Threesome.

Tuesday evening triptych via iPhone. © Ryan Schierling

In hindsight, suede loafers in the pit was a bad idea.

Kataklysm @ Emo's. © Ryan Schierling

In my defense, however, I was there to shoot a local rockabilly-roots-punk band on the indoor stage. Afterward, J and I curiously wandered over to the much louder outdoor stage, where Canadian death metal band Kataklysm and German thrash metal band Kreator were rupturing eardrums.

I spent the rest of the evening in the mosh pit, finding life, trying to stay alive.

From the soil to the sky and back to the soil.

Treaty Oak. © Ryan Schierling

I am the lone survivor, the last of 14 elders. I have seen 500 summers and 500 winters pass. I am the senescent body and the blood of Comanche and Tonkawa, embracing, pushing away, giving and taking life. You cannot kill me, with one bullet or 100. Cut away the extremities, knock my crown to the poisoned grass and I will live on still, pushing from the soil to the sky and back to the soil.

© Ryan Schierling

There are cliches for this – trite, tried and true, emblazoned on motivational posters, emboldening those stuck in ruts and well-worn paths. What doesn't kill me may make me stronger, but it does not facilitate change if I keep going back to the same fight.

Un-plug, plug-in, un-plug.

82nd Annual Zilker Park Kite Festival. © Ryan Schierling

We started our Sunday waiting for one cable technician, waiting for a two-hour window to open and close, waiting to end our three-day drought with no internet. Technology is occasionally a frustrating child, unwilling to cooperate, throwing a tantrum of ones and zeroes and disobeying the simplest of commands (pleas). The lights on the cable modem just kept blinking, and blinking, and blinking – no send, no recieve, no in, no out – just power and a tired, blinking cable light.

The tech showed, went through the un-plug, plug-in, un-plug, plug-in routine, and finally had to scale a fence into our neighbor's yard to suss out the problem at the cable junction box. Long story short, internet restored. Faith restored. Hope restored. Connectivity, resumed.

Happy just to know it was there, we abandoned the emails and the internets for Hippie Church and tacos at Maria's Taco Xpress, and to go fly kites at Zilker Park.

On the road - Lorena, Texas.

City boys not allowed. © Ryan Schierling

On the road - Driftwood, Texas.

All of my favorite food groups are brown and white. © Ryan Schierling

The boy with the green balloon.

Sometimes all it takes is the simplest of things to make us happy. © Ryan Schierling

Jezebel.

Jezebel © Spanish For 100

Promoting their new album Jezebel, Spanish For 100 played a great live set on KEXP recently, and there was a nice mention of Go Away, Come Home. A humble, heartfelt thank you and much love to Aaron, Chris, Corey and Ross, and DJ Cheryl Waters. Click on "full performance" for the rock.

Spike Jonze, Huck Magazine 2010.

Plane ticket carbon Rorschach test, September 22, 1987. Courtesy of Spike Jonze.

In certain circles, Spike Jonze is crazy famous.

And for good reason – look at the attention Where The Wild Things Are has received. As a director, he's an Academy Award nominee, and he's won a fat fistful of national and international awards for Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. He has directed some of the coolest music videos and commercials you've ever seen. Go back a little further and you'll get to Dirt Magazine (brother publication of Sassy Magazine, masterminded by the Master Cluster of Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman and Jonze), Blind's Video Days (arguably one of the best skateboarding videos ever made) and Freestylin' Magazine.

Imagine it's 1987. You're a high school kid in a small midwestern town who rides a skateboard religiously and dabbles in a little BMX freestyle on the side. There is no southern California skate/freestyle culture where you live, there is only farmland, football and frustration. Transworld Skateboarding and Freestylin' Magazine are your only lifelines to the outside world, and you pore over them like they're sacred texts promising a better life if only you believe.

I believed.

When Jonze joined the Wizard Publications staff in the late 80s, shooting photos and writing the odd (odd) story here and there, I noticed... enough to write a few letters, call long-distance and bug him in the darkroom from time to time, and see if he was going to be at the AFA Masters Finals in Wichita, Kansas in the fall of 1988. When E. Heins and I found out he and writer Mark Lewman were going to be covering the event, we made plans to be there. Thankfully, our parents were receptive enough to our fervent teenaged pleas to agree to book a couple of hotel rooms across from the venue and chaperone us that weekend.

The highlight of the two days (and probably the highlight of my year) was skating downtown Wichita late that first night with Spike and Lew. Everything else was just a buzz and a blur.

Huck Magazine pages 54 & 55 (click for larger image). Bottom left photo © Ryan Schierling

One of my photos of Jonze from the AFA Masters Finals in November of '88 just ran in the UK skate/surf/snowboarding lifestyle magazine HUCK, along with three photos by Lew. It's good company to be in, and I am honored.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from our family to yours.

(L-R) Joon, Ryan, Benjamin, Miss Winifred, Julie, Waldo. © Ryan Schierling

Much love from Austin,

Ryan and Julie.