the curtain's a sea anemone in the way it sways to the slow breeze i lie spread out on the floor looking at these things and most of them are yoursand it's so nice sitting very still without those old shoes i could never fill
starfish with its arms out in a daze staring at the stars through an ocean haze was i one you wished upon burned out like a lightbulb when you turned on me
and it's so nice sleeping here all alone with my ashtray and white courtesy telephone now i'm making out the shapes like the shower rod - can it take my weight? i will tell you i am fine i got some news, friend, feels like i'm dying
turtle on its back in the desert sea and you *look* like a cool drink just slightly out of reach draw myself into the shell waiting on a sign from god or a nod from hell
and it's so nice sitting very still without those old shoes i could never fill now we're turing on the lights it's the first day of my second life take my name off of the lease you can even keep the name it never suited me
hmmmm....
sophie_holding_flower_and_leaf.jpg (JPEG Image, 1000x1157 pixels) - Scaled (70%)
Something about this is appealing to me right now. I have been doing a lot of real pano's with tripods and all that goodness. But I think I may have to go back to the David Hockney-ish way. But with a bit of this kind of narrative in mind.
Go to the interwebs young man....
Somewhere out there on the interwebs, awesome awaits. I shall find it....
best video ever!
YouTube - The Vendor Client relationship - in real world situations
"Yeah, you see, we didn't budget for this...."
When I hear those words, I reach for a bottle and a gun.
Oh man!
This is a "technique" group, and the technique here is regarded by some as insanity. For we are the reckless folks on flickr that enjoy the abstract, chance, generative, physical photography that results from throwing our cameras into the air (most often at night in front of varied light sources). It is about trading risk for reward in the pursuit of art. It is not about being a photographer, it is about enabling the photography that happens naturally when you let go of the process, give up control, and add a hell of alot more variables. It is about physics, gravity, angular momentum, acceleration, direction, chaos, and timing... most of which you have tenuous control of at best!
This is pretty cool actually. The nagging Art Scholar says, 'decorative' but who gives a shit. It sounds and looks like a fun time.
Hmmm...
Is it just me or is fffound, reddit and digg suddenly filled with the same crap over and over again instead of new content? What is afoot? Are the Corps moving in and rehashing themselves with scripts instead of user generated NEW content?
I think I found a fix!
Macintosh Performance Guide: Configuring Photoshop
Bigger Tiles is criticalThe Bigger Tiles plugin in particular is absolutely critical to performance. Using Photoshop CS4 11.0.1, I measured these bizarre results with and without Bigger Tiles on both a 2.8GHz 2008 Mac Pro and a 2.93GHz 2009 Mac Pro Nehalem. I confirmed with Rob-Art at barefeats.com that same behavior; the culprit seems to be the Smart Sharpen function, which runs far more slowly without Bigger Tiles.
I ran into this page yesterday and since installing these plug ins CS4 has stopped it's constant crashing. Oh man, I spent hours on the phone with Adobe tech support and never got a good answer. I rebuilt this system from the ground up to try and resolve the crashing. So if you have problems with Photoshop CS4 crashing constantly, try installing these little guys.
On a side note, some other things I have recently learned:
Itunes Genius function will crash your itunes on launch if you are not connected to the internet. My ISP went down on Saturday and that meant no music for me since it would not launch. Turn that crap off. Good luck on turning Genius off if you have no internet by the way.
If you highlight a word on the New York Times web site you will get a little question mark that will open a definition of that word. Pretty slick.
goodbye sir.
Jay Bennett, Former Member of Rock Band Wilco, Dies at 45 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
Mr. Bennett joined Wilco in 1994, shortly after the recording of the band’s first album, “A.M.,” which was released the next year. Beginning with “Being There” in 1996, he played keyboards, guitar and various other instruments, and gradually his role grew. With “Summerteeth” in 1999 and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” released in 2002, Mr. Bennett became a key part of the band’s songwriting, often as a darker foil to the more fragile style of the lead singer, Jeff Tweedy. A perfectionist in the studio, Mr. Bennett took an active hand in the recording process.
I have to say, he did add a lot to the music and the newer Wilco albums are unlistenable dentist office music to me. Bland crap.
A Ghost is Born is quite good. But the last two... wow. Amazingly horrid. I compare them to the music in the background on the Weather Channel. Someone mail Jeff Tweedy a bag of Heroin ASAP please.
In Defense of Distraction Twitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation.
The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation -- New York Magazine
One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filing techniques and organizational software. “On the web, there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,” he says. “But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit. My wife reminds me sometimes: ‘You have all the information you need to do something right now.’ ” ...“Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,” he continues. “It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it’s gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.” ...
This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.
Interesting piece at the New Yorker, take the time out to read it all the way through. Here are a few choice bits that got my brain a firing.
One of the key factors left out though is the sheer luxury in being able to take the time out of your day to focus on one particular task. I would say our lives have become fragmented because of technology. If you do not respond to those emails, Facebook notices or text messages people will assume something is wrong. There is a perceived sleight to a person if you do not reply to them. A social faux pas. And I would argue that we are more socially linked then ever before in history. One would wake up and have no clue what others were up too. Now I wake up to hourly updates!
Not very many of us today can afford to turn off email, not send out a quick reply, not read the trade blogs to keep up on the latest tech / trends. Not follow Facebook / Twitter / Linkedin to see what colleagues are doing. To be able to just focus on your work would be a amazing luxury.
Maybe someday I'll have the means, but for now, it's pots of coffee and endless information gathering.
Art and changing tastes
The New Atlantis » Reality and the Postmodern Wink
something in me wants to remain true to my adolescent vision. The beauty I imagined I also saw, and could not have seen without Rothko’s aid. But I do not see it today, and wonder how much it was the product of the stress of adolescence, and of the strange, still atmosphere of the Whitechapel Gallery in those days when so few people visited it, and when those few were all in search of redemption from the world outside. Now that modern art has been cheapened and mass-produced, to become part of that outside world of commercial titillation, it is harder to see Rothko as I saw him then.To some extent this dilemma is an artifact of modernism itself, whose most salient characteristics are the feeling of liberation from traditional restraints and the exaltation of the artist at the expense of his subject. Both things have by their nature a relatively brief shelf life in the aesthetic marketplace. After the modernist revolution around the turn of the twentieth century, it only took a couple of generations before both freedom and the phenomenon of the artist-hero could be taken for granted. Nobody cares about the traditional restraints anymore or remembers when anyone but the artist was the hero of his own creation. Though the culture is still committed to these once-revolutionary doctrines, the thrill of the revolution itself is long past.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Obama proposes Indefinite Preventive Detention without trial - Behind Blue Eyes - Open Salon
Obama is proposing we keep people locked up not for the crimes they have committed and we prove they committed in a court of law, but on the chance that they might commit crimes in the future. There will be no trial, for no crime exists to be charged. There is only the nebulous threat of "future acts" to justify depriving people of their liberty potentially indefinitely.
So far, Obama have proved that he is mostly made of shit on many topics. Bankers salary caps, Gitmo, spying, Iraq... Sigh....
The gear does not make the artist.
So a lot of photo buffs on the interwebs are linking to thisEssay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age. And I can't help but kinda laugh at it. There is a tendency in photography for people to define there work by the gear they use to make it and I just think that is a cop out. I do exactly what he does digitally and I have shot with hand held 4x5 pressboxes over my head with strobes to get action. This romantic association with gear is something that just seems like a lack of vision on the part of the artist. If you want to shoot slowly and take your time, shoot slowly and take your time. Don't let your gear frame your art. The gear is there to serve you not the other way around.
Nice screen prints
the blog and art of Jessie Douglas. I like the look of this stuff.
River Ride
Here is a Pano I tool on the ride the other day with the Canon G9. I really enjoy the look of that bridge coming out of the trees. Then the fishermen and sunbathers just add that summer touch.
Die you slugish bastards!
Jane's Delicious Garden - Snails and Slugs
Slugs and snails love eating fleshy, green plants – and especially young fleshy, green plants. This is why they make a beeline for our vegetable garden. But did you know there is something slugs and sails like even more than green plants? Beer!
Oh, they shall be made to pay for going after my spinach. The slugs, they shall suffer.
River ride
Morning Pics
Really been enjoying my mornings in the garden here. Here is a pic of some of the veggies I planted the other day.
Been thinking about killing the original pixelrust photo page as it is almost redundant now. I really like the new wordpress engine running this part better then that one, but I like the single image post as well. It's just clean and simple. So screw it, I'll keep both running simply because it amuses me.
This here pic was taken with my trusty Canon G9. The macro on that thing is fun as all get out. I have a fancy idea of doing a trypdich of these three images (two links there, fyi.). But I have not laid them all out yet. I like these as a sun flare series though.
(I can hear that little voice in my ear going, "Decorative art! BAH!" and I have stabbed it with a rusty swingline stapler.)
Not Paradise by the dashboard lights
Disable Dashboard | Utilities | Mac OS X Hints | Macworld
There may be other reasons you’d rather not have Dashboard available. For instance, if you run a lab of Macs in a school, you may not want the students wasting all their work time on the Asteroids video game widget or watching the (I am not making this up) Goblet of Fire movie release date countdown Widget. If you’d like to disable Dashboard, for either RAM usage or other reasons, here’s how to do it. It requires a trip to the Terminal, in /Applications/Utilities, but it’s not too hard to do.
How to kill the Dashboard once and for all!
Quotes
"“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do" - Mark Twain
"Daddy, what does regret mean? Well son, the funny thing about regret is, It's better to regret something you have done, Than to regret something you haven't done."
- Butthole Surfers
Coffee and Poetry
In the vain of, "Do Something Different, Start Today" I figured maybe I'll do something I have not done for many years here and post some poetry. I used to do it all the time in the way back archives. What is something that is possibly particular to me is that I cannot write shit at the computer. I need a good sitting spot some coffee and the outdoors to write anything decent. So when I get sucked up into computer land I fail to write anything at all. But anyhow, Here is a coffee time ditty I wrote this morning: