countessian

Downtown Los Angeles is probably always going to be one of my favourite places to walk around all day taking pictures.

I’ve stood at this spot a lot during the past few years and it still doesn’t bore me. And Los Angeles is so nice at seven in the morning that I don’t mind waiting for the bus at all.

[I've been making some colour themes from my pictures on Kuler.]

[That's just a ghetto shop sign round the corner from my house that I took a picture of on Valentine's Day, though.]

The actual EP cover has a picture I took on it, blood everywhere.

You can get it from the American iTunes store if you like.

I shot my favourite Texans again the other night, for Brooklyn Vegan.

My neighbourhood, on Saint Valentine’s day.

[I had a hot two-cocktail date with Blaque Chris Mathis, during which we watched someone spray gang tags across the street and listened to the bartender whine at length about everything from the lack of sugar cubes to the time his ex called the cops on him for domestic violence when he "like, totally didn't even lay a finger on her". It was great. We were giggling into our eggs. Best Valentine's Day ever.]

True romance, LA style:

I went on 750words.com for the first time today, and I’m already rated PG for “swearing, sexual content and violence”. Success!

In all seriousness, it’s a good little writing project to go along with the at-least-one-picture-every-day thing into which I wrangled myself six weeks or so ago.

PS—Some new Chain & The Gang and Strange Boys shots will be appearing soon on Brooklyn Vegan.

I met marvellous photographer and all-round person-who-knows-what’s-delicious-in-New York Kathryn Yu at Mayahuel and just before we parted she told me about the great hot dog place round the corner.

I was loitering by myself for a while before meeting up with my next appointment, so I went there and it was wonderful.

The hot dog was so good I had to just get right up and order the same thing again, and while waiting I got to watch a stream of people enter the old-fashioned phone booth in the wall, pick up the phone, and then disappear through the wall when it was opened up by the girl on the other side, which all seemed entirely lovely to an English girl alone in Manhattan in the middle of the night on her first ever trip to New York City.

I didn’t write this; I found it between layers of my clothes on someone else’s bedroom floor in a foreign country.

I thought a lot about what to do and then decided that seeing as it was tucked in among my belongings it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable for me to take it and keep it secret for years and years and not show anyone until now, when I’m much older and and it’s been so long that I sort of can’t remember being hopelessly infatuated any more.

I found it the other day and had completely forgotten it but somehow kept it with me through, I think, eight house moves and one change of continent. I was looking for something else entirely, and it was so strange to find this.

(Meanwhile, I’ve been shooting lots of little shows: Pope Anything and Har Mar Superstar at Three of Clubs, Harlem, Smith Westerns and Pearl Harbor at Madam Wong’s, and so on. I wasn’t wearing any of the above finery at the time, thank God.)

They were pretty impacted, as you can see.

I liked it, because a) it made for a good x-ray, and of course I care about the photos more than anything else, and b) I lived on butternut squash soup and Persian ice cream for a week after the surgery.