I'd take a look at mine.

Those of you who have ended up here because you were looking for the song from the new Kia car commercial, the busty Asian porn star Kia or her co-star Peter North, "penetrable gaze" lingerie, a Doors song called "Like My Fire" (light, it's light), pictures of hammer toes, Volkswagen camper horror stories, where to find Eggo waffles in San Jose, or, god forbid, Jimmy Stewart handsoap, I'm sorry. This must be terribly disappointing for you.

On the day after the burn at Burning Man this year, as a gift to everybody who hadn't left yet, I whipped out my trusty old Crown Graphic press camera and took a 4x5 Polaroid of each member of our camp so everybody could have a picture of what they looked like after a week (or more) in the desert. I finally got around to scanning the Polaroid Type 55 negatives that didn't get torn, crumpled or scratched beyond recognition on the way back from Burning Man. So, if any of you don't see your picture, you got a one of a kind print! Maybe it'll uh, be worth something someday.

So take a look at 18 happy campers from Get Lost! (who, for the most part, look surprisingly fresh and clean for having spent a week with no running water).

I've been in a miserable mood all weekend. I'm sick of the heat, I'm sick of the constant, beating, oppressive sunshine. I sit inside all day doing nothing because it's too hot to go out, and when it's finally cooled off, I'm too tired from sitting in the heat all day. So goes my life in Los Angeles. No wonder everybody here lives in their cars. It's the only way to actually go out and see the outside world while still remaining in the relative comfort of air conditioning.

Leek sent me a link to an op-ed piece in the Seattle Times today about fall in Seattle. It made me wanna cry. I would happily trade a year's worth of LA sunshine for just one drizzly Seattle afternoon.

I've been getting some nifty catalogs lately from Veer, a bunch of people who appear to be one of the few remaining creative stock photo agencies that haven't been swallowed by Getty Images or the dreaded Corbis. I like the catalogs. They nail me in the forehead demographically. They are like the stock agency equivalent of a Jetta. They're giving away messenger bags. They have a swingin' hip logo that is refreshingly free of swooshes, dots or little jumping men. Their design is gorgeous, their type is clean, and they openly admit to not using Quark. So of course I like them.

I took a look at their website, and even though it is strangely completely lacking in any information about the company itself (please say they're not actually in Provo, Utah), it does have some neat features - not only can you download some free desktop pictures, they have a really spiffy "ideas" blog on the site.

Anybody know anything else about these people? I really want to like them, so don't tell me they're owned by Time Warner or something.

Today I woke up, took a shower, and took a blowtorch to a plastic baby doll. Sometimes art school is fun.

To the 3,025 people who died on September 11, 2001:

I'm sorry that you died for this. You worked hard, you came in early, you were just at your desk, you were just getting on a plane, you were just minding your own business, and you were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with you, nothing at all.

The spectacular, terrible moment of your death made us look up for a moment from our People magazines and our sitcoms and our trips to Walmart, and for one day we sat weeping in front of our televisions, or on our rooftops, watching in disbelief, mouths open, speechless except for the expletives we whispered when the towers collapsed in front of us, over and over, replayed in slow motion from a hundred different angles on the TV. We watched, helpless as you as you jumped from windows, holding hands as you burned, as you suffocated, as you suffered in fear and pain and panic. We could not believe what we were seeing that day, just as you surely could not have believed what was happening to you in those last moments of your life.

I'm sorry that your deaths have become an excuse. Your names have been cheapened, taken in vain over and over, to sell stickers and flags and cars and toilet paper, to justify imprisonment and torture and fear. You are an excuse for liberals to say "I told you so" and an excuse for conservatives to parade the flag and push a war that has nothing to do with you, or the people who killed you. The place where you died has become a sightseeing destination, happy tourists waving, smiling into a camera in front of the place where you last breathed, terrified, lungs full of smoke and dust.

We pick at the scab of our pain today, not the pain of your friends, your relatives, your survivors, who know what it is to have lost you, but our pain, the pain of watching others die in front of our eyes. We want to feel something too. We fetishize those moments we saw on television, fetishize that loss as meaningful and at the same time strip it of meaning by not understanding, not asking why it happened.

The television tells us to remember September 11th. Should we remember this each year, on this day, remember to re-live the horror and fear and shock as we listen to the eulogies and speeches and memorials? Or should we remember why this has all happened, and question why it happened, and determine how to stop it from happening again?

I'm back. Back in the real world, back in school, back in LA. This seems like it should be such a small thing, coming back from a few week's vacation. Instead I feel like I've been forced to leave the place where I belong. I'm not alone in this. My friends all tell me of their post-Burning Man depression, that initial shock of returning to the real world, to jobs and responsibility and television news.

Sitting here at a desk, in front of a computer, I feel like I imagined the whole trip, that this city in the middle of a dry lakebed in Nevada never existed, and I half doubt that I ever saw a burning temple of plywood lace, a whale that breached five hundred miles from the ocean, a hundred strange automobiles that spit fire and hurled flames, a city that grew from nothing to something and back again in a week's time.

I'm still having dreams about the desert, dreams where I am riding my bicycle across an endless expanse, lights twinkling on the horizon, city lights like no other. I dream that I am under a sky full of stars so close I can touch them. I reach up and the Milky Way is like mist through my fingers, the night breeze cool and dry against my skin. In my dreams, I am home.