More pictures

WWII gun installations north of San Francisco (having a good time with an old discipline).

Holiday meandering

Mission San Juan Bautista & Half Moon Bay
[Some scenes in Vertigo were shot at San Juan Bautista --- although the belltower in the film was artificially added and doesn't exist]

Top ten of 2008 in no particular order:
-Getting married
-Backpacking Patagonia
-Cormac McCarthy
-Australian tour
-Barack Obama
-Phillies breaking the curse
-The Dark Knight
-Building bikes and amps
-Stars of the Lid live
-Hanging out with my smarty-pants wife

Collage 2006

Silver prints, collage, pencil / 48"x20"

Posting some old non-digital work, more to come. I am hereby re-titling this piece "Life Gainstage Visual" in honor of Gabriel Sim-Laramee, whose name I have spelled correctly and who will undoubtedly comment upon this post.

Two surfaces

1. Long Island
2. Philadelphia

Australia 2

I'm in Adelaide now. I don't know what to say.

No April fool

Science can explain these things, but it can't interpret them. You have to step outside of time (chronos) and into Time (kairos) to be present to something this powerful. Land and text both want to be read and understood. I felt afraid when I realized this, especially since the realization only came while unprotected, at the mercy of the environment.

Wedding countdown & usual curmudgeonly ramblings

I am getting married in 12 days. Surreality reigns! If you would like to come, the info is here.

Believe it or not, I am done with my planning work for the wedding, and not particularly stressed about it. Instead, I'm thinking about a string of recent interactions/observations wherein I'm increasingly finding --- in my fundamental disillusionment with both the trappings of corporate globalism and the silly contemporary remnants of the "countercultural idea" of 40 years ago --- that I am not alone. Not by a long shot. I am looking forward to seeing what happens in the next couple of years, and whether the hopeful grouches of our generation begin to stand up and insist that "thinking different" has nothing to do with purchasing another Apple iProduct.

West coast foray

10.5mm DX, from Mrs. Claus. More later, maybe.

And...again

8/25, the hottest day of the year (finally getting around to it now)
Manual panorama mash-up rules: turning & cutting allowed; stretching, bending, retouching, & exposure matching not allowed

The tower

This is the tallest man-made structure in the world. It is in Blanchard, North Dakota. I visited it while staying in Fargo on tour with Battlefields. I waited a long time to do this -- a site which is the pinnacle of a personal mythology, a dream-object, like my own personal Mount Olympus. It is no skyscraper, it is the anti-monument.

Squares

"In order to be prepared to hope in what does not deceive, we must first lose hope in
everything that deceives."
Georges Bernanos

More surface

"In the hastening or delaying of the end lies all distinction in the knowledge of the end when at last it comes. At rare moments speed is determined; all else is something else."
Charles Williams, Descent into Hell

St. Louis

1/1/07, 11:30am
Post-Urbana-evac, prior to 15-hour drive home

St. Louis is an okay place (buildings by Louis Sullivan = awesome), but I had three complaints. First, nobody lives in the city center; it's all hotels and offices, which made me a little sad. Second, as a result of the lack of actual residents, everything closes at 6pm. I couldn't find food after 6 except at a grocery store. Third, Wawa does not have any stores in metro St. Louis.

Three

These are for my mom for Christmas. I hate family photos, they always look blown out by on-camera flash, everything flattens into the background, and everybody always has that same dumb "picture smile" on. They're awkward. I wanted to make something closer to what we really look like.

(I'll post those requested amp/guitar diagrams later.)

Comfort / Space / Steadfastness

I keep returning to this place. I first came to it in person a little less than two years ago, to explore it with a 6x6 manual TLR camera as a metric proxy for my eyes, which were overwhelmed.



As much as half of my constructive output over the last two years has made use of this site. I have finally concluded that the reason is comfort. I was explaining to a friend recently that there are some things which, though they are simple, overlooked, or odd, are comforting and beautiful to us because they are steadfast. They remain. In the context of that conversation I somewhat facetiously referred to peanut butter as one such thing. Though everything fall apart, I will still enjoy peanut butter. This is reassuring.

These towers, though both hyperrational and ethereal, are comforting like peanut butter. Every night since I first moved to Philadelphia at age 8, to this day, I have been able to see their pulsating red lights from the window next to my bed. Thus, to me they represent steadfastness and transcendence in a way that can never be expressed in words, because the subjects themselves stand silent. Their idiom is the glow, the hum, the breeze, grass, metal, and radiation: a quiet spring of enormous power, a bridge between earth and sky. (Given my sentiments about media and information, it would be entirely appropriate and expected if I hated and feared them. Quite the opposite.) Ironically, though they are implements of broadcast, in my mind they do not impose or interject. They watch. Their vigil is not invasive, judgmental, or in any way reminiscent of Big Brother; rather it is patient, reliable, and benevolent --- as friends ought to be. As such, the towers stand as a tangible, monumental, omnivisible reminder of the unseen power which guides my steps and Remains, though everything else be ruined. Perhaps this is naive.

Trnsmssn

HDR

This photograph was constructed using a relatively new technology called High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR). A computer program compiles bracketed exposures of a single scene into one image with a contrast ratio of about 100 times what a normal computer screen can reproduce. The resulting file can be "tone-mapped" to a normal dynamic range (somewhat analogous to multi-band audio compression/limiting) such that much more detail is visible, and contrast can be boosted locally instead of globally. The resulting images are often quite beautiful, if a little unreal.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before this particular micro-aesthetic becomes an annoying visual cliché, like dozens of Photoshop effects already have. Can it then still be "beautiful"?

For that matter, does technological development of this kind actually spring from need --- or is it more simply novelty for novelty's sake? That is, to what extent does technological development respond to actual needs, versus creating by its onward march a felt lack that would not have been perceived otherwise? Perhaps need and development feedback positively. I am of course talking about consumer technology here, those developments which are targeted at a buying public. I suppose it could be argued that we don't need 99% of what gets developed for these markets. If technology does address needs, it almost always exceeds them too, creating a gap in which we realize that what we have must not be enough ("Ooo, I want that"). The amplification of this gap is accomplished through advertising --- forcing us to acknowledge the obsolescence of what we have, to usher in the novelty of what we do not.

Considering this particular case, I had thought about this issue as a "problem" before. But I might have accepted it as a limitation of the medium, since display media have greater limitations than the associated recording media. Now technology enables me to work around those limitations --- but what I produce in so doing is not more lifelike, it is in fact less so. As such, the new process seems less addressed toward solving an existing problem than it is toward generating a "gee-whiz" reaction. When the novelty wears off, does the technology remain worthwhile?

Which came first, the disease or the drug?

Nocturnal

Fog level ~800 ft. / Still air / Aesthetic refuge
Low-level 60Hz hum from 13,700V transformers

More to come

Pan

Same old

Finally found a way onto the rail bridge.

2006.3-11.24 (8 mo.)

I am very thankful.

Consenting to be invented by the Other.

Internal space

Crown him the lord of peace, whose power a scepter sways
From pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise.

If you don't shop and you don't drink, there's nothing to do in New York City

Trigen revisited

IMPULSE GENERATION {
Current {
Turbines
Transformers
}
Comm {
Towers
Arrays
Dishes
}
}

TRANSMISSION {
Wires / ground
Signals / air
}

Inner terrain

:
paint fumes
disquiet
twilight
this
mixed feelings

Fun morality & Molech, illustrated

"You went to Molech with olive oil and increased your perfumes.
You sent your ambassadors far away; you descended into Sheol itself.
You were wearied by all your ways, but you would not say, 'It is hopeless.'
You found renewal of your strength, and so you did not faint.

Whom have you so dreaded and feared that you have been false to me,
and have neither remembered me nor pondered this in your hearts?

Is it not because I have long been silent that you do not fear me?
I will expose your 'righteousness' and your 'works,' and they will not benefit you.
When you cry out for help, let your collection of idols save you.
The wind will carry all of them off, a mere breath will blow them away.

But the man who makes me his refuge will inherit the land and possess my holy mountain."
-Is. 57

Here's a gem of cultural analysis on the American cult of individualism/consumerism, resonating deeply with the supernatural perspective from Isaiah:

"The effectiveness of the mass media, however, as the key agent of psychological totalitarianism is not based on political or religious ideology. Rather it rests upon a base that I have described elsewhere as the myth of technological utopianism. Unlike religious myths in which meaning was spiritual—nature or the gods —this myth is thoroughly materialistic. Technological utopianism substitutes the perfect health and happiness of the human body for the spiritual well-being of the human soul. This meaning is ineffective because it is based on individualistic consumerism. For meaning to be effective it must be shared meaning that binds people together in common responsibilities and reciprocal moral relationships. Consumerism is a shared belief but it leaves one psychologically isolated, for it is based upon freedom without responsibility. The attempt to create meaning in consumerism, to spiritualize consumerism, fails because its utopian promise of perfect happiness and health cannot be achieved in this world, and therefore happiness and health remain transitory, as anxiety, suffering, and death constantly remind us."

-Richard Stivers, from Ethical Individualism and Moral Collectivism in America
(go read the whole thing; listen for the echoes of Ecclesiastes)


Along with the contemporary fragmentation of our selves (Stivers' description of what a Biblical scholar might see as the sundering of community in the Fall---resulting in distrust of other people and fear of manipulation), our "collection of idols" has become equally fragmented, and as such, far more insidious and difficult to specifically identify. Perhaps it is not too far a stretch to say that our Molech is consumerism, and that which we fear is simply isolation as punishment for non-conformity to public opinion. The lie that real freedom is "freedom from responsibility" directly undermines the promise of a restored, redeemed community which results from taking responsibility and laying down one's life in purposeful sacrifice---the essence of true Freedom is a Choice, yes, but more specifically, it is the ability to choose that which is Good (permanently) versus that which is pleasing or pacifying (transiently). It is this dream of mutuality through sacrificial exercise of moral agency, in purposeful community, not mindless collectivism, that the words in Isaiah hold out to us: "inherit the land and possess my holy mountain."

Masts

These things become invested with the personal, the sublime. In daylight hours they menace, Babelian in their silent and sinister imposition, beautiful yet somehow poisonous. But in the night they glow with a warm and comforting light, and play in counterpoint with stars. Though silent, they are alive, and they watch.

It becomes apparent that this is an obsession with the "soft places," where boundaries are blurred: sky and earth, water and land, space and the terrestrial. Introduction of a penetrating element to bridge the domains gives rise to the ethereal Middle, invested with a memory that cannot possibly be ours, yet resides in us nonetheless. Maybe it was a dream, maybe it was something seen from a window as a child. The experience of these places is wholly alien to our categorical structures, but familiar to our hearts.


:
Breezes
Signals
Distant jet engines
Grass
Hum
Pulse
Twilight

Context is everything

Nothing is ever just what it is. It's really unnerving to see retrospectively in one's own constructions the unintended expression of the subconscious. If that's in fact what it is. Who knows? Blah.

Surface

Relationships

Hit by a car

Terraform #1 // Subject: Tim F. // 11x14" c-print

Tonight while riding my bike back from my Color II class, I was broadsided by an oncoming car as it turned left at 42nd and Spruce streets. I was thrown against the windshield and then rolled up onto the roof, where I remained for a few seconds as the car continued moving through the intersection. The bike flew all the way across the street. After I regained my presence of mind (I was badly stunned) I jumped off the car roof and immediately started looking for my bike. By the time I grabbed it out of the street the car had disappeared. Five people saw this happen, but no one got the license plate of the hit-and-run driver. Someone asked if I wanted them to call 911, but I said no. Then they said I was "really badass."

I have no injuries to speak of, and nothing I was carrying was damaged. The bike, however, got maimed, and despite being able to repair most of the damage, I will probably need a new front fork and possibly a new wheel. Luckily, this will only require magically conjuring some money out of mid-air.

Less digital

Polaroid type 557 emulsion transfer
4x5 view camera / colored strobes

{
Chihei Hatakeyama - Minima Moralia
Loscil - Stases (available entirely for free here)
Pulse Programming - Tulsa for One Second
Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue
new Rosetta recording for Balboa split disc

Tungsten film = uh huh

1. Midterms are over. Lent starts tomorrow.

2. Call my phone and listen to the greeting. You will be glad you did.

3. Also, contribute to my Johari window which, I suppose, is nothing more than yet another manifestation of the self-knowledge fetish. Speaking of which, I'm taking the MBTI Type II test this weekend. My unbridled glee knows no bounds.

{
Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
Sunn o))) - 00Void
Stars of the Lid - Per Aspera Ad Astra
Arovane - Atol Scrap

Towers

Yes... again. Doc project for Color II (light cycle). WCAU #2, late morning.

Monochrome