November 23, 2008

A Choir Gathered Outside my Studio

A church group gathered in front of the homeless shelter outside of my studio. There is usually a consistent level of noise coming in from the street, mostly from people calling out to friends or screaming at enemies. The choir was a welcomed reprieve. But, only for a while. They would carry the same tune about Jesus for 10 minutes before changing to another song about, well, guess who... yes, Jesus. The subject matter wasn't really the issue though. It was more that instead of just repeating the whole song, they only repeated the refrain. Over and over again. What's worse is that they had a guy calling out the lyrics a few beats early. I think it was him that got me the most.

But really, it was still nicer than the alternative. I even opened the balcony door and windows so as to hear them better. So enjoy the 30 sec clip below.

[mp3]/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/studio-11-15-2008.mp3[/mp3]

November 21, 2008

Overdue Account

On paying overdue accounts.

Dear David, Thankyou for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

(via TMN)

November 6, 2008

Milquetoast

Milquetoast

noun (sometimes initial capital letter) a very timid, unassertive, spineless person, esp. one who is easily dominated or intimidated: a milquetoast who's afraid to ask for a raise.

Finally had a reason to look it up.

November 6, 2008

Kronos Quartet and Tom Waits

Holy crap! Two of my favorites, Tom Waits and Kronos Quartet, made a love baby.

October 11, 2008

Back to Film

I've been researching DSLRs the past couple of months to be as informed as possible before I drop 2k on one. After I decided on the Nikon D90, my current digital cameras have seemed less than adequate (which of course they aren't).

They have served me quite well in fact. I bought my first one, the Nikon Coolpix 995, in 2001, and I still use it today. I get a lot of laughs though because it's pretty big. One guy was so excited, when he saw me using it he asked "Whoa, is that one of those old pocket TV's?". Granted, it's large, but the split nature of the form has made difficult shots much easier than todays point-and-shoot cameras do with their static LCDs.

Now that I see what I've been missing being unable to take advantage of different lenses, I'm having a hard time using a point-and-shoot camera. During my research I came upon an article at kenrockwell.com about using the photo services of Costco to have his film developed and scanned. It still costs money but you get your film back and a CD that allows you to import them onto your computer. For some reason I had it in my head that I was going to have to scan everything manually if I used film. But if asked I would have answered that "of course they scan a CD for you".

So yesterday I took out my old Nikon F3 that I've not used, except once, in the past few years and loaded it up with some some old 800 speed film. It was great! Feeling giddy, I shot every mundane thing I could find. The mechanics of manual photography started to come back to me in bits and pieces. One thing I remembered when I finished the roll was that you actually have to set the speed of the film using the camera's ISO dial. Oops! Just shot a roll of 800 using 100 ISO. No big deal. Fixed that on the next roll and actually got some good pictures out of it.

It ended up costing $25 for two rolls with a CD for each. A little pricey but very worth it if you plan on printing large-scale. I did have to do a little white balancing and Gaussian blurring in Photoshop as I didn't use any filters while shooting and the 800 film was pretty grainy in some of the shots, but hey, I do that anyway.

So long story short, if you still have an old SLR (and a little cash), grab some film and go to town.

October 8, 2008

Graham Smith | Kleenex Girl Wonder

For some reason I got on this Kleenex Girl Wonder kick tonight and felt the need to write it down.

I was first introduced to them (wikipedia) (or him, Graham Smith) at my local CD shop, Shake It Records (beware of the pointless "Media Player" popup), while living in Cincinnati. One of the owners (2 brothers and if I remember correctly, they are are twins, at least fraternal, or they just looks a lot alike) told me that "this guy is one of the best songwriters today". So I bought After Mathematics.

It has it's highs and lows, mostly due to the subject matter, Love. But on the whole, the lo-fi effect of the recordings give a distinct vibrancy, and yes, I have to agree, Graham is a great songwriter. Not only the lyrics, which are easily accessible, but the composition and instrumentation of the music as well. Like the Talking Heads who reclaimed Pop music during the 80's , Kleenex Girl Wonder contributed to the same effort in the late 90's-00's.

Here's a good example via youtube off of "Smith", Reunited Airlines . Also a good album except for the early 90's-style interstitial (a new word borrowed from my day job) skits.

September 23, 2008

Tanya Batura on artforum.com

Tanya's work reaffirms my faith in LA galleries showing experienced artists. Great work gets to be a little thin around here. And congratulations to her for all the great coverage.

From: artforum.com / critics' picks. (link to pdf from the gallery)

Though "Monochroma" is strictly limited to heads and necks, taken as a group, the series conveys a surprisingly fluid motion: The arch of a truncated shoulder and the smooth curve of a cheek morph easily into elegant abstraction. While the subject matter flirts with lulling viewers into an unconscious appreciation of violence, Batura evades this trick and instead carves out a nuanced if queasy place where pathos resides side by side with harmony, historic ideals of beauty are part and parcel with contemporary images of suffering, and the tension between attraction and revulsion remains pragmatically taut.

September 16, 2008

Zapruder Film Stabilization

Zapruder Film Stabilized

Not only can you the see the events more clearly, you can start to make out emotions as well. Just horrible.

And come on, you'd have to be crazy to think that the shots actually came from the book repository. The location of the shot and the direction JFK's head reacts to the shot clearly makes the origin of the shot perpendicular to the side of the car.

I know, it's old news

via BB