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The End of Outside
January 10, 2008 | permalink
Gentle Readers, I decided what to do about my Haiku a Day project. I am going to put it up on Twitter. You can follow it online at my Twitter page, and/or you can sign up and follow me, and you will get the Haikus delivered to you via text. I will start today.
Perhaps I will do something more permanent later, but I think this will be fun and immediate, sort of keeping with the tone of the project (at least, the way I see it). And I thought it might be fun for you, if you chose to sign up, to get random bits of poetry on a daily basis.
I mean, who doesn't need more poetry?
Disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with Twitter- I just think it's a cool service that suits my needs...
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Lust for Life
January 7, 2008 | permalink
I didn't make any resolutions this year; they are always the same ones, and making them never seems to give me any extra motivation anyway, so I decided to skip it. What I did do, though, was set myself at a project for the year: I am going to write a haiku (surely you have noticed that I like the haikus!) every day.
I think its do-able. I can't see any reason why I can't find the time to write one a day, and the idea of doing so for a whole year appeals to me in a sweeping scope kind of way.
Some of them I will put up here, for your enjoyment. And I think perhaps after Fashion Week (yes, it's almost Fashion Week again) I will build a place for them on the internets.
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One Million Years B.C.
July 4, 2006 | permalink
I made a stop motion claymation short when I was in the fourth grade. It was about dinosaurs. Specifically, I wanted to show the relationship between the different tiers of the food chain. Not that I was able to express it like that when I was nine, but the concept was there. My film opened with an egg, out of which a small brontosaurus hatched. It shambled over to some green construction paper grass and started munching. A clever use of cottonballs as a dissolve to show the passage of time later, and we see the brontosaurus, now fully grown, munching away on yet more grass.
Cue the predator! A tyrannasaurus stalks into the frame, and after a very one sided battle, begins munching on the now dead herbivore. After eating his fill, the tyrannosaur walks off, and the carcass quickly decomposes, with new grass sprouting from its remains.
I did the whole thing myself- the story, the sets, the lights, the sculpting and animation. The only things I let anyone else do were modify the camera to shoot frame by frame and develop the film. I was immensly proud of my accomplishment. Actually, truth be told, I still am. I never made another- not long after my parents split up and we started moving around, and blah blah blah (is that an old story or what?)
I mention this now because I have often thought about my little short, and about trying my hand at another. The other day on Boing Boing they ran a bit about Between You and Me, a film strung together from still images from a digital camera. I feel like an idiot for not putting it together that I have had all of the equipment I need to make a stop-motion film for years. Doh!
I made a little test film last night; nothing complicated, just a few frames of a guitar pick crawling across the coffee table, to see what it would take to animate something. It was so cool. I can't wait to try something a little more ambitious.
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Back in the Big Apple
March 8, 2006 | permalink
Well Gentle Readers, I'm back. Our trip to Chapel Hill was awesome. It was so great to get out of the city for a few days and spend the weekend with Surfer Grrl and Mountain Man. I saw them on Thanksgiving, but only for a few hours; before that, I hadn't seen them since they moved down there in May.
The trip down last Friday was pretty uneventful. Laughing Girl and The Director rented a car for all of us the day before, and we ('we' being Smacktalk and myself) met at their place at 9 and hit the road. Traffic was light and we made good time, listening to the iPods and chatting about whatever. I was a little nervous about Laughing Girl and Smacktalk rubbing each other the wrong way while we were cooped up in the car for 10 hours, but there was none of that. The one blight on the way down was our poor choice of lunch. We stopped just south of DC at the something or other Grill... it was one of those places where it's all the meat you can eat, brought to your table on a spit by a bored waitress. It didn't sit well with anyone.
The first night we were there, we went out to eat at a place in Brightleaf Square, which is an old tobacco mill and warehouses that have been renovated into an urban park. I would tell you which place, except that I cannot remember and didn't write it down... oops! After dinner, we headed back to the house for beer and hot toddies.
Saturday, after breakfast, we went for a hike in the woods around the Duke campus. I tried out the new wide angle lens on my camera, taking some big wide vistas as well as some extremely close up shots of moss and leaves. It took me a while to get the hang of it for the close up stuff, but I think by the end they were coming out pretty well. We had lunch at Foster's Market in Durham, which was so delicious that I bought one of their cookbooks. Sara Foster even autographed it for me! (I'm a geek, I know...) Dinner was at a pub in Durham, where we met up with Scully (another New York technician turned grad student) and fought rabid basketball fans for posession of our table. When they got too rowdy for our taste, we decided to continue the beer drinking back at the house. Which pretty much wrapped up the evening. Oh, except that I made bread for Sunday's breakfast.
Sunday I took the bread I made the night before and cooked up some French Toast for everyone. It was quite delicious, if I do say so myself. We had decided to spend the day getting some culture, so after breakfast we went to check out the Nasher Museum of Art, which had just opened on the Duke Campus. It was small; it only took us about an hour to see it all. But the collection was top notch, and quite varied. I think Side Steppin', the living sculpture outside, was my favorite. We whiled away the afternoon at the independent movie house in Chapel Hill watching Nightwatch. (Yes, again... Smacktalk and I had talked it up so much that everyone wanted to see it for themselves.) Surfer Grrl and I cooked dinner for everyone that night- baked catfish with mashed potatoes and broiled asparagus, and molten chocolate volcano cake for dessert. While we ate all that good food, we watched the Academy Awards and pretty much heckled everyone.
We spent the first part of Monday, our last day, wandering around Chapel Hill. It's a cute little college town; lots of little shops and pubs and public art. There was an awesome rare and used bookshop... I spent a lot of money there. Then we hit the Chapel Hill Botanical Gardens, which was pretty cool even though it was way too early in the season. I got to play some more with my wide angle lens, and there was an awesome oversized chess board upon which The Director and Smacktalk faced off. The last half of the day, we earned our keep by helping our hosts install a drainage system in their backyard. That's right- digging ditches, lining them with gravel, laying pipe- the whole shebang. Dinner was out, at Mama Dip's Country Kitchen. Truly delicious. After that, we spent the evening drinking beer and playing Scattergories, which if you don't know it is one of the finest games ever made for playing while you are drinking beer.
Monday we came back. The trip up was mostly uneventful, though tensions were running a little higher and there were a couple of dicey moments. And now I'm back.
Posted in Artistic Endeavors & Out of Town & Social Life(3) Comments
In Which the Subway Portrait Project Goes Live
October 31, 2005 | permalink
Here it is, Gentle Readers; the photography project that I mentioned I was working on a while back is up and live. You can see the Subway Portrait Project on my Flickr page.
This project was born out of a new appreciation for the incredible variety of people that live and work in this city. I thought that since, as a freelancer, I take the train all over the city at all hours of the day and night that I might be able to capture that variety. So, every time I took the train, I took a portrait of the persons sitting across from me. I'm really excited about it, I think it came out great. Please, check it out. And feel free to leave me feedback! I've never done anything like this before, I would love to know what you all think.
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Yo Ho! and a Bottle of Rum
October 2, 2005 | permalink
Good morning, Gentle Readers. I have to tell you, I have had the best week that I think I have had in a long time. There was a little work, which is always good; but what's more, I was able to use my craptacular revelations of last week as a motivator to not be a loser all week. I went sailing on Smacktalk's boat, did some home type-stuff, got off my ass to see some people I havesn't seen in a while, and even dreamed up a photography project for myself (which I am very excited about). Once I have some of it done, you will read it here first! but for now, it will remain under wraps...
Posted in Artistic Endeavors & Musings & Social Life(1) Comments
(The Gala Event)
(The Gala Event)
(Soft Sell)
(Soft Sell)
(Black Bread (of the Sea))
(Black Bread (of the Sea))