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I have received my final letter of recommendation, so now all I need to do is fill out the personal statement portion of the application (which I have all weekend to do), then my application for an adjunct faculty position will be complete, and I can deliver it to the school’s Human Resources department.

I got the rest of the Llano del Rio shots processed today.

Katie was having some trouble coming down that chimney. Anyway, the rest of that day was spent down in Koreatown, at Cafe Jack’s on Western and then back to Stephen and Alex’s apartment. These, I kinda refer to as “Photos a la Gomez,” because Rachel will often shoot in this style with her point-and-shoot. Hers come out better than this. I was just playing around to see what I could get.

Speaking of playing around, I also did some playing around with a few images in Photoshop. These are the result of playing around with various layers, masks, blend modes, and brushes. I don’t consider these art. This is just what happens when I’m bored:

And finally, a happy accident. This was another attempt at a “Photo a la Gomez,” but the flash didn’t fire, so I just got a nice abstraction of Alex’s art installation:

I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to what I had said in the previous entry about being able to discuss my own work, and specifically, about what The Faceless Series means. I intend it to be a critique about our current cult of conformist individualism. What I mean by conformist individualism is that, in this consumer culture of ours, we base a lot of our identity on what we buy. This is something I mentioned in my comments on Tucker’s blog entry on Kathrin Burmester’s “Peoplescapes”. Yet, marketing and advertisers don’t see people as individuals at all. They see demographics. And when people buy name brand products to say something about themselves as an individual, in my opinion, they’re not saying that they’re an individual at all. They’re buying into an image and saying, “I am part of this demographic.” (And that’s really the reason I hate brands like Abercrombie & Fitch–I see no reason why I should spend $60 to advertise someone else’s brand on my chest.) So, really, what’s one of the most basic ways to identify an individual? By their face. Remove the face; remove the individual identity. I’d like to go more in depth into this, but my brain gets constipated.

Really, what it comes down to is that identity is a social construction, so it varies widely from culture to culture. And in our culture, everything has been taken over by sales, marketing, consumption. At our core, we are not who we think we are. Collectively, we’ve bought into this model created (intentionally or not) by commercial interests, and I think people need to challenge that.

Jarrod and I had our first session with a professional trainer today. No use of the weight machines. It was entirely elliptical, stretching, and stairmaster. We were apparently just dicking around on our previous visits. I am very much in favor of people who don’t know what they’re doing in a gym (such as myself) utilizing the services of a trainer. I can tell that I will make much much much more progress with Dexter’s training than I would without. In the meantime, ow.

Oh, and I was at my ideal weight when I returned from Boston in October of 2006 (though my body composition was probably off). The 20 lbs. I put on over 4 months of removing dust from pictures of pets for the publisher of Cat Fancy is what needs to come off, and that is why I hate desk jobs.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to grad school the last few months. I really like what I’ve been finding out about Savannah College of Art and Design’s online M.A. program in Digital Photography. I’ve heard very good things about SCAD in general, and the digital photography graduate program looks like it would be a great expansion on the technical knowledge I obtained at Brooks Institute of Photography. Plus, that it’s available online is a great benefit, as that means I wouldn’t have to actually move to Georgia, and that would save me quite a bit of money. However, it is not a Master of Fine Arts degree, which is something else that I am interested in. Enter California Institute of the Arts. I know many people who have attended CalArts at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I have not always been impressed with everyone and their work, but on average I have been. My exceptionally strange friend, Stephen torrential., is a current grad student in the Creative Writing and Musical Composition programs. From the conversations with him I’ve had about CalArts, it seems like it would also make an excellent choice. In particular, the main point Stephen has made that interests me is about the conceptual focus the school has throughout its programs. That seems ideal for a graduate program. Rather than expanding on my technical background, it would compliment it. Photography is a very technical form of art, and it makes sense to me to establish a base of knowledge about the tools at the undergraduate level, and then expand into honing one’s ability to express oneself with those tools at the graduate level. And of course, the final thing in CalArts’ favor is it’s location. Being in Santa Clarita/Valencia, it is perfectly in between the two places I already spend most of my time–Hollywood and Lancaster.

Up until now, the thing that has prevented me from pursuing graduate work is the entrance portfolio. I have not been sure what work I would want to put in such a portfolio, as my work tends not to be particularly portfolio friendly. I have often described the problem with the analogy that if I were a musician, I would be the kind of musician who releases great singles, but crappy albums. However, I recently began going through various ideas I’ve had over the years for photo essays, and one in particular struck me as ideal for a grad school entrance portfolio–The Faceless Series. Without going into too much detail, it is basically a series of images in which people’s facial features have been retouched out. Of course, a failing of mine is my inability to discuss what my work means. I know what it means, but I have trouble putting it into words. That is an area I hope to improve in grad school.

On a completely unrelated subject, here’s a book review by John Dolan I found entertaining: Why Is Coke Glamorous and Heroin Scary? Because of Halfwits Like Nikki Sixx. In particular, I enjoy how Mr. Dolan channels Bill Hicks, such as in this passage:

So, naturally, God comes in when the lights go out, right there on page 384. Before he can even turn blue properly, Nikki is visited by Grace — Grace the religious epiphany, not the groupie of the same name. His unintentionally hilarious reaction to the fact that he’s been literally, physically saved is, “Maybe there is a God.”

Many an observer would have come to the opposite conclusion: Cobain kills himself and Nikki lives? There is no god.