Ivanpah Solar Concentration Thermal Power Station Facility Not Aliens

After being twice mesmerized by what was obviously an alien colony I'd driven by on my way to and from Las Vegas, I decided to research what could maybe be a solar farm and get some peace of mind.

Sadly, there are no aliens colonizing outside of sin city.  The Ivanpah Solar Power facility is the world's largest solar thermal power station.  It cost $2.2 billion to build, with the majority of financing coming from a New Jersey power company, the U.S. government, and...Google.  It has been operating for two years and provides about 86 local jobs, and a helluva lotta power for San Francisco, over 500 miles away.

How did the aliens make this crazy thing!  There are thousands of mirrors reflecting the sun onto tanks of water atop power towers, and the water creates steam which then enters a turbine that generates electricity.

One of the side-effects of feeding our power-hungry civilization is creating airspace that is 1000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Approximately 1000 birds are burned alive every year while flying into the radiated area.  Pretend phoenixes, unwitting self-immolating avians rising in flames and falling for our delights.

I took these pictures riding shotgun on the 15 freeway.  Look for the towers in each image!

where have you been

i've been coming here - to my blog - once a week, wondering where you are and if you'll show up and tell me something inspirational, something outrageous, something to kick my ass into creating things beautiful or ugly or not total shit.

i can't blame you for my lack of production.  i've been in the midst of a move and i have been consumed with thoughts about paint color, drywall anchors, and peacocks.  there are peacocks.

my camera got turned on a few times.

echo park.  elysian park.  the clouds, the zeppelin, the rocking out to Testament.

the journey on the way to i don't care where

i want to fault my not writing on something, but i can't figure out what's responsible.

it's likely that i have only myself to blame for not writing more lately.  maybe i used to have so much more to say in my primy youth.  or perhaps i'm using photography as a crutch to express what i feel without having to go through the shitty process of parcelling it out in words and sentences and well-constructed ideas.  when my images don't meet whatever nebulous, unreachable standards i set out for them, i stop trying.  i figure i must be failing if i cannot relay some monumental meaning to you in one picture, so why bother pissing out a sidecar of explanations?

the holidays present a wealth of psychoses for the average human.  all of a sudden, we are confronted with ourselves and an overwhelming, albeit unnecessary, amount of CARING about what we are doing - why am i not richer, who are you you can't go first i got here first, how come the country's still in the shitter??  but most important, what have i done this year?

since i started creating an annual end of year portfolio a few years ago, titled WHAT HAVE WE DONE, december has filled me with anxiety about filling the pages.  i fluctuate between self-loathing and ecstatic jubilance in the scrutiny of my work.  i fear failing at creating something important - or at the very least, pretty - but i fear most not making anything at all.

there's that thing that people say - it's the journey, not the destination that matters.  so maybe the parts that have made up my year are worth a damn, despite being lumped in with a bunch of other janky parts.  it's possible that the finished magazine won't suck and that sucking isn't even what's important.  every page turned clears the way for another page, a newer page, a new experience, an opportunity.

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there's a video game called journey.  it is one of the only video games i enjoy playing.  i don't play well, but i don't care.  skills aren't that important in the game.  it's about coming into existence, living a life filled with beauty, history, trials, and companionship, and arriving at a place filled with light, a place where you will be reborn and shot back out into the world to play again.

my boyfriend and i spent october building journey costumes for halloween.  at the west hollywood carnavale and at stan lee's comikaze, many people approached us for pictures, but also to exclaim how important the game is to them and what an impact it has had on their lives.  i was incapable of taking pictures while in costume, which wasn't easy.  instead, i got to engage and inspire people in a new way and i loved it.

we went on vacation to the central coast for thanksgiving and brought a costume with us in case we had an opportunity to shoot.  we did, see below.  there are more to come when i'm able to get a model to wear mine and give this journeyer a friend to travel with.

how much you miss

a lot of women my age grew up watching the miniseries, anne of green gables, on pbs.  i was the same age as the title character, a strong-willed and clever orphan girl who exasperates and enchants everyone she meets.   her adventures and vexations proved to me that things are not always what they seem, and that one's imagination can transform a trite exactitude into a revelatory reality.

as anne says to the woman who has reluctantly adopted her,

“Don’t you ever imagine things different from what they are?” 

“No.”

“Oh, Marilla, how much you miss.”

what have we done 2012

semantic satiation.  it's that thing that happens when you repeat a word so much that it becomes meaningless sound.  it's how i feel about the evolution of my second annual collection of work, what have we done 2012.

after a year spent searching and coping and re-evaluating while not taking as many pictures as in the past, designing my magazine was a difficult task, made more trying by an incessant stream of technical problems, printer errors, crossed-wires, and mandatory re-designs.  i worked on this magazine so much that the images started to look like blotches of color and abstruse shapes, void of content.  the text sounded trite and tried.  i nearly sent the fucker to languish in the matrix of mac trash, but instead i published it.

despite the tribulations, i am proud to have created such a thing.  after all, the experience of making something doesn't always reflect the quality of the outcome.  and i am uber grateful for the people in my life who have cheered me on and made me feel like what i've done is important and meaningful.

What Have We Done 2012

mister julien

the play i chose for my senior acting project in high school was the stronger by august strindberg.  i had been a dancer for a long time before getting serious about acting and i remember thinking of my scene partner as a barre for me to stretch on.  necessary, only as a set piece for me to dance around.  i could make leaps from one tactic to the next without even a blink from her.  like playing tennis with a wall.  after all, i was the only one with any dialogue.

that was the first and last time i performed strindberg, but his influence lived on in what i found attractive about art and artists and innovation in the theatre.  he was a madman, and a visionary.  i am often one or the other, but rarely both.

and so it was an easy decision to accept a photography assignment to shoot the inimitable ken roht's dancing, singing, gender-bending adaptation of miss julie.  a few years ago, i shot roht's 99 cent only extravaganza, and got some righteous shots.  ken told me i could go anywhere i wanted to take pictures, which is the most thrilling thing a photog can hear.  i joked that i could be one of the dancers and, delighted, he said Yes!  if the lead role typically played by a woman weren't being played by a man in this version, i'd tell him to watch his back...