Johnny Kimble is the patron saint of chain-smoking, cocky house DJs, hung-over Saturday morning kitchen help, and two-pills-to-pass-out insomniacs. Light a candle for Saint Johnny. Pray for guidance on attracting madly adoring throngs of women and advice on the art of getting people who don't dance moving on the dance floor. Pray for matching beats after 10 beers and a tryst in the storage closet between records. Maybe you will reach Enlightenment. Maybe you will wake up under a stranger's couch with a very large Englishman. Either way, you'll have a good story. He always did.

A few years ago I made something of a hobby of doing goth-style portraits of all my friends. Some of them inevitably came out cheesy, but those that didn't? I treasure them. I did at least one or two a month for most of the time I lived in Seattle, and made little postcard-sized prints which I mailed to friends. Bug is the curator of most of my prints from that era, which were rescued from a gallery owner in Vancouver when I failed to collect them after they'd been shown for a month or two. It is my only work to date that's gotten any fine art showing, and my infant career as a fine artist was doing pretty well before I left Seattle, excepting the fact I never actually sold anything. I still haven't sold anything.

Anyway.

There was one print that was almost good, except for this pesky problem of a horribly inadequate prop. Justin (who is way too cool to have a home page) posed for me as a fallen angel, but the wings I had were just too silly. I spent most of last night scanning feathers to correct the problem. I'm still working on it.

All the self-portraits I have on this website are horribly out-of-date. I built this site originally in 1995 or so, featuring low-res webcam captures I took of myself at age 19 playing dress-up in my room in Santa Cruz. It hasn't changed much since, except for the addition of the weblog. The majority of this site was written in BBedit, on a Mac LC with 16 whopping megs of RAM, in 256 colors, for Netscape 1.1. Everything but this weblog is still perfectly viewable with that same setup. Nothing has changed at all.

The thing is, I've changed a lot. I don't look anything like those pictures anymore. In fact, I probably didn't even look like that then. Not long after I took them, this socially-awkward English bloke named Maynard, a coworker of mine at Apple, came up to me in the hallway outside my office.

"I've seen your website."

"Yeah?"

"You don't look anything like that."

Those are the only words I ever exchanged with Maynard.

Now I have shorter hair, glasses, probably a lot more wrinkles on my forehead. Certainly my life is different than it used to be. In real life, I definitely get a lot fewer random anonymous marriage proposals and creepy "will you be my special internet friend" emails. My goth phase is probably permanently over. I have not been seen wearing a Death t-shirt, Doc Martens, or excessive amounts of black eyeliner since I was old enough to drink. (boo.)

In the spirit of perpetuating this "kia" internet persona thing, however, I thought I'd pitch in a few more completely outdated self portraits. I was digging through some old negs this weekend in the hopes of finding some usable compositing fodder and found a sheet of 35mm black and white negs that I never printed.

So. here's me at age 23, next to what appears to be a pile of laundry in my apartment in Seattle, with different hair and different glasses, and clothes I'm not sure I'd normally admit I ever wore.

God, I was angsty.

Not long before I started school a couple years ago I saved my hard earned (ill-gotten?) cash and bought myself the cheapest, simplest 4x5 camera I could find, a Cambo 45NXII.

Right in the middle of a shoot last week, I'm trying to get the focus right on a dessert with mint leaves that literally wilted in about 30 seconds, and my focus knob falls off. Like, completely. I turn it and it comes loose and falls on the floor. And it won't go back on. Something is stripped. Something that is probably very expensive to replace. In the meantime? I have a camera that I can't focus.

This camera always sort of sucked. I bought it because it was cheap, and it had completely simple controls. I really didn't know anything about shooting large format at the time except that you could make really weird out of focus parts in your picture if you swung the front and back standards different directions. I didn't see the point of "yaw free tilt" or "geared fine focus" knobs. After all, I was going to be a fine art photographer. How things change.

Needless to say, after almost three years of screaming obscenities at this thing when I have to shove the front standard too far one way and then shove it back to focus instead of turning a little knob that moves it a half millimeter at a time til it's perfect... well, I'm beginning to see the point of all those thousand dollar features. That, and the fact that those nice ones? They probably have focusing knobs that also stay attached to the camera, unlike mine.

This is like the decision to fix your shitty old car one more time when you know it's going to break again. When do you finally just bite the bullet and get the shiny new one you know you can't afford?