Long ago, on an island not too far away… This was last year, when I was kind of in the thick of it. I had just gotten my dialysis port in, but hadn’t yet run with it. Basically you have to heal for some weeks before you can begin treatment with peritoneal dialysis, so I had a tube coming out of my gut that made me very prone to infection. Usually when I go to driftwood I go for the whole time, and last year I was only able to go for like 36 hours. Basically one dock day, one night, and the morning after, and then I was on the ferry home.
One of the things that makes the island special is there’s basically nothing there. You bring in everything you need and pack out everything at the end. I wonder if that’s how the early days of burning man felt? Just like, throwing a cool party with your friends in a place that has nothing (well, there’s not nothing there, Jack has a pretty big solar array and a deck, and the all-important dock is there).
There is a alchemy to just coming together with a bunch of people like that, just to share space and time and sort of care for each other. Not in a ‘this guy needs a nurse’ kind of way (which given my trailing 12 months I also understand) but passing around snacks and sunscreen and shooting the shit all afternoon. Everybody brings their own grace notes to the thing, and there’s a beautiful music to it. Also there’s a lot of good music over the speakers.
Gonna throw up the film photos after this, and I have some things to say about those, too. I have been editing these for almost a year and need to let them out into the world. Perfect is the enemy of done, as they say.
Posted by matt on 2026-06-27T06:01:28Z GMT
In keeping with my new practice of getting the pictures out as quickly as I can, news is new, as they say, this was last weekend. Drop party is a celebration of music and art; it’s been hosted at a bunch of different spots over the years, but we keep coming back to the same central themes. Usually one or more DJs, always at least DJ OTHA, and at least one community painting; this year they had three easels going all night, and someone was swapping out canvases when they got done (when is a painting done? who knows?)
I was in and out, shooting the whole night. My photos from last year weren’t the best, but this year I just sort of relaxed and let whatever happened happen? You can’t really push these kinds of things, or at least I can’t. When I’m shooting, people definitely respond to whatever energy I’m putting out, and respond in kind; if I’m nervous or anxious and fumble or screw up, it definitely puts people off being photographed. Or maybe I’m projecting.
It was a pretty experimental night, for me; I haven’t been to a party since February (still have those pictures in the pipe, at some point I might get them out). I took a bunch of lenses I hadn’t used and got to mess around a bit. The 21mm I really like but I feel like it needs some kind of shooting tweaks to make it work properly; as it is I can’t really see to focus in the live view, the optical VF isn’t wide enough, and the other finder I have doesn’t have any focus indicator. I suppose I could just always use it at f/8, which would make it focus-free.
I also got to use the Noctilux a bit. It’s been mellowing on my shelf so I could forget some of the bad feeling I had about its focus issues. I fixed them some time ago, but so much of what I do with a camera is by feeling, any nagging doubt will throw me off. Yes I’m a sensitive little baby like that.
Enough about me and my camera shit thought. Me and Sophie went over in the middle of the afternoon to set up, then went to Bronco Billy’s to get everyone pizza. The Bull Durham there is still one of my favorite pies in the Bay Area.
Posted by matt on 2026-06-26T23:45:35Z GMT
Hot off the SD card, here are some photos from last night. Drink and draw, which I think I’ve mentioned here before, decided instead of the usual meetup at Lovely’s, we’d make our own smashburgers and watch a movie, specifically the anime Redline. Akhil was saying before the we watched it that the movie was called ‘Speed Racer on crack’ when it came out. I’d never seen it, but that’s not un-accurate? Except like, there’s no expectation that an animated feature will be grounded in reality, so somehow it reads as more grounded than the neon acid trip of Speed Racer. Maybe even a little noir? There are also a bunch of Escher-esque reality-warping acceleration sequences that also are just the best animation I’ve seen since watching Paprika.
Akhil hosted and cooked the burgs. He also showed us a really moving short called ‘Butterfly‘, which saying basically anything about the plot would be spoilers, but every frame of the thing is literally a painting? Which is just a wild amount of work and also stunning as an animation style.
This was the first time I’ve been out of the house at 10pm since the transplant, which meant, of course, that I had forgotten to bring my 10pm anti-rejection meds. So like 15 minutes before the end of the movie, I had to run back to my house (which luckily was like 2 blocks away) to get them. Of course, even being that close, I missed the end of the show. Luckily for me, the whole thing is on youtube.
Posted by matt on 2026-06-19T21:57:07Z GMT
These photos have been a long time coming, at least partially because I’ve been having a really hard time letting go of them. I wanted badly for them to be something else, but eventually I have to realize that they’re not, and that’s OK, and move on.
I can make excuses, like the light was difficult, and I was using a camera that, it turns out, was eating about 10% of the files it was supposed to be recording due to a faulty memory card, but really this is more about my feelings around the pictures. I didn’t discover the missing images until very recently, when some from a different party dissapeared and I ran PhotoRec on the card. And the light: that’s why these are in black and white, the color just didn’t make any sense.
It’s weird lately, like I just haven’t felt like shooting that much? Could just be the winter getting to me, but could be the hangover of a year where a lot happened. The last project took years to get anywhere and then years to materialize into a single copy of a book (which isn’t technically done), so maybe I should just cut myself some slack between projects? I don’t know.
I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I’m gonna blog what I’ve got.
Posted by matt on 2026-01-19T09:53:07Z GMT
