for the past few days i’ve been chasing a 6 week old kitten around the floor of my office, trying not to get my feet clawed and bitten. i’ve had to move fast and be vigilant. still, sometimes the little guy catches me, even though i’m watching him out of the corner of my eye at all times, even though my reflexes are pretty good for my advanced age. for all the many things wrong with me (and there are many) i’m still able to move about the world fairly well. i take this for granted every single day. so, i suspect, do most of you. if i couldn’t get out of the way in time my socks and pant legs would be shredded by now. but what if i couldn’t even hold myself up in bed? i’d be kitten fodder for sure.

lilly grossman has mitchondrial disease. if you remember from high school biology, the mitochondria are the parts of the cells that create energy. the energy to sit up in bed, the energy to regulate your body temperature, the energy to walk down the hall, the energy to dance or talk or write or chase a kitten around a room. this disease is very rare and takes many different forms. in lilly it seems to affect her muscles, primarily. she has trouble holding herself up. she uses a walker, and sometimes still falls over, lacking the strength even to lean on it. because it takes so many complex muscle movements to do so, lilly even has trouble talking clearly at times.

lilly is also eleven years old. she loves high school musical, the color pink and hannah montana. she laughs at the things her parents do, and generally seems to be having a great time, no matter where she is.

as someone who has spent a lot of time around sick children – and, more importantly, as someone who has spent a lot of time as a sick child – i can confidently say that i could not begin to imagine the incredible patience it must take to be lilly grossman. lilly is whip smart. she’s watching and listening to everything. she’s laughing at everything. she just can’t move very well. she has a lot to say. she just has trouble putting the words together and getting them out right. when that’s your whole life you get used to it. you can get used to anything. but just being used to something doesn’t make it less frustrating, especially not when you’re seeing everyone else float so effortlessly through the things that cause you to struggle every moment of every day. now to be fair, this is me talking – i’m not pretending to speak for lilly here. it’s quite possible that lilly doesn’t have a care in the world and she’s perfectly happy, even being a bit incapacitated. in fact, i’m sure of it. but the whole of a life and the breadth of any single person’s experience is never so simple, never so easily summed up in one pat and tidy way.

when i was a kid i was always shocked and a little annoyed when people referred to me as frail or fragile. sure, my heart didn’t work very well, but i was used to it. i didn’t think of myself as fragile, and it pissed me off that other people did. even though they might have been right, and even though there wasn’t anything i could do about it, and even though what they thought didn’t really matter. but i had my happy days and my not so happy days. my cynical attitude, of course, has a lot more to do with the family i grew up in than with any illness i was born into. my point, inarticulate though it might be, is that when i meet these kids i try very hard never to assume that their lives are all bad or all sunshine and roses. the fact of the matter is that their lives are like anyone else’s, full of good days and bad days. it’s just that you have to try a little harder for the good days, that’s all.

lilly’s parents, steve and gay, try hard for the good days. they’ve built their lives around making sure the good days outnumber the bad. they moved to san diego from cleveland, to a climate that was much more stable and much more gentle on lilly’s system. gay was telling me about how so many of her old friends have become the kind of women who say they don’t need a man for anything. convincing themselves, perhaps, if no one else. but gay insists that she’d be lost without steve to back her up. i’ve seen too many families tear themselves apart over the stress of a child’s illness, but sometimes you see one come together heroically, put unnecessary things aside and make their lives work for them. watching steve and gay care for lilly even in the short time i visited with them, it was very clear that in doing so they’re caring for each other just as much.

the latest shot recession special: two CEOs in a row, now that these have both finally gone to press.

jay flaherty is CEO of HCPI which, as far as i understand it, invests in real estate. you’d think that’d be a recipe for disaster right about now but jay didn’t seem too concerned. they build medical offices and hospitals, and if those vultures at anthem blue cross are indicative of the industry as a whole they’ve got plenty of money to buy buildings.

hell, i think i’ve financed a building for blue cross all on my own. those crooks raised my health insurance rates twice in one year, to mind boggling levels and are constantly up to dirty tricks in an attempt to boot me off to the ranks of the uninsurable. this guy is pissed off enough, and he’s paying only a quarter of what i’m paying. let’s hope obama can do something about the asinine pre-existing condition laws, but i’m not holding my breath. a couple weeks ago i actually had a health insurance agent suggest i marry a government employee. that’s my only option?

anyway, jay seems to think that the health care real estate game is fairly stable. i guess people always get sick, no matter how bad the economy is.

good luck to us all.

i don’t meet many CEOs who share my encyclopedic knowledge of 80s movies. if fact, with just a few rare exceptions this encyclopedic knowledge has mostly been met with derision from my friends. it’s not really my fault that i memorized the entirety of legend, it just seemed to be on TV every fifteen minutes and the whole dungeons and dragons element didn’t hurt. tim curry as a minotaur? mia sara? ridley scott? sign me up! tom cruise? well, i’m willing to overlook some things.

my parents were in show business. they had a TV in every room, including their bathroom. every TV was always on. they slept with the TV on. if i went in and turned it off in the middle of the night they’d wake up, turn it back on and go back to sleep. my dad claimed he couldn’t sleep unless something he wanted to watch was on. the point is, i saw every 80s movie many, many times over. can’t buy me love? just one of the guys? the flamingo kid? coming to america? doctor detroit? gotcha!? howard the duck? once bitten? check. all of ‘em. my father actually took my brother and i out of school to see the very first show of indiana jones and the temple of doom. when my mom took me to a special industry-only screening of superman II, i burst into tears in the theater when superman lost his powers. my very first date ever was with lani miller and my sister drove us into westwood to see ferris bueller’s day off. (lani, you were adorable and i was scared to death. thanks for going to the movie with me.)

my point is that wade bradley is a CEO. a real CEO. he wears ties, and nice suits and commands power and respect and wealth. he can say “Yes” and actually make things happen as a result. and he knows all this crap, too. that means somewhere in the world an important CEO has filled up some part of his brain with the same useless trivia that i have, and actually is happy about it, too. wade spent time as a venture capitalist and eventually started a company called indievest, to make independent movies.

so all i lack is that venture capital background, nicer suits and ties, any sort of business sense at all and credibility. oh, and any desire to make movies.

i’ve been meaning to post these pics for a while now, but i’ve been struggling to figure out how to explain the story concisely. in the end, i think i gave up trying to explain it. there was (is?) an ongoing pension scandal in the city of san diego with city workers, but the story is very convoluted and a little hard to follow and likely not particularly interesting unless you really, really enjoy being a securities lawyer.

for my money, even though i didn’t really understand the legalese involved, i found the key players to be very interesting to talk to. the main subject in the story is san diego city attorney mike agguire (above). the son of a boxer, he’s called a “bulldog” by his enemies. aguirre seemed to be the driving force behind the pension investigation that – and i know i’m going to screw this up – i think involved many people getting overinflated pension benefits illegally, while at the same time robbing the system of sufficient funds to finance those pensions. regardless of my inability to be a lawyer, mike aguirre was one of the smartest guys i’ve gotten to talk to in a long, long time. he’s one of those guys who immediately seems fiercely intelligent the second he opens his mouth. i left there with a very good impression of the guy, and i always admire someone who’s so open as a photo subject. in his defense, we shot these pics on a sunday. he was still at work, but with shorts and sandals. hey, it’s san diego.

other key players, also working with aguirre were don “the rat” mcgrath and bryan vess. don is the assistant city attorney, and all of us at the magazine spent some time trying to figure out why he was called “the rat”. there was speculation amongst the photo department that he might look rodent-like, perhaps, though this proved not to be the case. the real reason: it was a nickname he had in college (no explanation why, and also no explanation as to why he would choose to keep it many, many years later). bryan vess is an outside attorney hired to help with the investigation. this has been ongoing for a long while, you can see all the document boxes surrounding bryan. in case you all think being a lawyer is glamorous, imagine having to go through all that paperwork just to find something that might help your case. no thanks! wait a second, though, lawyers get to bill in 15-minute increments, right? maybe that’s not so bad.

i just heard from bryan vess that mike aguirre just lost the election and is no longer the city attorney in san diego. i wouldn’t count the guy out, though. he’s got some fight in him. all i know is if someone’s suing me, i want that guy on my side.

it’s long overdue but i’ve taken a step into the 21st century (of the internet) finally. with many sincere thanks to the efforts and skills of bill smith who as usual went above and beyond any call of duty to pull this thing together. so please go visit the new and improved, shiny and sleek www.msgphoto.com. now with easier navigation, much larger photos, and a general sense of professionalism that heretofore only existed for me in person. really. so, my art director friends, polish up your checkbooks, click the above link and get ready to give me those big time gigs. thanks very much.

i get to meet people who do a lot of different things, some of which seem very enviable. i mean, really, who wouldn’t want the title “venture capitalist”? it seems like it’d be great for once to be the guy able to give out the money instead of being the guy trying to get the money. i find it funny, then, that many people i get sent to shoot see me lugging a whole bunch of gear around in the summer heat and comment on how great it seems to them to be a photographer. i guess this falls under the “grass-is-always-greener” umbrella.

andre has an investment blog on the side, called dealflow diaries. he was also extremely patient with my requests to move out to the empty rooftop parking lot instead of the original plan to shoot inside a much more boring office space. i’m a sucker for arrows and directional signs. there’s something comforting about being pointed in the right direction.

i’ll be honest, i couldn’t care less about sports. never did. never had any interest in watching sports or participating in them. i certainly never had any particular aptitude for any sport, though i did waste practically my entire freshman year of college playing ping pong, and was pretty good at it there for a while. i’ve been to one basketball game in my life, and three dodgers games. i can’t remember a single thing that happened during any of those events, save for the following:

1) the first dodger game i went to i spent mostly watching the crowd and ignoring the game. for the brief period of time i actually looked at what was going on on the field i saw two players run for a fly ball, slam into each other and fall down. i thought, ‘hey, baseball might not suck after all’.

2) at the last dodger game i went to my buddy alex managed to squirt mustard all over the ankles of the woman sitting in the row in front of us. her very large boyfriend was not pleased, and all of poor alex’s friends (myself including) immediately abandoned any shred of loyalty by pointing to him as the culprit. nobody was ultimately hurt.

3) at some point during the only basketball game i went to as a young kid – i think it might have been at madison square garden (do they play basketball there?) – i managed to get an earache and spent the rest of the time crying.

still. . .i have a soft spot for the summer olympic games. i’ll watch nearly anything during the summer games, though this year i was a little disappointed that i could never seem to find televised ping pong, and there was way too much volleyball which is really boring. gymnastics, though, is my favorite. this is mostly because i believe that gold medal athletes should be able to do things that aren’t even in the realm of possibility for normal humans. olympic level gymnastics are about as close as humans get to actually being spider man. that shit is amazing.

everybody knows, though, that this year the olympics were dominated by swimming, mostly because of michael phelps. so in the middle of all this olympic swimming fervor i got an assignment to photograph shirley babashoff.

shirley has won eight olympic medals in women’s swimming – two gold, six silver, in the 1972 and 1976 games. unfortunately, though, shirley is remembered mostly for something else that happened at the ’76 montreal games. as she tells it, her and her teammates went into the locker room and were startled to hear what appeared to be men’s voices. investigating the noise she found that it was coming from the east german women’s swim team. when the east germans went on to dominate the games, shirley called them out for doping. this charge turned out to be accurate, but before that shirley was lambasted by the press as being a sore loser and was nicknamed “surly shirley”.

now shirley lives in fountain valley, with her son and her dog, leroy. leroy is a brussells griffon, and shirley said she got him after seeing a similar dog in the movie “as good as it gets”. these days shirley is a letter carrier with the post office, and doesn’t really swim anymore. she says she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about her olympic career, being that it’s been about thirty years since she swam competitively. she seemed proud of her tomato garden, and even gave me a bag full of really delicious plum tomatoes to take home.

my thanks to mindy benham at orange coast magazine, and to the always talented kevin miyazaki for the referral.

(my thanks to joey gu for noticing a typo above, which has now been fixed.)

it’s been really busy lately over here on allen avenue, and there are lots of legitimate updates to get to, but first this. . . a couple of my friends seem to have two year olds at the moment, and both dropped by for a visit over the last week on one of the rare occasions when i was home and not cramming to meet a deadline or struggling with misbehaving computers. above there’s denny, with his daughter catherine. catherine mostly played out in the front yard and seemed to take great delight in climbing a stepladder repeatedly.

below is lavey and flynn who now looks considerably different than he did the last time i photographed him, at 47 days old. flynn enjoyed running around my coffee table/flat files repeatedly, gnawing on a DVD-R (blank, thank god) and investigating whether or not a speed graphic camera is breakable. (it is, but also thankfully, wasn’t).

also, there’s tim, but he’s in brazil. and since this is an election year, everybody knows that expatriots don’t count.

david allen is the author of a popular series of books and accompanying lectures promoting a system called “getting things done“. it’s quite possible i could use some of this training myself. i was very pleased to see, though, that david allen doesn’t abhor the use of post-it notes. really, i’ve got way too many of those things around here. for an otherwise technologically savvy guy, i have a lot of pens and a lot of paper still cluttering up my desk. then again, that’s got to be one of david’s steps: get rid of clutter. a cluttered office = a cluttered mind, or so they say.

i forgot to ask him to explain to me why it is that every time i clean things up it becomes harder to get things done, not easier. seriously whenever i clean up my office i spend twenty minutes the next day just trying to figure out where i put all the post-it notes.

(this was shot for mindy katzman at businessweek magazine. thanks, mindy)

what do you do if you’ve made millions in business, you find yourself retired and have been slowly watching someone you love ravaged by multiple sclerosis? well, if you’re cliff giese you look around, find someone working on a promising treatment and struggling to finance it, you step in, put your money where it can do some good and get things rolling. cliff and his brother kevin started BioMS, a company that is aggressively seeking new MS treatments, based heavily on an experimental drug called dirucotide. cliff is the CEO of the company, and his wife, robin, is a living testament to the effectiveness of the drug and what can be accomplished when wealthy people channel their resources to amazing ends.

this was shot for forbes back in february but the story just ran a couple weeks ago. my thanks to janice pikey at forbes, and to corporal bennett for his helpful assistance as usual.