Vacation Slideshow
Most of you are probably too young to remember the days when you had to watch actual slide shows of vacation photos. I remember my grandparents went on a safari in Kenya in the 80’s and I had to sit there and watch all these slides projected on the wall for what seemed like hours. I thought the elephants and giraffes were cool but when you are 7 years old it gets really tedious really quickly. Vacation photos are almost always boring but fortunately for you guys I don’t do vacations like most people.
I rarely go on vacation because my whole life is sort of a vacation but once a year, every year, three of my closest friends and I go on a fishing trip in the small town of Lewes, DE. This year was a little bit different because sadly my friend Jamie’s grandmother died and it was just three of us. We also had the fishing boat we were going to go on get canceled twice which means we had to go fishing on a pier instead of on a boat but it was fun and relaxing and I have some pretty weird friends. My friend Barry is a 6’6″ tall in shape black dude with questionable taste in style and my friend Sam is a short nerdy Jewish guy. I have known them both since I was 10 but the three of us look really weird rolling into Dairy Queen together.
After the fishing trip I spent a day in DC with my parents before heading out to LA for my girlfriend’s birthday. She wanted to go to the desert to celebrate so we spent a day in LA, four days in the desert and then I hung out for another few days in LA. When we got back to LA from the desert I did a little bit of work and photographed two naked porn chicks but mostly it was just hanging out in bed with my girlfriend and eating lots and lots of food.
It seems like your normal vacation except that my girlfriend is a porn star and we went to the Salton Sea so shit got weird. You saw the photos we took in abandoned homes in Bombay Beach but you didn’t see the photos we took on the beach or in Niland, CA. Niland is this dying city at the far northeast end of the Salton Sea. It is an amazing place on it’s own but on the outskirts of Niland there is a place called Slab City. Slab City is a free RV park that has people living there year round. It’s sort of like a giant hobo camp in the summer full of crazy people, meth addicts, hippies and outlaws. The sign on the way in claims in spray paint that it’s “The Last Free City”. There is a shoe tree and a venue/bar made out of a bunch of trailers stuck together that has live music on the weekends. I really want to spend some time there at some point in my life. It’s incredible.
Slab City is in the shadow of one of the weirdest and most amazing tourist attractions in the country. “Salvation Mountain” is an art project started by a man name Leonard Knight. He built a mountain out of sand and trash and has been painting it for decades with religious messages. Despite my disinterest in religion I have wanted to see this thing for years and meet Mr. Knight. Unfortunately he was put into a home for dementia late last year. From what I know about him he was a very kind man and never preachy and created an amazing work of art. A twenty something guy with a beard was working on it when we got there and was very nice as well. I asked him if I could take his picture and he said “This is Slab City. You can do whatever you want.” Amazing.
So yeah, this is not your normal vacation slideshow. We did some touristy stuff like visiting Shield’s Date Garden and Pioneertown but a lot of the photos are just of her naked all over the place so you cannot complain about that. We ran into Vincent Gallo at Dana DeArmond’s place and he gave us tons of tips on the Salton Sea, we hung out with a really cute puppy and there are outtakes from two shoots with naked porn babes. So yeah, you get some pretty shots of clouds and landscapes and touristy things, but you also get naked girls, dead fish and adorable puppies. It’s a pretty fun gallery and it’s all shot on 35mm. You even get some black and white stuff.
Hairless cats rule.