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Saturday   February 10   2007

maybe not sunday

Maybe there will be linkage on Monday. Zoe was up all night packing for her trip to Clear Passage. I crashed around 5 in the morning. Zoe woke me up at 7:30 and we were on the 9:00 boat to the mainland. Her friend Kim is going with her to help. I waited until I saw she made it through security. I was on the phone this evening with my brother and there was a message from Zoe when I got off. She sounded good. They were in Jacksonville and were starting the drive to Gainesville. They should have been there by now so I assume they've gone to bed,which I should do too. Tomorrow I go to Tacoma to visit Zoe's mom, Gerry, who has Alzheimers. I will stop at my Aunt and Uncle's to pick up the slides my Grandfather took with my Leica IIIc. the live about 20 miles east of where Gerry is. It will be late by the time I get home so I should be putting links up on Monday.

But I went to Steve Gilliard's blog and he had put up some music clips from YouTube. That inspired me to look for some of my favorites. Holy shit! The first two are from Steve and the rest are some that I found. There is a lot more. A lot! So here are some musical gems to tide you over until Monday.

The Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane (Live)

The Ramones - I wanna be sedated

Buffalo Daughter - Cyclic (Live - Factory 2004) + Interview

Violent Femmes - Blister in the Sun

Miles Davis & John Coltrane- SO WHAT

Bob dylan -- Subterranean Homesick Blues

And this is the most demented version of Stairway to Heaven. Ever.

Frank Zappa - Stairway To Heaven Cover

sidetracked again

Just as I started getting links up I get distracted. Aside from working on a Friday deadline for a web project, I've been laying out the interior of my 5x7 camera case on a CAD (Computer Aided Design) program.

I've found room for:
Items in case
1. 5x7 Burke & James camera,
2. lenses: 90mm, 150mm, 210mm, 254mm, 330mm, Packard shutter
3. sheet film holders -- 4x5 & 5x7
4. light meters, focusing loupe, lens cleaners / incidentals
5. 4x5 back
6. Polaroid back / 120 roll back
7. Polaroid film
8. B & J bed extension
Items in lid
1. BlackJacket focusing cloth
2. film carrying bag
3. photo vest

A 24" rolling luggage is not small but neither is the 5x7. A 4x5 would probably fit with room to spare in a 22", but 5" lensboards take up more room than 4" lensboards plus the extra backs I have. I still need to find a bed extension. I didn't find room for my 24 1/2" lens and the back extension I still have to build. (I see another case project in the future.) This will make using the 5x7 a lot easier and, with the printer coming in the next month or two, I will be wanting to use it.

I used to be a drafter at Boeing. From 1980 until 1992 I used CAD programs. I really enjoyed that. I haven't used my little CAD program much. It was good to get back into it. I have some other CAD projects in mind. Someday.

Monday night my oldest, Jenny, called. She was inspired by the soon to be acquired painting by Katie, done by my Grandfather, and went to eBay and searched for "Coale". She found a 1948 Budweiser beer ad with a painting done my Grandfather.

I didn't know anything about Griff having done that. She actually found two and bought them both. This inspired my LOML, Zoe. Her Great Uncle Al Herman was the leader of a vaudeville band. She found 3 pieces of sheet music with his picture. They are on the way.

Aside from that little excitement, I'm still trying to get a website done by Friday evening. Today I need to drive Zoe up to Oak Harbor and tomorrow we hope to go down to visit Gerry. Zoe flies out Saturday to Florida for two weeks at Clear Passage for her abdominal adhesions and Fibromyalgia. I might have some more links before then but not likely. Sunday I should get caught up with the link backlog. Many tasty links to come. Take care.

11:43 AM - link

food

Watch this movie. This is so totally fucked. These coporations have become the embodiment of mindless evil. We are destroying ourselves for a good quarterly report.

The Truth About Genetically Modified Foods

  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan

After watching this, do read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillema. You can buy the movie:

The Future of Food

Deborah Koons Garcia and Alice Waters Talk GMOs

As an interesting side note, or not, Deborah Koons Garcia, who made this movie, is Jerry Garcia's widow.

04:46 PM - link

photography

Bruce Osborn: Oyako - Portraying Japanese Generations

There surely are extensive sociological studies of the Japanese society: figures, numbers, tiny print on countless pages and lots of dry charts, too. But what about a more artistic, visual approach? In 1982 American photographer Bruce Osborn began what has become his lifelong work: the Oyako series. For the last 25 years he took pictures of one parent with one child in a white studio setting. Bruce even introduced its own version of the Japanese “Oyako No Hi” (parent and child) day: he organizes a huge photo session every year. After some time, Bruce would even repeat the same parent-child shoot to reveal the significant changes in the relationship between mother and daughter for example, the differing characteristics of fashion changing over the years or simply documenting people getting older. A part of Bruce’s huge archive is currently shown at the JCII Camera Museum in Tokyo until this Sunday, the 28th (more info below). PingMag talked with Bruce Osborn about his devotion for Oyako, the Japanese parent and child.

  thanks to photostream

03:15 PM - link

big al

Run, Al, Run
The ideal candidate for the Democrats may be the man who won the popular vote in 2000 -- and who opposed the war in Iraq from the very start

A stiff vice president campaigns on his administration's legacy of unprecedented prosperity. Looks terrible on TV. Bows out, following a disputed vote count. Then, two terms later, with no incumbent in the race, he re-enters the fray. Promises to change the course of a disastrous war founded on lies. And charges to victory. I'm referring, of course, to the 1968 campaign of Richard Milhous Nixon. But four decades later, history has a chance to repeat itself for Albert Arnold Gore. If the Democrats were going to sit down and construct the perfect candidate for 2008, they'd be hard-pressed to improve on Gore. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he has no controversial vote on Iraq to defend. Unlike Barack Obama and John Edwards, he has extensive experience in both the Senate and the White House. He has put aside his wooden, policy-wonk demeanor to emerge as the Bush administration's most eloquent critic. And thanks to An Inconvenient Truth, Gore is not only the most impassioned leader on the most urgent crisis facing the planet, he's also a Hollywood celebrity, the star of the third-highest-grossing documentary of all time. "He's perceived very differently now than he was six years ago," says Frank Luntz, the Republican consultant who advised George W. Bush to dispute global warming during the 2000 and 2004 elections. "He's an icon. Imagine that: Al Gore, Mr. Straight and Narrow, Mr. Dull on Wheels -- now he's culturally cool."

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I can only hope.

01:54 AM - link

book reccomendation

The Place No One Knew:
Glen Canyon on the Colorado
by Eliot Porter

It was sometime in the mid 1960s when I was wandering through the University Book Store (Seattle) that I came across a portfolio of about a dozen pages from this book. I had never seen anything like them. Sharp and saturated color. I didn't know about large format at the time. They were also printed very expensively. It was a landmark book from the Sierra Club. I still have those pages. My library has the original version with those shiny pages. It was interesting looking at them over 40 years later. We've come a long way in the color world. Porter was doing color in the 1950s and 1960s when no one else was. He printed using the dye transfer process. (Ctein is one of the few left that's mastered this difficult process.) We have so much more control now with Photoshop and digital printing. The picture on the book cover is a good example. In the original book the area in sunlight is very washed out. It's still worth looking at. And the battle over Glen Canyon still goes on.

Eliot Porter Collection Guide

Eliot Porter (1901–1990) introduced color to landscape photography. In so doing, he created a new way of viewing the world that today has become commonplace. An artist with strong scientific and environmental interests, Porter took up color in 1939, long before his fellow photographers accepted the medium, to produce more accurate photographs of birds. Soon thereafter, he expanded his focus to celebrate the colorful beauty of nature in general. Over a fifty-year career that includes works from Maine to China, he built a broad popular reputation based on thousands of richly hued prints and twenty-five books. His work energized environmentalists, drew accolades from museums, and created the foundations for today’s color nature photography.

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