Two for two!

I just renewed my Chicago driver's license, and not only did the DMV get me processed through its labyrinthine renewal center and back out to the rainy sidewalks of Chicago with a shiny new license in my hand in about 10 minutes—a new world record!—but they also took their second photorealistic picture of me in the eight years I've lived here. Two decent pictures. In a row. It's a feat unheard of in the history of recorded DMV portraiture. This is change we can believe in!

Speaking of being hounded by the paparazzi, I got to pose over the weekend for fellow blogger and commercial photographer Scott Barnes in Indianapolis. He'd asked me to come in for a shoot whenever I made it to Indy, and I happened to be in town (sans domestic partner, who was stuck working) over the long holiday weekend to help some friends renovate their fabulous new (old?) midcentury modern home. But I took no pictures of the renovation efforts so you'll just have to picture fabulousness + midcentury + modern + home + friends + plate of giant homemade chocolate chip cookies and enjoy what you see in your head.

Where was I? Oh, yes: Rick Warren is a lying, manipulative sack of douchenozzles. But his clumsy machinations are pissing off the wingnuts. And any clumsy machination that makes a wingnut's head explode is a clumsy machination I can believe in. So I'm conflicted about loathing him. But only a little.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blathering. So Scott the photographer is great with male figure studies and exploring composition in light and dark. We had only two hours together, but I brought a suitcase full of random clothes and props and a so-fresh-it-was-still-kind-of-scabby tattoo and we went to work.

Some of the pix he took were just about mugging for the camera and showing off the ink:

Some were supposed to be about athleticism, but every once in a while a cat would wander into the frame and make it look like I had the magical ability to poop cats:

Some were all about gratuitous flexing:

Some were about an almost-41-year-old's delusions of looking like a lifeguard on a Milan runway even though he's wearing a Gap hoodie:

Some were about shadows and ink and the human form:

But that love handle—which Scott swears he thought was muscle—grosses me out on levels only a self-absorbed almost-41-year-old gay man would understand, so I did some cropping in iPhoto and cut out some of the abovementioned shadows and ink and flabby human form and turned a potential lifetime-of-therapy trigger into ART: