Here’s one of the first of the B/W 620 pictures I had developed last week. There’s a bunch on Flickr right now (which is unfortunately pig-dog slow this morning) with more to come as I scan and clean them up. I’m thrilled with the results, although I’m hoping that they develop a little darker than they scanned. The camera did an incredible job—there’s a bit of blur around the outer edges of the frame, but that adds a little character, in my opinion.
I’ll upload more pictures as I scan them. As you might guess, it’s time-intensive, and this weekend we had our hands full.
Boards of Canada 10/18
New release in october. W00t!
I picked up four rolls of 620 film from the developer this afternoon. Three of the rolls are from Ireland, and one is a leftover roll from two years ago that sat in the camera until I opened the back without checking, and exposed three of the frames. Our regular developer disappeared sometime in the last two years without a trace, so we had them done at a different lab which won’t print contact sheets for large-format film. I’ve looked at them through a lightbox, and they look very pretty. I’d scan them and post them here, but HP decided to make their slide adapter fit only 35mm film, so I have to wait until I get home to use the 5-year-old UMAX scanner in the basement. Sorry, folks.
It’s funny to see pictures from the old roll—I’d loaded three different cameras with film to see which one took the cleanest pictures (the Duaflex II, hands-down) but forgotten about the final roll. It starts with two blurry shots of Geneva on Jen’s apartment deck. Apparently this camera’s lens is designed for landscape-style photography and not detailed closeup shots, which is unfortunate, because she’s really cute. Blurry, but cute. The next shot is (I think) of Lakewood Avenue during a snowstorm. Or, it could be taken during a very, vey sunny day. I can’t really tell. The road is almost black, as is the sky, and the trees are bare. What a lovely subject for a picture! (What the hell was I thinking?) After that is a shot of my back porch, with some very small plants, before I put up the wood walls. It’s amazing how ghetto the place looked before stuff actually started growing back there. (I thought it would be one of the main selling points for the house until two dumb chicks stopped to look at the house, and one said to the other, within earshot, “OOH, a backyard! You could knock that wall down and put in a parking pad! That would be great!” Memo to you, Dumb Chick: Shut your hole. I didn’t take your offer, and it was higher than the other one.) The next shot is of the Scout parked in front of the house, looking south down Lakewood Ave. Again: Ghetto. Like, West Virginia Backwoods Ghetto. Here’s a picture of my broke-down truck. Directly following that is a picture of the tree outside my front door (I must have been feling arty that day.) The final three shots are of the Pagoda in Patterson Park, taken during a walk with Jen in the springtime. These are actually kind of interesting, because they’re shots of something interesting. Unfortunately, the third one was obliterated when I opened the back of the camera.
So, don’t fear, dear readers: I’ll scan the negs this weekend and post the best ones for your perusal. There are some good ones in there. Seriously.
Yeah, buddy. Good times, man, good times.
In other news, thanks to the lovely Claire for beers and conversation last night; it’s always good to meet new people and swap war stories. Sometimes it’s surprising how much shared experience there is between relative strangers.
I’m super busy this fine Thursday, so this is a short one. Go drink a cold beer, kick back, and relax, everybody.
I signed up for a Netflix account this afternoon. I’m going to make this here Internet work for me, dammit.
The thrills just keep coming from Idiot Central, folks. It’s getting sort of pitiful, really. There’s nothing to report on with the house, because, well, nothing has been done to the house since we paid somebody to do it. The garden is growing despite our best efforts to ignore and kill it. You might say it’s a victim of its own success, really. There’s an eggplant about the size of my fist, a green pepper begging to be used in a Cuban recipe this weekend, and several new tomatoes starting on the vines. Our grapes are filling out and haven’t been carried off by the birds yet.
Looking at my weblog entries from last July, it’s obvious we were very busy. For my part, I was fixing the pantry, buying/donating a car, building a DVD presentation of our trip to Rome, finishing the thank-you cards from the wedding, attending studio drawing class, finishing up the first phases of a website redesign, and working on the linen closet. I think I may have been painting the house by this point as well. Shit, just reading about all that stuff makes me tired. What the hell have I accomplished this July? Nothing. There’s freelance work, sure, but for whatever reason right now it feels like all I do is freelance work and I still don’t have enough money to buy a proper pair of sunglasses.
Meanwhile, my dream Scout is for sale in fucking Seattle. If I had the Scout kitty available, I could fly out there, pay for the truck, and afford the drive home, but it’s just not happening. We live on the wrong coast.
I think everybody’s bored with the internet these days. Ms. Lis is looking for questions, as is Todd; Molly seems to be fighting off the boredoms. So I’ll try to make my stupid questions as interesting as I can.
If you could put two people in a ring and have them fight to the death, who would it be and why? (Neil Diamond vs. Barry Manilow? Your shop teacher vs. your math teacher? Charles Nelson Reilly vs. Paul Lynde?) Who would win?
What’s the last life lesson you learned, and why did it take so long?
You have a vehicle with a full tank of gas and an empty weekend. Where are you going to get away from the (heat, people, job, family, ex) within a 250-mile radius of where you live? (and what are you driving?)
Sum up the thing you wish you could go back and do over in your life with one word.
What’s the dumbest thing you never got caught doing?
What should you have accomplished in life by now, according to the 18 year old version of yourself?
…because, chances are, where you are it’s just as fucking hot as it is here in Maryland.
I don’t really have much to write about today; it was a quiet weekend of laying low and getting stuff done, so there are no stories about plane rides or rock concerts or commando raids or celebrity sightings. There was a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone freelance work happening, and Jen got her portfolio pretty much finished (it looks beautiful) as well as three boxes of business cards (thanks Shelly!), so there’s some serious forward progress happening.
I will say that I’d have to formally extend my recommendation for the Sleep Number bed, based on our experience over the last two weeks. We’ve slept heavily, peacefully, and fitfully—something I never would have imagined possible six months ago. (That is, not both of us, at the same time. In. The. Same. Bed.) We’re still sorting out some of the minor issues unrelated to the bed itself (the air conditioner that seems to spit water at us from outside, which is unpleasant, and the lighting situation) but overall, we’re digging on the new arrangement.
(I’d post some weekend photos here, but they’re on the CF card sitting on my desk at home.)
I have a vivid memory of riding on the giant, vinyl backseat of my mother’s ’66 Buick Special one fine afternoon as a child of about five or so. We were cruising through the parking lot of our local grocery store with Mrs. Greame in the front seat, on some kind of errand. For some reason, I was thinking about the concept of age to myself in the back seat, and realized that I didn’t have all the information. When their conversation lulled, I asked, “Mom, how old are you?”
The women waited a beat or two, and my mother turned to Mrs. Greame, probably with the I-don’t-know-where-this-is-coming-from look on her face.
“Nineteen,” she replied, and both women broke up in laughter. (Mrs. Greame had the kind of laughter you couldn’t ever forget; she also liked to say “Ta-ta!” when leaving a room, followed by that same laughter.)
Of course, being five and very naiive, I ignored the laughter, took this and stored it away as the Gospel Truth. I think I was probably about twenty-three before I did some math and realized that she was fibbing in the way that you do around your friends when your kids ask a strange question.
Happy 39th Birthday, Mom.
Really, I’d like to write something more involved, but things are pretty busy around Idiot Central these days. As you may have gathered from the inconsistent Ireland trip reports, I’m a little backed up right now. Professionally, I’m busier than perhaps I’ve ever been (when measured in the sheer number of open projects—however, the Sky Pilot has seen to it that certain things ebb and flow with a rhythm that makes each one a priority at a different time. Of course, now I’ve just jinxed myself) and personally, Jen and I are just as busy. I can also see that a recent post made in the heat of the moment to a certain telecommunications company seemed to strike a nerve with the audience here.
I got a stack of new music from my friend Dave; The latest New Order album is a CD full of suck, further proving that Pitchfork, while a reliable guage of new music, is not infallible (and quite often crap). The latest Audioslave album is pretty underwhelming, as were the singles I heard from the debut album. It seems to me that Chris Cornell is a singer waiting for another folk/blues rock band, and the RAtM guys are waiting for another pissed-off screamer. They are a band built for power, not for the slow introspective stuff, although they’re competent enough. It reminds me of when Dave Navarro joined the Chili Peppers—they were two tastes that didn’t taste great together. Also: this review was worthless, you stupid, pretentious emo prick. Next up: New Sleater-Kinney, Motörhead, American Music Club, and CKY. I’ll let you know how the ROCK sounds.
I finally pulled about 2 gigs of crap off the Powerbook here last night and archived it to DVD, and she seems to be running a bit faster now. Perhaps only having 1.2 gigs free for a swapdisk wasn’t that advisable after all. (Where did all that crap come from, anyway?)
Here’s a shot of our resident celebrity, the wild Catonsville parakeet. He sat on the branch and clucked and sang while I got about ten feet away and shot his picture. Obviously he’s comfortable around people. Meanwhile, his gang of birds cleans us out of at least a feederful of seed every day. I think we’ve created a monster here…