Titles return

Changing all sorts of stuff around here and now it looks like titles shall be making a return to the blog. It looked clean with the last template, but I feel this one holds up nicely with titles.

So there you have it.

Other new items of note is that I have a nice Profoto rig now which should make my life easier. But as of now I need to finish the band shoot from last Sunday and get that posted before I have pissed off Grindcore people beating on my door.

LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy | ARTHUR MAGAZINE - WE FOUND THE OTHERS

Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

California's Inland Empire - Los Angeles Times

We drove through streets of boarded-up bungalows, the neighborhoods of old California now turning back to wild oats and silvery foxtails so high the windows were obscured. Men wandered the potholed streets looking like something out of a current-day Steinbeck novel.

To say we might lose "community" is too simple. We are already more isolated and urbanized than in the past. But to lose the community on my street, the street I've lived on for 22 years, breaks my heart.

Yikes....

Random note 35426:

If you have a black background and white text on your website, you are in fact, an asshole. Thanks for making me see lines everywhere I look for the next ten minutes.

Skull master - Pay your respects to Mr Vernon Courtlandt Johnson - Lifelounge - Daily Goodness

There are very few artists that can claim that their artwork has helped to define an entire subculture and era. Vernan Courtlandt Johnson (VCJ) can easliy stand by that claim as his iconic illustrations shaped and represented one the of the most influential skateboard brands of the 80s, Powell Peralta. Still to this day, his illustrations are out of this world and in terms of illustrative skulls, he's still number one in my book. Mad respect for you VCJ.

In search of the click track « Music Machinery

I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python library that allows you to analyze and manipulate music). In my first attempt, I used remix to analyze a track and then I just printed out the duration of each beat in a song and used gnuplot to plot the data. The results weren’t so good - the plot was rather noisy. It turns out there’s quite a bit of variation from beat to beat. In my second attempt I averaged the beat durations over a short window, and the resulting plot was quite good.

at some point you just say fuck it, throw the oars in the river, open the last beer and float downstream. see what the god damn river has in mind for you because you don't have a fucking clue.

Project MKULTRA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Efforts to "recruit" subjects were often illegal, even discounting the fact that drugs were being administered (though actual use of LSD, for example, was legal in the United States until October 6, 1966). In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, and the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors and the "sessions" were filmed for later viewing and study.[21]

MK-Ultra fun and good times.

The Teenager Audio Test - Can you hear this sound?

Clicking the play button below will produce a tone that is generally only heard by people under the age of 25. It has been used as a deterrent device to keep teenagers from loitering in malls and shops, and sounds similar to a buzzing mosquito. Typically the longer you listen to it, the more annoying it gets.

This actually hurt my ears and I'm well into my 30's.

Landscape Blurs

In the fall of 2008 I started working on a series of images whose main characteristic involved moving the camera while taking the photograph. This is a process I had tried in Paris in the early 1980s under the guidance of Scott McLeay with whom I was studying photography at the time. Unfortunately, at that time my attempts had been unsuccessful for reasons we will see shortly.

The motivation for creating this series was related to my study and research of color and composition. Because these images cannot be composed as precisely as non-blurred photographs, and because colors get mixed with other colors when the camera is moved, I thought that they were near-perfect examples of composing with color instead of composing with shapes and objects.

The Godfather Wars | vanityfair.com

“There’s a story there,” says Beatty. “I was offered The Godfather before Marlon was in it. I was offered The Godfather when Danny Thomas was the leading candidate for the Godfather. And I passed. Jack [Nicholson] passed, also. And I remember something else. I was offered The Godfather to produce and direct. Charlie Bluhdorn was a fan of Bonnie and Clyde and sent me the book.… I read it. Sort of. And I said, ‘Charlie, not another gangster movie!’”