Katrina Benefit Gallery Show

Artists for Katrina
Saturday, September 24th
from 2pm til 11pm

Lightspace
1984 N. Main Street
Suite 501
Los Angeles, CA 90031
located inside the Brewery Art Complex


Please join us for a benefit art exhibition featuring 30 artists from all over the world.

Azcra, Guillermo Bert, Eduardo Bonilla, Wil Cohen, John Cope, Mitchel Evans, Ivana Ford, Ed Fox, Perry Gallagher, Steve Diet Goedde, Jim Groves, Phong Hong, S. Jenx, Gene Jimenez, The Joker, Rick Lujan, Dave Naz, Marco Patino, Pixie, Lisa Prichard, Mark Rasmussen, Donna Ricci, Simone, Tiffany Trenda, Christine Uskievich , Mitzi Valenzuela Cardenas, Victor, Yoffy

Proceeds will be donated to:
American Red Cross
Feed the Children
SPCA
HSUS

Artists have agreed to to donate 50-100% of their sales of artwork to the charity of their choice.

Victor's Birthday Party

My good friend and master black and white photographer Victor (www.lightworship.com) had his birthday party a few weeks back. Octavio (www.winkytiki.com), Dave Naz (www.davenaz.com), and I celebrated a new year of Victor at Footsie's Bar in Highland Park. You haven't heard of it yet, but you sure will in a few years when it'll be an A-list celebrity drinking hole. Footsie's has shiny, quilted red leather booths sandwiched against wood paneled walls displaying naked lady paintings from the 1960s. Nice bartenders and jukebox too!

Octavio, Victor, Dave Naz, and I


Octavio being Octavio.


Mere seconds before I devoured Dave Naz.

Midori Signing in West Hollywood!

My good friend and long-time collaborator Midori will be in West Hollywood on Saturday reading from and signing copies of her new book Wild Side Sex: The Book of Kink (Daedalus Publishing). I will be there showing my support.

Saturday, Sept. 10th, at 7:30pm

A Different Light Bookstore
8853 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
310-854-6601

Wild Side Sex: The Book of Kink
Midori's Fire Horse Productions

New Fetish Stuff

Frankie, Los Angeles 2005

Okay okay, just to keep all y'all people interested, I better start throwing in some fetish stuff here. Here's a somewhat recent shoot with Frankie.

New PhoneCam!

Ozzy the Cat, September 3, 2005

I had to upgrade my cell phone cuz my old one finally crapped out on me. I knew this day would come. I've been wanting to get a fancy new PDA one but was hesitant cuz I still wanted the crappy image quality of my first generation phonecam. So this past weekend I finally said "fuck it" and got a new Treo 650. As a phone, organizer, web browser, and messaging device, this thing is invaluable! I'm SO in love with it. Of course the image quality is better, but not too significantly better. The photo of Ozzy the Cat above was taken with it. I reduced the size by a few inches so it wouldn't be too big for your webbrowsers. I even got a 1GB SD card for it which means I can store thousands of images in addition to hours of video and MP3s. So back to the art issue, I'm just looking at it as the next phase of my phone art. I actually have enough images from my old phone to call it a collective series which has finally ended.

www.phone-art.com

No, that's not all I do...

Sixspace Gallery, July 2004

I received an unusually odd comment last week from someone at a signing basically condemning me for doing non-fetish photography. Some people take fetish way too seriously. Do they have any real appreciation for art or do they only like what's IN the art? I take photographs because I feel compelled to record the world that I see. I see beauty all around me whether it's the light shining off a body-forming latex dress or the accidental stain on a mechanic's office ceiling that I just happen to notice while patiently waiting for my car. Having a phone-cam lets me instantly record these moments of unintentional beauty. It's what I react to. It's me. One unfortunate thing about being pigeonholed in the erotic/fetish genre is the closed-mindedness of *some* of the people who like it. Again, it's rarely about the art but what's IN the art. In their minds, photography is merely a means of documenting something that arouses them. Nothing more.

Then there's the technology factor. I happen to love the low-def quality of a simple phone-cam shot. It's the same way I love the low-fi audio quality of PJ Harvey's "Four-Track Demos" album. It's music reduced to its most simplistic and raw elements. It's this rawness that makes the art even more real and emotional. There's no fancy technology or manipulation masking whatever defects are laying within. Combine this simplistic rawness with engaging composition, and I accomplish what I want visually. It's sad to me that some people judge quality by megapixel size. They're the same ones who value quantity to quality.

It's funny, I've been doing my phone-cam art for a little over a year now, and I've received more significant exposure in the mainstream art world than I've ever had for my 15 years of fetish work. That's something to feel good about.

Billy Bob Thornton

Since I moved about a month ago, I started finding all kinds of things that I had forgotten about. I figure I'll post some of them here for all to see. Otherwise it'll all stay in a box unseen for years to come.

Above is a photo of Billy Bob Thornton that I took on the set of Some Folks Call It A Sling Blade in 1993. I did all the photography for the DVD cover as well.