Today’s soundtrack: There’s a new kind of dedication,
maybe you’ll find it down the tunnel.
Today at 8:02pm: Pineapple shopping.

The photographic version of a Mexican standoff.

He sticks a light meter in your face and the lamps strobe, pow, pow, pow. Asks you to shift this way or that, look this way or that. Lean forward more, he says. Try to relax, you can smoke if you want. So this is what it would be like to be a model.

I’ve been used as a testing dummy for photographer friends before, and the thing I’ve found is I’m not very good at it. Partially because I kind of look like a turtle but mostly because I’m not very photogenic.

You know how flourescent bulbs flicker on and off hundreds of times a second? It’s imperceptible to the naked eye, but if you filmed yourself sitting under flourescents and replayed it in super slo-mo, you’d see that for a portion of the time you were sitting in complete darkness and didn’t even know it.

Basically my face is like a flourescent bulb. Every other millisecond it’s imperceptibly shifting into extraordinarily unflattering expressions, and it takes the shutter of a camera capturing the moment in order for you to see it.

Mike had various weird photographic “themes” Shady and I had to fit into, by wearing different clothes in differently-lit backdrops. Shady was an Off-Duty Yakuza (wifebeater, tattoos) while I was the inglorious “Accountant to the Yakuza” (Slick dark shirt, geek-chic glasses).

At one point he had me put on a traditional Chinese shirt and stand in front of a shoji screen for the Asian Exploitation look. The shot was backlit and I got to see the photo. My ears are so big and filtered so much light it looked like I had malformed red peppers attached to my head.

I’ve only ever had two friends with bigger ears. My friend Seiji, it looks like his ears can pick up radio signals from Brazil. My other friend Jimmy’s got a similar problem, though he does pretty well with the ladies.

“One time I was at a bar,” Jimmy said, “and this girl, she told me my ears make my head look like a car driving down the highway with both doors open.” Everyone laughed. I forced mine.