max s. gerber(the latest shot)

tommy, a dear friend and an amazing talent, an endless well of energy, ideas and enthusiasm. tommy is never far from a positive spin on a situation, which would be a good lesson for me to notice (especially after knowing him for 17 years) if i were the kind of guy who assimilated those sorts of lessons. in late 1996, when told that his record label had changed their minds about allocating $100,000 for him to make a music video, he decided to make one himself, for free. geggy tah was on the road at the time, but at various points they would stop, go to circuit city, buy some tapes and put them in the demo cameras on display there. they made an entire video inside of circuit city for likely under a hundred bucks.

tommy jordan, lemons into lemonade. (see below)

tommy has been a tricky guy to photograph, as he almost never stays still for very long. years ago i swore he was most himself in a still photo as a motion blur. somewhere out there steve croes has a photo of me literally chasing tommy down the streets of north hollywood, trying to get him to stop moving long enough to do PR photos for geggy tah. these days, though, the moments of stillness are more frequent and every once in a while i catch something a little less blurry.

also it should be noted that the way to his heart is with ridiculous amounts of tabouli. in case you’re wondering.

circuit city “lotta stuff” video below, as well as – somewhat randomly – a woman hula hooping to tommy singing “holly oak”.

we photographed claire at home for the cedars-sinai medical center’s research magazine. suffering from an inherited autoimmune disease, claire was involved with new genetic testing and therapies offered at the hospital.

one of the benefits of living and working in southern california is that you can occasionally stumble into these incredible locations. claire is on the swim team at her school and the editors were set on having her photographed in the pool. usually i dread those kind of things, being the sort of guy who gets a sunburn in two minutes flat, but claire had this beautiful indoor pool and we couldn’t resist using it. click play below for behind the scenes footage.

behind the scenes shoot with claire from Max S. Gerber on Vimeo.

when you go to a conference on evolution, it’s hard to miss the one guy in the room who actually looks like darwin. a philosopher amongst an auditorium full of scientists, he joked that his uncanny resemblance to ol’ charles might have been the reason he was invited in the first place. dan dennett, co-director of the center for cognitive studies at tufts university, might be more accurately described as an evolutionary philosopher. his work and writings focus on the philosophy of biology and the mind. why we are the way we are, why we think the way we think, how we got that way, and why people keep insisting on believing in fairy tales to explain complex things.

(according to wikipedia, when recovering from aortic replacement surgery and after having been told that his friends were praying for him, he very nearly asked them “did you also sacrifice a goat?”)

not originally on my lineup of people to photograph for this conference, i was really pleased that dennett agreed to sit for a few minutes. aside from my longstanding beard-envy, his was one of the few presentations i was actually able to see (on darwin and memes). funny, sharp and insightful, the presentation was way too short. luckily, there is quite a lot of dan dennett on youtube.

today is the first birthday of olivia collins, youngest daughter of my good friend, dana, graphic designer and illustrator at large. happy birthday, olivia.

not everyone runs on batteries, but i do.

(thanks to jonathan for the concerned shout-out)

i have looked like this for two thousand, eight hundred and one days. after thursday, i’ll look different than i ever have before.

dibromochloropropane (DBCP) is a chemical pesticide. manufactured by dow, it was used in the 1970s on crops grown in the US and abroad. DBCP was found to cause sterility in workers at the dow plant where it was manufactured. dole foods, one of the world’s biggest producers of fresh fruits and vegetables, stopped using DBCP on its banana crops in latin america in 1977, when dow ceased production of the chemical. over the years dole (and dow) have settled many lawsuits from workers who claimed to have been affected  by DBCP. a DBCP trial in 2007, though, took a bizarre turn.

dole was being sued by 54 men who claimed to have been made sterile while working in their banana fields in nicaragua in the 70s. michael carter, dole’s general counsel, thought something sounded fishy, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. dole lost that first trial, a jury awarded damages of 5 million dollars to six of the workers. then the weirdness started.

a mystery witness – who they actually referred to as “witness X” – came forward in nicaragua and revealed some surprising things. he said that the whole thing was a fraud put together by the plaintiff’s lawyers. he said that some of the workers suing dole had never actually worked on their banana fields. he revealed that some workers who claim to have been made sterile by DBCP decades ago even had children. witness X alleged that even the judge in nicaragua was in on the scam. carter flew witness X out to LA right away. then he got scared and refused to testify.

carter hired rudy perrino as an in-house litigator to handle all the fraudulent claims. for extra backup he hired ted boutrous, andrea neuman and scott edelman of gibson, dunn & crutcher. boutrous was an expert in dealing with punitive damage awards in litigation, edelman was good with the judges and juries and neuman was good at getting people to relax and be revealing.

neuman interviewed some of the plaintiff’s wives, many of whom had stories that were wildly inconsistent with their husband’s accounts. they got witnesses to practically admit to memorizing false testimony fed to them by the plaintiff’s attorneys. in the end, from the one witness X, carter and his team got 27 people to come forward and admit to the fraud.

while this was all going on a documentary was made about the original 2007 trial in which dole was found at fault. the documentary made no mention of the fraud behind the case. dole tried to stop the film’s release, to no avail. in the end the filmmakers gave in somewhat and put a brief text acknowledgment at the conclusion of the documentary that mentioned the allegations against the plaintiff’s attorneys.

it’s always an easy out to assume that the giant multinational corporation is, at its heart, inherently evil and poisoning us. how strange it must be, and how difficult it must be, to turn one’s thinking around and admit that – for once – the giant corporation may actually not be as guilty as we thought.

wendy mogel is a psychologist who focuses on issues of parenting and families. ten years ago she wrote a book called “the blessing of a skinned knee”, which dealt with raising kids to be responsible, self-reliant, aware of the world and capable. the book is framed with teachings from jewish law, the talmud and the torah. wendy believes that talmudic ideas can inform modern parenting in a way that could help parents navigate tricky issues like discipline, responsibility and the dangers of coddling.

i am not a parent (though i am an uncle), and most days i feel quite far away from being a parent. still, it’s fairly easy to see the ways in which parenting has changed even in the course of my lifetime. when we used to ride bikes as kids nobody ever wore a helmet. my brother and i, as children, seemed to have far more unscheduled free time than i see kids having nowadays. that isn’t to say we weren’t busy, or weren’t occupied in important things, it’s just that they were our important things. there was less pressure to achieve, or to do everything you could think of all at once. the funny thing was, though, that even with less pressure placed upon us to achieve we didn’t seem to achieve less. sometimes when you leave kids to their own devices they come up with some pretty amazing things – and also take responsibility and accountability for them.  i’d say my generation has done fairly well, all things considered. especially those of us who didn’t turn out to be photographers.

wendy mogel advocates letting your children be what they are, and encouraging them for it. seems like sound advice. i would only caution (based on limited, anecdotal experience as a non-parent) that i do sometimes see parents pushing their children towards doing what they’re good at, even if they’re not too interested in those things. children will stumble through things, they will fall down, they will hurt themselves, they will make mistakes, they will develop regrets. they will. there’s not much a parent can do to prevent that, and often i’d imagine a disservice is being done when such attempts at prevention are made. then again, adults do the same things. is it too cliche to say that our character is often defined by our failures? yeah, somewhat cliche. still. . .

aimee bender’s new book, the particular sadness of lemon cake, was released this week and is already skyrocketing up the charts at amazon. i’ve known aimee for a few years now and feel quite honored to have one of my pictures used as the author photo in this new book. it’s very nice to see situations in the world where success, recognition and acclaim come to those who actually deserve and appreciate them. aimee is the genuine article, no doubt. like many fine people that i’ve been privileged to know, aimee deserves your support, and deserves to be made so wildly successful that she can bathe in hundred dollar bills and stop responding to my emails.

buy aimee’s book here.

in the giant venn diagram of popular culture there is increasingly more and more overlap between those of us who are exceptionally academic and those of us who are exceptionally nerdy. sometimes this takes us by a bit of surprise (generally the more academically minded – never underestimate the obsessive power of the nerd), but mostly we can see it coming if we stop to think for a moment. i mean, someone, somewhere liked battlefield earth, right? hmm. . .maybe not.

anyway, one of the ways in which this overlap is presented to the general population is in giant science fiction blockbusters. more specifically, giant science fiction blockbusters that contain their own invented alien languages. complete languages. ones that people start learning and obsessing over, and adding to. but before they can do that, someone’s got to come up with the actual words, sounds and grammar, right? that’s where paul frommer comes in.

when james cameron needed to create the na’vi language for avatar his production company sent an email to the USC linguistics department. this email got forwarded to paul frommer, who spent several years devising the language. starting from a couple dozen words that cameron came up with, frommer generated an overall sound palette for the language, a vocabulary of over a thousand words, an alphabet, and a complete syntax. he made recordings for the actors to help with their pronunciation. he coached them on the set.

at the moment there doesn’t seem to be anyone – frommer included – who is completely fluent in na’vi. but that’s bound to change. when the language forms the core of the highest grossing movie of all time, you’re going to get your die hard fans. frommer says that people write emails to him in na’vi, which take some time to translate, even for him. i asked him to tell me a joke in na’vi, on the spot, but he said it’d take an hour or so to figure it out first. too bad. i have to say, it’s a different thing to hear the language spoken from a normal, non-blue human standing in front of you than to see it in the movie. you hear the words more, the sounds (as foreign from english) are more distinct.

all my life i’ve been able to visualize words in my head. if i hear a word, i almost always, instantly, see it spelled in my head. (this is especially true with names.) in school i studied latin and greek, but it was always written, never conversational. i have to say, for someone like me it’s a little jarring to hear na’vi words and then later see them spelled out as totally different than i’d visualized. is it too much to ask to be a good speller in alien languages, as well?

if you want to learn the na’vi language yourself, don’t worry, the internet can help you with that. look here.

there’s klingon karaoke, and i know paul frommer is looking forward to the day when we can hear na’vi karaoke as well. living on a prayer in na’vi, anyone?

i can speak for all my graphic designer friends when i say that the true travesty of avatar is in it’s celebration of the oft (and justifiably) maligned papyrus typeface.