Ploafmaster General

It turns out that as politicians continue to crawl their way into the land of 21st-Century technology, Congress must consider the proper use of communication media like Twitter...

Many folks close to me know my obsession with many things Italian. While I'm only one quarter Sicilian, the prominence of my full-blood grandmother in my upbringing and the associated happy memories have fostered a deep love for the food, language, culture, and country of Italy.

But lately, I'm kinda pissed at the Italian government.

You see, it seems that they're performing a fingerprint census of all Roma (or Gypsy) people in their country - including the 90% which claim Italian citizenship - in an effort to "crack down on crime." This fingerprinting includes Roma children, but doesn't include any non-Roma Italians (sounds confusing, but this doesn't refer to residents of Rome).

I hope this sounds as obviously horrific to readers as it did to me and many in Italy's population. This is terribly similar in concept to how Germany treated Jews leading up to WWII; blame a minority ethnic group for societal woes (in Italy's case, theft and such) and set them apart, treating them differently than the rest of the population. That certainly snowballed into one of the greatest human tragedies in history.

Thankfully this isn't the 1930's, and the European Union took notice early on, so I don't foresee any larger-scale escalation without the intervention of the international community. There are currently political efforts within Italy and without to stop this practice, and I hope it picks up steam.

I'm starting to sense a pattern in this, the latter half of my photography class. Darkroom, darkroom, and more darkroom, with little in the form of instruction. I'll not repeat what I've said the past two weeks, so here's what I did tonight:

I focused on trying to get the best out of one particular image. I took my recently posted duck photograph and made three prints, two of which involved the technique of burning. Burning involves using a piece of opaque material (cardboard in my case) with a small hole cut out, moved around over the photo paper to expose only a desired portion of the image. On one image, for example, I exposed the whole image for 38 seconds with the aperture on the enlarger set to f11. Then I burned in the body of the duck for an additional 25 seconds in an attempt to coax more detail out of the feathers.

After all that, I think I have my first image worth putting in a frame :-)

Anyway, still no assignment (now three weeks in a row), so I'll try to finish up my self-imposed experiment of photographing total strangers looking at or toward the camera.

Dan in Real Life is a study in discomfort. In a movie filled with in-your-face metaphors and too-clever script contrivances, my main beef is the lengths to which this film goes to perpetuate an unrealistic and horribly tense family situation. Sure, there's decent acting, some good camera work, some touching family moments...but it's all over shadowed by the overwrought slow-motion train wreck that you can see from an hour away.

Two out of five.

Why don't we have Mitchell and Webb broadcast in the United States? These guys are freaking hilarious.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqnD6umhOGw&hl=en&fs=1&w=580&h=485]

You can thank me later for laughing your head off this Friday morning:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1YJbCftjBI&w=580&h=485]
(via trey)

The Morning News has an interesting feature on their site titled, simply, "Albums of the Year." The distinguishing factor, here, is that these lists cover years gone by, such as yesterday's "The Top Albums of 1989."

There are sample MP3s for each album listed along with commentary.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1028035 w=580&h=326]
CACHE . 35mm short . from isiah flores on Vimeo.

I don't know how I let this slip by, but either way, Cache is the most recent short from Isiah Flores. I wish it was a little longer, but I still love the filming and the choice of shots. Penelope Allyn Collins deserves as much credit for writing, directing, editing, and of course, acting.

Six new shots for your viewing pleasure, showing off the glories of Fuji Neopan 100-speed film.

I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world

-- The late poet Stanley Kunitz, quoted on a wall in the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

David Friedman over at Ironic Sans has turned one of his great ideas into a reality with Thsrs.

Thsrs is a simple (on the surface) web application which attempts to do for words what services such as TinyURL do for hyperlinks, providing shorter synonyms to help folks keep Twitter messages at or under 140 characters. Sure, it's a niche app, and likely only to be used by those few tweeters who stretch the bounds of their alloted message space. But it's creative thinking like this that moves the internet forward.

It's still in its infancy, so it's not perfect, but it's a sweet idea for now.

Here's my song-by-song impressions of Beck's latest album, Modern Guilt, gathered from my recent Twitter postings:

1. "Orphans" - The first thing you notice is the super cranked bass. Steady beat, total rock throwback. Sure sets the tone for what's ahead.
2. "Gamma Ray" - Shag-a-delic 60's dance party, YEAH, baby! The bass line rocks, and the inverted-sounding vocals are trippy. Nice touch.
3. "Chemtrails" - This song was streamable on Beck's site before the album was official. It starts chill, rocks your face, and finishes great.
4. "Modern Guilt" - The title track is bouncy and ironically dark. It's an excellent blend of retro with a touch of electro-pop.
5. "Youthless" - Starts similarly to "We Dance Alone" form the last album, but distinguishes itself less than a minute in. Driving and intense.
6. "Walls" - Danger Mouse seems to have more of a hand in this track, but to good ends. Interesting layers and scattered percussion.
7. "Replica" - Frenetic processed drums kick into a song that feels more like Amnesiac-era Radiohead with Beck singing. Trippy, and awesome.
8. "Soul Of A Man" - Straightforward in-your-face rock with Beck's touches of noise throughout. Meh. Not great, but at 2:30, tolerable.
9. "Profanity Prayers" - Vocals and guitar nearly indistinguishable at first, but in a cool way. Nice riffs with a nice interlude near the end.
10. "Volcano" - Beck slows it down for the end of the album with some pounding melancholy. What a great outgoing song.

This may be the first major-label Beck album with no "secret" track at the end (though I don't own Mellow Gold, so I'm not sure)...I was kinda surprised by that.

And after all that, a final word:

I have to say that after The Information I was a bit worried that Beck may have lost his edge. There were some cool tracks on that album, but it didn't hold up well next to the rest of his catalog. I'm happy to report that with Modern Guilt Beck's tunes are fresh and excellent with a retro flourish. I'll be spinning this puppy for a while, and I can only imagine what lies ahead now that his contract with Geffen is over...

Tonight was a lot like last week - mostly dark room time, and no assignment again, but still very enjoyable. My disappointment at the lack of formal instruction is made up for by my enjoyment of photo printing, but all the same I'm pretty sure I'd like to take the intermediate class; I'm too hungry for continued education.

So there are four sessions remaining, and I'm not sure when we'll get to any critiques. No matter, I'm still shooting, and I'll keep posting.

It's worth your time to go check out PWNYS, a page created by my hombre Phil, that lists and links the websites of several Internet Aficionados. I'm somehow graced with a place among these fellas who all have some skill for web design, so you can skip my link (it'll just bring you right back here) and check out everybody else.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Soy Vay; Kosher Asian sauces and marinades. Now the eighth of me that's Jewish can snack guilt-free.



I wonder which variety of He'brew pairs best with these...

Phresh Photos.

Okay, so I have an update, from Beck's own website - his new album, Modern Guilt, is dropping this coming Tuesday, July 8th! Check out samples from the album on the music section of the site.

I think I have yet another trip to Plan 9 in order...

Check out these absolutely gorgeous hand-made notebooks from five and a half. The above, "let them eat cake," may just have to find its way into my hands in short order.
(via Gentle Graffiti)

I suppose my weekend was so relaxing that I completely forgot to write about my first visit to Lulu's in Shockoe Bottom, so here I am, four days after my brunch, making up for just that.

The interior was visually interesting if a bit disjointed; the jury's out on the pairs of close-set columns separating the booths between the bar and the rest of the main seating area. I did, however, like the bar, the open kitchen, and the spectacular back seating area with what must have been 30-foot ceilings and skylights. I'd really like to check the place out at night and grab some drinks (unless anybody has reason to avoid it).

The food, so far, is another story. Very little about my first meal there calls me back. I ordered the Pork BBQ with cheesy scrambled eggs (hold the slaw, please), but what arrived wasn't actually BBQ. Sure, it was tasty and spicy shredded pork, but it was clearly braised pork. Not smoked. The color, the texture, the flavor...no smoke at all, and perhaps not even liquid smoke. Additionally, there was half a handful of chopped red peppers and scallions scattered across the plate of food, something not indicated in the menu (or I'd surely have asked to leave them out as well). Finally, the gray-brown thinly sliced potatoes on the side were presumably home fries, but they were soggy, limp, and thoroughly unappetizing.

Better luck next time, whenever that is.

Blizzard is developing Diablo III, and the nerd in me is about as excited as possible over this. I spent many hours playing the original, and even more on LAN games with my buddy Dave when we were roommates in college.

We're both anticipating this next installment, and our wives are preparing already for some time without their spouses :-)

Oh Wikipedia, you treasure trove of useless yet entertaining knowledge. You have surprised and delighted us again with your exhaustive list of problems solved by MacGyver.

Some serious gems:

While being pursued by dirty CIA operatives at a strip club, MacGyver loads a confetti cannon with make-up powder and fires it at them as they enter a door, thus blinding the enemies with powder.

MacGyver builds a hot air balloon from scratch to escape from a Soviet search party. The balloon was made of homemade super-glue, old clothes, a parachute, welding equipment, a refrigerator, condoms, and metal box.

MacGvyer also built a swinging playpen out of hockey sticks, a rope net and rope, and fastened a baby's diaper with duct tape.

(via the title text of today's XKCD comic)

The nerd in me often has a desire to check out new web apps at least for a short period of time, and the flavor of my week is Textpattern. Textpattern is a blog-centric CMS which is PHP-based and open source. It was pretty easy to install, and seemed to near-seamlessly import everything from Wordpress in a few seconds. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects to me is the CSS editor...should be fun to play with.

Anyway, if you're curious, it's at blog.danielcwarshaw.com - but don't expect much. Followers of my site know my attention span for these things is pretty short. If it plays nicely, though, it may be time for a change of platform, so we'll see how it goes.

Tonight's class started off by demonstrating a camera obscura constructed by taping black tarp over the windows except for a penny-sized hole cut out of a flattened piece of soda can. When we killed the lights, the whole room was turned into a canvas for an upside-down projected image of the scene outside. It was impressive to see how much detail was visible as well as the rich, full color. All this served as an elementary example of the optical principals of reproducing an image.

Then, of course, it was back into the darkroom for more print making. Tonight I took a different path with my test strips; I used multiple strips with a single exposure time on each instead of incremental exposure times along the same strip. This allowed me to have a better idea of how the different exposures would affect the whole image instead of different patches. I think the results were an improvement, and I was able to make three prints after a contact sheet.

There was no particular assignment this week, but as we finished up we were given handouts with additional information about how images are reproduced. Christopher may send us something to work on via email during the week, but otherwise we're simply to shoot more film :-)

I think I'll cut up some of my pre-class negatives this week so I can make prints from those images next Monday...

Proving once again that its customer service department listens and acts, Netflix has decided to keep profiles after all. Less than two weeks after pissing off hordes of subscribers, Netflix sent out this glorious message:



Thanks for listening, guys. The goodwill you earn from this is worth more than any perceived technical hassle from keeping profiles in tact.

As if you couldn't tell, I'm hopped-up on photography these days. I'm also, as you may have noticed, a fan of my locality, Richmond, VA.

It's truly a shame, then, that it's taken me this long to highlight the photography of Ansel Olson. With a background in photography and interior design and a practice in the graphic arts, Olson has a clear eye for well-conceived photographs, be they digital or film. From the literal to the abstract and sometimes surreal, there's a rich variety of work, and plenty of inspiration for a novice photographer like myself.