A-riding On A Pony

So I bought a box of Easy Mac, which, if you don’t know, is macaroni and cheese that you don’t have to boil, either because you’re too lazy or because…well, that’s the only reason, actually.

Anyhow, there are six packets of noodles/cheese mix in the box, and when you look at one of the individual cheese packets, which has the instructions printed for preparing a single pack on one side, on the other side, it asks “WANNA MAKE TWO PACKETS AT ONCE?”

Look, motherfucker: don’t patronize me. I just bought a box of microwavable mac and cheese. Of course I want to make two packets at once. I can hate myself that much faster that way.

If you see me coming, look across the rich man's field

The other night I had a genuine Ghost World moment. I was on my way home from wherever, probably just driving around. I was listening to "Last Kind Word Blues" by Geeshie Wiley, a woman who is so mysterious no one even really knows the proper spelling of her name. She recorded this song and two others in 1930 and then more or less disappeared. It's a motherfucker of a song--it's dark and beautiful and almost impossibly otherworldly. When you listen to it you might as well be listening to a transmission from another planet. It's a haunting fragment from a place that no longer exists. It's a favorite of mine, and I doubt I will ever get to the bottom of it.

It was a nice warm night, late summer, and I had my windows down. I was sitting there in my car at a red light, across the street from the Circle K, and a blue Mustang convertible pulled up next to me. There were a couple of girls (women?) sitting in the car. I have no idea how old they were, but they were dressed like Leslie Mann in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, like women who were pretending they were still girls. When I sensed the car pulling up, I turned the radio down a bit as an act of, you know, simple human courtesy, which was something apparently lost on these two, as they continued to blast whatever the hell that Eminem/Rihanna song is called. The girl (woman?) sitting on the passenger side apparently noticed what I was listening to, because she asked the driver to turn down their music for a second. “listen to this,” I heard her say, indicating me. Eminem went momentarily quiet as they listened for my radio, paused for a moment, then started laughing.

The light turned green, Eminem roared back to prominence, and the three of us drove on into the night and the rest of our lives.

Stop And Look Around; It's All Astounding

How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise?

I know I’m late to the party on this one, but I thought I would mention that in that Insane Clown Posse video for “Miracles”, the duo make essentially the same argument for blissful ignorance as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet: To Science”, wherein the poet decries science as a “vulture, whose wings are dull realities,” who “prayest…upon the poet’s heart.” Walt Whitman, too, echoes Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope in his “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, where the poem’s narrator becomes “tired and sick” of “the proofs, the figures…the charts and the diagrams” presented him by the titled astronomer, and instead seeks the simple childlike wonder of the universe splayed dark and infinite above him in the night sky. finding “perfect silence” at the mere sight of the stars.

Like Whitman, The Insane Clown Posse also realize the intangible nature of beauty: “It’s just there in the air,” they tell us, “you can’t even hold it”; Like Poe, they realize that science is, at best, a poor substitute for the poetry of the heart: “I don’t wanna talk to a scientist,” says an impassioned Shaggy 2 Dope, “y’all motherfuckers lying/and getting me pissed,” his anger at man’s destructive urge to know all no matter the cost palpable and stirring.

One must dissect a thing to discover its works, these poets tell us, but the cost of knowledge is the death of wonder, and who but the most base and dull among us would make such a trade?

This guy Heath that I went to school with--he was a year behind me--got blown up the other day. He's some kind of oil field worker, and there was an explosion, and hey you know the rest. He's not dead, though, and is currently in intensive care some place close by, waiting for the day when the doctors tell him he's free to again walk the earth, and how lucky he is.

My most vivid memory of him is when I went to take the ACT. I went along with my friend Robby, and this guy, the one who got blown up, went along with us to take it as well. The three of us, packed into the brand-new Mustang that Robby's parents had just bought (a horrendous idea, as Robby was a fucking insane driver--he was going 110 mph the entire way to and from the testing site, on a two-lane highway, in the rain), drove from the little town we lived in (population 925) to the slightly larger town of Magnolia, Arkansas (population 11,800) to take the test. I guess Heath had never been in such a large and exotic city before, because every time he saw a black person, he was happy to point out to us "there's a nigger," or "look at that nigger over there," or, while waiting for our food at a fast food place, "I hope these niggers don't fuck up our order."

When I found out about his getting blown up, I took a look at his Facebook page. There were an enormous amount of get-well messages, and I scrolled through probably thirty-five and counted only three that didn't include some variant of "we're praying for you" or "you're in our prayers" or something along those lines, which means, I guess, that if he dies, then they were just not very good at praying, and God hates them.

I spent the first twelve years of my life in Texas, and then another four years shortly after I graduated high school, going to what was technically a college, and living with my grandparents. Practically all of my extended family still lives there, and though I only moved about eighty miles away, it feels much farther in my mind, and I rarely go back. I doubt that anywhere I live will ever feel like home the same way it does when I take that left turn off Highway 155 onto the one-lane blacktop where I spent the majority of my earliest years. I left a lot of bones buried back there.

Guy Clark--seen above with his incredibly beautiful wife, Susanna--is from Texas. He’s one of those great Texas singer-songwriters you hear so much about, along with Steve Earle and Willis Alan Ramsey and of course Townes Van Zandt; he and Van Zandt were great friends, and while Clark is nowhere near as consistent as Townes, every now and then he would strike gold—“LA Freeway”, “The Randall Knife”, “Dublin Blues”, and, probably my favorite, “Desperados Waiting For A Train,” a song about the relationship between a young man and an older mentor figure—in this case the young man was Clark and the older was his grandmother’s boyfriend. It’s a beautiful song, and sad, and it tells the truth about how cruel time can be, its thousand little thefts that leave even the strongest of us with nothing. It tells the truth about what it’s like to love someone.

Funnily enough, the lyric I respond to most is the line about “them old men…playing/Moon and 42,” which are both domino games, and one of which, 42, was played by all the adults at every family event I can remember. Everyone would come to my grandparents’ and after whatever big holiday meal we would have, the shitty old card table would get broken out and the clack of dominoes would be inescapable for the next five or six hours. It’s honestly one of my favorite memories, and probably all the more precious to me because I never learned to play the game despite it being the background to literally a couple of hundred hours of my life: it’s just one of the countless regrets that pile themselves up on top of you when you think back to the people you knew and loved and all the things you could have done or said.

I could still learn to play, of course, but what would the point be? Anyone I would want to play with is long gone.

I went to a barbecue at a friend's house the other day, and there was a little girl there. She was maybe twelve years old, pretty tall for a young kid, and she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Hating me won't make you pretty," and it was easily one of the most depressing thing I've seen in a long time. It made me feel absolutely awful. Do people really want to turn their kids into vapid, catty little bitches? How can you see something like that and not feel sad? How can you see something like that and think it's funny?

On Friday, I had the day off work, and I had couple of errands to run. Nothing too major--I just had to cash a couple of paychecks, then use the cash to pay my rent and my electric bill. Simple.

So I set off for the grocery store. There was an old woman in front of me, maybe 65 years old, but hit pretty hard by life. She was maybe five feet tall and at best she weighed 90 pounds. She had an oxygen tank with her, hanging from a sling around her shoulder. Her skin had taken on that old-person quality--translucent and thin, with networks of bluish veins plainly visible. It would have the texture of cold wet silk, if you were inclined to touch it. She was meekly trying to catch the attention of the man behind the glass partition, who was working to repair the money-order printer. "Sir...sir...sir," she muttered weakly, trying her best to peek over the countertop. She had a pretty ghetto, rail-thin nurse with her, who took time from scolding her two children to caw "he tryin to fix that thang," at her patient. Finally, the man behind the counter finished repairing the printer, handed the woman two money orders, and the four of them made their way out of my life, hopefully forever.

While all this was going on, I took some time to look around. In the grocery line behind me, a guy was checking out. Older, wearing a t-shirt and cargo shorts. Baseball cap with long stringy hair hanging down. Moustache. He had a fanny pack on, cinched so tight around his gut it looked like someone had tied a piece of string around a sack of meal. Not terribly strange, true, but for the fact that he was wearing one of those weird claw-ring things that Ozzy Osbourne and Alan Moore wear.

I managed to cash only one paycheck: the larger one was over $400, and the store would not cash it, so I had no choice but to take my business to the liquor store. This was a little annoying, but so be it.

At the liquor store, as I was paying my electric bill, one of the employees came walking by. "Did you hear about Michael, that used to date Susan, when she lived next door to you?" he asked the clerk who was attending me. "No," she replied. "He killed hisself last night." "Oh my gawwwd," she said. "Yep. Hung hisself with a chain." And then he went right on by, back to work.

I finished up my business and turned to go, only to come face to face with an old man who looked sort of like a combination of Murderface from Metalocalypse and Captain Beefheart, only with long Willie Nelson-style braids. Right behind him was a youngish white guy with a sort of Kurt Cobain/grunge rock hairdo, ratty face, and ragged soul patch. He had a rather--ahem--effeminate walk, and was wearing a ripped-up red muscle shirt and cutoffs that were riddled with holes. Sticking up a good four or five inches from the waist of his pants was a leopard-print thong.

These nightmarish images still fresh in my mind, I made my way outside to my car, where I was counting and arranging my money. I looked over to my left and saw a youngish woman in a Statue of Liberty costume adjusting her breasts in her bra while smoking and playfully slap-fighting with a tow-truck driver. A few minutes later she was texting on her cellphone and disinterestedly waving to traffic while picking a wedgie out of her ass.

And I thought to myself, what a wonderful world...

There is a garden in the memory of America. There is a nightbird in its memory.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody...

12 March 1922--
21 October 1969

Every year at Christmas, my mother invariably buys me clothes. Which is fine, as long as it's just jeans or socks or maybe a button-down shirt. But she insists on buying me t-shirts with wacky sayings on them. It's a real window into what my mother thinks I'm like when you consider that past shirts have said things like "You call it slacking--I call it dedicated inactivity" or "I just can't take it anymore". I look forward to next year's shirt, which will most likely say something like "I'm not really a worthless piece of shit, but I can see why you would think that".

Script notes for Meerkat Manor: The Movie—Meerkats In The City

Note: all meerkats will be CGI.

We begin with a meerkat scientist/researcher, a Jane Goodall type, ideally played by Patrick Stewart. He lives among the meeerkats and observes them. He is struck by how extraordinarily intelligent the group he is studying seems to be. We see a lot of shots of him beginning to train/teach the meerkats. We see him reading to them as they sit in a semicircle, showing them how to take high tea, etc. The meerkats are a sassy and lively bunch.

Sadly, the meerkat scientist dies. This is a real tragedy, but there is a silver lining on this dark cloud: the scientist has left his substantial personal fortune/grant money to the meerkats, who quite naturally use this newfound wealth to travel to the city to live. They are convinced to do this by the wistful young main protagonist meerkat, who discovers the meerkat scientist's notes, outlining his dream of taking the meerkats into the wider world to show everyone just how smart and wonderful the meerkats are.

The meerkats take up residence in a fancy downtown hotel (think Home Alone 2), where they almost immediately run afoul of the bellhop, played by John Turturro. He is dedicated to the hotel and cannot stand to see it being overrun by what are in his mind vermin. A good introduction will show him walking to a limousine to open the door only—to his horror—to be confronted with a band of sassy meerkats. “Keep the change,” our young meerkat protagonist will quip as he and his friends scurry past, tossing the bellhop a quarter. “Meerkats,” the bellhop will mutter under his breath, “I hate meerkats.”

There will be the inevitable montage, where we see the meerkats inspecting their swanky new digs. James Brown's “I Feel Good” will play as they run around the suite, acting crazy, dancing, wearing sunglasses, etc. We will see the meerkats don swimming trunks and do cannonballs into a bubblebath.

Hopefully, Joan Cusack will be available to play the concierge, who is secretly in cahoots with the John Turturro character. She too, hates the meerkats, and the two of them are together scheming to swindle the meerkats out of their inherited fortune. Not sure how this will play out; most likely by befriending one of the stupider/less outgoing meerkats and spinning some kind of tale.

The meerkats will need a human friend to stand in for the audience. Probably another hotel employee, or, better yet, one of the meerkat scientist's students, who helps the meerkats. Need to do some work on this character.

Unsure of exactly how to wrap this up. Perhaps the meerkats will lose or squander their fortune in some way, and wind up in the laboratory care of the student, who will be full-fledged professor in the sequel.

Note: idea for sequel: the meerkats are stolen/kidnapped from the lab by someone who wants to exploit their intelligence for his own ends.

Need to continue workshopping these ideas so a full script can be shopped around. With any luck this can be in theaters by Christmas.

Late winter in Dallas, a city that wants to pretend that it's still 1984, and that the oil will never stop flowing. With all its ugly angular buildings that send sunlight out in every direction, but mostly directly into your eyes. A city that desperately wants to ignore all those cool, skinny kids with their too-tight jeans and their little flannel shirts all scuttling around the periphery. Six Flags and six hundred convenience stores. Hard to get a fix on the weird, meaty sadness you feel when you're ten miles out of town and you see a herd of alpacas calmly wandering the perimeter of a manmade lake in the middle of a subdivision. Steak houses the size of churches and churches the size of soccer stadiums. East of the city, just outside Canton, you pass a pasture where a dozen camels sit calmly, being slowly covered up with snow. There is no way for anyone to explain to them just exactly what is happening.

For whatever reason, 2009 turned out to be a really good year for music. It was probably my favorite year for music in half a decade, and certainly an improvement from the dark days of 2007/08, gloomy years when I sort of began to wonder if I actually liked music anymore (I didn't even bother making a list for 08—can't even remember what if anything I was enjoying at the time). But anyway. That is in the past. Let us be grateful for today. Here is my list, arranged in no particular order:

Top Ten Albums

Vic Chesnutt—At The Cut
I think I sort of took Vic Chesnutt for granted. I loved Little and The Salesman And Bernadette, but found his other work sort of patchy, and largely stopped listening. When North Star Deserter, his previous collaboration with Guy Picciotto and Thee Silver Mt. Zion came out, I gave it a cursory listen but didn't hold it in any particular regard. But a few days before Christmas, I sat up late drinking and giving At The Cut the attention it deserved: it's a stunning record about death and decay by a fantastic singer and lyricist that will unfortunately be forever linked with the circumstances of Chesnutt's death.

Built To Spill—There Is No Enemy
Built To Spill's previous album, You In Reverse was distressingly by-the-numbers: it wasn't a bad album by any means (the band has never released anything even like a bad album), but it sounded aimless, which is probably worse, implying disinterest or lack of commitment. It felt like the band only made the album because making albums is what bands do, and it had been awhile since their last one. But There Is No Enemy, despite sounding more or less exactly like every other Built To Spill album, feels light years ahead of its predecessor. Doug Martsch actually sounds engaged with the songs he has written, and even though the subject matter is often less than sunny, There Is No Enemy makes me feel an incredible joy.

Phosphorescent—To Willie
This was the year that I rediscovered Willie Nelson. Having loved Red Headed Stranger for years, when confronted with Nelson's other, later, albums, I was invariably disappointed by their uneveness. As it turns out, I was just going in the wrong direction: Red Headed Stranger is actually just one of about a half dozen great albums he produced in the 70s. Phases and Stages, Yesterday's Wine, Shotgun Willie and The Troublemaker are all fantastic records that I introduced myself to thanks to Phosphorescent's woozy collection of Nelson originals. Great, beautiful record.

Mt Eerie—Wind's Poem
This was the first Phil Elverum album I ever really got into, and it's a grand, amazing thing. The sonic equivalent of being alone in a huge dark forest and listening to the roar of wind shake the trees. An album about being a very small thing with a very small voice that sounds both humbled by and in awe of the enormity of the earth and the forces at work upon it

The Mountain Goats—The Life Of The World To Come
Apart from At The Cut, no album made me think about dying more this year than The Life Of The World To Come, from the suicide (David Foster Wallace?) in “Phillipians 3:20-21” to John Darnielle's mother-in-law, cancer-stricken, in “Matthew 25:21” (“the last of something bright burning/still burning”) to the captive Thylacine, last of its kind, baring its teeth in defiance in “Deuteronomy 2:10”, a song about the eventual extinction of everything.

Califone—All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
Much like Built To Spill, the last Califone album seemed more like the work of a band making a record just for the hell of it. It is to their credit that in spite of its rather workmanlike quality, it was still pretty good—an album they could have made in their sleep, but still pretty good. They came back in a big way with All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, though. It's what Califone do best: combine ancient Harry Smith Anthology-style songcraft with modern production—clanky percussion, washes of synthesizer, buzzing frets and distortion. Califone are masters of creating dreamy sonic landscapes that are at once incredibly vivid and somewhat hard to pin down. A great album by one of America's most overlooked bands.

Lil Wayne—No Ceilings
For all the praise heaped on Tha Carter III, No Ceilings (despite a kind of crappy final third)beats it by a mile. A friend of mine once described Wayne as a really smart dumb rapper, which, to my mind, is a perfect descriptor. And with that in mind, he sounds his absolute best, to me at least, when backed by the shittiest, ringtone-stupid beats, which are in abundance here, making No Ceilings my personal favorite Wayne album.


Magnolia Electric Co—Josephine
I have reached the point with Jason Molina and his work where I've sort of lost my ability to be objective. Most reviewers thought this was a mediocre effort, but for my money Josephine is the best album the band has released since 2001's Magnolia Electric Co. In theory a concept album about a recently deceased friend, Josephine in fact tackles the same issues Molina has wrestled with for over a decade: disappointment, failure, the inability to live up to one's potential. Probably the most musically varied Molina release yet, with traces of doo-wop (“Rock of Ages”), straight-up country weepers (“Song For Willie”, the title track), and the haunted, rootsy numbers most closely associated with the band (“The Handing Down”, “Map Of The Falling Sky”). My favorite album of the year.

Bill Callahan—Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
Bill Callahan continues being one of the four or five best lyricists working today. He is an absolute master at paring things down to their most simple components, whether it be heartbreak or coming to terms with one's atheism. I suspect that this album, along with At The Cut have probably the most staying power of all the records listed here. Fantastic, heavy stuff.

Sonic Youth—The Eternal
I have to confess that I never really “got” Sonic Youth. I respected them immensely, and I liked a handful of their songs, but their albums always sort of bored me. Growing up I made a couple of efforts to get into their music, but it never clicked. But somewhere around the time of Murray Street, I began to come around to their sound, and have as of this writing, fully embraced them, and would rank The Eternal on par with my own favorite album of theirs, Washing Machine. I still don't like Daydream Nation, though. Go figure.


Top Ten Songs

Shakira—“She Wolf”
The single of the year, hands down. Shakira decides to make a sexy dance-pop track, and she does it so well it's a shame the rest of the album isn't as good.

We Were Promised Jetpacks—“Quiet Little Voices”
I listened to a lot of Scottish rock music this year, bands like The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks, lots of very serious young dudes being serious about their feelings. They all sort of remind me of my old favorites Idlewild, who were also Scottish, and also terminally serious. The Twilight Sad are probably the best of all these groups, but “Quiet Little Voices” is probably the best song of the lot, soaring and anthemic and full of muscle. It sounds like it could have been a hit once, a long time ago. A song that has the kind of romantic melancholy you can only associate with youth.

Sunset Rudown—“You Go On Ahead” (Black Cab Sessions)
I typically only really like Sunset Rubdown in small doses, or not at all. I feel like Krug (and basically all of those guys in the Frog Eyes/Swan Lake/Destroyer/Wolf Parade mafia) has a tendency to be needlessly cryptic and yelpy and irritating, but this version (which is infinitely better than its studio counterpart) is loose and joyous and makes me wish I liked more of their material.

Keri Hilson feat Lil Wayne—“Turning Me On”
My favorite single sixty seconds of music this year was Wayne's gleeful, breathless verse dropped into the last third of this goofy Rihanna-lite club track.

Destroyer—“Bay Of Pigs”
Dan Bejar is probably the only person who could get me to intentionally listen to a weird ambient disco track that runs somewhere near a quarter hour. Its opening lines (“Listen, I've been drinking”) set the stage perfectly, conjuring images of a young socialite (“a crumbling beauty trapped in a river of ice/a crumbling beauty trapped in paradise”) gently staggering around a fabulous home on the edge of some personal—or, owing to the song's title, literal—apocalypse. A song bathed in pale white fluorescents.

Taylor Swift—“White Horse”
Swift's big hit this year was “You Belong With Me”, a pretty terrible song about a young girl who pines for an asshole who ignores her in favor of a vapid cheerleader-type. In the infinitely better “White Horse”, the girl gets what she wants, and finds out it's not all it's cracked up to be. An inversion of the standard high-school-love-conquers-all bullshit so prevalent in pop music, and a nice addition to the canon of leaving-my-stifling-small-town-behind-me songs. Swift is really likeable: I hope she gets better at music.

Animal Collective—“My Girls”
I've never really cared much for Animal Collective—they always just sounded so formless. But even I was won over by this song, which manages to shackle some kind of structure to their usual clusterfuck of directionlessness. “My Girls” was a refreshing blast of open-hearted optimism, a trait I generally lack, but one that, in the proper amounts, I'm more than willing to open myself up to.

Girls—“Hellhole Rat Race”
A trebly burnout's final words, recorded on cassette, and chewed to bits by the churning California sun. From an album dotted with a handful of bright spots, this one was far and away the brightest.

Twilight Sad—“Reflections Of The Television”/“I Became A Prostitute”
One of the things I never liked about shoegaze was how wimpy if often sounded. I like pretty, ethereal vocals as much as the next person, but I also like a little passion. The Twilight Sad are the best of a handful of young Scottish bands, and the closest to being a full-on shoegaze act, but one thing they are not is twee. The first two tracks off their album Forget The Night Ahead are seething, angry storms of distortion with pounding drums and ear-ringing feedback. If their feelings are hurt, they're out to hurt yours back.

Lady Gaga—“Bad Romance”/Britney Spears—“3”
I strongly suspect the me of ten years ago would probably have been horrified by most of the songs I enjoyed this year, but the me of ten years ago was pretty stupid sometimes, and was probably a bit too concerned with keeping it real (the me of ten years ago didn't even like bands with keyboards, unless they were like, upright pianos or a harpsichord or some shit), and the me of now really does not give even the slightest shit about that. There was a lot of trashy pop music I liked this year, including Miley Cyrus's “Party In The USA” (fantastic bubblegum) and “Videophone” Beyonce's collaboration with Lady Gaga, the It Girl of 2009. I find the argument that Lady Gaga is some kind of avant garde genius a little silly; she's obviously smart, and has an aesthetic ideal, but that hardly makes her Andy Warhol. The Britney Spears song, an ode to what the French would call a menage a trois, is more or less indefensible, but what the hell: I really liked it.

Which in the end, is the best defense one can ever offer in these kinds of situations.

These are wise words indeed:

To be good, whiskey has to be named after a dude. Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are perennial favorites; Evan Williams is a dark horse; George Dickel is my favorite. Preferably a number will be involved as well. No. 8. For example. The label should read like a secret Masonic world government, just like the back of a one dollar bill, Dr. Bronner’s soap, or anything else cool. If you understand any of it, do not swallow the liquid inside.

A postscript to the previous William Eggleston entry:

"...a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.

"Pictures that embody this calm are not synonymous, of course, with what we might see casually out of a car window. The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly."

--Robert Adams

Morals of Vision

I bought my first camera sometime around 1999, during my senior year of high school. I'd been interested in photography for a few years before that—my favorite thing about being on the yearbook staff was getting to roam around the school taking pictures—and finally saved some cash and bought a sturdy black Pentax point-and-shoot. I haven't really used it for a few years now, but the last time I dug it out of the drawer, it worked as well as it ever had.

What is it about photographs that makes them so fascinating. I think, for me at least, they're a way of rendering a moment—a single moment—forever. The subject of the photo, in the moment that it's taken, will never exist again. The light will never be the same, the branches of the tree will never be the same, the expression in a face. A photo preserves something otherwise ephemeral and imparts a simple object with profundity.

A good example of that aesthetic is William Eggleston, who I think I'm willing to call my favorite photographer. His images are, on the surface, so simple, but there is a strange, implied tension. When you look at one of his photographs, you feel as if you just missed some incredible revelation. Critics can say that Eggleston's photos are mundane, that anyone could take them, but those are the same people who decry Jackson Pollock or Piet Mondrian. If anyone thinks Eggleston's photos or Pollock's artwork is so easy, they should try replicating it. They'll undoubtedly find it a lot more difficult than they think.

I love democracy in my art, whether it be Walt Whitman or Carl Sandburg or Robert Frank. That dedication to democracy—no one image is more important than another, all things are equally valid subjects for photography—is what I love most about Eggleston. He takes the banal and creates something sublime of it.

Photography is, like a few other pursuits I enjoy, something I feel I have some talent for, but I lack the discipline to perfect. And when I started taking pictures, without my realizing it, I was ripping Eggleston off. Not because I'd seen his work, or even knew who he was, but simply because his influence was so prevalent. I had the same experience when I discovered the Beats and realized that my own writing was similar to theirs due entirely to the fundamental nature of their work. The same way any American teenager who picks up a guitar and starts playing rock and roll songs is going to, whether they know it or not, owe something to Robert Johnson and Hank Williams and Chuck Berry.

Still, it's hard to shake the feeling of remarkable synchronicity. Imagine the feeling I had when I saw these Eggleston photos, compared to my own pictures, taken years ago with that old Pentax:









It was like meeting a kindred spirit.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are going to be in some movie this summer, and there's a scene where he's got sunglasses on, and he's riding a Ducati motorcycle, and she's sitting in front of him with her legs around his waist, shooting two pistols over his shoulder.

I can't really put into words just how tired, how exhausted this photo made me the first time I saw it. People have been making movies for about a hundred and twenty years--haven't we gotten past this? How can anyone look at that picture and honestly get exited in any way about what they're looking at? Is everyone a god damn moron but me?