Mandudes and art.

Ha, mandudes reenacting Chris Burden’s “Shoot” and a Bruce Nauman piece. My favorite part is the dramatic music.

Fire Photos

I’ve been looking at the photos from the fires in California, and though it is awful that this is happening, photojournalists must, at least on some level, be enjoying their job. I also found something interesting on the LAtimes site. They have photo galleries of the fires from professionals, and they have a gallery from readers who have submitted photos. Let’s see if you can tell the difference:

And now:

Well, I have a feeling you can tell, but I’m still impressed by the quality of the “amateur” photographs.

Yay RIT!

We are totally owning it over at Conscientious! First Dan Boardman, then Alex Baker, and now Ethan Jones, and it’s a picture of me! Not exactly how I wanted to get on the blog, but I’ll take it for now. I wish they would have put one of these up though, Ethan rules:

Now all I have to do is make my freaking website work so I can try to be on there too, or at least be wildly disappointed when Jorg doesn’t put it up. On a nerdy note, my site works completely fine in Safari but not in Firefox, please someone help me. I could send a zip file to someone maybe. Also, if website enabled people are reading this, where do you get your hosting from?

Small Miracles

I am so tired of hearing people who have survived an accident claim that God was looking out for them. Not that I am not happy for them, but to think that God had something to do with it is ridiculous.  I just read this article on MSN about how an autistic boy was found alive after having been lost in the woods for four days.  The article is titled “God watched over missing autistic teen” like it is a fact or something! Here are a few quotes from the article:

“We knew that God had something in this for us,” she told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer during a live interview via satellite on Friday. “Every day the weather got warmer and warmer and warmer — it was as if God breathed his warm breath down on us.”

As further evidence that divine intervention was involved in saving her son, Karen Allen observed that on Friday, the day after Jacob’s rescue, it started to rain.

Oh wow, it started to rain.  What does that have to do with anything? So God saved him just in time huh?  Why did he wait so long, I mean he’s only God, he’s only an all-powerful all-knowing benevolent force.  If he was truly watching out for your son you would have found him chilling eating a hamburger and playing with woodland creatures, instead of curled up on the ground, tired, afraid, and hungry.  Or wait, how about this?  If God were truly watching out for your son, then maybe he would have stopped him from wondering off in the first place.  That’s what gets me the most.  “God breathed his warm breath down on us… after of course he breathed the frigid breath of loss and fear.”

I mean seriously, it’s like those people that say it’s a miracle that their loved ones survived 9/11.  No it is not.  It would have been a miracle if God had taken over the airplane controls and landed all those planes before anything terrible happened.  What a ridiculous concept.  Like God is up in heaven or wherever and is like, “Well this horrible thing is happening down on earth right now, how about I sprinkle a few small miracles around to lessen the blow.  I’ll still let two buildings collapse and  thousands of people will die, but Jill Brown, you are going to make it out alive, oh how the glory of God shines down upon you.”

It’s the same thing with praying.  I mean maybe we have a force inside of all of us, a supernatural force, and maybe that force is God, and maybe we can harness that force and use it sometimes, and maybe praying could work that way.  But there is no way that there is some dude sitting up in heaven answering Karen Allen’s prayers about her autistic son while ignoring the prayers of thousands of people dying, suffering, starving, etc. across the world.

TG Motorcross 3: Australia!

Holy Crap, addiction strikes again.

…

Hey Benny! ay benny!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahah   (deep breath)

   hahahahahahahaha! 

 ”POWERBARRRRRRSSSSS!!”

Living Closely Together

I saw these photographs by Michael Wolf this summer in a gallery in San Francisco:

 When I used to live in southern Georgia my family and I would travel to Atlanta to see my grandparents.  Looking out the window in the backseat my favorite part about driving into the city was seeing the apartment buildings.  I was so amazed that there were so many lives bumping right up against eachother.  It makes you think about how close you are to so many people all the time without knowing them at all.  How do the lives in one apartment building all interact and intersect?  Each square represents a life or multiple lives, and from within each square is an individual looking out.  They are the main character in their own lives, surrounded by other main characters in their own lives, all looking out of their own little squares.  

I can only think about these things for a small amount of time until my brain starts to burn.  It reminds me of  a Neutral Milk Hotel lyric:  “How strange it is to be anything at al-l-l!!!” 

Chicaaaago

I spent the last few days in Chicaaaago with Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen.  It’s been really fun and interesting.  I got all my film developed in one big run, horrifying, but luckily everything came out.  There were a few screw ups, light leaks, and double exposures, but overall I am super excited to get to scanning.  Now if only I can find a place to scan in Salt Lake that you don’t have to cut off your pinky to pay for.  Riding my bike in the city was also something that was horrifying, but exciting.  There is this great path that goes along the lake all the way to downtown.  I also got to go to a graduate school photo critique at Columbia.  It was weird, I’m still going through it in my mind, but I can see how important being in a creative place is.  Just being in a classroom and looking at work makes me start thinking about my own work, and consequently start coming up with new ideas.   I don’t know how I am going to supplement this need for a creative community in Salt Lake, but we will see.  If all else fails, at least I’ll be shredding gnar-dog pow-pow all winter bro…yeah snowboarders are idiots.