Back to corn country

couple days late on this one.

September ended up being one of those months where I was doing a lot more making than reflecting. Most of my free time lately has gone towards creating my first short film (cue the applause) Super excited about this and cant wait to share more

What do we actually remember?

I’ve been staying in the house I grew up in again.

Its kinda crazy coming back after all these years

There are places in this house where I can remember standing ten or fifteen years ago and almost nothing around me has changed. Same room, same window, same neighbors with annoyingly loud halloween decorations.

And then i realize how completely my life has changed from those carefree days

shooting airsoft guns with the kids next door

running through the sprinkler while my dad clipped the hedges.

those drumstick ice cream cones with the chocolate in the tip…

You remember versions of yourself that don’t really exist anymore.

makes me wonder what memories we’re actually going to care about 40 years from now.

Something can feel so immediate when you take a picture, and then suddenly five years have passed. Then ten. Eventually everyone in the photograph gets older. Eventually none of us are here.

Pretty uplifting stuff for the September newsletter.

But really, we spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us when most people are just busy thinking about themselves.

We live in a culture that seems obsessed with getting somewhere. Make more money, build the business, grow the audience, become successful, move onto the next thing. I’m more guilty of this than most. I like having something to work toward and I’m pretty terrible at sitting still

But what are we really rushing for?

Because eventually the things that feel so important right now will probably blur together. I doubt I’ll remember the random week I worked a few extra hours or the month I was slightly ahead of where I thought I should be.

I’ll probably remember the people. The places. The chocolate at the bottom of a drumstick cone.

And if that’s true, it makes me care a little less about a lot of the stupid shit we spend time worrying about. What someone thinks of you. Whether you’re doing life the “right” way. Whether you’re slightly behind someone else.

Print your work

I have thousands of photographs that I genuinely love sitting on hard drives that I almost never look at.

Take the photo. Edit it. Post it to Instagram. Watch it disappear down the feed. Forget about it like everyone else will

Then make another one because the algorithmic gods must be appeased

That feels kind of insane to me

I want more of my work to exist somewhere outside of a screen. Prints, magazines, scrapbooks. Things that can sit on a shelf and be found again years later, things i can give to my 80 year old grandma that just learned how to text, things that my future kid can find in my office and ask me if i really did that.

Something you can actually hold in your hand

That idea has grown into a bigger project I’m hoping to bring to life sometime in 2027

It’s called Field Notes.

The idea is to create a physical publication built around photography, stories, and conversations with people living interesting lives. Part of it comes from wanting to make something tangible, but just as much from wanting an excuse to collaborate with more people in this space and meet the kind of people I’m naturally curious about anyway.

I don’t totally know what the first issue looks like yet, but follow along and youll see more for sure

Right now I just like the idea of creating something that gives me a reason to go somewhere, meet someone, make something together, and leave behind more than just another feed post

There’s something nice about not understanding

Living somewhere where you don’t speak the language very well is strangely peaceful.

You’re obviously still surrounded by people talking, but most of it becomes background noise. You don’t know what the couple beside you is arguing about. You don’t understand the television behind the counter. You don’t accidentally listen to someone’s heated phone conversation in the coffee shop.

Then you come back to an English-speaking country and suddenly your brain understands everything around you

It feels loud

Not really necessarily physically louder. more mentally louder.

There’s something kind of beautiful about being forced to pay attention to everything else. Tone, expressions, gestures, how people interact with each other. a persons eyes give away an awful lot

One of my favorite things in Vietnam was going to the same coffee shop (shout out Tabiji coffee) enough times that eventually the barista would see me walk in, flash me with a big stained smile and start making my drink before I even ordered.

We barely spoke the same language but that made me happy every time.

Also Vietnamese coffee is wayyy better than American coffee and I’m willing to stand by that.

What's next?

I fly to Oregon on October 13th.

I’ve said for years that if I were going to live somewhere in the US, it would probably be the Pacific Northwest, so I’m finally going to spend some proper time there and see how it feels. Ill still be traveling a good portion of the year, but ive come to the conclusion that having a base in the states will make some things alot easier

I’ll be around Portland for a bit before heading south toward the Oregon coast and the Redwoods.

Possibly another film idea in the works there….

no idea if it will end up looking anything like what’s currently in my head, but im going to see what i can do

Beyond that I’m trying not to plan too much.

I’ve spent a lot of this year trying to figure out exactly where I’m going, what I’m building and what the next few years are supposed to look like.

At the moment I know I want to make more films, take more photographs, travel, work with interesting people and build enough freedom into my life that I can keep doing those things.

That seems like enough direction for now

A few things I've been into lately

1. Print your work — Watch here

   This video is what sent me down the rabbit hole of thinking about how little of my photography actually exists outside a screen. I want to change that.

2. Pet Sematary — Read more

   reading a few old steven king horrors to get into that october spirit. This is one of my favorites

3. Wild Horses — Sioux Falls — Listen here

   on repeat lately

4. Super 8

   Currently spending too much time looking at footage people shot on cameras older than I am in prep for these films. Just got a roll of 200T so be on the lookout for that in the next month



5. Hard work doesnt work anymore — Watch here

   Might write a bit more about this in a future entry. I just found this part of this podcast really fascinating and relatable. Meritocracy is what is always pushed as “the right way” in america. BUT:

   • college no longer = financial security
   • less jobs because of AI
   • rates of sexlessness and loneliness at all time high
   • Real friendships at an all time low

Anyway, I’ve got a motorcycle film to finish

See ya next month

KC

You bring yourself with you

Currently about an hour into a 2.5 hour plane ride from Kuala Lumpur back to Da Nang, trying to turn the last month of my life into something legible to share here.

This is more or less what I imagine Field Notes being: a place to dump thoughts, stories from the road, photographs, songs, things I felt were worthy of sharing but maybe didn't have the right platform to share them on.

I keep a journal, but I'm terrible at going back and reading it. So once a month I'm going to force myself to do exactly that, pull out whatever seems worth sharing, and send it your way.

A task made no easier by the lady sitting next to me, who has either forgotten her headphones or decided that I am also interested in her TikTok feed.

August update

• traveled to Malaysia and tried some of the strangest cuisine
• parted ways with my partner of 3.5 years
• had the worst trading week of my life (but we bounce back)
• hiked 16km up Monkey Mountain in hopes of sighting a red-shanked douc (rare monkey)

Malaysia

I spent a couple weeks here, my first time in the country.

It's a beautiful, wildly diverse place. The vintage scene was great. Hokkien Mee:

crazy views. this was in the pool of my apartment

It was also one of the most difficult two weeks I've been through yet.

My partner and I parted ways after 3.5 years together. Communication issues, built-up resentment over the years, and areas where we both need to improve as people.

There's obviously a lot more to that story than I want to unpack here, but there is one thing in particular that I've been thinking a lot about since the breakup:

Moving to a new country doesn't fix relationship problems. Neither does moving to a new apartment, making more money, or convincing yourself that the next chapter will somehow make all the issues from the last one disappear.

You bring yourself with you.

Not exactly sure why I'm sharing this. It's just been a big realization this month. Maybe one of you is going through something similar and this can help.

couple more from Malaysia:

Music as memory

I put out a post you might think is cool on Instagram this month about music and memory. Naturally, after a relationship ends, I've been listening to a lot of music to help process everything.

I've always been that friend people look to when we're out and a song comes on and no one knows the name of it. Like a human Shazam.

Music plays a huge role in my life. Not only listening to it, but playing it too. I actually just got a beater guitar over here because I realized my life is genuinely worse without it.

But the crazy thing about music is what happens when you hear a song you've attached to a memory.

Suddenly you're back there in that moment

Maybe it's a song you heard for the first time on a road trip with friends, or something that was playing during a particular night out at 2am

Sometimes I hear a song and remember something I genuinely don't think I could have pulled out of my head otherwise

I did a little digging and apparently there's a real phenomenon behind this called the reminiscence bump / music-evoked autobiographical memory .

Apparently music is particularly good at triggering autobiographical memories because it engages multiple areas of the brain at once.

Seems pretty fucking cool to me.

Listen to more music. It's one of the closest things we've got to a time machine.

Performance

One more thought, just been on my mind lately.

How much of life is actually lived for ourselves, and how much is performed for other people?

I see it all over the internet, and I see myself sliding in that direction occasionally.

Just the other day I took my guitar to this little park to play and people watch. About 10 minutes into playing, I caught myself thinking:

This would make a really cool post. I bet some people would really resonate with this.

And it probably would have.

But the second I'm thinking about how the experience will look to someone else, I'm no longer completely inside the experience itself.

I'm performing it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with taking photographs of your life or sharing the things you're doing. That's basically what I'm doing here. I just think there's a line somewhere between documenting your life and living your life for the documentation.

I've been trying to pay more attention to that line lately.

It's pretty easy to build something that looks like a great life from the outside. The right places, the right clothes, the right hobbies, the right photographs.

I've said it before on Instagram, but I think authenticity is one of the most attractive qualities a person can have.

Because if your happiness or sense of self depends on other people's opinions of you, what happens when those opinions change?

Just look at Will Smith lol.

This guy puts it better than I could:

On Slop

A few things I've been into lately

1. Tokyo Express — never been a big mystery guy, but picked this up in KL and really enjoyed. it is credited as having launched the mystery genre in Japan in the 60s
2. this guys apartment is cool as hell. Dream apartment, but not LA. Think Amsterdam or Tokyo.
3. actual life 3 — this album on repeat as I speed through the streets of Da Nang dodging scooters on my road bike
4. Sin Sze Si Ya Temple— if you're in KL, this temple in Chinatown is worth a visit
5. chinese hot pot — soo spicy. Just get medium, trust me.

What's next?

Vietnam holds a lot of memories for me right now. Some good and some bad.

I've always said that if I had to live in the US it would be in the PNW. Something about the idea of life in a cabin, playing guitar on the porch, hiking to waterfalls, and walking the rocky coast just speaks to me.

Anyone want to rent a place out there and shoot some photos this fall?

also, if you know a good medium format camera that's not crazy expensive DM me on Instagram 🫶🏻