This site is currently under construction. Though the blog is active semi-daily, the portfolio has been mostly archived and will only showcase newer work—anything done before 2020 will remain offline. As I’m currently working on a variety of new projects, there will be significant updates throughout the fall and winter. (There will also be a regular front page directing to the portfolio instead of the blog, but due to the fact writing is the only really active part of the site right now, I keep it on the front page.)

Anyway, thanks for visiting and hopefully the actual content of the site will be up sooner rather than later.

Watching Ed Sheeran’s career implode this week has been a delight. He dropped Macklemore from his tour due to pressure from known associate of Jeffery Epstein Robert Kraft regarding voicing support for Palestine on stage. The fallout from Sheeran’s spineless bending of the knee to billionaire Zionists has been wonderful. Everyone else performing (including his backing band) left the tour while Macklemore pledged $1 million of his earnings from the tour to Palestine Aid.

It’s unfortunate but the only way to really change things under capitalism is to fuck with Big Money. Though some some celebrity entertainers who remain ‘apolitical’ (Taylor Swift and Jay-Z come to mind) for the sake of their ticket sales are still kind of untouchable from public criticism, this fall-off for Sheeran suggests the protests against Israel have reached a new level in American discourse. The general public cares more about celebrities than most things, and this kind of attention will hopefully provoke those at the top to understand standing with Israel—or deciding to not comment on the matter and thus side with the genocide—could potentially lead to major losses in both income and legacy.

With the Trump administration agreeing to sell $2.8 billion in arms to Israel, Sheeran’s disaster is helping to increase the scope of debate about the United States’ position in funding genocide and protecting an apartheid state—and what it means to say, No Comment.

At this point I will not even speak to someone who supports Israel (except maybe to tell them to get fucked). There is no excuse for ‘not picking a side’ regarding (much less openly supporting) a genocidal apocalypse state that protects pedophiles while targeting children in Gaza. Over fifty percent of the population supports killing every Palestinian, while eighty-two percent support expelling them from Gaza using force. It is a depraved horror show of a country that should be dissolved immediately and left to the history books in a chapter titled Great Mistakes of International Governance.

I hope Ed Sheeran learns some kind of lesson from this and I hope every PR agency is in a state of panic as to how to handle their clients with this increasing public discontent for the wealthy supporting mass murder. Mostly, I hope this becomes the type of protest that begins to really interfere with the finances of people who only care about money and are OK with disregarding human life. They are the rot of humankind and the only reason I hope there’s a heaven is because that means there is a hell that they will all burn in for eternity.

One project I always loved was The Dissonance Polaroids, an abstracted instant film series I worked on from 2013-2015—three from the original batch can be seen above. I’ve returned to that with a refined conceptual approach and put the first results online to view. I am doing this new volume as four-image sets and will likely update the gallery when five new sets are complete.

Alvarado and Sunset

Alvarado and 8th

I remain intrigued by photographing intersections while I’m waiting on the light—although I will say since moving to Westlake I am amazed at how many people on foot or scooter or bike just do not care about what light is which color at any given time.

HEART Trio tonight at Zebulon

Saw the HEART Trio of William Parker, Cooper-Moore, and Hamid Drake tonight and it’s one of those performances that can’t be put into words. At one point Cooper brought out what looked like a two-by-four with a string lined between two blocks of wood and hit a bass tone so deep that it shook us in the front row. I mean the guy was playing hand-made, one-of-a-kind instruments that looked like they’d been assembled from things found on the side of the road (and some of them were), but damn if these guys couldn’t play.

The show wasn’t sold out, so that means under 300 people in a city of eight million saw this incredible performance. Which is fine, different strokes for different folks. But it’s such a cool thing to live in a place where on any given night I can go to a club and sit in the front row as some jazz legends blow my fucking hair back with some improvisational music that has no counter.

After the show ended the guys talked about the instruments they played and how they related to the history of music and really brought their performance full circle into shifting from hearing those relationships in sound to comprehending them through language. This was music that seemed to transcend the bullshit of the world and tap into something pure. Absolutely wonderful.

Those that didn’t make it

I want to talk a little bit about failure.

This is a photo of the wall next to my desk where I’m currently working on the 2026 edition of my ongoing series, Standing Still In A Storm. I’ve been doing this project for close to 15 years now, with each year the guidelines changing a little bit. The basics remain the same: painted freehand parallel lines in black gesso that are not allowed to touch but meant to get as close as possible to one another. The paper size, border measurements, and brush width vary year-to-year, but the general rules are always the same.

So far, this year I’ve finished 18 pieces—including these six failures. For one reason or another, each of these did not meet the standards I have for the work. On some the ink bled under the tape (an issue I did not discover until the work was already complete and otherwise satisfactory). On some the slightest twitch of my hand caused the black lines to meet at some point. On others the proportions weren’t right and by the time I got to the last line it ended up wider than the brush I’m using. Whatever the reason, these are the failures—one-third of the work I’ve done so far.

I feel like artists online only ever show their successes. The ones who post process videos only do so when the final work is suitable for publishing. Content creators and influencers crop frames and set up shots that don’t actually represent what they’re doing. The rule of advertising is that everything has to be positive all of the time, and the internet has become one big advertisement for life. It’s all success stories, and I wonder how many of them are outright lies.

The thing is, everybody fails. The process of taking inspiration to creation is an arduous one. Yet in a society that demands better results faster, standards lessen, quality drops, concepts fade, and the finished product is cheapened. It’s no wonder those obsessed with capital love AI—it removes all the parts that take time from creativity, but in doing so it also removes everything that makes a creation good.

Failure is important to process. It’s a learning experience, much more so than achievement. By having this entire sect of culture that only shows finished products, it becomes akin to something between a gallery and a mall. The human values have been lost, and it’s not because people don’t fail, but because in the public eye, they’re not allowed to.