raleighnet.org

For a while there I was routinely visiting the photo blog of Marc North. He’s been experimenting with taking photographs of strangers in public places. He talks about struggling to get past the taboo of photographing these strangers.

I understand completely what he means. In my own experience with hobbiest, weekend shooting, I’ve found it to be almost impossible to bring myself to intrude into a random strangers space with a camera. I find I can only really bring myself to observe if I myself am not observed. Distance helps, surreptitiousness helps, but you can’t get the really good shots that way. I’ve let more than one really, really good shot slip away. There is a disturbing parallel with flirting in this that I will leave unexplored for now.

By placing himself within their lives, Marc is able to get some nice, humanizing shots. David Crawford has gone even further. By introducing stop motion, he’s able to capture even more of their humanity. As he says:

It is said that 90% of human communication is non-verbal. In these photographs, the body language of the subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of Web-based animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage.

By isolating these random movements, he does seem to have captured some essence of a human experience. Number 1 doesn’t seem to really work for me, so you may want to start with one of the other numbers then hit 1 after you understand better what he’s trying to do. [Thank you, thank you, thank you metafilter]

Holy crap - somebody else listens to Jonatha Brooke (I’d link directly to the entry in question but her archive pages turn into HTML source code in mozilla for some reason).

I could have sworn I was the only one that listened to Jonatha Brooke. Actually, that’s not true except that it sort of is. I wasn’t familiar with her when she was singing with The Story, but I was fortunate to hear her interviewed when she was promoting Plumb on this local triple A radio station (Adult Album Alternative - sort of light rock, college alternative music for the after college crowd).

That station has since gone to a spanish format - because you know LA doesn’t have enough spanish format stations. I’m sure they probably make more money with that format, but I hate that in a market the size of LA we basically have horrible corporate rock/rap/alternative in the form of KROQ on one end and a few hours of eclectic music on KCRW on the other. One of the things that attracted me to LA was the chance to finally hear some decent radio, and as soon as I got here it all went to pot. It was one of the really, really small things that attracted me to LA, but still.

It’s always kind of weird when you think you know an artist that is kind of obscure and it turns out they really aren’t. A lot of times I’ll hear a Brooke song on a restaurant’s musak station, and it always seems out of place for some reason.

Anyway, as long as I’m signaling out Beth’s site, if you aren’t reading her, you totally should. I’m always amazed at how charming and unselfconscious her entries are. I’ll never be that personal here. I write an innocuous entry about feeling light headed after taking antihistamines and letting my blood sugar drop too low, and before I post it I picture my mother going to talk to some nurse and calling concerned about some imaginary illness she’s given me (don’t laugh, this has happened). In that case i figured screw it, “Spin, Spin, Spin … Wheeee!” is a funny headline. Other times though, I certainly censor myself in a big way, and I’m sure my writing suffers for it.

Sometimes when I’m watching TV, I’ll just bounce around from one random site to another. After doing that for a couple of months now, I can safely say that most journal type writing on the web is pure crap. My site of course is no exception, but hers is in a big way, so go read it before she realizes how brave she’s being and stops.

The word “interesting” appears in 70 out of 414 entries on this blog. That’s almost 17%. I am remarkably lame. My new mission is to strike that word from my vocabulary. From now on whenever I catch myself using the word “interesting”, I shall replace it with the word “???”. I don’t know. I wanted some funny phrase to replace interesting with, but the best I can come up with right now is “Krazy Fresh”. That’s even lamer than lame. I gotta get me one of those books, you know the ones with the words, and the… and the words?

Note to self: Antihistamines, physical exertion and lack of nutrition does not make for a very good combination. If you really feel you must try to stand up, do it a little slower next time. OK? And really, wouldn’t a nice nap be better anyway? You’ll still be hungry tomorrow. There’s no rush in getting food.

Alice in Wonderland has always seemed to me to be the most adult of children’s stories. Maybe it’s because I didn’t actually read it until I myself became an adult. Although, the truth is I didn’t read most children’s stories until I became an adult. Which is strange. I’ve always been an avid reader. My mother or some relative told me that I came home from kindergarden or maybe even pre-school angry because they weren’t teaching us to read. I don’t remember that (or really any of my childhood), but I can certainly believe it.

Somehow though despite a life-long love of reading, I don’t remember being read fairy tales or having them in the house. There was a Dr. Seuss book or two I think, and I remember looking at pictures of snakes in the encyclopedia, but that’s about it. I wonder if there were other books and stories that I’m not remembering.

I finally got around to reading Alice a few years ago. I must have checked it out from the library or something because despite reading and enjoying it, I didn’t have a copy. Anyway, about six months ago I decided I really wanted a copy, so I purchased the Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. I’ve yet to so much as crack it, but I’m really looking forward to it though once I get through my stack of books.

This is all a round about way of saying I was very interested in the background of the Alice books that Ultimate Insult pointed me towards.

The chorizo and eggs ad Mill’s Country Restaurant may well be the worlds most perfect food. If I could have, I would have just kept on lapping it up like one of those coke monkeys that just keep hitting their jones until they fall over dead. For the next few days, I will be thinking about it and building it up in my mind until enough time has passed that I feel I can go back and have it again. Of course it will never live up to my memories of that first experience. I always find myself returning to a restaurant time after time, for months … even years trying to recreate some magic moment when the planets aligned and everything was just perfect. I never manage it though. It’s never the same, never as good. I obviously need to learn to embrace my inner-Buddha. Or, I guess release my inner-Buddha would be more appropriate wouldn’t it? I need to do one of them though since a few more breakfasts like that and I’ll need to get comfortable with my external Buddha. I should have worn looser pants.

Oh god, that can’t be right. This Quiz says that I’m a Randian. I thought I’d grown out of that a few years after college. And Mill? Really? Utilitarianism? Come on where’d they get that?

1. Rand (100%)
2. Kant (98%)
3. Mill (95%)
4. Sartre (82%)

Kant I can get behind, but the others? I demand a recount.

This is fall off your chair funny. I bet if I’d studied science and so was more familiar with the type of papers this is lampooning the funny factor would have actually killed me. Fortunately, I didn’t, and it didn’t, but if you major(ed) in physics, proceed cautiously. via here

Is it possible to address multiple buyers/personality types with a single copy message? The ClickZ article, The Way Customers Want to Buy, seems to be saying yes. I came of age steeped in the tradition of one audience, one message. If you have two audiences, then you need two messages. It makes sense, if you try to hit everything, you’re likely to hit nothing. I’ve gotten to be good at projecting myself into the mind of a hypothetical buyer - even a buyer who thinks and interacts radically different than I do. I’m less comfortable trying to speak to several buyers with the same message. Would my message be diluted or strengthened by trying to work through that? I’m not sure. I need to think about this more.

I have the body of a 78-year-old man. He’s pissed. And, he’s trying to take it back. Strangely, just a few hours ago, I had the body of an 18-year-old boy. I aged 60 years in the space of a few hours. Clearly I’m suffering from some rare form of physical bi-polar disorder or something. Hmmm….Do they make pills for that? ‘Cause I could really go for some pills.