This is the first in a series of illustrations for the book TV Cream Toys: Presents You Pestered Your Parents For which was released late in 2007. I met Steve Berry, the author, in 2005 during my brief jaunt through England taking a final stab at the world of design and illustration before my life became completely consumed by photography.

He liked my style and so I ended up making illustrations for his book. Here’s a set of three, only two of them ended up in the book.

The first had to do with “Vertibird”, a toy that was probably banned beforeI had a chance to harm myself with it. Because of this disconnect, I was dreading doing the illustration but it turned out the be one of my favorites. The second is for something called “Stop Boris” which was some game for British kids featuring a horrifically large spider. And of course the third is for beloved and cherished Star Wars action figures engaged in battle at the ice planet of Hoth.

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Enlargements of Unusual Quality

I still dream about my home town. Usually it’s an innocuous road, somewhere on campus, or one dark corner of the backyard of the home I grew up in. But one thing that’s curious about these dreams is that the place is frequently flooded.

I’m not sure if there’s any meaning behind these dreams, but I do know that London, Ontario, Canada is a place that is now very far away from me. A place my family has pretty much abandoned, with no real desire to return or visit for more than an hour or two.

It was after I left London that I received an original envelope of photographs from 1937 complete with negatives. My mother’s cousin Jane had died, and since I was interested in photography I inherited this little piece of history.

The photos were of London’s notorious flood of 1937. They were quite possibly shot on the little pocket Kodak I have around my apartment. Over a thousand homes were destroyed in the flood along with millions of dollars worth of damage.

Some vaguely familiar places in the photos are inundated with water, mirroring my eerie dreams. Luckily I don’t really have to worry about floods of this scale here in Southern California.

These photos all had descriptions on the back. I’ve incorporated those captions via photoshop. Enjoy!

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It’s been a dull weekend. Disappointing one too. I was so enthused from last week’s slides that I hopped on eBay to find some more. I saw a huge lot of 1800 slides described as being of the eastern seaboard from  “1950-Now”. The seller was close so I just picked them up.

However the oldest slides were no older than 1971, the vast majority were boring… very boring slides from, predominantly, October of 1983, and there were next to no people in them. I was hoping for sea captains, fishermen and all sorts of coastal culture. Nope. I was supremely bummed.

What I liked about last week’s slides were their very amateur and dated nature. The fashions obviously placed the time frame, and lack of composition or context added an air of mystery and interest to them.

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The dusty old box and the memories within

This week I was at the Long Beach Coin Expo shooting some footage for my company. In between  takes I had the opportunity to look around at the tables on the bourse floor. There’s a lot more than coins there; Stamps, currency, fossils, antiques, post cards. A whole mess of old stuff. At one table I noticed an old box off to the side going unnoticed. I saw it was stuffed full of old black and white slides. I asked the man behind the desk what he was charging for the slides and he replied, “You mean the whole box?”. I shrugged, and he replied, “$25 for the whole thing.”

Knowing the hours of entertainment this would bring me I jumped at it and brought this dusty old box home. What it appears to be is a family’s photos chronicling various vacations from South America, to the coasts of the USA, to Europe and all of their respective cruises. The slides themselves seem to be labeled between the late 10s to the early 30s. All are 35mm transparencies, Kodak film. I think some of these may be dupes from the original photographs, some may be the actual pieces of celluloid that took the journey with the family.

I only scanned half of that’s in the box. There are 178 here so there must be well over 300 in total. The majority aren’t exactly the best photos technically or even aesthetically speaking. But they offer, at the risk of sounding cliched, a window into the past. Enjoy.

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I was going through assorted negatives tonight and I came across a sheet from our family’s 1986 trip to Disney World. When you’re a kid you don’t think of the aesthetic value of your family photos. They’re usually anything but art. Especially the photos that came back from the lab with a little sticker saying “No Charge” because the photo didn’t turn out. So it’s no surprise that I overlooked this in my initial scanning, it was a bad photo after all, wasn’t it?

But this evening I looked at the negative with new eyes and immediately saw pure gold. What I had was a set of two unintentionally and inexplicably double-exposed photos that overlapped. The exposures were also clipped off by the light of the camera back opening up in an incorrectly while presumably reloading. The result? Pure art. Can I credit my father for the exposures? My mom for incorrectly rewinding the film? Whatever the case, I’m showcasing it now. Enjoy.