| H1N1 v. SARS Who Would Win? |
[30 Dec 2009|02:06pm] |
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mood |
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 saucy |
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All the incessant buzz about H1N1 is really making me miss SARS. Remember SARS? Whatever happened to SARS? I say let's bring it back! Theme for 2010: I'm bringin' back SARS!
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| Triple homophones |
[10 Dec 2009|11:49am] |
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mood |
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 busy |
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I have been obsessed with triple homophones ever since I was in high school. Recently I came across a great big list of homophones and was delighted by the following:
aye, eye, I
bight, bite, byte
braise, brays, braze
by, bye, buy
censer, censor, sensor
cite, sight, site
ewe, yew, you
flew, flu, flue
heal, heel, he'll
holey, holy, wholly
for, four, fore
or, ore, oar
pair, pare, pear
peak, peek, pique
praise, prays, preys
rain, rein, reign
raise, rays, raze
right, rite, write
sees, seas, seize
so, sew, sow
to, two, too
there, their, they're
toad, toed, towed
vain, vane, vein
wail, wale, whale
ware, wear, where
way, weigh, whey
weal, we'll, wheel
yore, your, you're
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| Personal Spam |
[28 Jul 2009|09:37am] |
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mood |
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 weird |
] |
Today I got spam in my inbox from a spambot that had the last name of my great grandparents! Ok it was off by one letter, but it was essentially the same. Weird.
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| Old Skool Part II - Lunch: the Life and Times of My 11-Year-Old Self |
[25 Jul 2009|01:59am] |
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mood |
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 why am I still awake? |
] |
Speaking of being 11, I was just telling someone that when I was 11 I used to write down everything that happened in my 6th grade class at lunchtime in a notebook I called my "newspaper." Kind of like a more public version of Harriet the Spy. This was both hilarious and ridiculous because I was mostly the only person who ever saw it but strangely enough just by calling it that everyone in my class started all-of-a-sudden acting a lot nicer toward me because no one wanted me to write anything slanderous about them in my alleged "periodical." It was my first real taste of something vaguely resembling popularity and didn't last long, but thanks to the ol' Sally Times simply titled "Lunch" 6th grade was the highlight of my elementary school career.
 
At the end of the year I even tried to make some copies for some of my new-found "friends" (I typed the whole thing up, mispellings, slander and all) but Stacy H. made me tear up all the copies and throw them away under the threat of tattle taling (tattle telling?) to the teacher about all the libelous content of my oh-so scandalous "newspaper." At the time I vowed to some of my classmates that I would somehow get them a copy. But then middle school came along and with it my 15 minutes of elementary school fame.
I have told various friends of mine about this and even had a good laugh with the few who have ventured to actually read some excerpts from it with me, but today as I was telling my friend Scott he gave me a really brilliant idea. I had always said I'd love to put it up on the internet somewhere now that all this time has passed (with all the names changed of course, which wouldn't even be hard since most of them were already nicknamed in the original) - but then like the egg of Columbus Scott came up with a brilliant idea: to post it serially as a blog. Genius!
That would obviously be the perfect format - I could even try to synchronize the dates (like post Sept. 5, 1992 on Sept. 5, 2009.) I was considering back-dating them, but I think it would actually be funnier to post them as if they were current as if I am an actual 11-year-old that is posting them now and readers would have no way of knowing that this all happened 18 years ago. It would be even better if I waited until 2012 so it would be exactly 20 years later, but I don't think I can wait that long because I am really excited about this idea!
So the new task at hand is finding the most ridiculous blog-hosting site on the net. The one that would be most likely to be used by 11-year-olds. Diaryland?
*******************
Edit: maybe a twitter account is the answer? That would be particularlly believable for an 11 year old of today and has the advantage of being a little more sustainable. Also advantageous: all my sentences were short and completely unrelated. Read: "Today an apple flew off a straw and hit SC"; "MC wears mickey mouse underwear" and "Today I pulled down Kristen's pants" Even if I do a full blog I would like to sync it with a twitter that would have one or two of the best lines from that post. I think twitter also lets you post more than 140 characters at a time, it's just that the rest of it is only viewable on the web so effectively like a blog. Then again a blog is easier to go back and read after the fact than twitter. Twitter is made to be so disposable.
Hmm... thoughts?
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| Kickin' it Old Skool |
[25 Jul 2009|12:56am] |
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mood |
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still tired |
] |
Today I brought in one of my rotary telephones as prop for my students to make fun photographs by "painting with light" with flashlights to make images like this:
When I showed it to my 11-13 year old students they were all shocked by it because THEY HAD NEVER SEEN ONE BEFORE IN REAL LIFE. They said things like "I've seen one like that on TV before" and "How do you do it [dial a telephone number]?"!!! Even worse, when I told them that this was the telephone I had grown up with in my room when I was their age they were shocked and said "Whoa! You're that old!?!" and then I was sort of appauled and offended by these obvious zygotes. But then reminded myself that of course they have no context of exactly how not-that-long-ago things like rotary telephones were in use since they grew up in a world of cell phones and computers. Kids these days/OMG, the future is now!
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| Summer of Camps |
[25 Jul 2009|12:44am] |
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mood |
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tired |
] |
The summer has been absolutely flying by - I've been teaching summer camp every week minus two weeks of installation at the gallery. It has been a challenge coming up with new lesson plans for every single day of every week for the past four weeks but I have managed it and I think the kids have all had a pretty good time so far.
Summer Camps down:
- Traditional Darkroom Photography
- Experimental Photography
- Fundamentals of Digital Photography
Summer Camps left to teach:
- Black and White Photography (only one week as compared to the above Trad. photo which was two)
- Intermediate Digital Photography
Exhibition installed: Self Portrait show at Silver Eye. Exhibition to be installed week of Aug. 3: new member show. Also taught: one photoshop class for adults and guest lectured twice at Point Park University on entire history of photography (in just over 2.5 hours!) It has been a really busy couple of months! But I feel like I've accomplished a lot and gained a lot of valuable experience. I keep getting more and more comfortable with teaching and I am also building up a really great repertoire of lesson plans that continues to grow and be a resource for future classes.
But it has left me feeling very tired. Though I'm trying this new thing called "bedtime" where I try to actually go to bed and get up around the same time everyday so I can try and function like a normal human being. It's been going relatively well so far but is definitely a work in progress.
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[10 May 2009|02:18pm] |
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Found in the ladies bathroom outside the auditorium in Bellefield Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
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| Oh, iTunes Shuffle |
[07 May 2009|12:27pm] |
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mood |
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 amused |
] |
My iTunes was playing Act One of Bizet's Carmen, the 'Parle-Moi De Ma Mere!', a soft, sweet duo in which a woman delivers a letter and a kiss to a man from his mother only to be cut-off mid-sentence by:
DOMO ARIGATO MR. ROBOTO!
I lawled.
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| Frantic Lethargy or... Why Mark is Awesome |
[16 Dec 2008|11:34am] |
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mood |
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franticly lethargic |
] |
This morning Mark, Matt and I went to this cool little cafe in Morningside called Morning Glory Cafe. In it we found such delights as a poster of the Lonley Hearts Club Band (not actually the Beatles) in 70's shiny, metallic track suits riding on a flying tuba (or possibly euphonium) which was spewing strawberries out of its bell and a bunch of cool old games including the game of Probe (which I own and have never seen anywhere else before!) and a really old game called "Psych Out".
I should have photographed it because I can not find anything about it on the internet (next time!) Everything about it was amazing from the fuzzy blue velvet interior of the box complete with shinly blue pencils with "Cameo Games" printed on the side, right down to the design and typography of the various booklets included. The only "modern" game I can think of to compare it to is Slumber Party. For any of you out there who have ever played the "Dear Dairy" game within Slumber Party, it's like that but for adults. There are various questions that everyone must secretly write down answers to. I'm not sure how scoring works, but the questions were all really great including "What makes the man?", "What is one custom to which you will not conform?", and "With which modern day 'convenience' would you do away?" Just the way in which the questsions are phrased says so much about the time period--I love it! The best was when I posed the question to Mark "What title would you give to a portrait of yourself when you first wake up in the morning?" to which he answered Frantic Lethargy which I think is amazing. Now he has to write a piece of music with that title.
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| Earlier this week... |
[10 Dec 2008|10:53pm] |
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mood |
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 wtf? |
] |
On a day where the high reached about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, I saw a guy outside completely shirtless checking his email on a laptop.
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| The Weekend In Review |
[27 Oct 2008|12:09am] |
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mood |
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 satisfied |
] |
In the past 48 hours I:
- took high school students on a photo adventure in the park
- attended an opera
- watched fireworks synchronized to music
- had an impromptu dance party
- got a free t-shirt
- ate tuna fish out of a conical paper cup
- listened to three different forms of live music
- ate chocolate pie
- drank one pink squirrel and four sips of something that was decidedly not a pink squirrel
- taught a digital photography class
- created a book about the future as a birthday present for a friend
- attended a surprise party
- froliced in the woods of highland park
- walked among ruins
- ingressed an ancient tower
- ate amazing turkey squash soup and home-made pumpkin ice cream
- saw The Secret Life of Bees
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| 'Ween |
[14 Oct 2008|12:56am] |
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mood |
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 dorky |
] |
On a photo-related note, I just came across a hilariously wonderful flickr photo set of famous photographs that have been recreated using legos! Fantastic!
This one, after Henri Cartier-Bresson's Behind the Gare Saint Lazare is incredible!!!
 
The recreation of Eddie Adams' famous Vietnam war photograph however, is just completely out of control.
So inappropriate.
Still, I find the concept rather amusing and the photos are kind of irresitable.
 I came across these as I was pondering my halloween costume. I know this incredibly geeky (and I'm ok with that) but I want to dress up as a photograph. As in, a famous, well-known photograph that everyone will recognize. Of course the photo which instantly came to mind was Dorthea Lange's Migrant Mother.
I think this would be a really cool choice because it is so well know--in fact, this photo is the most reproduced image of the 20th century. So people will definitely recognize it, but the down side is that it is rather depressing. I might be ok with that though because I can't think of any other photos that are so iconographic and easily recognizable.
I find it interesting to note that many of the most famous photographs are of people and often have some sort of disturbing underlying social commentary. So that's the problem, the ones which do not fall into this category would be much harder to dress up as. But if anyone has any better ideas, let me know!
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[14 Oct 2008|12:46am] |
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mood |
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 artistic |
] |
I just sold my first photograph!
I had a few pieces in a show/benefit for the International Institute of Art and Languages and one of them sold for $250 (of which I recieve 65%)! This is exciting as this will significantly offset the cost of matting, framing and printing them. I might even make a profit if I sell any of the other four pieces in the future. This is a significant moment.
The piece which sold is this photograph of records from my side gazing series:
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| 57 Varieties |
[09 Jun 2008|02:20pm] |
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mood |
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amused |
] |
Heinz's new slogan/website = "Heinz it up"/heinzitup.com.
Just so everyone knows.
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[07 Jun 2008|01:29am] |
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mood |
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exhausted but happy |
] |
I took a random turn on my way home today to avoid traffic and this is what I came across:
I put on the brakes but didn't even pull over or turn off the engine. I jumped out of the car and asked if I could take his picture and he said yes. I told him how great I thought he looked and in an accent that I couldn't discern (maybe french or italian?) he kept telling me he thought I was beautiful.
What an amazing day.
***edit***
As soon as I drove away, I thought to myself--why didn't I take that chair!?!? After I made this post I drove back to the spot and much to my surprise, it was still there! It did not fit in my car in any way shape or form, but I ghettoed into my trunk with some bungee cords and just drove really slow--and it worked! The chair is now mine!!! The hardest part was actually getting it through the various doors in my apartment, but I did it! I feel pretty accomplished, but now I am ready to pass out.
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| kickin it old skool |
[03 Jun 2008|01:42am] |
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mood |
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tired |
] |
This weekend I went to a fantastic photographic symposium hosted by a group called f295 who specialize in lensless and alternative photographic processes.
 It featured lectures by some of the top photographers working in this arena today and all their words and images completely blew my mind.
Probably the most exciting presenter was Ilan Wolf, who makes amazing pinhole camera photographs with a giant cylindrical camera. After he grew dissatisfied with only being able to work close to home/his darkroom he turned his car into a darkroom and later into a giant pinhole camera! He also lived inside a camera obscura for six months in Paris!! Other things he has made into cameras include red peppers and THE EARTH.
Another series he did was of photograms of the four elements
   
Air was made with balloons, water with melting ice from the alps, fire with pieces of hot metal and earth with hot stones.
My other favorite was Martha Casanave who has also done a lot of fantastic work with pinhole cameras and photograms. I really enjoyed her talk as she was very funny and I loved in particular the story of the evolution of one body of work, her Table of Elements: Studies of the Hebrew Alphabet. What interested me was that this very serious and beautiful work was made using parmesan cheese! It all started with her jokingly putting cooked or dried noodles on photo paper to create "pasta-grams" . Eventually she started adding a little parmesan cheese to it and found that she liked the results. She then started experimenting with cheese as a medium! And the results are quite stunning. She said she even tried to use other things (salt, laundry detergent, dirt, flour, sand) and nothing had the same effect. So cheese it was!
For a write-up in a magazine she is quoted as saying she used a "granular substance" and during her talk said she was "not proud of the cheese", but I think it's so much better that way! She would have never come across this media if it weren't for her excellent sense of humor.
Despite the fact that I was worried about having to sit all day through eight hours of lectures, at the end of the day I was very taken by everyone's work and was really glad I had the opportunity to go.
But the fun didn't stop there! There were also workshops the next two days in conjunction with the symposium and since they were happening at Filmmakers I was able to go to one of them in exchange for volunteering to help out.
 I got to help with the wet-plate collodion workshop which was taught by France Scully Osterman who is one of the foremost experts on this process. She has made some gorgeous work using this process, most notably her Sleep series.
The process itself seems a little less insane now that I have actually done it, but compared to modern processes it is very complex and involved. It is done by coating glass plates with sensitizer and then exposing and processing them while they are still wet. There are a lot of chemicals and a lot of steps involved and some steps (like pouring the collodion or varnish onto a plate) that involve a lot of finesse.
It was really exciting to see the process done, and even more exciting to see the results because collodion has an exquisite and unique quality and way that it renders tones in black and white. In particular it can make skin tones look very dark and lush and somehow it made everyone look sexier.
I was able to make one plate, a self-portrait, which is now officially my new favorite thing ever.
I'm so inspired by everyone's images and words of wisdom, I hope it will drive me to make a lot of great new work!
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madmadammim's journal
jubilant
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