the niki download
Some Trees Whisper Fables, Others Tell Jokes, The Wildest Ones Make Threats.

#77
Niki Williams
12/4/2024

November was an adventure! I have been picking up assignments from the SF Standard, working on pre-production for a commercial shoot I’ll be doing this month with Nice Handwriting, and I pulled the trigger on my first mirrorless camera. I also took a 10 day road trip through California, hitting Yosemite, Mammoth’s Hot Creek, Mount Whitney, The Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forrest, Death Valley, Joshua Tree and Los Angeles.

I love being on the road. Hiking all day and making my bed in
the back of my Honda Fit. Waking up in beautiful places, eating
fungus contemplating all that occurs on this great space rock
hurtling through the universe.

I had set out on this journey to photograph a group of folks who re-enact the “pioneer lifestyle” rolling around Death Valley in a Wagon Train.

However when I showed up to our meeting spot, they were nowhere to be found. Which was a bummer, but it freed me up to explore the Californian landscape in my second month living in the state…

It’s pretty wild how time feels. Sometimes it’s dilated, sometimes compressed. I arrived in California on September 16th, just shy of three months ago. I’m getting swoll—big Strava guy now—biking and hiking, eating avocados and liberally using sriracha. I still have not found a good pizza.

I wonder what time feels like to a 4,000+ year-old Bristlecone Pine...

High up in the White Mountains of the Eastern Sierras sits the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, which contains the oldest living tree in the world. It is called Methuselah, and it is approximately 4,850 years old.

The exact location of Methuselah is kept secret by the U.S. Forest Service to protect it from potential harm or vandalism, but visitors to the area can still see many other ancient Bristlecone Pines, some of which are nearly as old. These trees are remarkable for their ability to survive in harsh conditions at high altitudes, where their twisted, weathered trunks whisper fables and tell jokes, the wildest ones make threats…

I thought about how Jacks Links Beef Jerky burned the Squatch on my retinas.

I saw the light… It emanated from surreal volcanic basalt columns and etched fantastical self evolving problem solving geometries into my brain. I encountered Anubis, the Egyptian dog god of the afterlife at an abandoned graffiti covered waterpark styled after the orient and forgot everything…

I also saw a crashed UFO, and later met a man in an illuminati T-Shirt in LA, my final destination of the trip.

I was visiting LA to start filming a mini-documentary on my friend Jett Lara, who has been relentlessly photographing in Downtown Los Angeles. His book “Dreams & Nightmares” is on pre-order right now. It is going to be legendary. We met a man named Eddie who wanted to show us how his German Shepard, Shadow, likes to eat raw meat from his mouth. I plan to edit the short together by the end of December.

When I got back to Palo Alto, I was synchronistically assigned to attend the 40th Anniversary Party of SETI. Which was a lot of fun, they served alien cocktails. I met some cool egyptologists, radio telescope scientists, and a techno pirate named Joe Davis who works at MIT.

Joe fashions his own prosthetic legs out of little league baseball bats, sent the sounds of vaginal contractions into space, and experiments with how E. coli responds to Jazz.

Here is the story.

Sooooo yeah it was a great month. I think December will be pretty dope as well. Then we are into 2025… Time really flys. I hope we can work together in the future!

If you have any photo/art nerds you need gifts for… I have some wild shirts, books and drawings for sale…

Be well!

Some Trees Whisper Fables, Others Tell Jokes, The Wildest Ones Make Threats.
#77
12/04/2024
the niki download