Technology = weird

As part of my preparation for Lollapalooza, I looked into various ways I might be able to use my phone to communicate with the outside world. It turns out that I have two different ways to update my blog from my weird little mobile device, and three different ways to update via Twitter/Facebook statuses. That seems like at least two too many ways to stay "in touch" during a three-day music festival. Woodstock, this ain't.

It got me thinking about the various ways the digital age has completely changed how things are done. Practically nothing remains the same as it was twenty years ago, when they were still pressing vinyl for any album that came out and photography was a weirdly poetic alchemy of chemicals and paper and darkness and time.

But fear not, gentle Blogreader. This is not a post of weepy nostalgia for a simpler time. Frankly, most everything is way more convenient nowadays. If nothing else, it turns out that digital was the main thing that kept me from taking a lot of pictures earlier in life. I simply did not have the time or money to invest in it back in the pre-digital days. Film was expensive, let alone darkroom fees, paper, chemicals.

Blah, blah, blah. The long and the short of it is that I might fling some words or pictures up here from my phone during the weekend.

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So Lollapalooza starts in a few scant hours. We have not been blessed by the weather gods. Tomorrow should be gorgeous, right up until it rains. Saturday and Sunday are both scheduled to peak above 90°F. I'm hoping that our proximity to the lake will provide at least a small amount of relief. Even so, I expect to sweat out a lot more than the one liter of water that the rules allow me to carry into the festival with me.

Lolla rules also prohibit me from bringing in my good camera, so I spent a little time today dinking around with the consumer model I used to use a lot. I discovered that I no longer know how it works with any certainty, so I'm not sure if I'll get any decent shots or not. But I sure will try.

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Speaking of things I never expected to have the word "electronic" attached to them, I have begun a transition to electronic cigarettes. They provide the part of a normal cigarette to which I am addicted, without any of the stuff that is striving to kill me. So that's nice.

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Tomorrow's lineup includes Gaslight Anthem, Heartless Bastards, Fleet Foxes, a tough call between Andrew Bird and Of Montreal (that I suspect Mr. Bird will lose by virtue of not being the kind of performer one benefits from seeing in a festival), and a headliner matchup between Kings of Leon and Depeche Mode. The current plan is to see a bit of each of the latter two. Am hopeful this will be enough to sustain my friendship with Los Angelista. There are also dozens of other bands, but the list above are the ones I'm most interested in seeing. Fleet Foxes, especially, who had one of the best records of last year.

Sorry, Decemberists.

More soon...

In which a return to blogging is attempted

When last we saw our erstwhile blogger, he was spewing forth yet another apology for not blogging more often. Even though he seemed to mean it, it was nonetheless a bit tedious. The only thing more tedious is the several half-hearted attempts he had made to keep the blog alive during his ridiculously lengthy absences. Such attempts typically began with some sort of announcement that he was back on the blog.

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I am back on the blog, Blogreader*!

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Next weekend is Lollapalooza, once a national touring festival and now something which happens only in Chicago, once every summer. Typically during a heat wave. I have never attended one of these before, but I think I had tickets for whichever one Siouxsie and the Banshees co-headlined (1992, maybe).

The lineup looks really good. There is almost never a time in the three days that there is not at least a band I would be willing to see, and there are several slots where I shall have to make a choice between two or more excellent shows. So I've got that coming up. Currently, it is supposed to storm all three days, so I'm expecting a wet, muddy, exhausting slog through the contemporary indie scene. This hasn't seemed to dampen my excitement.

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I also have about a 74% chance of another longish trip to London, similar to the one I took in 2006, near the conception of this blog. This was really when I started blogging seriously, and I expect I'll once again be sending my travels home in 300-word blobs for my friends who cannot come.

*at this point, I'm assuming that the term "Blogreader" applies mainly to my mom and whatever friends I personally harrangue to come and read this. But if any old Blogfriends remain, please stop and say hello.

The Lucy Conundrum

Normally, if I am asked to liken myself to a Peanuts character—which is no longer as much of a rarity as it should be, in the age of memes—I'd have to say I'm Charlie himself. I'm a bit hapless at times, prone also to repeating mistakes and finding myself crushed all over again even though I should know better. Also, I am not a good baseball player.

But thinking about this blog, I realize I have become Lucy, the obnoxious one who continually sets up Mr. Brown for one of his disappointments. And all she does is offer to hold a football.

Just in the way that I flit back in here from time to time with every intent of opening anew this blog of mine, which I think about far more often than would be apparent to anyone who clicks in to find I have once again not created a new post.

So, thinking about it, and myself as a writer, and how keeping this blog made me a better writer, I went and reread a bunch of it last weekend. It was sort of like reading an old diary, except that enough time had passed for most of the entries that it was a bit like reading the diary of someone else.

I wonder if Lucy fully intends to hold still each time. I try to imagine the scenarios that could pull a person away suddenly in the span between when Charlie starts his run and when he reaches that pivotal moment when foot fails to meet ball and he goes off hurtling through the sky. I wonder if Charles Schultz ever thought about the physics involved, and the impossibility of such a thing really being caused by the lack of a football.

I wonder if anyone still clicks in here. I wonder if I can rediscover that part of me that sought out little tales and small jokes to bring back to all those I affectionately called "Blogreader."

Can't hurt to try.

If nothing else, it's a good way to avoid work.

Phoctober the one hundred sixth

We're a week away from getting our new President, the one we ordered back in November from the catalog. This will be the seventh peaceful transfer of power in my lifetime, as I was born in the vaporous remnants of the Nixon administration, around the time Butterfield admitted before Congress that tapes were made of conversations within the Oval Office.

Good times.

And if there is one thing our nation took away as a lesson from all that, it was never to re-elect a seemingly shifty Republican who has clearly misled the American people.

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What's that? Not a political blog?
Quite right. I apologize.

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What's that? Not really a blog at all anymore, since the word perpetrator who once filled these pages with his thought(s) disappeared under mysterious circumstances quite some time ago?
A bit wordy, but I can see your point. Again, I apologize.

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While we're on disappearances, did you know that the US government built a Liberty Ship in 1942 and christened her the SS Amelia Earhart? Seems a little strange to me to name a sea vessel after someone lost and presumed dead at sea, but I was not consulted.

I am almost never consulted.

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When last we saw one another, Phoctober was in full flush. For abandoning my post in the middle of a communal project, I truly do apologize.

I recently had occasion to look through my discarded photography and try to find some beauty in the shots that were total misfires for one reason or another. I found a few that worked in the same sort of way that some abstract art does: they just sort of appealed to my eye. I'll close this post with a few of those.

Phoctober the fifteenth

Frog and Toad are friends (Blog and toad...?)

What I was supposed to be shooting, when I was gazing moonily at the weeds from my previous post, were a small frog and a toad who I am told is his friend. Both had been constructed by my friend, who is designing the poster for a production of "A Year With Frog and Toad" in one of the suburbs with a grain in the name.

When he first asked me to shoot these, he did not know that Frog and Toad are Friends was the first book I bought from the Schoolastic Book Club when I was in Kindergarten. When it arrived, as the only kid in my class who could read, I was obliged to read it aloud in front of the class. Looking back, I may have had a really lazy Kindergarten teacher, making me read stories all the time as she did. No doubt she was envious of our naptime. On the one hand, making me read aloud when I had crippling shyness issues was sort of mean. On the other, I did spend a fair chunk of my adolescent and adult lives as an actor, so maybe it wasn't so much mean as incredibly early career training.

My friend did a nice job on the figures. I hadn't seen the book or its characters for ages, but they still struck a chord of recognition for me. We walked out into the little wilderness behind his house, posed them, furrowed our brows, moved them, moved the props, rotated things and generally did the things you do when taking pictures of tiny frog statues in a muddy field. I had a thick blanket to lie upon while I got down close to the ground to shoot our tiny subjects, but still managed to get a fair amount of mud on my shoes and pants. It was wet enough that if I stood still for longer than a few seconds, i could feel myself slowly sinking into the earth. Probably not a great day to have worn canvas shoes.

I was not, frankly, completely happy with the results of the shoot. Too many of the shots had focus issues caused by my crappy unfocused eye or from trusting the autofocus to not select a single blade of grass as my subject. Still, there were some I thought were nice, and at least one that my friend liked enough to make into a poster, which is kinda the main goal.

I told him that I would do a better job photographing them for the sequel. When I was told there isn't one, I sat down and came up with several. Whoever owns these characters, let me know if I should proceed with any of the following:

Frog and Toad are Coworkers and Nothing More.

Frog and Toad are Sisters AND Mother and Daughter
"Forget it, Jake. It's Amphibiantown."

Frog and Toad are Friends Until They Meet A Salamander and Each Decides to Vie for Her Affections, Which Causes an Irreparable Breach in their Relations, Despite the Fact that the Salamander is Not Remotely Interested in Either of Them

Frog and Toad are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

Frog and Toad are Two Personalities Housed in a Single Body

Frog and Toad are Metaphors

Frog and Toad are a Dual-Income Family Earning a Combined Total of $170,000 Per Year. Under Which Candidate's Tax Plan are they Better Off?

Snail Goes to Jamaica

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This was more for me than an actual part of the shoot. I wish I'd gone back and taken one like this once we had the kite set up. I really like having to look for them a bit.




This is the one that got selected. We cleaned out the wires, and fiddled with it a bit for the final poster.



More or less the same as the select, except in this one their friend the snail has arrived to deliver a letter.


The final shot, wires removed, in poster form. From this I learned that tickets to something like this are far more expensive than I would have guessed. And that a photo credit is a gratifying thing.

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Other Phoctobering:

All 2008 Phoctober posts from this site.

Minx finds poetry in a statue.

It isn't too late to join the fun. Just do a photo post, mention Phoctober, and come and tell me about it in the comments.

Phoctober the thirteenth

Yes, I am behind in my Phoctoberly duties. Apologies. Illness and other things wedged between me and you, Blogreader, but I am returned. And many Phoctober links adorn the bottom of this post. I hope it catches me up. At least it's all of those who came and said to link them, plus one I went and found, from the very talented Jefferson Davis.

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Weeds and soft houses

Saturday, I drove out to the suburbs for a couple of reasons. One was to take some pictures of clay amphibians which I will show you in a later post. While wandering around behind my friend's house to see where we might shoot, I came across what seemed to be a man-made lake surrounded by lush plant life, mud and the flesh and blood analogues to the amphibians I was there to shoot.

I kept walking toward the water. I was technically walking through someone's yard. I heard children playing. It was unseasonably warm. I made my way closer, until I stood on a concrete drainpipe at the mouth of the water. I crouched down upon it, bringing myself close to the water, listening to the staccato ploppings of startled frogs seeking sanctuary in the depths.

I never saw an actual frog, but I did see lilypads. And I snapped a few pictures as well. Today, I give you two weeds, and a house behind them fading off in soft focus.

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Other Phoctobering:

All 2008 Phoctober posts from this site.

Minx on a pond, with lilypads much better than the ones I saw.

Taffiny's ode to summer.

Baino joins in with rocks and sea and a lighthouse.

That's So Pants on birds and...well, mainly birds.

Jefferson Davis finds beauty at Furman University.

It isn't too late to join the fun. Just do a photo post, mention Phoctober, and come and tell me about it in the comments.

Phoctober the fourth

Night, Part Two

These were taken on Michigan Avenue or Wacker Drive on a clear night in January.



Same again, in sepia...

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Other Phoctobering:

All 2008 Phoctober posts from this site.

Kyklops and a sleepy feline.

Taffiny and bathing birds.

Absolute Vanilla takes us to the seashore.

It isn't too late to join the fun. Just do a photo post, mention Phoctober, and come and tell me about it in the comments.