Not quite a year ago whilst biking to work one morning I passed a patch of passion fruit flowers growing on a fence alongside the Ballona Creek Bikeway near Sepulveda Boulevard and among the many marvelous blossoms found a big and busy carpenter bee hard at work on one. As I go nowhere without a digital camera, I snapped it, liked the end result and thus popped it up on LA Metblogs. From there the fine Mark Fraunfelder at Boing Boing happened upon it and liked it enough to complimentarily repost the image to that ridiculously famous blog (although for some unknown reason he changed my name to “Will Mann” and despite a couple requests made since asking him correct that error it hasn’t been; oh well).
Fast forward to a couple months or so ago and from out of the blue I get an email from a writer named Diana Barshaw. She tells me she’s doing an article on carpenter bees for her local paper and in the course of her research she found my photo on Boing Boing and wondered if it might be possible to get my permission to reprint it.
Being a greedy bastard I wondered to her if any monetary compensation might be available, and though she tried to get the editor to pay me, it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. Barshaw was such a sweetheart she even offered to give me a cut of her writing fee but as she was barely getting paid herself I told her permission was hers and the paper’s in hopes I could at least get a copy sent to me after the story ran. She said absolutely.
Her local paper? The Jerusalem Post. As in Tel Aviv. As in Israel.
My copy arrived yesterday (click the thumbnails to enlarge):
The article as it appears on the JP website does so without my image for some reason, but it’s there in the dead tree version with my name and website spelled correctly in the credit line, thus allowing me to cross No. 64 off my to-do list: Get something published in a publication outside of the United States.
In other publication news albeit far closer to home, three images I took of Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” installation at the LA County Museum of Art were included in a new book/online exhibition from the museum titled, “Celebrating Urban Light.” Got no scratch for that either, but I did score a complimentary copy of the $45 volume. I’d submitted four pics, but I guess they didn’t like my favorite of the bunch, what with my bike cluttering up the shot.