visit mr. iliketotellstories himself, here.

happy birthday to e. john thawley III, a titan among men, and maker of the meanest brisket in the great state of california.

back in march and october i had the chance to spend a few days visiting matt nathanson in silver lake, california, where he was recording his new album, modern love. matt was the very first person i met at college. he was a year ahead of me and had volunteered to mentor incoming freshmen during orientation week. so when i pulled my 1990 toyota celica into the parking lot of sanborn hall and struggled to get my bass amp out of the trunk, matt was there, ready to help out. i liked him instantly. at that time, with my wire frame john lennon glasses, mike-watt-inspired flannel shirts two sizes too big, a crazy long jewfro halfway down my back, and dreams of being a music major, i met matt and thought, yeah, this is going to work out.

matt ran an open mic every tuesday night at the grove house, a student coffee shop/meeting place on campus. that’s where i met john darnielle, too. i attended those open mic nights religiously, even played every once in a while when someone needed accompaniment. honestly, my freshman year of college is a blur of grove house open mic nights, way too many hours spent playing ping pong, and the revelation of my very first intro photo class in the spring semester. matt (and scarth) would close out each night with starfish and coffee, and to this day there’s no truer version of the song to me than that one.

matt would always play at some point during those tuesday nights. usually it was a song about a girl he knew in high school (remember, we were 19), and the story of unrequited romantic disaster was always as entertaining as the song, if not moreso. especially when he gave out the girl’s full name and actual phone number to the audience. all i can say is that those girls are lucky this all happened at a time when it was uncommon for people to have cell phones, and nobody had a texting plan.

even though i was a music major, my interest in music at that point was overwhelmed by my inner nerd. i was a bass player and only cared about other bass and guitar players. jaco pastorius, les claypool, steve vai.  i was overly impressed with technical proficiency, often mistaking chops for feel. it didn’t take long for matt to try to talk me out of this fallacy, and in the process, over the next several years, after forcing me to accept loans of a number of CDs, i came to appreciate songwriting more. matt’s enthusiasm not just for musicians but for how songs were put together was evident even then, especially when he would spend 35 minutes in a friend’s dorm room playing and replaying the same 45 seconds of a smashing pumpkins song until we all agreed that jimmy chamberlain was amazing. when i think back on what i gleaned from being a music major, i kind of feel like i should have given my tuition checks to my friends instead of to the school.

beyond the music nerd debates, there’s something else that was really important. i soon figured out that matt didn’t offer rambling intros to his songs, complete with full names and phone numbers just to be funny. he did it because that shit hurts. still. you don’t write songs and join a band because you think life is fair. (not unless you’re polyphonic spree) we’re all looking for a catharsis of some kind, or validation, or familiarity, or sympathy, or a way to vent. in those early songs i saw a version of matt that was tough to see then, and very difficult to see now, but one that was probably so clear to him. as awkward as he thought he was in high school, as difficult and inexplicable as he might have found women and relationships – hell, other people – to be, matt knew very early on that acting the part got you at least halfway. he told me once, when i was very young, that if you decide to behave confidently nobody will know that you’re scared shitless. of course, as i enter my late 30s, this advice almost seems obvious, but that was the first time i had heard it. i always appreciated it, and i never forgot the source.

so almost twenty years later i still count matt as one of my dearest friends. in the intervening time we’ve always been close, even if the crazy schedules of self-employed life make it take months in between visits or phone calls. even though we lead very different lives now the foundation of those early years, the awkwardness, the nerdiness, the angst-filled tendencies, they keep us on the same page. matt calls me on my shit when i need it called out, and vice versa.

but i’ve had the chance to see him grow into the bona fide rockstar we always kind of figured he was. i am pleased as could be to see that in the process he hasn’t lost his love of obscure drum fills, the great lyric that nobody notices, and a deep rooted dedication to his own neuroses. hey, man, it’s all part of the process. i am glad to see he’s no longer roaming the halls wearing skirts and arbitrarily flashing people. we all have to grow up some time, even if it’s just a little, right? we both even cut our hair. on that note, when i first picked up a camera back in 1993 matt was gracious enough to be my guinea pig. i rooted through some old print boxes today looking for that very first picture i took of him to put in this post, but i couldn’t find it. it’s probably better that way, as it would’ve been profoundly embarrassing for both of us.

matt’s new album was released last week. the pictures here are out-takes from other photos used in the liner notes booklet with the CD. do yourself a favor and pick it up. you can download it from itunes here.

thanks, matt.

last sunday morning i got a phone call from sebastian. i hadn’t seen him in almost eight years, i think, but we were facebook friends. he said apologetically, “my wife said i was crazy to call someone at 9:30 in the morning on a sunday, but i thought it’d be all right.” it was fine. it was, in fact, great to hear from him.

i first met sebastian in 1999, through camp del corazon, where he was a counselor and supporter. sebastian has a pacemaker and a defibrillator, and because of that the kids at the camp called him “zap man”. the last time i talked to him he had been a personal trainer, which – what with all the hardware he was sporting – was amazing. sebastian once told me a story about working out at the gym too soon after surgery and busting a wire right through his skin. i’d like to say that’s the only thing that kept me away from the gym, but really, it’s just my own laziness.

in the time since we last spoke he had changed careers, started working for the american heart association as a youth outreach coordinator, gotten married, had kids, moved to texas and then back to los angeles (not necessarily all in that order). he said that he had been in congestive heart failure and that he was going to need to get a mechanical heart valve put in. he asked if i would be interested in documenting his recovery.

i wasn’t able to be there for the day of the actual surgery as assignments had been keeping me busy last week, but i found time to visit with him yesterday, four days after the operation. he was walking around, moving better than i had any right to expect. he claimed the percocet helped, but don’t let that fool you. sebastian is as tough as he is kind, calm and open. he seemed to be dealing with the hospital very well, though when i arrived the TV remote control was broken and he claimed to miss sitting in his backyard at home.

thanks, sebastian. get all the jello and ice chips you can stand, and then get home to your comfy chair in the backyard safely and quickly.

this past winter brought two visitors to LA. in march i was able to meet up with tim archibald when he was down from san francisco just for the day. it was a brief visit, but even in the rush back to the airport tim was still gracious enough to let me take his picture on some random side street in culver city where thankfully no one caught us accidentally removing paint off a wall with gaffer’s tape. (i mean, really, that stuff isn’t supposed to do that.) i met tim many, many, many years ago and if you’re not familiar with his work do yourself a favor and check it out here. i’m consistently moved by his pictures and grateful for his advice and encouragement. in a world where photographers often look over their shoulder and jealously guard their secrets, tim is that rare kind of guy who is always open, welcoming and genuinely happy when the photo community as a whole does well.

good to see you tim, thanks.

while i’ve known tim almost as long as i’ve been a photographer myself, i’d only just met tony fouhse. i’d been an admirer of his pictures for some time, but seeing as how i don’t ever get up to ottowa, my actual connection with tony had previously only consisted of being the kind of facebook friends who didn’t really know each other at all. back at the end of february tony spent a couple weeks in LA on a personal project, lugging a 4×5 camera around south central. we were facebook friendly enough for him to ask me to recommend a local lab, and then beyond that to meet up for pizza in hollywood. tony’s blog, drool, is required reading as far as i’m concerned. the guy is whip-smart, dedicated, and just crazy enough to do brilliant work. while he’s not at all responsible for my lens burning out while i tried to take his picture, i’m going to go ahead and blame him anyway. i know he’ll understand.

thanks, tony.

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: one of the (many) good reasons to live in a place like LA is that if you just wait long enough everyone you actually want to meet will come through town eventually.

i went to school in claremont, california, in the early-mid 90s. a week or so after arriving at college i went to an open mic night and saw another student sing songs in a way that had never occurred to me before. at that point the mountain goats was just john darnielle, and he wrote a new song nearly every single day. at that point i was still a wide-eyed, long-haired, quick-fingered music major, and those tuesday nights were what college was all about. at that point i’d never picked up a camera at all.

i went to rhino records in the claremont village and bought up all of the mountain goats cassette tapes i could find. they had scrawled drawings for covers, folded paper inserts and handwritten labels. they were recorded on a boombox. the ultimate in lo-fi. but i loved them, anyway, and john and i became friends. he lived off campus with his parents, and sometimes i’d pick him up and drive him to the open mic nights. very briefly, we entertained being in a band together.

john took greek classes at scripps, where i had music theory. every once in a while i’d pass by him walking to class and he’d complain about how much greek was kicking his ass – like i told him it would when he started (i had taken three years of ancient greek in high school – it’s not as easy as it looks). john would never miss a class – he calculated that each one cost him $70. though after cashing a student loan check he guiltily (proudly?) admitted to me that he had spent almost a thousand dollars playing street fighter. “but now i’m really good at street fighter,” he said. i always hoped that was an exaggeration (the money, not the skill).

still, john wrote songs inspired by myth, tragedy, literature and obscure legend. he wrote songs with narrators who often behaved very, very badly, caught up in their own mishegoss. his songs contained people overwhelmed by circumstance and emotion, people desperately searching to escape their own lives, people looking to redefine themselves;  people looking for meaning, people looking to start over but somehow just not quite able to. kind of like a college freshman. well, one with really serious problems, at least.

if you just listened to john’s songs and never spoke to the guy you might think he was a really stressed out, neurotic mess. he’s said often that the more frazzled he becomes in his own life the worse the people in his songs seem to behave towards each other. of course, that’s only half the story. john continually surprised me with his ability to almost aggressively notice the beauty in often overlooked things. one year around march or april he stopped me in the quad, pointed at a tree and demanded i acknowledge how awesome spring was. the next year i was alerted to spring with an excited and rambling message from john on my answering machine – something about leaves and blossoms. once he stopped me to expound on how amazing he thought snoop dogg was, another time, quentin tarantino and pulp fiction, which had just come out.

john has taught me many things, without meaning to, i’m sure. when i hear his songs i’m reminded that you sometimes have to work hard to keenly appreciate the world around you, and if you put in the work you’ll find it’s worth it. i’m sure thousands of mountain goats fans will agree.

back in the early 90s john routinely played in a side project with franklin bruno of nothing painted blue. the side band at the time was called the extra glenns, and they collaborated often on songs for compilations put out by various indie labels. franklin does my very favorite version ever of my very favorite holiday song (“what are you doing new year’s eve“), though his was the first version i heard. i had just purchased a record player and mistakenly played the song at too slow a speed. it was low and mournful in a way other versions of the song just can’t match. even today, i’ll admit, i often listen to it at the wrong speed just because it has a certain something that i react to. i listened to nothing painted blue albums while working in the darkroom in college, but i didn’t have much contact with franklin personally.

a few months ago john and franklin put out their first album together in eight years, this time dropping two letters, changing the band name to “the extra lens”. the album is called undercard, and is available on merge records, here.

thanks, john. great to see you again.

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”.

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

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.

bill foreman, “san diego”, march 7th, 2010 from Max S. Gerber on Vimeo.

bill foreman writes some of the best songs you’ll ever hear. heartbreaking, complex, layered and soulful songs. i was lucky enough to get the chance to record one of them when he was in town a few months back, crashing on my couch for the night while attending a teaching conference.

click the video above to hear bill sing his tune, “san diego”.

visit bill here. he deserves your time, your money and your respect.

thanks, bill.