Ploafmaster General

One more shot of my great uncle Vinny at my grandma's house in Farmville for his surprise 70th birthday party.

Today is my first day on this silly thing call the "Primary On-Call" rotation at work. This means I have to carry around an insipid Blackberry that may or may not buzz and ding repeatedly for the next week. It could even squawk at me in the middle of the night.

Now I'm told it's not so bad - I'm basically a communication hub, passing information about emergencies and their causes/resolutions to the appropriate parties. But I'm anxious, none-the-less. Anxious because at any second, any time of day, I may have to stop what I'm doing and spend an unknown amount of time shepherding the story of a problem through its lifespan. But really, I'm anxious that on this coming Saturday I'll be interrupted by the stupid Blackberry when I'm trying to make prints in the darkroom during my final day of the large format photography workshop I'm in.

That class, by the way, has been spectacular in its initial two days. If only for the enthusiasm of the teacher and my fellow students, it's been refreshing and inspiring. All 6 of us students are in love with film photography, and the teacher is an extraordinarily knowledgeable professional with a similar mixture of technical and creative emphasis to me. We spent Saturday learning the basics of the view camera movements and their effects on the image, and we spent some time learning to use a light meter to place our subjects within the desired range of the Zone System. Sunday was spent out on the grounds of the VMFA actually using the cameras to take photographs. As I already indicated, this coming Saturday is about printing from our 4x5 negatives. I can't freakin' wait.

So that's a summary of the past few days, pretty much. This weekend also sees the arrival of my wife's sister - typically a herald of many fun times to be had - so Valerie and I are both looking forward to that.

No emergency calls yet, but I feel like that Blackberry is giving me dirty looks...

As soon as I finish listening to this week's episode of The Talk Show I'll devote my undivided attention to this post...

...Ah, there we go.

In the interest of attempting to continue writing, I present to you another post written largely for the sake of momentum. But I do actually have a real topic for at least part of this entry: The Space Shuttle program. The first space shuttle launch (for orbital testing) was in 1981, the year I was born. Today, some 30 years later, sees the end of the space shuttle program with the final launch of the Atlantis orbiter. I watched the launch live via UStream, and I couldn't hold back a little wave of nostalgia seeing the orbiter lift off, solid rocket boosters and fuel tank under-belly.

But that's only part of my day. The better part of it, at least what I anticipate being quite good, is that I get to hang out with one of my best friends for the first time in what seems like ages. Just dude time. Our wives will be hanging out elsewhere, and we can head out, grab some brew, and just chat. I normally like to go out taking pictures with Dave (he's a great photo-excursion buddy, too), but it'll be nice to just chat, joke, and so on with the dude who was one of my two best men in my wedding. These things get more difficult when graduate school (both of us) and a child (his) start to disrupt your schedule. And as much as I crave the sort of sitcom-style buddy situation where a friend just stops by whenever he feels like it, the real world seldom affords such a situation. So that leaves me to relish these times where I actually get to develop that friendly bond, left unexercised these past six months.

As for the remainder of my weekend, I anticipate a mixture of immense fun and equally immense boredom as I spend much of Saturday and Sunday in my first two of three classes about large format photography, and much of Satureve doing homework.

My primary reason for reviewing the details of my weekend is much more about forestalling the inevitable: my first week on the on-call rotation at work. A week that is sure to fill me with frustration, and empty me of sleep. We'll see...

Trying to get a handle on this writing thing all over again.

I remember a time when I used to post here so frequently that I'd have at least two or three items to share every day. Of course those days included copious links to YouTube clips, pictures, stores, and other items that were somebody else's content. But when posting with such frequency, it's hard not to begin synthesizing at least semi-original thought into the occasional post exceeding one paragraph. That's because to post so many items required me to scour the internet, reading news stories, political commentary, tech journals, and link-dump websites; emulating, in my poorly approximated way, the sort of curatorial approach of Jason Kottke on his eponymous site.

Well the major difference between years ago and today is that I so rarely have that time at work. It's unsurprising, too. I'm no entry-level desk jockey anymore. I actually have people relying on my specialized institutional knowledge. So I can't give the same level of attention to my beloved internet as I used to.

Another difference is that I've long since worn myself out on political and social diatribes. Sure, I may still have a few left in me, and there will never be a shortage of moral, social, and systemic ills, but I've lost the desire and stamina to be a public complainer - hurling my outrage to servers far and wide. Even on Twitter I hesitate to complain, knowing that there are far too many real problems out there to which my petty travails pale in comparison.

And Twitter brings up the final shift. That's been, increasingly, my venue for the quick share; links to McSweeney's articles, pictures, cool products, or funny videos. I hate to post things twice, and I think it's the worst kind of internetting to tweet a link to a blog post that only links to something else.

All told, that's reduced my blogging largely to my own photography with the occasional recap of a restaurant or event I attended.

I'm hoping, however, to simply write when the feeling strikes me. That means that, for a while, my blog may feel more like - GASP! - a journal. I'm okay with that. I want to try writing as a mental exercise, and if that means stream of consciousness, incoherent rambling, so be it. I see it as an opportunity to clean my mental house, uncovering and making room for those things truly worth writing about. Maybe I don't have anything buried in my head worth writing about, but at the very least I can't be a better writer without first writing.

So there's that.

My great uncle Vinny at my grandma's house for his surprise 70th birthday party.

He's a man of wit, warmth, and wisdom.

As is often my custom, when I make changes to my website I make sweeping changes in rapid succession with frequently mixed results.

Well today I made a bit more of a serious chance. I've migrated my entire website over to Squarespace. I've transferred both of my domains (danielcwarshaw.com and ploafmaster.com - both of which point here), and as soon as my files finish downloading from Dreamhost, I'm pulling the plug after more than 6 years of hosting there.

Squarespace has allowed me, in one day, to get my site up and running the way I want with minimal fuss. If I ever get around to customizing the look the way I want, it should be fairly straight-forward, but I'm happy with things the way they are right now. And I even implemented a little CSS trick to get my images to auto-resize. Considering I've never taken the time to properly learn CSS (I know, I know...), I'm pleased as punch that it worked out.

So I prepaid for the year with Squarespace. That means I'm in it for the long-haul, and I look forward to having a website that I feel comfortable using again. Oh, and the iPhone app lets me post in Markdown, too, so I'm pretty happy about that as well.

It's a cliché to claim that a barber is a counselor or an advisor, but it's a claim with merit. That a proper barber possesses skills in the cutting, trimming, and shaving of all things growing from a man's capital follicles goes without saying. But any barber worthy of his chair provides much more for the common man than a simple ear-lowering.

You see, a man makes himself vulnerable in a barbershop - trusting his own flesh and blood to the scissor- and razor-wielding hands of another. Such trust, cemented over time and trimmings, opens one up to his fellow man. Perhaps it starts (and indeed may stop) with talk of sports, fishing, food, or events around town. Eventually, however, a loyal customer may feel comfortable sharing the minor trials of life and work. Nothing shared in a barbershop ever passes from those walls. One leaves his stress and clippings behind as he steps out beside the candy-striped pole, refreshed.

True barbershops become more difficult to find every year as fewer men enter the trade and the old professionals retire or pass away. This is problematic for me because I have such finicky hair; it grows out rather than down, almost fro-like. Most unisex hair salons, consequently, ask little more than what guard size to use on my head. I see no point in paying for what I could do myself (and certainly no point in tipping for such lack of imagination). So I was excited, several years ago, to discover a younger barber working at the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop here in Richmond, VA. Dave was only in his later 30's but possessed the demeanor and skill of the elder barbers of my youth. After a few months he needn't ask me how I wanted my hair cut; he simply told me to have a seat and got started. I left each month feeling like my hair had a style and shape heretofore unavailable to a Brillo-headed boy like me.

Dave was from Pennsylvania. So each month when I parked my tukhus in that chair we extolled the virtues of a real deli and a genuine pizzeria. We lamented the paucity of decent bagels in Richmond, talked about the real New Jersey Shore, and traded jabs over the Giants (my team) and the Jets (his). Dave wasn't perfect and he had his issues, but he was always affable and a welcome sight on a Friday afternoon when I walked in with a head full of fuzz. One time my wife and I even ran into him at the bar in Lemaire at the Jefferson Hotel and he bought us each a drink. Each month I tipped him well (I believe) and tipped much more in December before Christmas. And Dave called me Danny. You see, everybody generally calls me Dan or Daniel, except my family. Now Dave was hardly family, but he sounded like my family in his manner of speech, so there was something reminiscent of my Yankee childhood when he greeted me.

Today I stepped into the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop just as I always do on the first Friday afternoon of the month. Dave's chair was empty, and when I asked the short Slavic woman where he was she informed me that he left.

"Day off?" I asked.

"No, he left. He's gone."

Gone? He'd left without notice, it seems. Too dumbstruck to simply walk out, and no back-up plan in my head, I sat down in her chair.

"What clipper size? Number two on side and three on top?" she asked. She proceeded to give me the most boring haircut I've had in years. She rushed those clippers over my head with all the style, grace, and craft of military in-procesing.

I don't think I'll be going back to the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop anymore.

Today I attended a launch event for i.e.* - a conference for a multi-year initiative aimed at highlighting and elevating innovation and creativity in Richmond, VA. There was a series of talks by artists, business owners, and other members of the community. There were activities designed to illicit collaboration and ideas from attendees. And there were a lot of fantastically creative and interesting people involved in putting the whole thing together.

Several of my Twitter followers mentioned that they were only just hearing about the conference, and it turns out that's not an accident. It was intentionally un-marketed - as an experiment, essentially - to see whether word-of-mouth (traditional or electronic) would be enough to build up enough buzz. All 200 seats sold out this week.

So here's a summary of thoughts I gleaned from the speakers throughout the day.

• From painter Ed Trask: He shared a fascinating idea about two major forms of preoccupation when people are out and about; functional preoccupation when we're caught up in our tasks and visual preoccupation when we're caught up in what we see around us.
• From Matt Williams of The Martin Agency: A quote from French author Albert Camus regarding Sisyphus: "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Williams was not suggesting that we all seek futile work; rather he was highlighting that the process and work can be fulfilling regardless of the outcome. A recently popular quote from Chuck Close was also shared: "Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work." I've seen this message a lot recently in the creative world, and it resonates with me every time. Echos of this idea would manifest themselves a few times throughout the day.
• From writer Valley Haggard: Be vulnerable and naked/uncovered in your creative pursuits.
• From Jeff and Joey Anderson of BioTaxi: These guys killed it. Dynamic and funny, they seemed to have hooked the whole crowd. They're only 23 and 21 years old, but they're entrepreneurial spirit was evident. Two main take-aways: 1. It's all about people helping people - small businesses helping small businesses. 2. Be open to new, untested ideas, and just get started doing.
• From the folks at Rainbow Station: Why not teach leadership skills to kids? They have kids participating in volunteer work at the preschool level, and they were genuinely interested. While a lot of the philosophy comes from Steven Covey books (the language of which makes me gag a bit), it's remarkable to see such young kids engaged with their communities instead of just their toys.
• From Ken Johnson of Johnson, Inc.: He doesn't worry about his competitors - he makes himself his own competition so that he's always trying to improve.
• From Cam DiNunzio of Black Iris Music: 1. Do the work you want. 2. Own your work (whether it's artful or just paying the bills). 3. Be the easiest person to work with in the room.
• From poet Joshua Poteat: Don't let your lack of credentials keep you from doing something.
• From artist Liz Kellinger: Don't let "not understanding" keep you from doing. She never knew what compelled her to leave the business world and move into the visual arts, but she just went with it.

Also, there were mixed messages on the importance of "inspiration" touched-off by that quote from Chuck Close. I think it may have been important for somebody to differentiate between waiting on inspiration to strike before working and seeing inspiration as a set of inputs that help shape the outcome of your creative process.

Whew! That doesn't cover everything, and it completely missis the short "pod talks" where several speakers had 8 minutes each, and attendees chose between 4 presentations. I had an accidental "local small business-owner" theme with my choices hearing great origin stories from the proprietors of Pizza Tonight, West Coast Kix, The Camel, and Scoot Richmond. I sure hope there are follow-up events, particular smaller meetings and happenings designed to keep up the direction and enthusiasm generated by this launch conference.

And a parting word: During a break-out session in small groups we were asked to answer some questions about what this conference means for our actions in the future. Two people in my group described the notion that folks from different backgrounds trying to solve a problem together are more likely to be creative in their joint problem solving because they are each naive about each other's existing assumptions and ideologies. This is advantageous over homogenous groups attacking a problem where they may be hampered by shared misconceptions.

Let's be naive together.

Had to snag a normal lens in advance of my trip to Budapest, right?

UNDERSTANDING that: museums often operate under severe budgetary constraints and that the forthcoming suggestion (of a theoretical technological nature) may cost far more than most museums could afford, this blog post seeks not to establish the realism of the ideas proffered therein; rather said post attempts only to suggest a solution to the author's own perceived problem in a manner that would be, in effect, "totally sweet."

So it occurred to me a few weeks ago, while perusing the galleries at the wonderful Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), that it would be helpful to know whether certain works were presently exhibiting. I thought of this while my wife and I were in search of some Chuck Close pieces that we know to be in the museum's permanent collection. But we couldn't find them. And the museum's paper map indicates only (and fairly) which sections of the building contain which major categories of art. Museum's often keep excess pieces in storage in order to rotate in other works from time to time, but I'm not aware of any museums with a system by which patrons can tell whether their favorite works are on display or in a climate-controlled storage crate.

So my idea: location tracking within the museum for each catalogued work of art.

Using RFID tags, museums could mark each work. To keep things simple, the system could track only whether a piece was in a certain room rather than trying to scan the presence of pieces in every potential hanging/display space. Museums should NOT incorporate such asset tracking into their security system due to the insecurity of the RFID format. But using the simple location data along with detailed descriptions of each work, museums could create websites and mobile applications that allowed users to search for works by their favorite artists and see whether anything is on display - and in which gallery. Users could, alternately, search by any other form of data made available by the museum, whether descriptive tags, title, period/style, etc.

So...does anything like this currently exist? If so, I'd love to know about it.

Okay. Everything is set up on Posterous now with my domains pointing here. The theme may change with some frequency in the near future as I figure things out, but for now it's all stable.

Outtake from my photo shoot with Cassandra for my Creatives series. I shot this one using an old sheet film holder and some of the tape was crappy. I was afraid this would happen, but I still like the way this shot turned out.

Ektar 100
Graflex Speed Graphic

I normally research where I'm going when I travel, but for whatever reason I did no research whatsoever on Charleston. I relied, instead, on the recommendations of my wife's friend who knows more about that town than most folks do about their own hands. She gave Valerie a list of good restaurants and stuff to see and do, and off we went, neither of us having been to Charleston before. What I didn't know was that Charleston is a serious food town. Sure, lots of it is the kind of traditional southern coastal fare you might expect - crab cakes, oysters, some kinda seafood bisque, shrimp and grits, and so on - but there were a few surprises that caught me off guard in the best possible way. So rather than walk through every dining experience I had, I'll give you the highlight reel, which could be long enough on its own.

We had lunch on Saturday at an excellent little out-of-the-way place called Cru Cafe on Pinckney St. One of the specials that day was a house-made pastrami sandwich. House-made pastrami! In South Carolina! I had to try it, and I didn't regret it. I'm not kidding when I say this was some of the best pastrami I'd ever eaten. Smokey, salty, richly-flavored, and sliced up super thin in a generous pile on marbled rye bread. I could eat this sandwich for lunch almost every day. Valerie had an arugula salad with duck confit and fried onions, and we both thought the sweet tea was the perfect level of sweetness. Dinner that night at Slightly North of Broad (figure out the acronym on your own) was good, but not memorable.

We had Sunday brunch at Magnolias on E. Bay St., and while Valerie thought her smoked salmon frittata was okay, my meal was quite delicious. It was a variation on "pigs in a blanket," but in this case was made up of buffalo chipotle sausage wrapped in orange buttermilk pancakes. A fine elevation of a diner mainstay.

Sunday dinner was at Poogan's Porch on Qeen St, and it was absolutely tasty. And speaking of "a fine elevation of a diner mainstay," I can't recommend the macaroni and cheese appetizer enough. The menu stated, simply, that it had Tasso ham and smoked gouda, but the more-than-an-entrée-sized pile that arrived was the richest and creamiest macaroni and cheese I've eaten. Valerie, who's not a huge fan of macaroni and cheese, had to force herself to stop eating it in order to have room for her main course. I thought it was so good that I attempted my own variation (with Serrano ham) once I returned home.

Monday was our last full day in Charleston, and while we had a nice-enough lunch at Melvin's BBQ, our best eating and drinking of the trip lay ahead of us.

Neither Valerie nor I brought anything nicer than jeans, sneakers, and comfortable shirts, so while many of the restaurants downtown looked nice, we felt underdressed for most of them. We shared this concern with our cab driver that afternoon, and he assured us that with the exception of a handful of establishments in town, we had naught to worry. Armed with this advice, we made reservations at McCrady's Restaurant on Unity Alley. I double-checked the dress code and the host assured me that we would have no trouble. So wearing a long-sleeved New York Giants t-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, I showed up at the restaurant of James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock. Not only has Brock worked under Alinea's Grant Achatz, but he also worked his way up to executive sous chef at Lemaire in my beloved Richmond's own Jefferson Hotel. The food was almost all local/regional, with many of the ingredients coming from the restaurant's own farm in nearby Wadmalaw Island. While credentials are nice it's the food, of course, that matters. Valerie and I both agree that McCrady's was the finest meal we ate in Charleston.

This was modern haute cuisine without a doubt, executed masterfully in preparation, appearance, and flavor. We shared a first course of butter poached lobster and sea scallops with "sorrel bubbles" (an airy green foam) and a little parsnip croquette in the middle made up of a parsnip slice, parsnip puree, and coated in panko bread crumbs. The entire dish was also sitting in a popcorn purée and had little pieces of spiced popcorn as well. Valerie's dinner was grilled swordfish with shaved root vegetables, and she enjoyed it. My entrée, though, was called a "duo of pork." It looked like a zen garden with a little meat hill in the corner, and it was extraordinarily enjoyable in every respect. There was an exquisite peanut "granola," banana purée, and a number of preparations of salsify root. There was braised salsify that was savory and rich, a deep-fried stick of salsify that looked like a miniature log (but tasted much better), and an intensely flavorful salsify purée. The pork duo turned out to be a small piece of deep-fried pork belly from the restaurant's own farm, along with succulent slices of pork loin from the same. A little stream of cooked-down jus flowed under the pork across the plate. This dish was so good with all the flavors combining perfectly, and Valerie was completely distracted by the striking visual arrangement of my plate of food. Such inventiveness, attention to detail, and execution make me weak at the knees.

Bellies full of awesomeness, we shambled up the street to check out The Gin Joint, our final destination before heading home the next morning. This place is what would happen if you took the craft bar of Acacia here in Richmond, and mixed it with the casual small-plates atmosphere of Secco. Looking at their food menu made me wish I'd discovered it earlier in the weekend (I was too full for any more food), but the cocktails were some of the best I'd ever consumed. Whether it was the house-made cola syrup or the perfect proportioning and mixing of ingredients, or just the right amount of ice, this place knows how to serve some booze. I appreciated the careful pairing of the right gin or whiskey with the right juices and syrups, too. Be sure to check out the short video of the owner mixing up a libation (and ignore the cheesy Acoustic Alchemy music). Details, my friends. You know what? It's probably better that this place is 7 hours away or my friends and family would think me an alcoholic.

So there it is. I drove further south looking for nothing more than relaxation and a change of scenery, and I came back with a few extra pounds (like I needed that) and a well-satisfied palate. We saw some interesting historical sites in a beautiful town, but I'd go back to Charleston in a heartbeat just for the food.