Far Out, Man...

OK, mixed bag concerning the shoot I had last Thursday at the Music Box. It was a Getty shoot for High Times' 10th Annual Stony Awards, featuring (as you might guess) an assorted bunch of pot-oriented luminaries. Tops among this list was the immortal Cheech & Chong (seen above), who are always fun to shoot, especially if you grew up in the 70s and 80s listening to their albums like I did. My photographer colleague/friends Anna Webber and Katy Wynn were there. And as it turns out, MSNBC.com picked one of my pictures of Tommy for their daily Celebrity Sightings photo blog. Nice.



And now the other side of the coin: the truly nauseating conditions under which those pictures were taken. You see, unlike other Music Box gigs in the past where I've shot either out front or in the lobby, the geniuses who put this event together decided to move the step-&-repeat around the corner, to the Music Box's parking lot. This in of itself wasn't a problem...until you got to the problem of...THE VENT. You see, right next to the Music Box is a little bar/restaurant that has a kitchen, and this kitchen has a motorized VENTing system that empties out--guess where?? YES, directly over the step-&-repeat! Isn't that brilliant?? Not only does all the TV interview material get nearly ruined by the jet-plane-like drone of THE VENT, but the celebrities and photographers get assaulted by these smelly, offensive waves of deep-fried catfish and the like. We on the green carpet literally could not remain on that carpet for extended periods of time. It was that gross. If you stepped away, you could see clouds of the stuff spewing out of THE VENT, down towards the carpet area. Yuck.


At least Cheech and Tommy helped make it worthwhile.

My mama talkin' to me, tryin' to tell me how to live
But I don't listen to her 'cause my head is like a sieve...