Photo: June 2004 Archives
I should probably chill a little bit on the photo posting. Or I should start tossing together a gallery for each of my little theme projects. As it is I feel like I'm spastically spraying images out today. And I've gone off the deep end as far as smug amusement goes, so I haven't the slightest clue of whether this stuff is worth the bandwidth.
Update: Looking at this a couple days later, it looks really fake. The really nice definition between the subject and background that I like so much about it looks entirely wrong. Like I did a really bad job of dropping in a new sky. Except that...well, I didn't. Odd.
Wow. I actually managed to post something every day for an entire month. Someone should give me a fat sack of cash now so I can quit my job and go to Canada and NY. That's how these things work, right?
Another shot from a show at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City last night. This one being of F/T Shadow Government's pots'n'pans drummer.
William Elliot Whitmore playing at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City. I enjoy playing with this camera in low light situations.
It's a weird kind of night. So I share the weird, yeah? First, here's someone's shifter wig.
And here's some Apple Switch parodies. I know, I know, It's easy and cheep and overdone, but here: have some more.
- My name is Brandon Jones and I hit the fucking Dell kid with a bat.
- Hey, guess what? You're pregnant!
- I work at the zoo. I wash the hippos.
While you're at it, you should peruse the other videos by Olde English Sketch Comedy. If I may be permitted an entirely and shamefully local reference, it smells like Boston's version of a No Shame clique. I recommend checking out the rap video and a video Choose Your Own Adventure. Or, if you're move of a fan of funny-wha?, there's a race of Man vs. Leaf. If nothing else, there's always a sketch of a writers meeting for the sketch group played by people who aren't in the sketch group.
Or, if you want something less sketchy, there's these shorts. Try this one if you want something longer and more serious. Or this one for something a little odd and dark. This one makes with the Clerks-era Kevin Smith-style dialogue. This one? It cuts straight to the funny. My only complaint about this guy's stuff is that he needs to work on his sound. Just a little more attention to the audio track could really help these. It seems to me that when he doesn't have to deal with the sound as much is comes off much less amateur. Like here.
The best thing about my playlist at work is that I have no clue at all where most of the songs came from.
Oh, yeah. Finally, a short movie boldly asks the question: How much money would it take for you to kill a puppy with your bare hands? This is documentary film making at its finest.
As I understand it, I'm contractually obligated to say something about Fahrenheit 9/11 here. But you know what? Fuck you. You're not the boss of me.
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I'm awake again, so I bring gifts. Or, you konw, chins.
BoingBoing was the first place I read that Bob Bemer died on Tuesday.
You'll have to excuse me for being a huge nerd when it comes to computer people passing.
I can tell you where I was and how I found out W. Richard Stevens had died, which should probably give you some perspective or confuse you further, depending. Same thing with Dijkstra.
Admitedly, Bemer is a little different. Stevens was a prolific and skilled writer. I don't know many programmers without at least one Stevens book in their collection. Dijkstra was a genius with enough eccentricities to make him memorable and notable. I'm avoiding mentioning the standard list of Dijkstra factoids, so let's just say he wrote plenty of influential stuff and gloss over the cliches.
Bemer is a little different to me. He did enough to ensure his death gets good sound bite coverage in all of the usual places. The very idea of "inventing" the escape key makes him easy fodder (more central here is escape sequences, but that doesn't have the same ring to it as inventing a key.) Ditto with the two digit year problem. But what really gets me about Bemer is his very Rightness. Which isn't to say he was right about everything, but he was certainly Right about a few things. 8 bits per character, say. And ASCII. These are things that he had a hand in that were so Right as to be nearly universal. Sure, some day ASCII may be gone and forgotten, but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath.
There's really interesting stories in the Character Set Wars that are gradually being lost throgh the death of old Computer Scientists. I've been really interested in what I think of as the Character Set War, or the Battle of Interoperability for a while. I dug up a little hunk of history about character sets and programming languages, and since then I've wished the topic had any kind of appeal for most people so I could even faintly justify the effort of tracking down people and trying to put together a book. Bemer kept quite a bit of history here.
I suppose it's only natural for me to wrap this up with a link to The Babbage Institute's oral history archive. Bemer is unfortunantly not represented but Dijkstra is and it's kind of a fun read.
Heh. Caulk hole.
Tonight felt really...high school. We went to the store around midnight to get soda and donut holes. We ran around doing goofy things. Acting like little kids. The guy at the check out counter kept giving us "Are you guys stoned?" looks while I really obviously took pictures of the people behind us in line.
Mmmyeah.
On a movienerd note: The Manchurian Candidate remake. I can't tell what kind of sign, if any, it is when Meryl Streep is following in the footsteps of Angela Lansbury. I'd add something about Denzel Washington and Sinatra, but George Clooney has already done enough desecrating for everyone. Sure, it's oblique but that's what makes it nerdy.
On a photonerd note, the inverse square law is your friend, not your enemy. Using it is far more fun than hating it.
Additional: Not to jinx it, but it's starting to look like I might actually make it through an entire month without missing a single day. Which would be kinda neat. Though I think I'd made dire predictions about it before...
I caught the new Zaitoichi. I quite liked it. The film really went old school in terms of the style and composition. Takeshi Kitano did a really great job with it. Both in acting with his eyes closed and that whole writing the screen play and directing it thing. I don't want to sound like I'm a jibbering sycophant, but some of the cinematography really reminded me of Kurosawa. Mostly in terms of composition. You know how you can watch, say, Seven Samurai or Yojimbo and pause the movie at almost any random point and what you get is a very nice, well composed photograph? It's similar like that. See, now I'm rambling and digressing.
What really stuck out for me were some of the effects and not in a good way. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for anime blood in anime. That short of spurt that hovers and disperses rather than spurting and falling to the ground. And they either digitally altered or digitally generated some of the blood to get it anime style.
There's something about many digital effects that just don't look right. There's something about it that just catches your eye, like a human silhouette. Your brain just seems to mark it as noteworthy.
I love a good sword fight. But I really don't want to be distracted by blood. Sure, sure, gouts and gouts of blood are great fun. The Lone Wolf and Cub movies (Baby Cart In X, I haven't seen any of the other series) are a great example of how you can do great fights with tons and tons of blood. You can do it without so much of the spurting, too. But when the blood distracts from the movement and the actors, it's got to go. And inserting anime blood does just that.
I shouldn't be too rough on it, the action scenes were very nicely done and there was plenty of non-anime blood. Good old fashioned hose-down-the-wall blood. It just started me thinking.
While I'm wallowing in my nerdyness, here's some pinball shots. Bonus points if you can tell me what's going on in the bottom one.
It's the connections that amuse me, not the individual things. Nothing wrong with that.
Apperantly, they taste like bubble gum. I was honestly frightened.
I should note at this point that the post titles for the last few have been coming from a Grand Buffet song called "Cool as Hell", so don't start thinking I've flipped my shit entirely.
Oh, how I love live bait vending machines.
Go check out LegalTorrents and grab 8-Bit People's MP3 archive Volume 1 and 2. It gives me the beepy that I need, without all the clicky-download-one-at-a-time thing I hate.
Warren Ellis is looking for fan sign self portrait thingys for DiePunyHumans. It was an exceptionally slow night at work, so I had time to take a few labor intensive ones. Three of them are over here. Here's my favorite:
On a side note, the sky was pretty nice this morning.
While I'm sure this is hardly impressive to many people, I noted that this is my 300th entry. Which is, you know, kinda neat. Certainly not impressive in, what, 8 months? But still. I like to think that I've brought a little photo-joy to a few people.
Ricky Jay rules.
These children have just listened to 8 Bit Peoples release, Axel F. As in, Beverly Hills Cop's Axel. That' why they're hiding.
I give you the pretty. Or freaky. Hrm. Let's stick with "images."
One of the neighborhood outdoor cats.
Puccini, the professor-down-the-alley's coon hound, out at the park.
Another auction day.
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Below is a little teaser sample of the project I'll be doing for the next 6-8 months. The working title is something like "Shooting Herky." It's a full length book project that'll include 150-200 color photos of people photographing the Herky statues in Iowa City and interstitial by a variety of professional photographers and postmodern authors. I've already secured both a small grant from the Iowa Arts Association and an advance from Taschen Press.
Just kidding.
Supposed to be stormy for the next few days. Which is A-OK by me, since I'm starting to really dig the rain shooting. But the temptation to climb the highest, most treeless hill during really violent lightning storms is getting stronger and stronger. I'm sure there's a really lame Icarus-ripoff short story in there somewhere, but I'm still quite serious about this little urge of mine.
Satellite dish and generator at night.
Random gravel road, east south east of Iowa City/Coralville.
BoingBoing had a bit about a photography book. The photography book in question is from Suicidegirls and is doing quite well on Amazon. So anyway, this is how I came to be looking at the Amazon entry for a book chocked full of naked photos. And then I noticed this:
"Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs" with "Suicidegirls"...this makes me wonder if people are buying a martyrdom book to feel better about buying some nominally pornographic material, or if there's some sort of martyrdom fetish I was aware. The idea of people mastrubating over wood cuts of St. Sebastian is oddly satisfying.
Update: Since BoingBoing posted an update regarding this, Amazon seems to have fixed the pairing, unfortunantly.
I'm lamping. Stone cold lamping, at that.
Becoming a baby-sitter, pursuasive communicator, putting the children's finger paintings up on the r
Oh me, oh my. Shooting at the auction is good, clean fun. For example, there's the medical devices from the first half of the 20th century, like the Renulife Violet Ray generator.
I have a horrible confession to make. I wussed out at the auction and let a photograph get away.
There was a case full of Nazi memorabilia. I was standing beside it, frustrated. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a picture there, but I couldn't figure out quite what it was. While I was standing there and looking around, these two burly, hairy, yeti-men walked up to the case and made a little light conversation with each other. From where I was, they made the picture. They were large enough to block the view of the rest of the visually busy room. I raised the camera and composed the photo so you could see they were looking at brightly colored swag, adorned with swastikas. Almost immediately they both notice me and my camera. If looks could make testicles explode, I would have been rolling around on the ground clutching at my groin. They looked pissed. Suddenly I wasn't staring at an image of two guys bantering over a case of German loot. The potential picture was much different. Suddenly, it was an image of two guys looking like they wanted to kick the shit out of me for thinking it was cute to photograph them with Nazi gear.
A better man than I would have walked away with both photos and his ass in one piece. I just leaned forward, refocused into the case, took a shot and acted like that's what I wanted to do the whole time.
The sooner they bury Reagan, the sooner he comes back as a zombie and starts kick drug-dealer-ass. There's nothing on my local NPR affiliate but the whole state funeral/Ray-gun wrap-up. This is disappointing.
The Miracles of God at Gabe's Oasis, 6-8-04. (It's a damn shame you can't see Dr. Don on the drums.)
Sam Eggnog
The Worm
The Bassturd/The Musical Healer and Rob "Steely Dan" Bennett.
As much as I ramble about nerdy-style-this and nerd-core that, it amazed me that I hadn't heard of Grand Buffet before. And of course, the late comer action was compounded by some sort of "Didn't you get my email about them playing at Gabe's a while back?" nose-rubbing action. Such is life. Now I must root through the musical goodies the Bassturd brought with and mine them for choiceness. New Musical Healer (The Bassturd's hiphop persona...erm, which is different some how from the whole Sucka MCs thing) album, complete with crayon-colored cover.And the only hiphop song I've ever heard entirely about bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
There's been much talk about the house lately about putting out some sort of zineish thing. Something nerdy that incorperates all of those wonders of modern society, like Creative Commons, electronic distribution, Print-on-Demand with online ordering, etc. The sort of project that smart money says will never be brought to fruition due to all of the incredibly improbable events that would be required for it to be published without anyone putting in any effort.
That being said, I found a fine nerd zine named Nerdling. I laughed, I cried, I read them at work. It doesn't look like a new one has come out since fall of 2003, but there's nine issues and a couple of specials. Check it out.
Right then. It's Fresh Air round up time again. Here's a handy tip: if you(in the general sense) are going to interview Christopher Walken and you(still in the general sense) absolutely, positively can't avoid the topic of the way he speaks in movies, don't start the interview with it. Seriously, it’s Christopher fucking Walken. Everyone talks about the way he speaks. We get the point. Let it go. Or I’ll cut your face(No, no. Not your face. Your face, in general.)
Down there, near the bottom, is a Geoff Nunberg linguistic bit. Sometimes, it drives me nuts the way he obviously loves the sound of his own voice. And then I remember that he's doing his linguist schtick and it's fine by me. And in this case, the linguist schtick is in reference to the language of Vietnam.
Pieter-Dirk Uvs is a comedian. A gay comedian. A gay South African comedian. A gay South African comedian that speaks to children about sex and AIDS. An award winning gay South African comedian that speaks to children about sex and AIDS who is quite good at being interviewed. Silly stuff aside, if you want to laugh while the pit drops out of your stomach, I'd recommend giving the interview at least 20 minutes.
Another Nunberg piece. This one is “Going Nucular.” There’s also this one on torture.
You know, in case you were wondering to yourself what was note worthy on Fresh Air lately.
Ok, I'll admit it. I cropped this one judiciously. The picture over all was weak. A little too much motion for my tastes. But damn if that guy doesn't pop right out of the picture.
Went and shot some color with a 400mm lens today. I'm curious how the photos will turn out.
Update: I'm getting an awful lot of results for this from google. For the record, the post title is taken from a GZA/Genius solo album called "Liquid Swords." The samurai film clips are (I believe) mostly taken from a Lone Wolf and Cub adaptation's English dubbed track. I think it's Shogun Assassin, but I haven't seen the movie for quite a while and hadn't heard the album at the time. And my copy of Baby Cart at the River Styx (which is what Shogun Assassin is mostly edited out of) doesn't have dubbing. Hope that helps someone.
I felt the rumblings of a project at the auction yesterday. The mix of people is so odd. And during the summer, they've got windows and doors open that really put some light into the building. Good kind of dusk light. People ignore your camera when they're focusing on what's on the block. At the very least, I really ought to take some real equipment out there next week and see how it goes. But in the mean time, I have fun digital stuff. Like this.
I was really happy with the way the colors turned out. I didn't even have to touch them. The odd thing that I didn't realize when I took the picture was that at least one of these girls is a Ho. No, really, check out what's on the front of her shirt:
I know I'm getting old when I say things like "I can't believe her parents would let her leave the house like that." Kinda sad, really.
I'm not feeling very...writery. Writeringish. Writingaphilic. Whatever. But I sure do have photos.
The auction is fun to photograph at.
