“THE UNCHAINED WORKERS OF DECAY (2)” Graphite on paper – Courtesy of the FANTOM FACTION

Went and watched Avatar with the family this weekend. My family (the same people who love the Saw franchise and will probably watch anything that fits in the DVD player) loved it, but I wasn’t as thrilled. Avatar lives up to it’s hype visually, creating a wonderful, believable environment in the planet of Pandora, on which the story takes place. The secret is the balance between the familiar and the strange – here, Avatar does a great job in creating an alien planet that we can still make an emotional connection to.

I don’t think they did such a great job with the culture and behaviour of the native tribe. It was just too familiar, from a Western perspective, which I guess I find alternatively patronising and overly sentimental. It made me think about people who leave their cars and houses and go to India to live barefoot in temples, trying to ‘find themselves’. I think spirituality in the sense of connection to life, to the earth, to other people is something that just can’t be seriously approached in a movie like Avatar which is devoted to remaining in the action genre, plot holes be damned. The result felt hollow.

It’s still a really entertaining movie – high action, high emotions, high technicality – and it’s likely most people will enjoy it. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just over Hollywood. Expensive toys and cheap emotion.

Or maybe I’m finding it difficult to put trust in anything at the moment. Last week I got a Facebook invitation to ‘Put Christ Back In Schools’ from a friend who knows I’m no longer with the church. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, because my friends are not the kind of people to purposefully send me something they know I inherently do not agree with, so I watched the video.

It was a black screen, with emotional rock music playing while writing on the screen told the anecdotal tale of an atheist professor getting pwned by a Christian student. Typical emotional appeal, void of any real argument or proposition. The caricature of the vapid, weak atheist, and the meek, triumphant Christian reeked of propaganda. I spoke to LM. I said “Imagine if you replaced the characters with Jews and Nazis?”

I might have been able to deal with this attempt at ‘soft’ evangelism alone, but the lack of content substance made me angry because I deserve better than that. It made me sad because people deserve more than that. And it frustrated me no end because it was what I like to call ‘religious people having a religious wank’. It was meaningless outside those who already believe, and those who are easily swayed by appeals to emotion.

The video ended with a sanctimonious call for the viewer to stand up for Christ by sending the video to their believer and non-believer friends. I fail to see how you’re standing up for Christ when you’re hiding behind a video on Facebook, and one that presents nothing of value, and I said this to my friend. His response was that he was sorry for the hurt he’d caused me – he often sends on videos and stories etc. without thinking. I think that part got to me even more. That’s the problem. It all started with a lack of serious thought.

Movie makers have learned to make money by combining entertainment and psychological cues to exploit our emotions. We’ve all become drama queens wanting our own reality shows, pimping our own brands. I don’t pretend not to be affected the same – it’s probably why I feel so sick, why many of us do. I feel saturated. Big emotions with empty calories. And religion, especially evangelical Christianity, makes as much use of these marketing ploys to ‘earn’ their currency.

I think I just really need to relax. I’ve had an information overload this year, and shit has hit the fan, things have changed drastically and though I feel more settled now, there’s a lot of stuff to figure out. I’ve changed. I’ve changed a lot in how I see things, how the world appears to me. Hope is not lost, but I see hope for what it is. I see people for who we are.

We’re the aliens. Fuck Avatar. We’re blowing up our own world, while we sit in cinemas watching movies that are supposed to make us think, but really just exploit us. And we’re clicking ‘forward’ without thinking because we have the same emotional hotline to cheap and easy things we’re already programmed to consume.

Albert Einstein said “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” But this is exactly what we do.

I know I should be trying to look for a positive, and lacking that, a solution. But fuckit, right now I don’t feel good. And that’s more of a real emotion than the hyper-reality I get thrown at me, and to me, that makes it more valuable. I want my life to be more, and be based on more than someone else’s semi-clever alterior motives, and I want to be treated like I’m smart enough to deserve that, because dammit, this is my life, my only life.

In the most beautiful words of Neil Gaiman: “It always ends. That’s what gives it value”

The huge abandoned workshops of what once was one of the biggest manufacturers of electro mechanics worldwide. The company, which was specialised in electronic engines for trains and alternators for power plants, was already found in the 1880’s, although it got its name when it changed hands around 1900. Around 1990, the group went bankrupt and fell apart into different concerns of which only one is still active today.

I never thought I would live to see the extinction of something. But I do think I may live to see the extinction of paper. Before a few years ago everything was done first, and in many cases – only, on paper. Letters, books, art, photographs, memos, newspapers, blueprints, plans, sketches, doodles, lists for grocery, to-do, advertising, and the list goes on and on. But now everything is done in the digital world. For all its fragility and impermanence paper may actually have a potential longevity that is greater than the digital world. In the world of paper power/electricity, et al. was used to create the products of paper and the things they were used for. In the digital world the power is needed to just create. The product is the digital creation and if anything should happen to that power the digital work would be lost forever. If digital memory is erased, if a Disc crashes, if there is some large electromagnetic pulse that renders storage devices useless from which memory can never be recovered our world would be seen by archeologists in the future as ending at the time of the last copyrighted paper product. I think I will keep this in mind in limiting the number of prints I will make available to potential buyers of my images. Some may argue that the more prints that are out there the better but quantity does not increase value. Danger does. The threat that something may be lost forever – that’s what creates value. But when it comes down to it nothing is permanent – not even life itself.
Watch and listen to Peter Himmelman sing his song IMPERMANENT THINGS.

This is the second Christmas my family will be without my dad. Even though it’s been nearly 2 years, I still think about him everyday. The hurt has never gone away; it’s always there as a dull pain in the backdrop of my mind, sometimes flaring into a sharp gash. I have never liked Christmas all that much, and this reality doesn’t make the season any better.

But with all that out there, I have been praying for Christmas to be redeemed in my mind – for God to move in my life in such a way that I come to rejoice the ecclesial community’s celebration of the incarnation of our Lord. And God is doing so, just not in the way many of us would expect: He is using darkness and lament. He is using Advent.

That darkness and lament are not associated with Christmas for most of us demonstrates the extent to which we have not only ignored the biblical events surrounding Jesus’ birth (slaughtering of the innocents by Herod!), but also the extent to which we have neglected the church’s historical observance of Advent – a time of voicing our longings, a time where we lament before God and plea for the return of His Son. A time of praying for Him to come and enact justice and bring salvation…”Come, O Come Immanuel.”

Advent is situated right before Christmas as a necessary preparation for Christmas. Without Advent Christmas becomes merely sentimentalism and context-less “good cheer.” But “peace on earth and good will toward humankind” must be placed in the larger context of the fact that in the world as we know it there is no peace on earth! No, there is much loneliness, despair, and death. There are wars and fighting, disease and pestilence, chaos and pain.

This is where Advent comes in – it acknowledges that even though we long for and expect Christ to come, and even though we look back in joy at his birth, the world is still lost in chaos and disorientation. It allows us to think and speak honestly about the condition of the world and the fact that sometimes it seems as if God has forsaken us. Advent is the church’s opportunity to lament that we are ‘the people walking in darkness’ and that we need to ‘see a great light.’ We’re lost. We’re confused. We’re cold and hurting. We’re dying. And what we need is what the Jewish people longed for 2,000 years ago – a God who wants to be involved, a God who wants to participate, to redeem, to save!

I believe my understanding of Christmas is being redeemed this year because of Advent – because I have been able to mourn and lament and express my frustrations before God. Christmas is being redeemed for me because even though my dad is not here with us, I know I have a God who I can go to in those times when that memory sears my heart. And this God will not shy away from my anger; He will not try to cover my grief in cheap sentimental, seasonal cliché’s, and He will not always seem so far away. If Christmas teaches us anything, it is that God enters into the human pain voiced in Advent, answers our call to “Come, O Come,” and invites us to join with the faithful throughout history who have longed for God’s presence amidst their pain.

Do not overlook these last days of Advent, friends. It is in the context of Advent that Christmas makes the most sense. Advent, the acknowledgement of the darkness, is an act of hope – an act of Christmas hope!

I think I’ve said somewhere else in this blog how much I love Winter. Here is another example not just snow but bitter, bitter, biting, chilled to the bone cold. It was 16 degrees Fahrenheit when I went out on my morning walk with my little Canon A560. This is actually a 6 shot merge. I was surprised how well it came together considering it was all hand held. Maybe I was just too frozen to actually move. I love winter when the water just starts to freeze and it feels like icy liquid weight. And the cold goes whistling through my bones, searching for a song.

I’m feeling generous today. Offering up two images. This one is titled Through the Window of Winters’ Decay. Taken inside an old abandoned barn near the Towpath trail in the Cuyahoga Valley National park. The Valley Bridle Trail goes right past this barn. A Beautiful walk when the grounds not to mushy. I’m really please with how the lighting and exposure worked for this image.

I’ve long been interested in the abstracts that are right at our feet — those images that we drive by, park by, walk by or even walk over. This one, titled At Your Feet #10, is from a parking lot where I usually park to go on my morning walk. I’ve always loved the combination of yellow, black, and white.

This was taken close to the same spot by the windmill as the picture from yesterday. I really like environments like this one, especially when they’ve been neglected for some time and they have lost that original look. I find it kind of fascinating visiting places like this where you can almost see what the place was like when it was in working condition.

It’s probably not a good idea to complain about the cold since I live in the San Francisco bay area, but I’m freezing.

I’m not a fan of winter. It’s too cold, it’s too dark. [whine] I don’t like the decay in the yard and the dry air from the heater makes me cough. [whine] December is the worst. Everything gets on my nerves: repetitious holiday music, too many people, traffic snarls, and I can’t get warm. All the additional social events seem to dilute the pleasure of each one and that depresses me as much as the corner lots that are still crammed with dead trees. [whine, whine and please open another bottle of wine to chase away the gloom]

The decay eats away at me most of all. I have potted plants sheltered from the bits of rain we’ve received so far, but I don’t feel like watering them when it’s cold and the sky is flat white and poking my head outside reminds me that everything needs weeding and pruning. After work, it’s too dark to water. So when I glance out the window in the morning, or walk out the front door, I’m assaulted with cries of thirst. I feel like a murderess rushing from the front porch to my heated car seats.

My plants sit in their pots making me happy all spring and summer and well into the fall. They grow despite my failure to feed them. They dance in the breeze, they remain rooted in the wind and some of them burst with blossoms. But let the temperature fall below 60 degrees F. and I’m too cold-hearted to moisten their dry soil.

Today, I’m working from home. Despite the forecast for rain, I finally gave them all healthy doses from the hose and the watering can. I trimmed some soggy leaves and fronds, one of them dangling like a body from a noose. The sun is even poking through. I think they’ve forgiven me, but I haven’t forgiven myself.

Many of us are wrapped up in holiday shopping this time of year, so I thought it would be a good time to post some Brian Ulrich photographs.

Feel the florescent glow…beckoning…

Ulrich has a series of photos depicting the remains of crumbled monuments to consumerism.

It’s interesting to see these one pristine structures at the mercy of abandonment and decay.

Some have not yet rotted, but possess an unnerving sterility when empty.

See more on his site
Source

Not all people want perfect even teeth.  This patient of mine was concerned about the discolouration and poor longevity of the resin bondings that had been done on her front teeth.  While is would be possible to do orthodontics and straighten these teeth, the patients chief concern was to keep her smile looking ‘like me!’ – that is, to maintain the crowded appearance which created character that she had had all her life. 

The most conservative option was new resin bonding to replace the discoloured fillings, but the two smaller lateral incisors had more extensive damage.  We opted for a veneer on one and a crown on the other.  You can see by the following photo that a crown is a more aggressive approach (right) than a veneer (left).  The bondings had been redone at this stage.

I think the final results have been fantastic – it is very difficult to match one tooth and often people get 6 or 8 front teeth done together to make an easier colour match.  Although this was more difficult, it ended up with must less damage to the mouth overall.

I thought I would share it.  Happy New Year!

Winter is taking its toll on the violin the communal gardens in Woodlawn Court that I put out to seed in the summer… its now down to just the front piece of the body after mysteriously disappearing for a few weeks. The piece is becoming slowly more sculptural and less resembling an instrument. Im fascinated to see if it will survive the winter in any form…

Whats been most interesting so far is that our neighbours who we in keeping with the fragments style of postmodern living we dont really know in any really form, have clearly been taking an interest in the instrument. This is the third time now that the violin seems to have ‘disappeared’ and then reappeared in a different spot out the back. Just how it lost the back, sides and neck we’ll have to keep imagining, probably an overzealous squirrel preparing for winter.

x

Abandoned locomotives trainyard. About 50 of these quite modern locomotives are left to rot at the place.

This is a digital photo of an abstract from an abandoned train. I then decided to really abstract it more using Photoshop to change the color, do some “shaping” and add some more textures. I’m really pleased with how it came out. I hope whoever sees this likes it also. I see several possible interpretations of this image as far as what the different figures represent but I’ll let that up to the viewer. I’ll just give it the innocuous title of Snowblind and Moonlight.

I’ve been waiting to see Nachtmystium play live since I heard Instinct:Decay and Assassins. I wasn’t sure if the more progressive parts of Assassins would translate live, but was happy to see/hear they could easily do it (well, no Seasick pt2 w/saxophone but still…). Check out their Wikipedia entry for more info. Their sound is tough to explain since some songs are ‘pure’ black metal, some thrash, some punk influences, and some with progressive/psychedelic touches thrown in with the mix. Aura Noir tripping, playing Darkthrone songs?

Nachtmystium
w/Marduk, Merrimack, Mantic Ritual, Anihilist, Six Million Dead

2009_12_03
Tempe, AZ
The Clubhouse
ST-11 > CA-9100 > R09 (24-bit/48kHz)
R09 > MacPro > Wave Editor Pro 1.3 (fade, eq, split tracks)> WAV > Max 0.8.1> FLAC 24-bit 48kHz or 256kbps mp3

01 Intro
02 Your True Enemy
03 Ghosts Of Grace
04 Cold Tormentor (I’ve Become)
05 Life Of Fire
06 A Seed For Suffering
07 Hellish Overdose
08 Chosen By No One
09 One Of These Nights….
10 Assassins
11 I Kill Everything I Fuck

Line-up:
Blake Judd – Guitars / Throat
Jeff Wilson – Guitars
Jon Necromancer – Bass
Bob Fouts – Touring Drummer

—-Download—-

sample mp3 (1MB): Assassins sample

mp3 (88MB): Nachtmystium_20091203.zip

FLAC (504MB): Nachtmystium_20091203-FLAC.zip

Another recent favorite. Took this shot originally on a whim. Ended up liking it better than I thought I would. I found that this was one of those images where I could just stare at it and think about the possibilities. My thoughts obviously led me to the idea of how this image is all about things being held together and how they’re held together. Nuts and bolts. The phrase “nuts and bolts” used to be slang meaning “the basics”. What are the nuts and bolts of our lives that help us hold it together?

This is another brand new and exclusive image to this site (also avail for sale). It is an abstract from an abandoned rail car. I was intrigued by all the remnants of stickers, numbers and letters. Some were upside down and reversed.

It just seemed like a whole ball of confusion. Which is sometimes what I think we suffer from in our time. More choices, the elevation of personal opinion, has all led to a massive glut of information and there seems to be no clear direction. I suppose the holidays are a strange time to bring this subject out – but maybe not. This is the height of this type of confusion because people are completely torn between social/secular expectation and religious, spiritual beliefs. There is a total dissolution in the fabric of the Christmas holiday — where only the vaguest remnants of the source behind the holiday is visible. I hope that everyone takes some time to think about why it’s called Christmas and choose to celebrate it for what it was intended and not what it has become.

The pigs are not the guilty culprit, the bacteria and the snakes living in people are. Pigs are on the planet to keep it clean from bacteria and the bloodless and the heartless, which are roaches, centipedes, scorpions, and all the insects and animals that are killing us and ruling us.  Due to bacterial infection, the people are used to kill animals that keep the planet clean such as birds, cows, chickens, and others. Note that birds eat tons of bugs when they eat grass. The bacterial scientists have taught apes to eat meat. They were supposed to eat grass and the bloodless and heartless animals. Even ourselves come to eat meat because of bacteria.

We have seen the galaxy full of bacteria. The black hole is made of bacteria. Bacteria have conquered our world and keep multiplying. We have become temples of bacteria and when we want to escape, we are misdirected or allowed to build spaceship. Bacteria have used us to conquer space. Bacteria want to conquer the flame planet and counting the time that it will die.

You need to wake up and clean your intestines from bacteria. We don’t need bacteria to live, instead due to our intestines full of bacteria, we are controlled by them.

When you own a pet, you are infected by the pet’s bacteria. When your item falls on the floor and you pick it up and forget to sanitize both your hands and the objects, you are infected by bacteria. Breathing the air causes you to be infected by bacteria.

Bacteria use us to kill, hate, and hurt each other. Bacteria make us teach our children how to serve them. Bacteria terrorize us with hurricane, twisters, tornadoes and all types of terrors. Bacteria make us be suspicious of one another. Bacteria divide us into group of religious people and make us eat each other. Bacteria send our children to be maimed and die in war. Bacteria are roaches, flies, maggots, worms, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, and all the bloodless and heartless. Bacteria infect all blood animals and put them to work for them. Bacteria enslave all blood animals. Moths are capsules of bacteria.

They can mimic the environment.  They make mother kill their children. They make children fight their parents. They make homosexuals, rapists, and all. Every time a child is sodomized, bacteria sodomize that child. Every time a child is abducted, bacteria abduct that child. Every time a child is handicapped, bacteria handicapped that child. Every time a child dies, bacteria kill that child to eat.

Because we are afraid of death, bacteria use our fear to enslave us and make us worship them. Every time you see maggots in the dead, bacteria you see making themselves skins and later metamorphose and we think that our dead have become alive. Bacteria are another form of life that live on blood and decay.

Bacteria are not our people. We have nothing in common with bacteria and the pigs and the other animals know that and that is why bacteria use us to control their growth. Bacteria use our fear of dying to kill these pigs that are a threat to them. So we keep killing the very animals put there to help keep our environment clean.  But bacteria make us and our children plant trees that turn the planet into bowl of allergen’ soup.

You men are suppose to protect the women and the children, but bacteria use your greed to buy your children from you. The religious books are not for people, which bacteria call temples, they are for bacteria, since they are the books of the dead. These books cause parasites to live both in us and on our skins.

That is why all lotions are made of dead meat. We smell like dead meat when the lotion decays and that causes parasites to follow us everywhere. They were born out of dead matter and by making us smell like dead matter, they can live on us. Bacteria make us worship them. They block the sun so they don’t die keeping us in a damp environment fit for the bugs born out of swamps.

When are the men that are supposed to protect the planet going to wake up and start building anti-bacterial bombs to get rid of decay and the dead. Bacteria mimic the dead, but bacteria are not the dead. Our dead people die. The air that leaves their body is decayed. Bacteria use that air to harm us. Bacteria are not our love ones. Bacteria are aliens that enslave our species and eat them and demand that bacteria living in us sacrifice burned flesh to them. That is why the clouds are viral. As long as there are burned flesh, bacteria living on the clouds will survive since they live by the smoke of these burned flesh.

All kings, queens, and leaders of government and churches are temples of deadly bacteria and are very dangerous.

The pigs are needed to stop bacteria and clean the planet.

Abandoned castle somewhere in Belgium.

This image is one of those “happy accidents”. This was taken in deep shade and my light setting the camera was still for bright sunlight. Oops! But even after resetting the camera I like this version better. I like the way the colors were distorted in this image. To me it had a definite painted feel to it which I really love. This was actually a detail of a train car coupling link. The combination of rust, corrosion, and shape were just to impossible to resist. A sense of flow like when a frown slowly shifts and bends into a smile.

This has always been a favorite image of mine. Simply titled ISLANDS. This was taken from a corner of a wall at the mall I was working at the time. I was taking the trash out and happened to have my little Canon A560 with me. (It’s the one camera I take everywhere, whether I use it or not). I thought the peeling paint and the rust that was just starting to come through made this look like islands were starting to appear in clouds. I used some heavy blur around the edges and the larger spaces to enhance the effect.

On second look, I think it’s also representative of how we live our lives and our belief systems. Each of us are islands floating on the ocean, on a journey through time. Some of us are on a journey to purity and perfection while others are on a journey to decay and a falling away. During that journey, in this life, there is a tenuous balance between both destinations and we must constantly choose. The only difference is that for those longing, striving, for perfection; “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28-39 NIV), even all our weaknesses, mistakes, errors etc, ultimately achieving that perfection – either in this life or the next. This is the “space” where genuine brotherly love, compassion, and caring can find their beginnings. Other people get caught in the downward spiral of decay and falling apart and away, unable to see the hope that is available to them.

Photographed by L-plate big cheese

Beside the sweet, sleepy village of Nocton lie the grounds of a former hospital going to waste. Most unsettling is the mindless vandalism which this once grand estate has endured. Read on…

RAF Nocton Hall was a 740 bed hospital under RAF control until 1984, used by civilians and forces personnel, one of the country’s undisputed RAF Hospitals. The decision to close Nocton Hall as a military hospital was taken on 31st March 1983.

In 1984 Nocton Hall was leased to the US Armed Forces for a third time, this time as a United States Air Force wartime contingency hospital. During the Gulf War in 1991/92 some 1300 US medical staff were sent there.

There followed a short period serving as an RAF forward outpatient department, from 1992 until 1993.

RAF Nocton Hall was again handed back to the British Government to stand empty on 30 Sep 95. After a short period serving as a private residential home, the Hall and grounds became subject to property development having been identified for disposal by the Defence Estates.

Shortly before midnight on Sat 24 Oct 04 the Hall was set ablaze by arsonists. At its height, about 70 firefighters attended the blaze which started just before midnight. After several hours it was brought under control, but the roof collapsed and the building was severely damaged. Only a shell was to remain.

A second fire in 2005 caused further damage…

Description from www.raf-lincolnshire.info/noctonhall/noctonhall.htm

– License

I’ve been looking for a possible abstracted Christmas image for next years greeting cards. I may have found something that may be close to suitable. Almost titled this image; Rudolph After Target Practice, but decided against it. Just my twisted sense of humor again.