Website Updated

The Main Site has been updated! After some code twiddling and image winnowing there is now a "Bands" gallery. I suspect that particular unit will see frequent and intense updating. Above is Antimagic, who are clearly celebrating this development (no endorsement of Richard Gin or richardgin.org is implied).

I Feel Like I'm Moving Further Away From It.

It's been almost a week since I shot Radiates and because I am old and my memory fades easily, I'm having a difficult time recalling details. Seeing as I'm left with impressions, I have managed to make the lamest music review since that time that Chris Ott reviewed the Slanted And Enchanted reissue for Pitchfork with the [awful], scanned, hand-written pages.

As we might (or might not) remember, being young means curfew and the promise of swift and brutal justice at the hands of parentals if curfew is broken. This is not all together unjustified as The City is a horrible place full of crazies and situations that would put Young White Girls In Peril. In short, I get the point. This leads to a certain problem for young bands that draw the last straw and go on with the post-curfew slot in a three-act bill: You have no one to play to, or the number of people has decreased to the point where the room is half empty. Sad story, bro.

Please recall the Ideal Gas Law, which can be used to show that the pressure of a gas (particles) in a small volume is greater than that of an equal amount of gas (particles) in a large volume.

Because the Ideal Gas law is expressed as an equation (PV=nRT), you can also determine how small a volume has to be to achieve the same pressure with fewer particles. Of course, people don't react in the same way that a gas does -- they'll go where the want to. It's up to the band to make them want to go. With that in mind, I think this illustration makes sense:



I call it Gin's Ideal Crowd Law.

In practical terms:

The Audio Department Confounds Project Runway Viewers In General

Did anyone besides Ally see my back (ass) in last night's recap episode of Project Runway? There seems to be some discussion that you might be able to see me molesting Jillian or Kit or some such in the background. A telltale sign would be a 6'2" tall half-asian with a black harness swaddled around his rippling body; lean with sinewy muscle and tense with strain from labor. There should also be a California Flag patch sewn on the harness between his shoulder blades which appears to wave in the breeze as he dances through the motions of his profession with the precise grace of a jungle leopard stalking his prey.

A Plea For Tenderness

MARCIA IS MY FWIEND. ARE YOU MY FWIEND?

So I guess at this point I'm curious as to who's stopping by. Yeah, I've broadly invited most of ILX to visit and Ally (The Schef) is such a social bird that I'm sure some people get forwarded to me from her, but the lack of feedback is a little -- not bothersome -- disappointing. So leave a comment!

I am particularly interested in seeing who's been stopping by from Maryland (no hyperlink. If you don't know where or what Maryland is then... there is no hope for you) and locally in New York City.

Yes, I check my webstats often.

Also, I like the above picture in color moreso than black and white. Woops.

Lesser Koodoo and Mountain Nyala

Lesser Koodoo


Mountain Nyala


This is an experiment in webtraffic (made up of bad science). Thank you for visiting. The Nyala is hosted on the Daddy Site and the Koodoo is hosted on Flickr
.

Zzzzzzzz...

I'm dozing and clock-watching as I hold fast to my promise of only adding another polaroid after the previous polaroid posting reaches 50 views (the sad bird is currently at 40 [as of 4/3/07]). I have one all lined up that will hopefully be a handy illustration of My Day With The IRS (working title), which might not have been as bad as I had forseen (knock wood).

That's a lot of parentheticals.

Far Away, Where We Might Laugh Again

I'm going to experiment again with product distribution and limit posting more of these until the one before reaches 50 Flickr hits. In previous instances I had spammed the sweetholyfuck out of some of the groups (10-15 at a time, or as many as they would allow) and it seems to have limited exposure -- once they drop off the facing page, the less likely they are to be viewed, etc.. The next experiment will involve dropping one onto Flickr with a route back to this site where I host the rest of the group exclusively.

VOTING CLOSED, VICTORY DECLARED

For those of you who would claim to have lost faith in the democratic system, please hold the results of Richard's First Vote close to heart as an example of the virgin-pure system this country holds dear. As I collect a steady trickle of images to shower upon you as one collects rain in a cistern to drink in the summer, please take the time to consider this token of my appreciation,



A new car!

I Made You A Diptych In Exchange For Your Wisdom

I made you a diptych to match your other diptych and your triptych. it is entitled, "Been Too Long Since I Seen Your Shadow." It echoes the timelessness of loss.



In exchange, I ask you to leave a comment below voting with a number "1" or a number "2." Number "1" says that you would like to see me drop a bomb of new Polaroids on your ass. A number "2" says that I shouldn't bother. A majority of 11 votes will determine the outcome of this experiment. This is a very serious vote. The vote may be called off before the maximum of 11 should a majority be reached.

I've Been Holding Out On You

So the gallery that was my one best (easiest) shot at a show was passively interested, so for the time being the fate of the Museum Project (lame working title) is in my hands... and I don't know what that means. I have a good 40 or 50 photos laying around that I was withholding for exclusivity's sake, holding off Flickr and the Daddy Site until I got word back and now that I have the word I have, I'm sort of torn as to whether I should unleash them all or not. An alternative to a show involves self-publishing, which is something I have a similar level of advising-access, but also a similar limit to help that that implies.

There is no conclusion to this thought at present.

Flickr, Judgement, and Taste

So I currently have three pictures kicking around the Flickr "Judge Me" groups, trying to glean some sort of information about taste and what is and isn't visually interesting to people, and maybe find something broader about the level of Flickr in general. I am also fishing for compliments. This is also bad science of small sample size. I chose images that I was not particularly fond of, but some people seemed to enjoy; They had a goodly number of views to start.

This is the first one I entered in the Score Me! group, and you can see from the comments and grades that there's a sharp curve between initial thoughts and those that come after (scores run 8, 7.5, 6 and 5 in that order). There was then a comment suggesting that I post this image on the Ultimate Score Me group, which I did. Aside from the clunky posting code that requires multiple cuts and pastes, the "Of 5" scoring scale means the difference between an American School "B" grade and "D" grade photo is one point. Scores for this group run 3 (D), 3 (D), 3 (D), 4 (B), 5 (A) in order. Wither the outliers?



I entered this in because it was old, and was obviously black and white and obviously off-centered and inelegant... I thought it was graphically interesting more than anything. Two of the comments mentioned the framing being off-putting (4/10 and 6/10), one claimed it 'doesn't do anything for' him (3/10), one didn't know what to think of it at all (5.5/10). There was one additional vote with no comment of 3/10. So my initial thoughts are numerically confirmed by outsiders.



My polaroids are popular. I know this, thank you. Mr. Sea Lion was in the 8's all the way down (8.5, 8, 8, 8, 8) and is probably the most pretty of the three, and the most obvious at the same time. Some of the limits of this series are:

1) The fixed minimum distance from the subject (there's a glass window, obviously).

2) The nature of the film (which sometimes forces me to work at the fixed minimum distance to get acceptable results).

3) The fixed focal length of the lens (Holga, yo).

4) The staging of the subject (the Museum is designed to provide maximum viewage of a static object).

These all add up to images that are essentially portraits and a portrait is classically considered to be an image representative of the subject, and the result can be a little didactic. Understanding the American School scale of A through F, we can say that 5/5 people found this picture a "B", and in my logic, effectively representative of the thing that it is.



My next thoughts lie with the viewers themselves, and this is where things get tricky in a Glass House + Stones way. Some pissy comments on the group pages point out the people who seem to cut 'n' paste their scores straight across, the people who seem to score out of perceived meanness or revenge, and the people who are angry that they got an honest score and thought more highly of themselves than they should have.

The first two sets of comments are correct in their anger, the last is not, obviously -- you don't just throw pictures out there figuring that everyone to love them. But what can be determined is your audience. The people that offer the highest scores to a given picture tent to have favorited similar styles of picture and the converse is true as well.

Apropos of nothing, and certainly not a conclusion:

Some observations include the caste system within Flickr itself: the most popular kids are traditionally pretty (landscapes, well-timed portraits, people who post their model tests and etc), the arty kids have their own little group (the people doing stuff with polaroids or x-processing tend to have the same postings to the same groups and the same taste in subject mater) and there's a whole bunch of people who just want to see pictures of babies and their friends (or their dogs).

Ironic Photos of Monticello New York Kennel Club Dog Show, Secaucus, NJ, 2007

This is another series that came about from a work situation, and the pictures I took might hint at my frame of mind more so than I'd like to make public. I speak of course about my great dislike of most people and fondness for animals, who are of course innocents in all of the nonsense of this world. And at the dog show, both my likes and dislikes collided in spectacular fashion.

There's a Bresson quote about a connection that needs to be made between "...the eye and the heart" and while it may be true, the question is what I see in my heart when I take something like this:



Bresson and Avedon and Penn and Edward Steichen and all the other great photographers had and have a great fondness for the people of this world and the connection to their place in it is what made and makes them great. My distrust and distaste for people shows through, I think, and I wonder if it holds me back creatively. Suze (see previous entry here), in one of her finer moments said that I can't take pretty pictures of people, that I took 'warts 'n' all' pictures and that my inability to do an unselfconciously flattering portrait was a great talent that I should embrace. It's all well and good, I suppouse, to be gifted (if true) with a predisposition to recognizing ugliness or some God-awful truth about humanity, but it doesn't really sell. Even Natchwey sees something beautiful in the struggle. I don't know if I do.

And back to my previous thoughts about the Flickr web-hit flow of traffic. Assume for a minute that I take unflattering pictures as a rule and that someday I am great at it -- I wonder if someone will see these pictures, and know a person in them and understand that I take unflattering pictures. Or if they'll see them, and ask they be taken down because of it.

Obsession Leads to Compulsion

WHO



ARE



YOU?



Thoughts on marketing:

There's more of those on Flickr, of course. I had originally thought that the Flickr site would draw more hits to the Official Richard Gin Site and the Official Richard Gin Blog (I Fall To Pieces) and it has, to a point, but not in any sort of impressive way. I think it takes a certain kind of person/Flickrwonk to bother to check in the profile page to find the link here and I may have to re-think my posting strategy. In a way, I'm more interested to see who finds this site directly, rather than those who make the trip over from the Flickr halfway house.

All the same, I would like to extend a warm hello to visitors from the UAE and United Kingdom who have come here.

It's Great To Be Alive

A grand day out at the American Museum Of Natural History results in me spending hours loading Polaroids to Flickr. I didn't think I liked the un-color-corrected Type 89, but I guess I do after all. Especially this,



Anyway, ducks and cats and dogs and fossils and other mammals abound in Richard's Menagerie.

Listening to Drive By Truckers, A World of Hurt

If you still think about each other and smile before you remember how screwed up it's gotten
Or maybe dream of a time less rotten
Remember, it ain't too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you got

Hooray! for sale!

My good and dear friend Matthew Hollister now has a book for sale at, TheHolster.com containing work from and related to his group show at The Proposition Gallery this past winter (Yes, I know winter is still going on. That's not the point). Also contained within are works from Sam Friedman, Phil Lubliner and Sakura Maku.

Please view the cover:


(Image not mine)

The price is a bargain at $10.00 USD and was printed in a limited run of 500.