Along the river, there are the remains of bath houses from the 20s and 30s. This is my favorite.  ¶ 22:31

  New Horizons
There's some interesting synchronicities going on that are making me sit up and take notice. I'm not sure what it is that I'm supposed to take notice of, but interesting things nonetheless. It all starts about a year ago.

• A few years back, I picked up a digital camera. I've taken it on vacation with us almost exclusively (though it also requires that I take the laptop so I can clear off the memory stick every night), and I'm starting to get the hang of how to manipulate the menus to make it do what I want.
  
• Earlier this year, I realized that I'm not being as creative as I'd like to be. I very often get caught up in the day-to-day management of life and don't take time to write or collect images, or whatever. I had an a-ha moment earlier this year: not being creative is bad for my soul. I need to do a little something creative every day, even if it's something as simple as taking ten minutes to describe the way the air smells in my blog.
  
• In an effort to start doing more creatively, I made a decision to start doing more photography. It started with simple things like taking my camera on walks to just look for interesting images that I could snap. This philosophy ended up with some really cool pictures of the river from May, and a few cool pics from my LA/THJ trip. Around this same time, I also started looking at the whole notion of medium format, just to see what a more serious hobby would cost me.
  
• Doh! moment. I'm not in the habit of taking photos 'cause I can't afford to blow through nine folls of film for the one perfect shot. Well, guess what? With digital, I can just empty the memory stick and start over. So I've been gradually convincing myself that it's OK to take six hundred pictures to get the perfect one. That took me a few weeks to realize.
  
• Then, I kinda lost touch with the whole creativity feeding my soul thing in LA, and didn;t really re-connect with it until Labor Day weekend while shooting the Harley rider/mini-donut documentary. Since then, I've made a concerted effort to carry my camera with me more consistently, and just shoot stuff for the hell of it. I'm also teaching myself Photoshop so I can manipulate the images in the digital domain.
  
• My one Harleyfest gig was basically field producing for Io Donna. A photo shoot. With hot Italian models.
  
• I've been looking at some of DB's stuff for 'Info', and digging the style and art direction.
  
• I've been finding myself more and more aware of the 'how to' when I see a good photo. Rather than just appreciateing it 'cause it's cool, I spend a lot of time in my head analyzing why it's cool, where the lights are, what lens they used, etc. I'm becoming more aware of photos and styles I like, and then turning around to try to duplicate them, without regard for how much film I'm burning through with the experimentation.

Here's where it gets interesting.

• I saw an ad on the MARN listserv that Techno Trance Belly Dance needed photos to document their performances. I kinda blew it off, not being sure that I could do it justice.
  
• A couple days later, I ran into I. on Friendster...and her homepage was that of Techno Trance Belly Dance.
  
• A couple days after that, J. sends me an e-mail with the subject line: P. is the center of the universe, and a link to the following:
  E., 07/27/2003:
  I. rocks! I'm very grateful to P. for putting us in touch with one another to collaborate on the music video. I.'s troupe, as well as herself, are some intense and beautiful dancers. very hypnotic and talented! I look forward to working on other collaborations in the future, as well as getting to know I. better. she has an awesome spirit and a burning power made visible when she dances. E.'s a filmmaker of whom P. has spoken very highly, and I've always wanted to meet her. I decide to send an e-mail to I., inquiring about her photographic status.
  
• Later, J. tells me she's heading off to ArtWalk with M. to see some bellydance troupe. OK. Too many coincidences. I make my way down there, introduce myself, do the perfunctory exhcange of business cards, and both I. and I are excited about the possibilities. I warned her that I'm rusty on photography, but willing to give it a shot. We're going to talk more. Soon.

Another tidbit.
Last week, I had my quarterly lunch with J. to talk about DVD duplication. He brought his wife J. along unexpectedly, and it turns out that she coordinates photo shoots for a photo studio. I get her card; it reads 'producer'. Hmm...that's what I do.

And this...
So I'd made an offer to S. to shoot photos for RWC. We met today, and I'm very excited about those possibilities as well. I'll have some published photos under my belt, and be able to get more experience with the whole photographic realm.

Click!
Then on the way home, it hits me.

Follow the money
My peers in other markets are supplementing their production income by doing photography. Why am I not marketing myself to photo studios as a producer/coordinator? I did it for Io Donna, I can do it for LC. I do it for feature films, I can do it for a catalog shoot. The only trick is the crossover trick. J. and I talked about this at lunch; it's a reare occasion that someone in Milwaukee works both sides of the fence (still and motion) for some reason that neither of us can ascertain.

It'll be a challenge, but I'd rather challenge myself with a client base of a few hundred rather than a few dozen. Time to re-work the resume.   ¶ 18:11

  I just discovered that Found Magazine has a website. I should have guessed. Everything has a website. If you're not familiar with Found, check out http://www.foundmagazine.com. Check back often for the find of the week. Especially the find of the week for August 10, 2003. And July 20th. December 22, 2002 is pretty wacky. I like September 1, 2002 as well, in a strange, Heather Shinn/Tim Burton-y kind of way.  ¶ 04:13

  Just saw "Underworld". It's one of those movies that I love and one of those movies that I hate. If you go in expecting a masterwork of action-adventure, you'll be sorely disappointed. It's far from that. The special effects are nothing terribly innovative, and compared to FX heavy films like "The Matrix" (where they were really pushing the envelope in terms of how FX were used), seemed downright cheesy.

However, if you go in expecting leather trenchcoats, tight pleather, and gratuitous movie violence, you'll love this movie. A point of reference: If you ever have the opportunity, go with the vampires instead of the werewolves. They live in big, gothic mansions, they're all hot, and have great wardrobes! The werewolves live in dank underground catacombs and are pretty grungy.  ¶ 16:52

  I love labels!
This is probably one of those INTJ things, but I feel a lot less restless with my thoughts when I can label them. I've been listening to all kids of cool electronica over the past year, and have acquired quite a few tracks that I adore which include a driving beat and satiny smooth female vocals (Fragma and 4 Strings are two examples of this). I found out today that there's a genre called Vocaltrance which encompasses all of these fine tracks, and has introduced me to many more. I love having labels for things.  ¶ 11:23

  So I've got this idea for a documentary that I'm not quite sure what to do with. I've been listening to all kinds of electronica lately, and of all the DJ's whose work I'm adding to my lists of tunes I need to check out, few, if any are women. The last women I added to my list were DJ Colette and DJ Abraham.

While I know a lot of women DJs, I know a lot more male DJs, and there aren't many women who've made the leap to international stardom like a Paul Oakenfold or Paul van Dyk. Even the one that I know of off the top of my head goes by a man's name (DJ Abraham). OK, I may be reading a little too much into that, but what do you expect from years and years of feminist film theory? :)

Still, it's another place where the male/female inequity is all too obvious. So what's the story? That's where I'm missing the pieces. Hmmm.  ¶ 09:43

  Last night, I dreamt of Sparkle Motion, and now I can't get Duran Duran's "Notorious" out of my head.  ¶ 08:00

  Amid my errand running, I stopped in to see Rachel at Skin to talk to her about the tat. I invoked the name of Jennifer, and she didn't charge me the deposit for the artwork. WooHoo.

She's going to try to whip up some designs, and next week I can stop in and take a look at what she's got. We can move forward from there. I'm hoping she comes up with something that wows me. I told her I preferred one-of-a-kind designs instead of the stock stuff from the books.   ¶ 16:05

 
I've finally got the concept for my new tattoo, but I'm not quite sure where I'm going to place it yet. When I select my tats, I always go back to having something that I'll be proud to have on my body for the long term, and I also like to have it in a location that's easy to hide if need be.

For the next one, I'm not so sure I'm going to stick by the 'easy to hide' rule. I'm thinking of my calf. The designs, like all the others, are things that have very deep meaning to me. Because of my love of Egyptology, and how the Egyptian mythos figured so prominently into my formative years, I want to go with something that's reminiscent of Egyptian symbolism.

I'd like to see a tribal-esque Eye of Horus/ankh combination that doesn't look like the-artist-formerly-known-as-Prince. Because these two symbols don't in and of themselves match up, this'll take a little bit of niggling on the part of the artist.

I think it's time to go see Rachel tomorrow and see what she can sketch out for me. I've also been told that Atom Bomb might be a good place to go, and I heard last night that Heather Shinn is doing tats now as well. That, of course, would be something significantly different.   ¶ 23:36

 
Photo of the Day










There was a fabulous sunset tonight.
  ¶ 21:00

 
Last spring, J and I had this great gym-going routine down, and I managed to work out three or four days a week. Then I went to L.A. When you're working one hundred and ten hour weeks, little things like working out tend to fall by the wayside. Well, having fallen out of the habit, it wasn't terribly easy to get back in the groove when I got back from L.A., and shortly thereafter, our club shut its doors. Well, that was just a wonderful reason not to go, and we kept procrastinating.

One day toward the beginning of September, I stopped by the Shorewood Community Fitness Center to see what they were all about. Aside from being half the price of our previous club (doh!), it's new, clean, and not the Bally's meat market atmosphere. We signed up for a trial membership about ten days ago, and today was the first day that I dragged my ass over there to work out. I used my workout notes from the last time I was at the gym as my starting point for weights and reps.

My arms hurt. Feel the burn. Yeah.  ¶ 15:43

 
Last night, I dreamt that I was ordering Chinese food, but that I wanted to make sure it wasn't too stronly spiced in case I started making out with my dinner date. They kept sending the wrong food.

Though in other news, I did have a productive evening last night. I spent a couple hours playing with css, and gave this blog a new look. I also created a new css for my faq, on which I made significant progress. I've been working on the FAQ project for about a year, and right now, the only thing left to do is find my Vegas document and import that as part of the vacation hotspot answer. I also need to import some pictures.

I enjoy my Tuesday nights a lot. Getting out of the house and having a large block of unstructured time with just me and my laptop is very refreshing. I'm finding that my natural circadian rhythms are to work until 2am, then sleep until 8am. I tend to get my best and most productive work done in the 6pm to 2am block of time.  ¶ 07:57

 
I woke up at 2am this morning witha migraine. I don't like migraines. It was an atypical migraine (for me, at least), as well. First, it woke me out of a sound sleep. Second, it was centered at the top of my head instead of behind my eyes. Third, I still have it. Not fun. I don't like migraines.  ¶ 15:30

 
So for the past few weeks, I've been calling forth the rusted parts of my brain that used to work with Photoshop. I received, from a friend, a copy of Adobe's Photoshop Elements and decided to finally load it 'cause I had some minor tweaking I needed to do on some photos. Nothing terribly major, just cutting and pasting some backgrounds over light stands and cleaning up places where the edge of the backdrop appeared in frame. Elements is a scaled down version fo the full Photoshop, but I've found it to be quite a robust little program, ready and willing to do whatever it is that I need done.

So I was reading the manual to try to kick my memory back into palce about a specific tweak I was doing, and ran across this feature called 'photomerge.' Feed in a series of JPGs, and it'll automatically try to match the edges, tweak the perspective to get them to match, and make a panoramic photo out of a series of single frames.

Now I've ALWAYS been a big fan of panoramic shots, and have a number of analog images from Italy of panoramas in Tuscany and Cinque Terre. Being too lazy to scan them, however, I decided instead to test the feature on a series of shots I took at Diana's Grove last fall.

Wow. Impressive.

Click here to see the resulting photo. It may take some time to load. Although optimized for the web, it's still big.  ¶ 23:39

 
Had a couple of productive meetings today. Met with JF; she's able to hook me up with some very good people to know for the internship program. MH showed up to discuss grantwriting for the program, as well as script development for "Peek-A-Boo". Very productive on both fronts.

M indicated that she's starting to get in a groove in MKE, starting to feel really bitter about not writing, and now that one of her stories got accepted for publication, she needs to create new work. I'm hoping it works out.  ¶ 17:26

 
See http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html, and thanks to Jennifer!

My pirate name, according to the test at http://www.fidius.org/quiz/pirate.php is Black Sam Kidd. "Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!"

According to http://www.stupidstuff.org/main/piratename.htm, it's Red Stephan the Gouger.  ¶ 08:41

 
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.
http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/%7Eyugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/index.html


Thanks, Elise!
  ¶ 15:54

 
I heard geese honking this morning while getting dressed.
On the way to my shoot, there was a 'v' cutting its way north through the sky.  ¶ 12:12

 
Today, I wore long pants for the first time since May 18. Winter's coming.  ¶ 01:12

 
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 “Solaris”, has been re-released as part of the Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films. You may be familiar with “Solaris” from Stanislaw Lem’s classic science fiction novel or Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 film starring George Clooney, but if that’s your’ only exposure to this story, Tarkovsky’s interpretation is well worth viewing.

Kris Kelvin is a psychiatrist sent to Solaris space station to investigate the strange phenomenon inflicting the remaining crewmembers. A sentient ocean covers the planet Solaris, and this ocean manifests ‘visitors’ to the station. These visitors seem to be apparitions from the darkest recesses of each crewmember’s subconscious.

Lem’s intended theme was an exploration of how mankind would interact and communicate with sentient beings who were were so unlike us as to be unrecognizable. Tarkovsky chose to depart from this theme by exploring issues of humanity and conscience, as well as nostalgia for Earth and the homeland. Throughout this character driven, passionate drama, the characters struggle with questions of conscience, redemption, humanity and sanity as they wrestle with their individual manifestations.

The film is interspersed with black-and-white sequences, which Tarkovsky used as a visual cue for night and dream-states. Like many Russian films “Solaris” has a pacing that’s different from what western audiences are used to. Tarkovsky eschewed the Russian montage popularized by Eisenstein, preferring to let the performance unfold in real time. To this end, he uses many long shots, and when an edit is required, he frequently uses Hollywood-style match cuts to smooth out the transition, if not hide it altogether and create the illusion of seamless time.

Tarkovsky was also fond of leaving visual clues in the frame that would be explained later in the film. Rather than spelling out the significance of the objects and event in the frame, he dangles a piece of the story in front of the viewer; an invitation to solve the puzzle concurrently with the main characters. This is the type of film that is so densely packed with images and symbolism that one can watch it over and over again, reading something different each time.

Special features on this DVD include a richly detailed commentary and analysis by Tarkovsky scholars Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie. They provide the viewer with historical and social perspectives about the film, as well as information about Tarkovsky’s personal life. These details help enhance the viewer’s understanding of Tarkovsky the artist, and ultimately, of his art.

Be sure to block off plenty of time. “Solaris” itself runs two hours and forty-nine minutes not counting the special features. In addition to a bevy of deleted and alternate scenes, a second disc of supplemental material includes interviews with actors, principal crewmembers, and Stanislaw Lem. These interviews all give viewers valuable insight into what it was like to work with a man many consider to be one of the geniuses of Soviet cinema.

Solaris is available through the Milwaukee Public Library and video stores around town.
Published in Riverwest Currents, on October 5, 2003 03:27 PM.  ¶ 10:37

 
There's a chill in the air this morning. Fitting; this is the last day of 'summer'. Not astronomical summer, which stretches another three weeks, but perceptive summer; what we commonly understand to be summer.

It's been a wierd summer for me. I missed my favorite part of it...that last spring to early summer transition period, watching the days grow longer and the air grow warmer, but being in LA from mid-May to mid-July.

On the plus side, I feel like I had a summer. Most years, there's a palpable excitement in the air as the city builds ups to Summerfest, and by the time July 4th has passed, it seems like we're on the downward slide back into winter and we've barely started summer yet.

One of two things:
a.) by being in LA since May, that's when my summer started, so it seemed a lot longer.
b.) missing out on that spring to summer transition, I lost track of how short summer in Wisconsin really is.

Maybe a combination of the two.

Ahh, summer.  ¶ 11:18