Ploafmaster General

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.

Okay, there are enough gushing reviews of Pixar's latest release, Wall-E, that I needn't muddy the waters with my lesser writing skills. I loved it. Best movie of the year so far in my opinion.

This post, on the other hand, is about the brilliant end credit sequence. Not only do we catch a glimpse, in a combination of stills and light animation, what happens after the conclusion of the feature, but we also see the visual design of the titles transition from cave drawings through hieroglyphs, to impressionism, and even up to 8-bit video game graphics. Pixar outdoes themselves with their films quite often, and the attention to detail - artistic detail, mind you - in an oft skipped part of a movie was a surprise indeed. Give these folks a Best Picture nomination.

Ten fresh frames on my Flickr pro-feezy.

Today I was thinking about our national debt in the United States, as of this entry estimated at about $9.3 TRILLION, or nearly $31,000 per person. This got me wondering whether other industrialized nations suffered from similar financial problems. So I did what any nerd with an internet connection would do, and researched my quandary on the Internet. Here's what I found:

France has a debt as of this writing well over 1.2 trillion Euros, which is close to $2 trillion, and considering their population this is nearly $30,000 per person.

The UK, in a 2006 estimate, is around 1.3 trillion Pounds, or $2.6 trillion. That's a hefty $43,000 per person.

Sweden, on the other hand, reported today that it expects a surplus this year of 163 billion Swedish Crowns, or $27.4 billion. They're expecting their total national debt to fall to around 933 billion crowns by the end of 2009, or a little more than $17,000 per person.

Yes, it's conspicuous consumption. Yes, it's impractical. Yes, it's so awesome my head asplode.

BEHOLD! The Terra Wind Amphibious RV:


(via Uncrate)

There's an article in The Atlantic making its rounds 'round the blogosphere about the affects on the human mind of the Internet and its immediate information availability. The general idea is that with the advance of the Internet the very mechanisms of human thought are changing, affecting our attention spans and memories. Slate recently published two related articles - one about GPS and its effects on learning about our surroundings, and another about how we read online - that support this notion of technology standing in for our own brain function.

On Tuesday, I posted my short quiz about memorized phone numbers because I wanted to emphasize the dulling of this simple ability. I got to thinking about this after reading the Slate articles (but before The Alantic's piece) and wondering just how many people with GPS units forget simple directions after extended use. If this even happens, how long does it take? Is it different because of the different sensory experience that comes with driving around?

Sure, some people have a hard time remembering all sorts of small details, but I bet for most of my (admittedly few) readers, the idea of memorizing a phone number was commonplace before cell phones went everywhere with us. For my part, I used to know anywhere from three or four times as many phone numbers by memory as I know now. I don't personally have a GPS, but I know several folks who do. I wonder if they've found a tendency to rely on that more than an understanding of where, exactly, they are.

I'll be looking out for other ways in which we turn over our own brain functions to technology and other systems. I can only imagine what impacts yet-to-be-developed devices will have on the way we interact with and understand our history, our world around us, and ourselves.

Oh boy, where do I start?

The only reason I went to see Shyamalan's waste of celluloid, The Happening, was because Val really wanted to see it, and wanted me along for the ride so she'd have an arm or knee to grab if it was frightening. I was glad to go out for the night with my wife, but WOW! was this movie horrible. The script, the acting (I hope just from bad direction), the direction, and worst of all the story were all third rate. I really can't tear apart the details any better than Christopher Orr over at The New Republic, so check out his review for a thorough take-down of The Hapless. I mean Happening.

This past weekend Val's mom showed us some old high school report cards from her husband which she dug up in the basement. The cause for interest was the grading scale - widely different from today's typical American report cards. The letters ranged from "A" through "G" and every letter in between, with "A" as outstanding, "B" as excellent, et cetera.

I give this R-rated feature a "G," for BAD FAILURE.

This one is hilarious, but if you're at work or are sensitive to profanity, beware some of the language...

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1228473 w=580&h=437]
Park from Amir on Vimeo.

(via Jakob Lodwick)

Tonight I decided to eat dinner at Chiocca's in the Museum District. It looks like my favorite sandwich in Richmond has been usurped by a piled-high pastrami and cheddar on rye, nice and hot.

If you can take the smokey and dive-yet-comfortable interior, grab a seat and enjoy. If you can't, call a head and take out. Either way, bring cash, because they don't take plastic (and as of this writing, their in-house ATM is busted). This is the real deal as far as deli sandwiches are concerned.

I have six fresh frames on my Flickr page tonight.

The above is one example of a series of Thomas Roche photographs from the aftermath of fighting at Petersburg, VA in 1865.

Think about this to yourself for a minute...

Without looking at your cell phone, how many phone numbers do you have memorized, including the area code, NOT including your own?
(answer in the comments, please)