Awaiting The Return Of Our Beloved

Someone thought it would be a good idea if I were raised to be a good internalizer so any information I give tends to come in riddles or cyphers. In tribute to the journey, the feelings that brought me down for the last week, and in the spirit of the person I miss, I offer this,

Awaiting The Return Of Our Beloved

She stands for me
Hiding the visage with glass
Coney faces south.

The Long Trailer

One of the companies I work for does corporate presentation videos -- the company is owned and operated by D. (referenced here) -- and I've spent the middle days of the last few weeks working for him in Pennsylvania. In Chadds Ford. It's one of those places where you know where it is but you couldn't tell anyone how to get there. Regardless, I've missed a goodly portion of the nice East Coast weather by spending the pastoral days locked in a Best Western ballroom listening to people prattle about this or that product while gazing wistfully out the window like a kid trapped in school a week before summer vacation.


With that in mind, one would think I'd been a world beater on my off days, galavanting in the city like a gay tourist ("gay" in the 50's way, thanks). In truth I've spent the last few days inside during the working hours, trying to motivate and finish editing the family videos but I've not had a good time of it. I'm starting to wonder if it's all in my head and if I'm starting to let go of some of the grander promises I made to myself about the type of person I would become. There's still time, sure, and I haven't had the fire under me lately, and it worries me terribly in my quiet moments, of which there are many.

When looking back at the last two years in terms or work cycle, I find that summer means work travel, and hopefully that will be the case this year -- something to shake off the rust and complacency that comes from working from rote.

In other news, I beat my audit! I'll be posting that story soon. Once I get my tires on the ground instead of spinning in the sand.

The truck stop is somewhere off 295 in New Jersey. I have no idea where, really and I'm not sure I would bother to tell you where if I did.

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
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Where We're From, The Birds Sing A Pretty Song

Subtitled: Emo Bird Is Emo



Today, sharing images with you brings me no joy, and I think my dead-bird friend here kind of says it all.

I'm getting audited and as much as I'd like to play it off as another life experience, it's a very lonely feeling right now, especially since they're asking for info from 2005 which I don't really have in any sort of complete form, and there's a big chunk of change that they're curious about that I have no documentation on AT ALL. I certainly won't have it by Monday (which is Opening Day, the first day of Spring). The numbers that we're talking about in terms of money are sort of nebulous to me and I have no cotton-pickin' idea why they'd want to audit me to begin with, short of 2005 being the first year I actually rose above the poverty line.

I've been asked by my friends, who are fearful of the same thing happening to them, to take good notes ... So in short terms, let this be a lesson to you, kiddies: keep EVERYTHING. One of my head-slapping moments was realizing that I had shredded 2005's phone bills literally 12 hours before the audit summons arrived in the mail. That said, they say to keep this sort of shit for 7 years. There isn't that much space in my universe.

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).