I remember waking up that morning with a long tail, thick whiskers, and an insatiable appetite for subway water runoff and fermented garbage. I wrapped the tail around my leg with duct tape, shaved the whiskers off, and then drank a large cup of coffee. By lunchtime my tail had disappeared. My whiskers never grew back. I never realized then that I had an ongoing medical condition.

Nothing ever happened again until a few months later when I began smoking massive amounts of the Purple Spike. Purple Spike looked like prime California Kush. Thick, golf ball size buds covered with purple hairs and crystals, and the kind of scent that just blasted through any container it was in. But the Purple Spike didn’t smell like weed because it wasn’t weed. Purple Spike was the last original strain of Dehydrated Free Will cultivated by the now infamous Clan of
Jompa. More on that shit later, because I have to get some preliminaries out of the way. Otherwise, you are not going to understand or even be prepared mentally for what you are about to learn. There’s a good chance that your body could just shut down and cease operating.

dear friend,

to begin, i want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for following/visiting my blog this year. it’s nice to know that people other than myself are actually taking the time to look at my photos. i am extremely humbled and privileged that you take the time out of your busy schedule to actually visit this and my other sites. it means a lot.

i’m not a professional street photographer. i don’t do workshops. i don’t sell prints. i don’t troll facebook. i don’t post youtube videos or have my friends create “biographies” of me. i do this here because i love doing it. even if no one read or visited this blog from today on, i would still be doing street photographs.

and that leads to the one thing they don’t say enough of on those “how to” street photography blogs about the “secrets” to street photography. you have to love it. that’s where it begins, because more than the camera, more than the lenses, more than the technique, more than the top ten lists, more than the flickrbation, is your heart. follow it first before you start wondering how to market yourself.

and in that regard, share share share your heart and passion with others. if you take lots of photographs, then share them, but with the understanding, first and foremost, that you take those photographs for yourself. if that concept is hard to understand, shoot a couple of weddings or for a client then you’ll know exactly what i mean.

it’s hard for me to figure out why some out there insist on “only showing your best” because you only have “ten or twenty” photos in your lifetime that are “good.” maybe so, but that’s living a photographic life in fear and with a hyper consciousness that you have a place in history. just let the chips fall where they fall. sure, self-edit but never self-censor your photographic expression. when you get your solo exhibit at the MOMA, then spend the time trying to figure out your place in history. but i imagine by that point, you’ll have someone who’ll do that for you.

have a happy 2012. and make every moment count, because life is one fickle ass bitch.

blessings,
eli a/k/a rufus

i know some of you know this, but i’m one of michael bloomberg’s unofficial biographers. he asked me to do it unofficially a few years ago while we were eating bagels at le bagel cafe in brooklyn. it’s been a pretty cool gig so far even though i’m not getting paid anything. he throws me a bag of ridiculously salty pretzels here and there and once in a while allows me to use his bathroom at his apartment so long as he’s not around and i don’t crap in it. i was asked a few weeks ago by one of those reporters from the new york times whether i could tell her something about bloomberg that wasn’t on wikipedia. i had to think about it for a few minutes because there was a lot of shit that people didn’t know about the mayor. for example, he uses a reduced fare metrocard, will not under any circumstances shop at c-town supermarkets, loves, i mean loves barbara streisand and elizabeth taylor, and is deathly afraid of squirrels. but the one thing that really no one  knows is that bloomberg was one of the founding members of run dmc.

my favorite thing about holiday shopping is the lines. i love waiting in lines, especially at the large national retail chains like target or as they say here in brooklyn, tar-zhayyyyy. there’s nothing like knowing that there will be three times as many cashiers and workers after the holidays than there will be in the days before christmas. i love getting to inspect the back of people’s heads and feeling the front of some asshole’s cart rubbing against my lower back in the only available four customer lines that each have at least eight hundred shoppers in them. i can’t find anything better to do on the day before christmas than wait three hours to get to the cashier and then when i finally do the scanner doesn’t work and there’s no one to price check my motherfucking gallon of milk. i say, ‘i’ll give you a twenty and we’ll call it even,’ because you know, i want to get out of there, but then she says in between chewing gum and twittling with her sterling plated earrings that her cash register is locked. i think maybe i could just steal the milk but then i remembered that during the holiday season there are like four security guards for every person in the store. so given the crowd, i figured there were at least two hundred and forty three thousand of them hiding behind the plastic bags or the woman’s lingerie. instead i went to the dollar store and got some expired milk and seventy eight corn husk angels for my nephews.