Friday, December 23, 2011

Traits



"It has always seemed strange to me...the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

John Steinbeck

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Tracer



Hugh McCabe is a photographer whose work echoes the tonal and often eerie quality of early film photography. A course in Photography and Digital Imaging led him to begin documenting a project he calls 'Stages'.

He began taking long exposure photographs from the balconies of music venues. The long exposure ranges from 3 minutes up to 15 or 20. "Generally I try and make each exposure the length of a song in order to try and answer these sorts of questions: Is it possible to take a photograph of song? If so, what would it look like?" With a nod to Hiroshi Sugimoto's 'Theaters' series the end result is eerie and beautiful.




Client on images above to see larger, better quality versions.

To see more of his work:

Monday, December 19, 2011

In Defense of Humbug




The experience of working in retail for a few years coupled with working with The Samaritans really gave me a different perspective on Christmas/Holiday Season (retail folk know exactly what I'm talkin' about!). Having evolved into a commercial/consumerist event that starts earlier each year (purchasing tree decorations in August anyone?), it became clear that Christmas was an intensely stressful, pressurized and lonely time for a lot of people.


I do feel to each their own and if you want to celebrate the holidays, go right ahead. However i've been called Grinch and a humbug repeatedly over the years for my stance on the subject. The embedded video above by Jay Smooth sums it up better than i could!



http://www.samaritans.org/


http://www.befrienders.org/


Saturday, December 17, 2011

Unalloyed



The world lost a good one on December 15th 2011 when Christopher Hitchens died from complications arising from esophageal cancer.

“If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking.

All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.”








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