Photo by Anna Kuperberg - www.kuperblog.com

After having Murray in our lives for over ten years, yesterday we finally made the decision to let him move on.  He was 16+ years old, and his legs and back were causing him so much pain on a daily basis that there just wasn’t much joy left for him in life (despite his daily meds, which at certain points rivaled anything I’ve seen humans have to take).

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the butcher and bought him his very own half-pound NY strip steak, seared it on the grill, chopped it into pieces he could manage with what little teeth he had, and covered it with a mound of shredded cheddar cheese (his favorite thing in the world).  He devoured the whole thing, though we still couldn’t get a tail wag out of him (which we haven’t seen in months).  Later that day, together with his vet, Chenin and I held him in our arms and stroked his fur while he passed into his last, final sleep.  It was one of the hardest things we’ve ever done, but giving him a peaceful death, surrounded by people who loved him, was the final gift we could give to a companion that’s brought so much joy into our lives.

To Murray (even though we know full well you can only read Spanish): You were truly a one-of-a-kind creature.  We found you at a time when no one else wanted you, and you returned the favor with fanatical love, devotion, and affection.  You’ve meant so much to us over the last decade, and saying goodbye to you marks the closing of a chapter in our lives.  You’ll be missed by all who knew you.  Sweet dreams, little pooch.  We’ll see you on the other side.

Murray - 10 years ago

Yesterday morning I received my Private Pilot license at Cable airport in Upland.  It took 2 years for me to complete my training (mostly because the summers have kept me too busy to find time for flying), which was MUCH longer than I thought when I naively picked up the phone one day and called a random flight school.  You legally only need 40 hours of flight time to get your license.  I had 63.7.  If I could have done the training without huge breaks in-between flights, I probably could have done it in close to 40, but you build up rust pretty fast as a student pilot when you aren’t in the air for a couple months.

The examination was one of the more difficult things I’ve done in recent memory.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper “boss,” and there aren’t many people in my life that could make me feel 2 inches tall.  However, when you have just barely begun to master something, and you are asked to demonstrate it to someone who’s been literally doing it full time their entire adult life, you’re bound to feel like a putz.  That was me.  My examiner had been flying since 16, an airline captain (yes, full captain on a 737) since 30, and had over 22,000 hours of flight time.  It was the aviation equivalent of having Kelly Slater judge my surfing or having Neil Peart judge my drumming.

So while most of the exam went fine, my examiner pounced on any weaknesses he sensed, and drilled deep down like a festering cavity on a tooth.  Like water leaking into a boat through a small hole, he’d slowly start sinking the whole ship, a drop at a time, with questions that made me feel like 2 years of flying had prepared me no better than a casual glance through a magazine.  We spent 20 minutes discussing True Airspeed because I had used the wrong scale on my little flight computer.  I told him I understood the concept.  He defiantly stated “prove it.”  He wanted to make sure I actually knew, but mostly, he wanted to see me sweat.  He wanted to see whether I was the kind of person who would crack and give up, or who had enough confidence and resolve to keep going.  In the air, these things matter.

And that was before we even got into the damned plane.  The engine gave me a hard time when starting it.  He told me that what I was doing to get it going was “a good way to start an engine fire.”  We taxied to the runway, and while en-route I set some avionics.  He said that was “very dangerous.”  We took off and turned crosswind.  I didn’t apply enough rudder in the turn and he said it was “a good way to get the aircraft into a spin.”  By doing what I normally did, I had, apparently, nearly killed us three times before we had climbed 500 feet above the ground.  It went on, and on, and on.  Too fast.  Too slow.  Don’t turn that way.  Don’t read that checklist now.  Don’t use flaps.  Why are you slipping the airplane now?  About half of what I did brought strong words of consternation, and dire warnings of fiery crashes and dead family members.

But at the end of the day, it’s his job to evaluate my performance by the FAA’s standards, not his own, and after a nearly 5 hour exam, he shook my hand, gave me my license, shot a couple polaroids at my request, and sent me on my way.  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  I was literally afraid that the next thing I did would be the thing that sent him running after me, saying “what the hell do you think you’re doing?!?”, and that he’d tear up my license and call me a cab.

I learned a lot yesterday – about flying, and about myself.  I’m certainly grateful that the examiner was hard on me, because it will make me a better pilot.  But I’ll also get a sinking feeling in my stomach every time I fly over Cable airport that I’m doing it all wrong, and that somewhere, an old grizzled pilot is watching me and shaking his head in dismay.

Glanced down at my desk and thought it made a nice little time capsule still life thing.  Baby monitor, post-its with development notes about the LR presets, a Hasselblad battery, more pages of notes, a sharpie, some CF cards, a lunchbox with homemade bourbon in it, a PS3 game that I still haven’t had time to sink my teeth into, a moleskine journal filled with ideas for shoots, a pocket knife, a 30″ Dell display with Lightroom open, a book on critical theory specific to photography, the ipod shuffle that I sometimes take surfing, and a flip video camera for documenting our growing boy at a moment’s notice.

I recently read a quote from the guy that heads up vehicle design at Ford, from a recent issue of Esquire, as I recall.  Paraphrasing: “If you look inside someone’s home, you’ll see who they are.  If you look at their car, you’ll see who they want to be.”  My desk, at a glance, gives you a pretty big clue as to what occupies my time nowadays (if my piano or surfboard fit on there, the picture would be near complete).  I wonder how true this rings for other people as well…

Mark's 2nd Time Getting Stuck In Mud In As Many Weeks

Unstuck

You can see the old crane we photographed in the upper right of the image.  Worth the risk to drive out there, but damn it was a close call almost getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with evening approaching.  Making pictures at the Salton Sea can be a dicey proposition.  Maybe I’ll eventually get a real 4WD vehicle…

Tradeshow freight sitting in my garage, with me sitting on the freight, wearing blue.

1. I turned 30 this year.  But I still feel like I’m in my 20s.  Which is either cause to celebrate or a precursor to a really bad midlife crisis soon when I realize I’m not.
2. I’ve been married 7 years this month, to a woman I started dating when I was 16.  It has been an uninterrupted relationship since then, which is already basically half my life.  (Hi Chenin!  Happy Anniversary babe!)
3. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UC Irvine, which I finished in 2002.  I spent one year at UC Berkeley before finishing the other 3 at UCI.
4. I didn’t set out to be a photographer – I originally wanted to be an architect, but there isn’t an architecture program at UCI, so I studied Art.  Chenin figured she better make the money, in that case, and got a law degree.
5. Long before that, when I was like 10, I wanted to be a fighter pilot, because I saw Top Gun, and flying F-14s looked bitchin.
6. I’ve only been to 3 countries outside the US – Fiji, Jamaica, and Mexico (which hardly counts when you live in Southern California).
7. I’m about 3 hours of flight time short of getting my Private Pilot certificate.
8. I own 7 surfboards.
9. I built my own custom arcade cabinet, which can play several thousand games.  It’s a converted TMNT cabinet that runs MAME on Linux.
10. I think that dark chocolate anything is the king of all desserts, and nothing else is worth the time, money, or effort.
11. I prefer only one ice cube in my whiskey.
12. I hate celery, and strongly dislike melon.
13. Aaron Barrett’s lyrics have profoundly influenced the way I see the world.
14. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou might just be my favorite movie.
15. I play the drums.  I think I might even be pretty good.  But I wouldn’t be sure, because I haven’t owned a kit since high school, since apartment living and percussion don’t mix, and I never got back into it.
16. I know enough C to actually code a functional program, and make sense of real-world code…. but I’m not good enough at it, nor patient or sadistic enough, to actually want to write programs for real.  I could, but I won’t.
17. I got rid of an Infiniti to buy a Honda Element, which I still drive, and couldn’t be happier with.  Used to dream about a Ferarri, and now my dream machine is a Sky Car.
18. Beelzebubba, by the Dead Milkmen, might just be my favorite album ever.  I actually believe it’s both funny and profound.
19. I’m a gamer.  Have been since the age of 2 or 3.  I play Call Of Duty – World At War a lot.  If you have that game on the PS3, look me up – gamer tag captain_manly (long story, don’t ask).  I only play that because it’s less adictive than COD4, TF2, CS, and all the other games I’ve sunk countless hours of my life into.
20. I can barely see out of my right eye.  If I ever get blinded in the left one, I’m screwed.
21. Sea Urchin (Uni) is probably my favorite cut of sushi, though Mackerel (Saba – not Spanish Mackerel) is a close second.
22. I kinda, sorta know how to sew a little, but haven’t really made anything since high school… I used to make clothes for Chenin.  Weird, I know.
23. I rarely go to bed past midnight, and rarely sleep past 8.
24. I love spending time alone.
25. A few years ago, I decided to try learning something new every year.  A couple years ago it was how to surf.  Last year it was flying.  This year it’s Mandarin Chinese, though it’s looking like “how to be a dad” is going to push it back a while.  Piano is on the list next, I think… So much to do and learn.

I haz a happy!

Check out the video at Vimeo:

I Haz A Happy! from Doug Boutwell on Vimeo.

Being a dad has been fucking awesome so far… takes a lot of time, but I swear it re-arranges your perspective on life.  All that stuff that parents would say to me about how great it is and all that… it’s pretty much all true.  Anyway – it’s a gratuitously cute and silly thing to post here, but it’s my blog and I’ll post stuff about my boy if I wanna :)

Anyway, here’s a frame that I never paid much attention to, probably because at the time it was just a picture of me and Chenin, and isn’t really anything special.  But now, it’s a document of just how young and excited I was about photography, that even a silly self-portrait in the mirror seemed worthy of a frame of film on the school’s loaner C330.  Just simply loading up the camera and shooting anything was an adventure worthy of the effort.

And then there’s the image that made me want to go looking through the negs – a frame from the shores of the Salton Sea, on my first trip there back in, probably ‘99 or so.  I remember this image vividly, but hadn’t seen it in years, and wanted a print for the walls.  I still remember sitting on the shore made of fishbones, trying to read the hands of my Mickey Mouse watch by the ridiculously dim moonlight to know when the 10 minutes was up for the exposure, and hoping I got it right because I only had like two frames left.

I’m looking forward to heading back here in a couple weeks to finally shoot this place for real, no messing around, and put the nail in the coffin of a photographic journey I’ve been on for years.  The Salton Sea still does and always will fascinate me, but it’s time to move the fuck on, so I’ll be seeking closure soon.  Ten years is enough.  Hopefully I can then turn my brain more fully toward new projects, and recapture a bit of that sense of wonder I had at the magic of pictures, when I shot that frame in the mirror a decade ago.

On that note, I’ll end with an inspiring quote, which comes at a good time for me.  I found it on the back of a Starbuck’s cup yesterday while shopping for baby tummy medicine at Target.  I’m going to tape it onto my monitor, because it speaks directly to one of the things that keeps me sitting at home instead of out shooting.

The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

– Anne Morriss, Boston MA