637 // December 20, 2009

What the heck is this? The plant was found at the local University up the street.

Tell me something.

I guess it is not enough that we have been like nomads these last few weeks while in the states. Since our house is rented for a season, we have stayed in four homes in four weeks! We are so dependent upon the kindness and goodwill of our hosts, and we have had some incredible friends to keep us in their homes until we return to Israel in a couple of weeks…

Yesterday, we hopped in the car and drove three hours west to Abilene. It was so refreshing to get on the road. I had such a sense of  ”leaving my burdens behind.”

I have learned to love the Texas hill country, the roadside farms and cattle ranches, and the big spaces of Texas!

Right now, my hubby is meeting with a few key people, and I am enjoying a good book, a Starbuck’s Soy Vanilla Latte with my feet up.

And the book I am reading is so inspiring…

“I Asked for Wonder” by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I have to stop and meditate and ponder about every three sentences. I love that.

You’ll excuse me now, if I bury my nose into my book and sip my coffee alone now…

More later…

Theme: Leaves

So I got a hankering for some chocolate chip cookies the other day and decided to try out the recipe from the package of chocolate chips. This recipe wasn’t great, I should stop trying out other recipes and just stick with my favorite.

It was cold so it a hot noodle soup day.

Some zucchini salad to go with the noodles. Very simple, just 5 ingredients but oh so tasty.

Forgive me if you have heard this before. I often lament my inability to afford purchasing, proccessing film and printing out photos. I also lament the look of digital photos, for the most part, and am unable to purchase a new camera. I have been told many times I can download plugins for photoshop to make my digital images look more like film. I don’t doubt this, and don’t doubt that they can look good. But it all takes away from the reason I am attracted to the sorts of cameras I use. If you are unfamiliar with my work, I use cheap, plastic cameras, like Holgas, or Russian Lomos or old cameras like Brownies. I even use old cameras that were given away with Time magazine subscriptions. I love these cameras because there are few functions to mess with. You point and shoot. Some of them don’t even require any sort of focus or aperture adjustments. The only adjusting I do is using one or some combination of the downloadable apps and maybe post productive adjustments in contrast. I like this because I like to focus all my attention on my subject and what colors I want to capture.

To make things clear, I am not much for subject matter. I have a materialistic love for form and color. Some images have some subjectivity to them, but mostly simplistic: particularly humor. Though life is a serious matter, I don’t take life that seriously. I will elaborate on that subject some time later.

If I have one complaint about the iPhone, it is the lack of flash. Nightime photos come out grainy. Sometimes pleasantly so, but most times not so much.

These are just a selection of some of the iPhone images I like. I am working hard to be better, to improve my editting process. If you are my facebook friend you probably have seen most of them. But because I post so often it is easy to miss or forget a few.

People:

Not People:

Yeah, that’s right. I spend my days, naked at my girlfriends house (she, working), facebooking. I’m unshowered and maybe I went out and did a few chores sometime after about 2:00 in the afternoon. I used the excuse with myself that I am “networking” but really I am so happy not to be working a “day job” that I am cannot pull myself together to put myself in the position of having another shitty job.

Actually I have had some pretty “good” jobs. Or at least they looked good on paper. But these jobs had two things in common. They were full time jobs with benefits, and they entailed massive commuting (about an hour at the least). These things ate up my time. I have had to do without sleep if I wanted to go out drinking. And THAT is no way to live.

What is more: though I have been good at my past jobs, they have not involved interests that to me are central to my being. Take job no. 1, which I performed for over a decade. I worked as a massage therapist at world class resorts, and also for celebrities and other famous or rich people in LA. Yeah, it was fun rubbing famous bootie for a time. But the high moments were inundated in a sea of doldrums: mindless ass rubbing drowned in wanky new age music. I am a restless person. I need constant stimulation. I like stress, the good kind. I like dynamic personalities clashing within thick convoluted plots. So you can see how this could be torture. Most of my clients were the same sorts of people: sad housewives of rich guys (often cheating on their wives elsewhere) entering into their midlife realizing that their hot looks were temporal and that they had to find some other reason to live. No really, this same story over and over and over again. It got old.

Job no. 2: working with plants. Again, plant people can be sort of predictable and unstimulating. But that aside, the sun was killing me. Especially this year. No matter where I hid, what kind of sun screen I was wearing, what sorts of hats I wore, the sun hammered down upon me relentlessly, setting fires in my limbs that burned until I retreated to my office or home. The sun does not want me to be a horticulturist anymore. She scared off the monsoon, leaving my plants looking the shittiest ever this year.

And this job too entailed something I have really come to detest–driving. So when my oil pan was punctured on the riddled 4 mile dirt road I traversed daily, my subconscious told me to ignore any possible signs that anything wrong was going on with my car and I drove my 1983 bio diesel-fueled Mercedes Turbo Diesel Wagon until the engine seized beyond affordable repair. I admit it, after the initial shock of losing such a cool car, I was happy and relieved. And though I lost my job a little while before I should have because I could not drive to work, I was happy to lounge around on the first cool days of fall, catch up on my book pile, spend money I didn’t have on cheap beer, and rebel against productivity.

After all what had productivity done for me? What is the reward for hard work? More work. I don’t even get to enjoy (if one really can) moving upward economically. The economy and it’s moment of honesty ensured I knew the true value of my work.

I realize now how much I really, truly hate capitalism, which mostly rewards NOT the hard-working, nor even the brilliant, but usually the most exploitative, opportunistic and dull people out there. For only a really dull person could possibly want to focus all their energies on MAKING MONEY rather than the myriad of things in the universe to preoccupy oneself with.

So I am rebelling against all this. I am packaging myself up honestly. Not playing the game. I cannot escape the effects of our predominant economic system. But I can certainly bend and break rules. Rule no. 1 I am breaking: I don’t give a shit about the results. I am not going to get scared and let the resulting fears guide me into another job I hate.

I am not going to worry about prestige. If I have to sling coffee, wait tables, that is cool. I never cared much about justifying my existence with a career. I am not going to package myself up pretty and innocuous (presenting oneself as innocuous and safe seems to be the trend in resume writing).

And most important, I am not going to work so much that I don’t have time for anything else. If it is not abundantly obvious here, I need to work on my writing skills. I need to finish my piles of books that amass around my bed and shelves, I need to spend quality time with my life, my friends, my girl, my dog.

Most of all I am going to have fun.

One of my first prints. Curled at the edges because it’s unmounted.

I think she’s in love with her Tattoos!

I like Tattoos too! I like to watch to Tattoos on other people… Fem Von V has a lot of Tattoos! That’s what I like about her! And every Tattoo has his own story and/or reason! That’s really very interesting to hear…

Enjoy the Photo’s!

Photography by Nicholas Hance McElroy. Based in Alaska.

(via sabino)

The fifth match of the 2009 Confederations Cup was played in Bloemfontein South Africa on 17 June.  I must say the organizing of the match tickets and accreditation was a pleasure compared to Sundays match between Brazil and Egypt. I think the organizers got everything under control by now and everything went very smoothly.

The media centre is something out of this world with working space galore and Wi Fi at 54MBS. I eventually sort out my wireless after targeted Jeremia the IT consultant on duty.  Wired networking if you want is available and lots of power points and plus minus 40 plasma screens working overtime. Oh yes and a restaurant with burgers, cool drinks and lots of other snacks.

The following image is of the media centre where +- 2000 images, according to stats by the IT department, get send after each match. In front sit Anesh my big photographer friend from Durban and my working space is just right of him.

Every photographer(there must be around 70 of them per game), get a number before the game and must sit on a chair with the same number on the field. Every seat got a wired network available and a power point for you laptop. To give you an idea at some rugby matches they even rejected our request for one power point on the field.

The following image of Etienne photographer for The Star sorting his Laptop out before the game. Yes he is an old scholar of Grey College in Bloem.

The crowd were amazing and at one stage over thirty thousand fans were clapping hands and singing Siwelele (official song for Celtic FC).  Even the Spain and Iraq fans were singing with the rest. I don’t think they had a clue what they were singing but they enjoyed it anyway.

On the field Spain won the game 1-0 with a header goal by David Villa. It was a great experience to see players like Torres and Sergio Ramos in action.

To see more photos of the game go to www.supermedia.co.za

Gerhard

Musium tua kota makassar adalah salah satu bangunan tua yang masih bisa kita lihat dan kunjungi di kota makassar musium ini hampir bersamaan dibangun dengan bangunan kantor walikota makassar sekarang dan juga gereja immanuel yang lokasi dari ketiga bangunan ini berdekatan dan konon katanya ketiga bangunan ini dihubungkan oleh lorong – lorong bawah tanah yang memang pintunya masih ada tapi menurut cerita pintu itu tidak pernah dibuka lagi karena menurut informasi yang ditemukan lorong-lorong ini masih bersifat magis agak angker karena dulu pada saat belanda masih menduduki kota ujungpandang pada saat itu banyak tahanan-tahanan perang yang dibunuh atau disekap maupun disiksa ditempat ini.

Musium ini masih berdiri kokoh di tengah keramaian kota makassar, dalam musium ini banyak benda-benda antik peninggalan sejarah dulu, benda – benda tradisional suku bugis dan beberapa peninggalan belanda saat masih menduduki kota ujungpandang masih tersimpan baik di musium ini dari luar musium ini jelas masih terawat kecuali ada beberapa bagian dari bangunan tua ini yang terlihat agak kusam termakan cuaca hujan, tampak bekas tetesan air hujan dan rumpun lumut di beberapa bagian gedung.

We should all inspire to be like the humble and simple ant! They represent labor, teamwork and community.

It’s at times like these that I wish I had a macro lens.

Posted on Shutter Sisters.

Alexandra and I ventured to the Fruiterie du Plateau, which has now become my new favorite place to shop for groceries. Although a wee bit expensive, the produce and quality of products is second to none in Montreal. Although both Jean Talon and Atwater Market’s offer wider range of products at the same caliber, the Fruiterie du Plateau, located on Roy, just off of St. Denis, is much closer and adorable.

For dinnerm Alex and I cooked up two white wine and shallot swine flu pork sausages in organic tomato paste. To that we added about half a cup of red wine, half a clove of minced fresh garlic, a Spanish onion, a red pepper, a handful of fresh basil leaves, two handfuls of fresh baby spinach, and, about a third of a cup of shaven Parmesan slices. All of this was then thrown into a pan and fried for a few minutes with fresh, 6-cheese, multicoloured  tortellini. It was so fantastic. Below are two pictures I took of the dish plated with cracked pepper, a basil leaf and more Parmesan.

I am not sure that I have seen anything that made me as happy as this series by Andrew Bush, 66 Drives. I am just showing 6 of the 66 – I think I must have the book . It is so great to look at them in his order – nice ride . . . . Here are the editorial reviews from Amazon.com - 

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Many of us know that automobiles are expressions of our individuality and personality. We may not realize, however, that the car can also provide the most space over which we have complete control in our daily lives. Being in the car is private and public at the same time, akin to lounging in one’s living room while simultaneously appearing on stage.Andrew Bush (b. 1956) examines this tension between private and public in his remarkable series of photographs of individuals driving cars in and around Los Angeles. By attaching a camera to the passenger side window, Bush made these pictures while driving alongside his subjects – often traveling at 60 mph. Taking notes on the speed and direction he was going, Bush created extended captions for the images and called the series Vector Portraits. Published here for the first time, this portfolio is accompanied by an essay by culture critic Patt Morrison and an interview between the photographer and Jeff L. Rosenheim that discusses the Vector Portraits in the context of Bush’s photography as a whole.

About the Author

Andrew Bush lives in Los Angeles. Patt Morrison is a writer for the L.A. Times. Jeff L. Rosenheim is curator of photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.