The new Tom Waits triple album really is that bloody good.
ATP: Anyone going?
The Dirty Three are curating All Tomorrow’s Parties in April next year. Nick Cave solo is the headline act, other noteables include Grinderman, The Dirty Three (obv) Low, and A Silver Mt Zion.
http://www.atpfestival.com/events/the-dirty-three/line_up.php
Can I tempt anyone?
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
The second of that pair I mentioned the other day, and as might be obvious, it’s detail cropped from the first, and is a quite radically different photo, I think.
As I said the other day, I’d be interested to know which one people prefer. (I know which I prefer, but I don’t want to prejudice anyone’s answers by saying anything until I’ve heard from a few people.)
Happy Birthday, Andrew!
I usually don’t bother cluttering up people’s friendspage’s with birthday wishes for people they don’t know. I figure my friends probably know I wish them all the best, or they will when I wish them happy birthday in person. But anw turns 30 today, and y’know, I think that’s worth making an exception for.
Happy birthday, mate. May your 30s be everything you could want them to be.
The rest of you: Go wish my friend a happy birthday, because he deserves it.
Golden Lotus
Peace In The Valley
One of those rare shots that I just flat out like, and wouldn’t change anything about. Well, aside from the fact that this is actually a detail from a larger shot, but I took the shot knowing I’d be cropping it to this.
I’ve been give an early christmas present of a Nikon 50mm F1.8 AF D lens. Basically, it’s a lens that has a wide aperture, so is good for low light photography, but no zoom at all, and obviously, sometimes you just can’t move to frame the exact shot you want.
So instead, I took something else, and pulled the shot I actually wanted out of the detail.
Do me a favour: Fight Crime!
The They Fight Crime! synopsis generator has a new home.
The reason I mention this is that it had fallen off the internet for a while (I’m currently wrangling to get my black-ink.org domain back up and running). In fact, it’s been gone for over six months. And in the interim, a load of people who have basically done nothing other than rip off the original and remove the credit, have started to clog up the google listings for “they fight crime”. And I object to other people thinking it’s OK to steal Andrew’s and my work (mostly Andrew’s), remove the authorial credit, and (in some cases) make money off it via ads, when the original was free.
So, if anyone fancies posting the link up in forums, blogs, LJs, myspace, with the usual “Here’s a funny link” nonsense, and perhaps a few choice generated phrases, that’d be ace. If you felt like explaining the reason I’d like the link to do the rounds again, including words like “The original they fight crime generator is back”, or similar, and generally encouraging people to send it about so that we get back to our fair place, that’d be great, too.
Thanks, folks.
A few from the archives:
I don’t expect anyone else will give much of a shit, but I’m delighted about this.
About what?
Well, a few years back, a database that held the only copies of a few things I’d written crashed and died, and I had no backup. I had assumed they were lost. But the wayback machine came up in conversation this afternoon, and on a whim, I plugged an old url into it.
Result.
I’ve managed to scrape 8 bits of my lost writing out of it – some of it stuff I wrote almost ten years ago, most of it stuff I still like. I’ve slapped it up in no particular order on http://www.dead-air.org just while I work out what, if anything to do with it. (Both the writing and the domain.)
Slightly depressing thing though: I’m sure I wrote better a few years ago that I do now. Or at least, about more interesting things. I know I’ve burbled in the past about the deformative effect of livejournal on the things I write, though – I’m much more willing to talk about absurdities when I don’t know the people that are watching by name. I think I may try dusting Dead Air off properly, and giving myself a blog site back, rather than being part of this terrible “community” nonsense. At worst, it’ll just confirm the diagnosis, and I’ll come sauntering back.
Celestial Geometry
A light fitting at a pub near my office. One of a very small number of photos where I’ve removed a detail – a little green light on the ceiling that there was no way for me to shoot around. I like the rich reds, and the heavy shadows here, paired with the ascending lights – it speaks to my appreciation of what you might call the virtues of decadence.
In case anyone’s interested, I spent a bit of time the other day making use of the new and improved UK maps, and you can now check out where I took almost all my photos (except for a very small number that I can’t find the location for on the maps) here:
The Heart Of The World
Jhayne Holmes (porphyre) is one of the more interesting strangers on my friends list, and she would like your help.
She’s found an old theatre for sale in Vancouver, a place where acts like Neil Young and Sonic Youth once played. She wants to re-open it as an artistic space – a place for theatre, and cinema and music, a place for art of any kind. As she says:
Imagine buying a space and starting your own theatre, or your own art gallery, or your own movie theatre, or your own music hall. Imagine being able to host performances of all sorts- giving your creative friends space to perform or exhibit their work. I’ve got friends who are dancers and painters and lighting designers and actors and directors and writers and photographers and cinematographers… it would be amazing to give them a space to create what they dream of, to be seen, heard, and appreciated.
You can find out more here: http://porphyre.livejournal.com/535610.html
She has three weeks to raise a million dollars. Please, if you can: help. Donate a token amount, if that’s all you can think of to do (like I have). If you’re able to help in some other way, do that. She’s trying to create the kind of space that’s hard to come by, the sort of place that there should be more of. It’s the sort of place I’d love to run myself in London. Please: send the link around. Talk about this attempt. Tell people about it, and tell them to help, too.
(Donate a token amount anyway – you’d do it for charity, and this is Art, and deserves your support every bit as much, and that’s a hell of a target she’s aiming for.)