September 2006            

Unpublished entry round-up
Posted Tuesday, September 26, 2006 @ 03:03 PM

Every now and then I start writing something here and am interrupted for one reason or another. Sometimes I come back to unpublished entries, but more frequently I don't. Here are some of the more recent fragments that have been lying around.

2006-04-17 20:29:00

I've noticed in recent trips to the library that I rarely check out novels, fiction, or volumes of poetry. Rather, most of my library reading is nonfiction, which I find both very surprising and very unremarkable. Surprising because good novels and good poetry have punctuated my life; sometimes a good book can serve as a kind of mile-marker in thinking or growth. Unremarkable because I feel like nonfiction is more touch and go, an easier way to pass the time. Poetry, for me, requires more quiet and focus, and when it comes to novels I prefer to read large chunks at a time, as opposed small bits which I'm terrible at piecing together. So it only makes sense that I read more nonfiction, especially when during the school year, we read cumbersome novels and pithy plays.

Nonfiction currently checked out from the library: On Bullshit, Airplane Yoga, The Cult of Mac, Nerds 2.0.1, We've Got Blog, The Elements of Typographic Style, Assassination Vacation.

2006-06-17 03:38:17

I go through these stages of wanting to write about absolutely everything. Nothing much happens, but every two seconds I'm composing something in my head to come tell you about here.

Sometimes I feel really safe here, like I can tell you anything and it won't matter. Other times all I can think about is who will read what and how long it will rot on the internet where everyone can see.

2006-06-21 23:57:28

I have holed up in my room for the past few days, hiding from the sweltering heat and decompressing. I can't remember the last time I was able to spend such deep pockets of time looking at my ceiling, reading, writing, thinking, and just lying here doing nothing. My bed has become like a ship in a children's game, sailing through the settings of books or letters, transporting me through time zones and across oceans. When I gingerly place a toe on the wood floor to venture downstairs for food, things begin to vanish; once I clear the threshold of the door I'm aware of time, the date. My room is the quietest of sanctuaries, buzzing only with the muted wavelengths of my

Every night before I curl to sleep I must clear the maps of the day: books, poems, movies, the phone, my journal, mail, my computer.

Learning to haunt
Posted Saturday, September 23, 2006 @ 02:54 PM

I have found the rhythm of leaving one place for another, recharging, going back, expelling energy and patience, and returning again. In this way, I am always leaving and escaping one place for the next, while constantly returning home. Until this week I had not considered this possibility—no home as many homes, displacement as a means of belonging everywhere and nowhere. What's that quote from Waking Life? The man that drives the boat car says, "The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving." Sort of like that.

Last Thursday I drove into Birmingham to see Kaki King perform. She was brilliant and tiny and cute. We returned the same evening to Tuscaloosa, fueled by my love of driving and a bit of roadtrip conversation, which seems only to happen in cars, frequently when it's dark. I'd initially planned to spend the weekend in Tuscaloosa, lacking any excuse to return home—my family gone, my friends at school. Just before leaving the city, Steva, formerly my manager and now my good friend, called to see if I could work a few nights at a new restaurant.

On our way out, I drove through the city, pointing to buildings which feel like my own personal landmarks. "This is my favorite bookstore. I'll take you there some time." "That's the library. I had my UVA interview there in the map room. I pretended to be politically active." "That's my school." "Sometimes we walked here to skip class and drink smoothies." Explaining the significance of a setting quickly becomes an activity more for yourself than for the other person.

With my excuse to return home for the weekend, I left T-Town with a bag of dirty laundry in my trunk, my small green suitcase next to me in the passenger seat. I worked Friday and Saturday night and made no more money than I spent on gas to get there and food for the weekend (the refrigerator empty of nearly everything—my family hadn't been there in a week). I'd brought a slew of textbooks with me to study and try to get ahead of a busy week, but I didn't crack one of them. Saturday, before returning to work, I drove to The Daily Cup for breakfast, home of the most delicious muffin I have ever tasted. Carolyn and I sometimes met there for breakfast before school on mornings when we were both crazy enough to get up early. On mornings I didn't join her, she'd bring me a muffin (and sometimes a latte), and we'd devour them together during AP English, our first class of the day. Since last weekend, there's not a day that passes that I don't crave the moist flesh of a peach muffin for breakfast.

I spent the rest of Saturday before work driving around the city being nostalgic, buying groceries, picking roads not because they were the shortest or most efficient, but because I miss driving them. I managed to cover most of my favorites without going too far out of my way. I sat out on the deck reading and writing for most of the afternoon, enjoying the pleasant weather (it almost felt like fall) and listening to the creek.

I had just completed writing this entry when I accidentally navigated away from the page and lost all my work. I'm too lazy to rewrite it. Basically: I went to Atlanta Tuesday afternoon with Steva, saw The Raconteurs at the Tabernacle, spent the night with Liz, then saw Sufjan Stevens at the Fox on Wednesday night, all before driving back early Thursday morning on almost no sleep, acing an astronomy exam, and crashing that night from total exhaustion. Pictures and video of the concerts forthcoming.

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"Help!" or "Caution: photography speak ahead"
Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 @ 03:56 PM

It's that time again—time to choose new camera equipment! Much to the disappointment of my family (or perhaps boredom is a better term—Erin especially loves to give exciting gifts—no gift certificates, no money, and frequently no specific requests), another birthday means another piece of equipment. Last year I got the f/1.8 50mm and my wireless remote, and for Christmas I got my big, hunky tripod. This year, in light of a wedding I'll be shooting in December, I need (err...want) a flash and a new lens. I may put off the flash to buy later on my own, but the lens is what I'd like to request from my parents, who have already begun to ask what plans I'd like to make and what sort of gifts they can shop for.

Here's what I'm looking for, and what I need your help with. I want a lens with a little more range than the kit lens which came with the camera (which I love for convenience, but the more I shoot with it the more I realize it's not that great). The kit lens is the EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6. Have you worked with or know of any lenses which meet some or most of these requirements?

- Good range, but not huge and bulky. This will hopefully be my primary lens for all-purpose jobs like weddings, events, etc. I don't want to have to carry around an extra bag for it, and I don't want it to feel cumbersome. Something similar or slightly larger than the kit lens in size is preferable.

- Great for available light photography. This is incredibly important considering how pretty much all of my photography is done with available light. Good color/saturation, etc. Optimization for low light is a bonus.

- By the same token, great autofocusing. I don't want to have to spend a lot of time tuning the camera to focus each time I start shooting. Low aperture would be great—you know I'm a sucker for it.

- Obviously, needs to be a step up from the kit lens. Why spend the money on it if there's no big difference?

Here's some of what I've found:

- Take a look at the additional notes at the bottom of this page. Rion recently decided on a new lens and had many of the same requirements. She bought the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 EX DC.

- The EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM has a good range, but I can't tell how bulky or enourmous it is. Any ideas?

Any leads, advice, "hated it," "I use this," sort of stuff you can give me would be much appreciated. I feel kind if in the dark here, since when I was shopping for a camera it was easy to see what people were using, but when shopping for lenses people aren't as careful to document what types they use for which photos. I guess I should just head for a camera shop and test some out for myself? At any rate, the clock is ticking—we'll be celebrating my birthday the weekend of October 7th, when everyone will be in Birmingham.

And lastly (for now), I've finally submitted something to JPG magazine, which I adore. I own the first four issues and have been waiting for a theme which I could do something about. Now's my chance! Issue 7 has a self-portrait theme (among others)—something which I have a lot of. JPG has instated a new voting system to help select which photos will be published, and I'd encourage you to join, submit photos of your own, and of course VOTE FOR ME. Help make all my photography dreams come true.

Let me know if you submit something and I'll send some votes your way.

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What's really going on
Posted Tuesday, September 12, 2006 @ 10:07 PM

I have done my best to explain to a few close friends what life has been like as a college student for the past few weeks, and have all but abandoned this small readership in the process. There are many reasons, none of which I'm sure are the real ones. Primarily, while my dorm room is already beginning to feel like home, I still feel removed from—or perhaps more accurately, without—context, which is somehow different than anything I've experienced before. I do not feel like a traveler, given an opportunity to disappear for a while to reflect and explore. I do not feel like I am resting or growing or thriving. This makes expressing myself difficult.

The cast of characters we are all familiar with have fallen away, and it is hard to introduce anyone when I do not know who will be important—when I do not know them well enough to adequately introduce them in the first place. To lean on an old cliche, I cannot write what I do not know, not because I feel I'll lose you somewhere along the way, but because I, myself, do not know where to begin or how to organize what I'm thinking, even through the creative outlets on which I usually depend. There are good days and bad (more recently, less bad), and bad ones lend themselves to tempestuous passages I don't know what to do with. Similarly, much of what I have been writing has felt emotionally personal, not necessarily due to a particular event or experience, it's just not usually the type of writing I share here. I consider it merely emotional, rather than reflective and significant, like some of my recent posts.

As writing and photography have gone hand in hand recently (one of you said, "I feel like I'm watching a documentary of your life"), my photography has also suffered. While everyone in my life up to this point practically expected me to have a camera attached to my face, trained for over a year to alternately ignore or lavish the lens with attention, now no one knows about the camera, and pulling it out around people who don't know me well tends to make them uncomfortable, suspicious, or distant. While friends used to ask me to bring it along, request my presence specifically to document something, or else secretly enjoy seeing themselves on flickr, now people hardly know it's something I do. For the most part the 350D (my love, my child, my life) has stayed in my room, and the SD600 has only made brief appearances in public, surfacing from the abyss that is my bottomless purse.

Even without considering people's reactions to pulling out the camera, again I feel I don't know where or how to start. Buildings? I don't know what many of them are for. Friends? I'd prefer them to be comfortable with me before they see my third eye. Students walking to class? I'd feel like a paparazzi. My shyness manifests itself through my demeanor and my art, apparently. I look forward to my brief return to Birmingham this week for a concert, if only because I'll see people who know my old friend the camera, and there's an event for me to document. It has been long enough that I feel I'm in a foreign land where no one speaks the language of photography, the native tongue of my recent creative process, and so I must only speak the second language of get-to-know-you conversation, which feels dry and inexpressive by comparison. Many things about college life feel this way, right now—like a new language I'm still anxious about speaking, while I long to find someone who knows the customs of home. Displacement, in a word.

I do not feel lost so much as nothing feels inspiring or familiar. I like my classes and I've even established some habits, but the excitement I expected to feel upon arrival has yet to manifest itself. Still, there are good things, and I plan to share them once I've a more solid footing here. I hope you'll bear with me as I struggle a little longer to orient myself. Part of me thinks all this hesitance and creative disorientation is bogus—like claiming you have writer's block, when all that's required is a brief confrontation with the blank page followed by a handful of terrible sentences. I do and do not believe in writer's block, just as I do and do not believe all this talk and bullshit about creativity and art in relation to my life.

I (like you, I suspect) hope something will come of all this turmoil soon. Until then, good friends, do not hold my absence against me.

For now, I hope you'll be satisfied with a video tour of my dorm room, and chuckle to yourselves near the end when you see my |\/|4d d4nc1ng skillz.

A tour of my dorm room on Vimeo

Oh, and a technical note about this blog: the amount of comment spam I'm receiving has increased significantly. For that reason, I will be closing comments on all entries after they are a few days old. Comments will remain open (and are encouraged!) for the most recent posts, and seeing as most of the comments roll in within the first few days following, I suspect none of you will mind. Until I get all the comments closed on old entries, please excuse the "Nice site! - Lance Bass Porn"-type comments which have flooded the site.

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Vimeo round-up
Posted Monday, September 04, 2006 @ 06:17 PM

After a break from uploading my summer media, I'm finally tired of having it all sit on my hard drive. I've been trolling through the last of it, throwing together some video, and soon enough it'll be officially done, burned onto DVD and filed in my fat disc wallet of "I don't have room for this on my hard drive anymore."

Below are a few of my latest clips on vimeo. You can find more here; I've only included my favorites below. If you'd like to read captions or find out more information about the content of the clips, click the title link below each video. Also don't miss my friend Matthew's video footage of his trip to college.

The bride and groom see each other for the first time on Vimeo

Parisian street jazz on Vimeo

Un apres-midi dans le Musee d'Orsay on Vimeo

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