things are a bit of a mess here on allen avenue this weekend as my kitchen is being remodeled. a new sink is being installed, the old tile counter ripped out and a new granite countertop put in. i already miss the old tile, actually, and i’m kind of bummed out that i wasn’t there for the crowbar fueled destruction. i went to lunch at the wrong time and when i came back all the demolition had been completed. everything that used to be in my kitchen is now stacked up in piles all over the dining and living rooms. i had no idea there was so much stuff in there.

this project is masterminded by luis sanchez (above) with help from his nephew, valentine. despite the temporary chaos and clutter i’m very grateful to have this done, as i’ve been hoping my landlady would put in a new sink for four years. it was sorely needed.

luis and valentine thought it was a little funny that i wanted to take their picture, but they were good sports about it all.

thanks, guys.

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.

growing up i would’ve said i was a dog person. really. but winona is the cat of my life. amazing to think i got her seventeen years ago, at the beginning of my senior year of high school. she’s lived with me the past twelve years straight, through dog attacks, unfriendly room-mates, two lovely girlfriends (one allergic, one as smitten with ‘nona as she was with me)  and several different apartments. once long ago, when i had a darkroom, i could’ve sworn that winona was addicted to fixer. those who know me know that i’m irrationally devoted to her, and i like her more than most people i meet. also, she depends on me for survival, which most people i meet don’t do. that kind of helps with the attachment.

now, at seventeen, winona is hanging on, in a pretty advanced stage of kidney failure. i give her 100 cc’s of saline through an IV every other day. she’s surprisingly patient with this, and i’ve been doing it for over a year. so far the veterinarian seems amazed she’s still alive and kicking. every day she makes me smile, especially on days when nothing else does. happy birthday, kiddo.

the above pic was taken with the glorious iphone 1.0, in mid august. the pictures below were taken today, on her birthday, in an attempt to do something more formal. cats are not terribly into being cooperative for studio pictures. thanks to mark miller for cat wrangling, even though it was an uphill battle. these aren’t quite what i was hoping for but i was afraid we were starting to stress her out, which is bad on the kidneys.

and my thanks, also, to the james watson bobble head doll for standing in.

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)

last week our fair city of angels was graced with the presence of jonathan saunders, who brought a shotgun with him. ignoring the fact that we’re a bunch of bleeding heart liberals out here, he somehow managed to convince a few of his photographer friends to travel to sylmar and shoot at fluorescent pink clay targets. i abstained from handling shotguns, but was happy to watch jonathan and joe toreno have at it (below).

not typically known for his good cheer, jonathan was downright gleeful handling a shotgun, so that was nice to see. he hit the first two targets he shot at which is good enough for me to remain impressed. really, the best angle to photograph from would be right in front while he’s shooting but i’m not that brave yet. maybe next time. i managed to pocket one of the empty shells as a souvenir, though.

later in the week we went bowling. i haven’t bowled that badly in twenty five years. but thanks to jonathan for hanging out, and for providing entertaining stories about people i kind of know. it’s a weird world out there.

a couple weeks ago i was taking pictures of a number of the incoming freshmen at occidental college. as the day went on i started to feel increasingly old in a room full of kids and mentioned that feeling out loud, to this girl (above) named yelka. the dialogue went something like this:

college freshman: “how old are you?”

me: “thirty-five”

college freshman: “thirty-five isn’t that old. my mom is thirty-six!”

somehow this didn’t make me feel better. and, of course, corporal bennett starts laughing hysterically, and repeating the exchange to everyone else we see that day. the moral of the story seems to be that no matter how young you feel, you’re always going to be an old fart to a teenager.

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.

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From: tara@————-
Subject: My Heart vs. The Real World…
Date: September 4, 2008 10:36:01 AM PDT
To: max@msgphoto.com

Hello Max,
I am a mom of a 7 year old boy, Theo, with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.

I bought your book for us to look at and read, and I just feel compelled to write and tell you what a difference it is making in our lives.

Every night, we read books together. Theo picks one, and his little brother
Tommy picks one. Every single night since we have owned your book, it is the
one which Theo picks. The first night, he lay on his bed and looked through
every single page. Now, he picks one chapter a night. We have read and reread
the chapters. My kids know the names of every child in the book. Theo LOVES
the pictures, and loves hearing about what older children do. He is absolutely
enthralled. Admittedly, I pick and choose which text to read, since some of it
is a little advanced for the little people.

However, last night I took the book into my room and read it after we had read the “Grant” chapter for the fifth time in a row. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, and ended up actually crying. With real tears. Going through all
that we have been through I think that we sometimes become hardened, and it meant a great deal for me to feel that emotion. Not only sadness, but awe, and amazement, and beauty. It is an amazing book.

One thing which stood out to us was the child whose brother had Leukemia. Theo, in addition to having HLHS, had cancer when he was two. My children said, “look, his brother’s a baldie!”. I told them that his brother had cancer, and Theo said, “wow, they have been through a lot just like us.” Not in a pitying
way, but in an admirable, camaraderie-filled, way. You presented that so
beautifully, and in such an understated-yet-powerful manner. Touching.

You did a wonderful job, and it is much appreciated. Just wanted to let you
know.

Thank you.

Tara

————

and as i post this it occurs to me that today is september 5th. this means that i took the very first picture for the hearts book on this very day, nine years ago. (of grant, at camp del corazon) on the way back from catalina island our boat had engine troubled and turned back. i was stranded at an abandoned campground with a bunch of doctors and donors (and one photographer and photo assistant who i think were there from family circle magazine or something along those lines). anyway, in being stranded i missed aaron’s birthday party. so in addition let me also add, happy birthday aaron.