Often when I am photographing wealthy socialites partying or buying art on the north shore of Chicago, I often think of a friend of mine, Amy Ernst, who is in the Congo right now taking amazing photos of interesting people.  But she’s not just there taking photos, she’s also doing her part to help out in that war-torn part of the world.  I asked her to write up a paragraph about what she is doing there:

“I’m living in a monastery with about 50 Catholic priests and monks in Mulo and Musienene, two villages in North Kivu.  It is in what’s considered to be an active conflict zone, in that there are several factions of soldiers in the area and there are still “confrontations.”  That meaning, they still raid and pillage villages, stealing everything insight, killing people and raping whoever they want to.  I have affiliated myself with a small Congolese organization called COPERMA, that originally started to help people learn how to farm and breed animals more effectively, but has been trying to do damage control since the war started.  I guess I consider myself a freelance humanitarian.   I don’t actually work for anyone, I just kind of am trying to learn about the problem right now, and help in the small ways I can like helping this organization start keeping records of who they’re helping, helping recently raped women start small businesses, and helping people who are displaced by the war find ways to feed their children and also go to school.  I do all of this with the help of this Congolese organization, they have made it very possible for me to become part of the community here and I am more able to visualize and try to understand the various problems by working with them.  The problems are endless.”

Amy writes a fascinating blog called The King Effect.  She also has a photo gallery here: Amy E’s Public Gallery.  She recently had her camera stolen.  If any of you would like to contribute a few dollars so she can get a new one, click the donate button here:

 

Here are a few selections from her gallery:

Today I experienced a cranial disaster resulting from a singularity in all space and time.  It all started way back when my parents decided not to have any more children after the birth of my older sister Sarah.  Sixteen months later, I was a newborn being carried around the hospital by my father showing me off to the nurses.  Growing up, I was mothered by two sisters and my mom and through the course of events, I never really acquired that drive to be 100% responsible for my own personal well-being.  With work and with others, I’m very responsible and will do everything I can to help.  I just have a hard time helping myself with the simple maintenance of life.  Now, living alone in an apartment, I usually purchase toilet paper the day I run out of the last roll, I flip my mattress when I develop back pain and I cook when all other fast food options seem nauseating to me.  Along those lines, I’ve recently run out of disposable contacts.  The left one, my dominant eye, has a two week old contact in it and my right one is about six weeks old.  Both feel rotten and the veins in my eyes resemble someone infected with the Rage Virus.  So in order to avoid being quarantined by the military Outbreak-style, I wore my glasses today.  I hate wearing my glasses for a few reasons.  Got made fun of while growing up for having 80′s Aviator style frames and feathered hair, didn’t like having them smashed against my face by Tommy King while playing football in the park, have no peripheral vision and little depth perception and they just aren’t comfortable.  Driving to work is like driving with a diving mask on; I’m just not used to turning my head this much.

Speaking of work, people have been complaining about the parking garage.  It’s one of the main complaints of patients, visitors and new employees.  The problem is, those complaints have been fed up the ladder as “general complaints about the parking garage”.  I’ve found that the main issue is that there aren’t any clear signs about where to turn and who should yield.  So people circle around repeatedly lost like trying to escape an MC Escher drawing.  During my first few weeks of employment here, I was walking outside and a little old lady stopped her car, ran out of the garage and begged me for help getting her car out of the garage.  She was desperate and looked as if she was ready to abandon her vehicle.  But because these complaints were generalized and not specific, the action taken by the administration was that all employees have to park on the upper floors and to the South to make room for additional parking for customers.  They call it, “Park South to Drive Loyalty North,” but the loyalty they are talking about is customer loyalty not employee loyalty because now it’s impossible to find employee parking anywhere except on the fifth floor with the construction workers.  And with two to three shoots a day requiring me to go up and down the garage six to eight times a day, you start to get a little dizzy with the contant spinning and spinning and spinning…

My father is often trying to introduce the family to new products from the grocery story in order to improve our lives just a little bit.  So this past Sunday when I went to visit, instead of plain old water, I was drinking Wild Berry Aquafina FlavorSplash water.  It was delicious!  Even the next day, during my nervous vision-narrowed drive into work, the water was still good having sat in the cup holder overnight.  The water was so good that after I parked on the fifth floor, I started to read the ingredients as I walked inside to see what else was in it besides water and deliciousness.  Phosphorous?  White Phosphorous is a chemical weapon that burns people to death in war zones.  Sucralose?  Isn’t that like saying Sugarsugar?  WT…(CRACK!)  That’s when I slammed the side of my head into something metal.  I reeled back and and saw a ladder strapped to the roof of a contractor’s vehicle.  I walked right into it causing unknown amounts of laughter among the security guards watching on camera down in the basement. 

It was like a singularity in the universe.  Think of everything that had to come together in order for that ladder’s aluminum and plastic and my bone and skin and blood to make contact.  I settled on these black plastic frames because nothing else looked even remotely attractive in the store, and it is like the design was specifically made to hide that ladder.  The only reason I was wearing them was because I’m too lazy to make an eye appointment sooner.  Think of all of those misdirected complaints by patients which forced me to park by the construction contractors on the top floor.  And consider that this specific contractor didn’t need his ladder today so he just left it strapped to the roof of his little wuss mini-truck that he had to buy instead of the lifted Ford F350 he really wanted but couldn’t afford because his business is underpaid by cheapskate clients.

With that much fate working against, me, it’s a wonder I wasn’t killed.  Had I looked up and avoided the ladder, all of existence could have been torn asunder.

One of the greatest crimes of the favored is apathy to the plight of the unfortunate.  Many Americans feel this to be true and for a few moments each year, they gather behind the news of the day and text money to a cause.  They allow others to work out the details and go on drinking Starbucks and smoking pot.  Edmund Burke wrote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”  Americans now are doing something worse than apathy, they are actively contributing to the plight of a nation.

Laws are based on action, not inaction.  Yet, if a friend was choking in your kitchen, you would help them, right?  What if you had set them up to choke?  Americans contribute twenty billion dollars to the Mexican government to help fight the drug industry.  Yet they also consume an estimated forty billion dollars of illegal drugs each year from the seven Mexican Narco Cartels.  Many of you reading this are direct contributors to one side or the other of this problem, sides which when broken down can best be described as a struggle between good and evil.  Perhaps listening to the audio documentary La Frontera will alert you to the result of your actions and help bring you over to the good side.  Perhaps calls for giving in to evil will wane when you hear of the effects many of you unwittingly contribute to.

Many people including reporter Colm McNaughton risked their lives to help make this documentary possible.

I woke up with vomit in my mouth. The kind of dirty stink that makes you run to a cup of anything to change the experience. All night I had been bent at the waist, feeling my body implode, stopped only by the frozen stomach muscles that I hadn’t felt for years. My skin was chilled and I could feel the fever coming on. At first I thought I had been sitting too long in the same position, stopping up the pipes. But after ten minutes of intense pain, I knew the McDonald’s I had too willingly wolfed down after a day of not eating was now fighting back the onslaught of my teeth and digestive juices. In fact, I thought that they had combined forces against me.

Forcing a finger down my throat had never been easier. I wanted to do anything to stop the pain. I dry heaved up some yellow mucus but the food had moved on to more distant locations. Would I be forcing this out both ends as my sister had experienced in the hospital when we were kids? I always dreaded that experience and didn’t wish it on my worst enemies. Well, maybe I did wish it on my worst enemies, but that was only because those people don’t seem to have ever experienced misery in their lives. And the good people of the world don’t deserve to go through that, least of all my sister, or myself.

So there I was, once again in that familiar position from college and childhood, grasping the dirty cold white porcelain in a way that only the truly sick are semi-comfortable with. Normally people will do anything to keep their heads away from a toilet. But when they need to purge something, it suddenly becomes a pillow and a relief from the heat.

During a brief misery-filled break from the porcelain, I rifled through my cabinets looking for the first aid that I was usually so proud of organizing, though I wondered if any of it could help. I felt like I had cut my arm off and was now looking for a band-aid. It felt therapeutic to throw things open and on to the ground. Now the contents of my cabinets seemed so over packed with backup toothpaste and backup deodorant that I soon realized, as the pain took hold, that I might actually have to get help from elsewhere. The upstairs neighbors were scattering ants on a gym shoe-damaged hill, heels made of lead. I wondered if they had heard me and would soon show up at the front door with contempt or concern. Could I finally call an ambulance for myself? Had that day come when I was that desperate for help? I shuddered at the pain and found 6 aspirin loose in a zip lock bag. I tore open the baggy dumping the contents onto the dusty rug. I took down three with the sewer water that comes out of my spout if I don’t let it run for 30 seconds, which made me wretch even more. Maybe I should eat some oatmeal. That’s all I have in the house to eat. But I knew I would instantly throw that up and who knows if I could even stand to run the microwave which was so far away in my rapidly cooling apartment.

The white of the porcelain curdled into Feta cheese and black roots shot up into the overcast sky.  They grew into trees which rustled in an imagined wind as my heart thumped into the ground with a curious purpose.  The sound was muffled by the cheese which was now white snow as a light brown deer emerged from between the branches to examine me.  We regarded each other for a moment with wanderlust.  I suddenly grew warm. My forehead started to sweat. I tried to lay on the bed, but swearing and turning on all sides and bending in every way imaginable didn’t seem to make me feel like doing anything other than calling for help. Is this how I will die? Some random stomach problem which might be as serious as my appendix bursting or a hole in my stomach spilling digestive juices into my body cavity. I think they call it sepsis and I think this is how it feels.

Would that the man on the moon were a lonely fellow, perhaps reclining against the slope of some great crater, he might say that he had more insight under the print of his thumb than all of the Earthling  extrospection gleamed from upon the snowy vantage of Everest.  Perhaps he fingers the collapsing edges of the first human manprint in the silty soil or sweeps away the gunmetal baby powder from the brassy words, “For All Mankind.”  Laborious cleaning of the human remnants sustains the mind while waiting for the next icy immigrant to plummet in and spread more work.  For what is a day when circling the Earth but that which is measured by the push and pull of an Earthrise and Earthset?  The humans are saturated with their colors unable to describe his gray world.  Let them come and recalibrate to stars with more detail and color against an ink sky than in all the speckles of sunlight off of their great seas and rivers.  Their glowing oasis of blue, a single source of color in a vast darkness, implies how much the man is missing as he floats alone, barely denting the sifted peaks.  A pocked white sphere lies half buried in this crater.  A red and white flag flies out in the open against an imagined wind in this airless void.  Lots of footprints to sweep up before the next visit.  The man reclines again against the slope of a golden leg, the only Earthly color for miles against the billion shades of gray that occupy the man’s day.  For what is a day on the moon when measured in the waxing and waning of the attention of billions so close, and yet so far.

Debating the details of someone’s  core beliefs is an entertaining yet usually pointless endeavour; but let slip the dogs of war, I say.  I once argued with a girl for what felt like two hours about the existence of Universal Truth, she on the, “it obviously exists,” side and me on the, “you can never prove it,” side.  Arguing about Universal Truth is like trying to prove that the world is round; sure, there’s a lot of reliable hearsay on the issue, but personal experience is not among most people’s presentable evidence.  It requires faith to a certain extent.  But that wasn’t a detriment to her strategy of poking holes in my arguments, while I kept coming up with new hurdles, and, of course, eventually Hitler came up.  I once read that whomever brings up Hitler in a philosophical argument is the automatic loser.  I think it is a funny rule, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but either way he came up.  So she talked about the trees having “treeness” and I just didn’t agree that every being in the universe would agree with her definition of treeness.  She tried to get me to agree to Universals like, “The sun is hot.”  And I would say, “To a Lava Monster, or to another larger hotter star, it’s not that hot.”  We went in circles like this for hours and I eventually conceded just so we could move on with our lives.

But today I must reverse myself.  How could this be?  How could my entrenched beliefs have been exposed and destroyed?  Through the erosion of introspection?  No.  I saw the movie, “Requiem For A Dream.”  This movie was horrible.  It wasn’t as bad and pointless as Hannibal, but it was pretty close.  I think I might slot it in behind Hannibal as the second worst movie ever made, right in front of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Showgirls.  I read a review that said it was, “difficult to watch,” and that’s putting it mildly.  I should have known it was going to be bad from the unclear description on the back of the Blu-Ray.

“A hypnotic tale of four human beings each pursuing a different vision of happiness.  Even as everything begins to fall apart, they refuse to leg go, plummeting with their dreams into a  nightmarish, gut-wrenching free fall.”

But really, the gut-wrenching was being felt by me as cheap scares and shock-imagery were thrown at the viewer for 102 minutes in an attempt to make up for the absence of plot and motivating dialog.  It was like having a tooth pulled by someone who was just messing with you.  I try to think back on my innocent youth before it was victimized by movies like this and somewhere a distant child is crying.  Maybe if this movie strove to elicit a larger truth about the human condition, some of the stupidity could be excused.  But as far as I can tell, the only intended conclusion was that drugs are bad.  I already knew that.

So my Universal Truth is that this movie sucks.  No one can like this movie, and if they do, they must be insane.  The soundtrack was good though.

After college, I lived in Kankakee County in a small town called Momence for a while.  There were only a few hundred people living there with a main street no longer than 10 or 15 blocks long, and that’s being generous.  It was far from work, but in the neighborhood which is what I wanted.  I used to run everyday, and in the summers it would be so hot that would I run with my shirt off.  I worked a few miles away in a larger city called Bourbonnais.  After work one day, I was hanging out with some friends that I had adopted through a coworker.  They introduced me to a girl who said that she had heard about me.  My mother grew up in a small town so I knew about how small towns can be.  But this girl told me that she had heard that I’m the city boy who runs around with his shirt off.  My smile disappeared as I thought about my preconception that I might be known as the cameraman for the local TV show, or the boy who had moved into the pink house next to that fancy French breakfast place.  Through the passage of time and circumstance, I eventually quit my job along with my coworkers, and my adopted friends soon vanished.  I didn’t really run after that and I gave up my gym membership.  I felt like I was alone in a small crowd.  I moved back up north to Chicago for work and because I couldn’t take the smallness of Momence anymore and the lack of social interaction. 

Funny enough, Rogers Park had a loneliness caused by it being too large.  So I again found myself being alone, but this time in a big crowd.  I bode my time at work making the best of an empty situation, waiting for a break or a big break.  One weekday night, I heard a cat meowing outside my back alley door.  It sounded hurt.  So I opened the door and looked to see if I could help out, and in flies this gray kitten.  He just swarmed past my legs, through the kitchen and under my bed.  He stayed there for two days.  I put out water and lunch meat which were ignored.  I tore up a newspaper and put it into a shoebox and he went to the bathroom in that.  He was so scared of the whole world.  On the third day, I came home and found most of the food and water gone.  I went to the store and realized that I had never bought cat food before despite years of owning cats while living with my parents.  Buying cat food, I found, was like buying bread; there are dozens of identical choices.  I laughed inwardly at my new choices in life.

By the end of the first week, the kitten was bounding around my apartment like a fur coated slinky on crack.  My couch was on the other side of the wall the front door was on.  So when I would come in, he’d stand on the backrest peering around the corner, his tiny head rotated 90 degrees around the corner at belly level.  I’d come home looking in a half crouch for him walking on the ground and I could see him laughing as I discovered him right next to my face at eye-level.  Then he’d tear away and run circles across every surface in every room no matter the height.

He was filthy.  I know cats are self-cleaning, but I couldn’t let that little guy put his tongue on that much dust.  He seemed to trust me more now sleeping in my bed and causing me all sorts of allergic reactions.  I sat on the edge of the tub as the water plunged in.  I’m not sure what my plan was; it was fluidly forming minute to minute.  Buddy slowly crept into the bathroom placing and replacing his paws deliberately in the same places as if the ground would give way underneath him at any moment.  His eyes weren’t wide, they were passively interested, scared but accepting like a traumatized child ready for the next terror to be catalogued into the darkness.  I leaned down, our eyes locked and I reached for the drain plug and let the water out.  A wet paper towel was a great way to pet him for one of the first times.  Loose hair and smokey dust came off in dark ridges into the folds of the towels.  His ears were pretty clean, considering.  But the therapeutic effects that scientists write about when petting an animal went both ways.  He looked up at me peacefully and I thought, “It’s a rescue.”

The ending to this story is harder to write about.  I was born allergic to evergreens, horses, dogs and cats.  For my whole early life, I was a “wheezy child” until I stopped riding horses and having animals around me constantly.  Into college and beyond, the years of breathing without wheezing made going back to animals that much harder.  I was weaker or more sensitive to the kitten from the lack of constant exposure.  I was dying with red itchy eyes and water seeping from every part of my face.  Buddy would play this game where I would go to bed, he’d rub his whole body against whatever part of my hands or face weren’t under the covers (usually my face) and I’d move him away gently.  Then he’d stalk my head as I slowly emerged for air and pounce on my face with both paws on both temples.  He’d rub my face all over with his nose and back.  He loved this game.  In his opinion, it was a great way to spend those dark quiet hours when humans are sleeping.  I must say, he was really talented at stalking and pouncing.  I could slightly wiggle a toe a quarter of an inch and he’d catch the movement and pounce from across the bed.  One night in bed, he buried his face and whole body into my arms and chest to escape a particularly loud and bright thunder storm.  His fear seemed so palpable and real to me and I was glad I was there.  But my allergic suffering eventually overtook my affection toward him and I knew I had to find him a permanent home.

The vast majority of animal shelters have a policy of killing the animals after two weeks if they are not adopted.  A very small number of shelters have a no-kill policy, unless the animal is violent or gets sick.  I must have called every animal shelter in the phone book.  No one was taking cats except a small number of the kill shelters.  One place told me that even though they don’t any cats, cats are left in cages at their back door almost every night.  She said with loss in her voice how hard it was to have to put these animals to death all the time.  They just don’t have the resources or room to take them in and care for them humanely.  So I put an ad in the Reader for a cute kitten giveaway.  “Gray, super friendly, a traumatic start to a soon to be wonderful life, if interested.”  A few calls led to one person coming over to see Buddy.  I met her outside and Buddy seemed very interested in the grass and trees but not the girl.  He’d been inside my apartment for about a month at that point and I had no idea how long he had been living outside before; maybe his whole life.  The potential owner, a 25-something girl, looked at him with distance and an upturned nose.  “I was looking for a smaller kitten,” she said.  See, Buddy was definitely a kitten, but he was doing much better now and he had grown a little in the month with me.  So even though he still seemed like a kitten to me, and he certainly wasn’t a cat yet, he was more medium sized.  “He’s more medium sized,” said the girl.

“Look.  I’ve called dozens of shelters.  And the only ones that can take the cat are kill shelters.  That means that if no one adopts him, they kill him after two weeks.  You’re the only person who’s come to look at Buddy and if you don’t take him, I’m going to have to take him to that shelter where he’ll probably be killed.  You’re his last hope,” I said.  The woman’s face flashed with anger.  “Don’t put that on me!  Why don’t you keep it?!”  I told her how I was dying from an allergic reaction every time I was with him.  She walked away.  “He’s free and he’s a cute kitten,” I called after her.   She got into her car and drove away.  Buddy and I looked at each other.  We went back inside.

That night, I could barely breath in bed.  My allergic reactions seemed to have a cumulative effect and that night I was really having a hard time breathing and not touching my face (which makes it worse).  Buddy seemed to want to be touched the more I pushed him away.  He played the face stalking game.  I would look at him and he would stare at my eyes with a paw in the air as if waving hello.  I’d blink my eyes closed and he’d paw my eyes as if he were trying to catch my eyes before I could close them.  It seemed like the worst game in the world to play when trying to avoid cat fur going into your eyes, but it was just so cute.  I wanted to hurry the night up and get it over with so I could do what I had to do the next day.  I could feel myself mentally creating a distance from him, justifying why I had to give him away.  A photographer needs to be able to see, and breath!  Red bloodshot eyes look bad to your bosses every day.  They’ll think I’m on drugs.  Buddy started to relax and give up when I hid every part of me under the covers for a long time.  He was warm against my chest.  It’s easy to think about the tides and waves of fate and how things happen and lives intermingle.  How could I give up this cat or cause him harm.  He’s an animal.  Why introduce him into the human-controlled government of animals where humans have to decide his fate?  Could he live in the woods?  The world is a big place.

I pet him all over devouring him.  He riled up and then relaxed into it.  I pet him until he was so relaxed he started to fall asleep.  Then I lightly pet him and memorized the moment.  Cats are a cool combination of soft and sharp edges, a fascinating accessible link into the more wild world of Nature.  Half in the darkness and half in the light, they seem to balance on anything and have been scientifically proven to be aerodynamically configured to always land on their feet (proven by dropping cats out of higher and higher windows – scientists are sick).  I’ve seen a cat jump from a stand-still eight feet into the air and catch a bird.  Their eyes are coated with a reflective film on the inside which bounces light around and enables a sort of night vision.  I’ve seen them kill; I’ve seen then scared and I’ve seen them blissfully warming in a beam of sunlight.  I hardly slept.

The form was very long and in that same non-English legalese used on tax returns.  I wrote quickly because I was parked illegally in the alley and I was afraid.  I wasn’t scared of a ticket, I was scared of the fear I saw him Buddy when I wrapped him in the towel and got him into my car.  It quickly evaporated though into an adventure and we barely made it downtown as Buddy wanted to drive.  The form asked for sex, color, type of animal and under size/weight, I wrote “medium sized kitten”.  There were all sorts of releases of legal rights to the animal, this small little kitten who had literally run full speed into my life and hid with me in bed.  Those rights were then verbally released as the woman robotically read off what I was doing to make sure I knew what I was doing.  I was confused at the formality and without looking she asked me where the animal was.  I told her to hold on and she impatiently watched me run back outside to my car.  Buddy was tearing around the inside of the car doing circles and he looked excited and happy with the new adventure.  I gathered him up easily without the towel and he held onto me wrapping his paws around my shoulder like a clinging monkey.  He looked at the chaotic city intersection with wonder as we walked inside.  He was light.  I pet his back and brought him to the counter as he darted his head around in curiosity.  I am assured that the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society is a no-kill shelter.  A volunteer grabbed Buddy from my shoulder as soon as I approached the forms.  Buddy’s eyes locked onto mine and his face turned to sheer panic.  The volunteer gripped him too tightly as she stuffed him tail first into a carrying cage.  His eyes never left mine and he seemed to wonder why I wasn’t helping him.  The betrayal.

There was a small tear in the room at that moment through which all the air was sucked out.  I apologized over and over in my mind as the volunteer whisked him away.  Buddy’s medium sized but soft kitten paws pressed against the thin metal grid and stared through my eyes and into my soul and just asked once, “Why?”

I backed away.  In my car now.  Window down.  A few blocks later, I started to breath.

I’m sure there’s some sort of life lesson to learn from the massive striped spider which has been constantly making a web on the side of my car door.  But I really don’t care because the damn thing scares the crap out of me every time I jumps out at me.  Perhaps the lesson is that I shouldn’t go to McDonalds because that’s the only fast food place around here that has a drive thru.  When I open my window to place my order, I get a corner-of-my-eye view of this trapese artist the size of my thumb quickly repairing wind damage from driving.  And I’m partially afraid that the checkout girl will see this huge spider and drop my drink all over the ground while handing it to me.  I have to say, on a black car, the spider web is completely invisible.  The spider hangs out inside my side view mirror.  Sometimes when I first get into the car and notice the web is back, I slowly reach for the attachment point which is on the end of the mirror.  I peer inside the darkness of the sideview mirror housing and see nothing, but I know the spider is in there looking at me through it’s 6 eyes or whatever.  As my hand gets closer, I can hear a girl crying from inside the theater in the back of my mind, “Don’t go in there!”  Sometimes the spider times it perfectly so that when my hand is 0.2 inches away from the web, it comes screaming out flailing a bunch of its arms as it ziplines down the web to the door handle like it’s going to figure out the locking mechanism, open the door and pull me out of the driver’s seat.  That would be horrible in an awesome kind of way.

In my mind, I think of the spider as male.  But come to think of it, there could be a whole little egg sack inside the mirror housing.  Or it could be the Sex in the City equivalent of a spider and just be an old floozie living alone in my side view mirror drinking until something better comes along.  It would be nice to think of the spider as a single mom with one daughter working every day on the intricate web with the same skill that my own mother has always had when it comes to drawing, sewing and all things involving fine craftmanship.  But that loving image is ruined every morning when I’m driving and I see it with its arms wrapped around its body in aerodynamic mode shaking on that super strong web glaring at me to slow down.  I tend to stare at the thing which is a great way to get into a car accident.  I can see it all going down now at the police station as I explain how I was staring at this spider, the lifer behind the counter completely unphased at my descriptions of the stripes on the fat little body.

Today’s blog photo comes from Bethany Pegues, a fan who contacted me about a Photoshop lesson I wrote back in 2004 that she discovered.

Regular readers of my blog already know that I imagine myself to be fluent in several foreign languages including Russian, Spanish, French, Southie, Klingon and of course Huttese. But I use the word fluent to mean, “I know enough to get myself in trouble.” The drawback of my foreign language skills is that I have acquired them through watching movies. For example, I know how to say in Russian, “Very cold this morning Captain,” which is from the Hunt for Red October. I also know how to say, “Yes, cold…and hard,” which is Marko Ramius’s response to his 1st Mate, Vasili. Sadly, one of the best lines from that movie, “Give me a ping, Vasili, one ping only,” is said in English, so I don’t know how to say that in Russian. But I do know how to say, “What’s happening here,” in a loud paniced voice in Spanish. I learned that from Predator when Hawkins is questioning the spanish woman about what killed Blaine. At least, I think that’s what he was saying. There were no subtitles. So maybe that’s why my Spanish-speaking friends are looking at me weird. When they ask me how I’m doing, I’m probably saying something like, “The jungle came alive and took him.”

I like sitting down to a quick breakfast with the Spanish-speaking kitchen staff at my work. See, the difference between me and other typical white Americans is that I’m not afraid to use my movie-gained knowledge in real world situations. Once when I was camping on a field trip back in college, I was housed with one of the non-students who was helping with the driving up to U.P. Michigan. He was in OCS at the time (Officer Candidate School) training to be a Marine Lieutenant. So to pass the time, I asked him if the Marines were just like what I’ve seen in Full Metal Jacket. Soon, he and I were barking cadences and rehashing the ridiculous sayings that DI’s scream at you as if I were an old salty Devil Dog. “You worthless puke! Did your parents have any children that lived?”

So as long as I keep the conversations short and sweet and limited to situations similar to what I’ve seen in the movies, I’m good to go.  The bad part is when I try to interact with a Russian-speaker, all I know how to do is ask for a cigarette and then kill them 007-style as they start to search their overcoat.  Or if I want to speak Korean, all I know how to say is, “Others!” and “Find Jack!”  in heavy Korean-accented English.  Fail.

So hopefully there will be more movies with smatterings of foreign languages that will be easy for me to understand and dramatic enough for me to remember.  And I hope they are subtitled because I still don’t know the English translation of John McClane’s famous line, ”Yippie Kai Yay, motherf****r.”

Kahplah!

It’s funny how some ordinary everyday objects take on a new life of their own depending on how you look at them.  Of course, for someone like me who has -5.5 vision correction in both eyes, this is how the bathroom looks to me every morning when I haven’t put my contacts in yet (except for the creative colors).  Those of you “blessed” with 20/20 or better vision unfortunately will never get to experience this sensation except through the medium of photography.  But I’m still jealous of you.

Photoshop has been good to me.  Since version 4.0 or so, I’ve been teaching myself successfully how to use it and having a lot of fun along the way.  I’m always impressed with what it can do in such a short amount of time.  Getting a Wacom tablet opened up a whole new world to me in PS as well, especially CS2 and later.  I often give tutorials to my friends and colleagues on some of the basics and tips and tricks I’ve picked up from classes.  Often during these tutorials, I get bogged down talking about the history of the development of the tool instead of just teaching what something does.  So I usually try and emphasize the importance of learning keyboard shortuts and not getting obsessed with doing something the “right way”.  Since there are 3 or 4 ways to do everything in PS, it’s best to just do what feels natural or is easiest to remember.

I threw together this short video of myself making some bubble thing.  Hope the music doesn’t get stripped out by YouTube.  We’ll see.  For now, have a look and a listen and enjoy.

While recently poking through my ancient floppy disks, I found some college papers which were written on a vintage Canon Starwriter 30 electronic typewriter.  Most of the disks are corrupted or unreadable, but mixed in among the Organic Chemistry and Ecology Lab papers were five or six philosophy papers that I could decipher if I corrected the strange formatting.  Some were basic writing assignments such as, “supporting or refuting an argument,” some more in-depth.  The interesting thing to me is that over the years, the higher math, the biology and certainly the advanced chemistry have all proven to be unusable in my adult life and career paths.  But the philosophy has done and undone whole sections of my understanding of the world around me and continues to be accessed whenever I’m confronted with some new story on NPR, a girlfriend’s arguments against my worldview or simply when I’m deciding whether or not to give money to a homeless person.  To quote Sean Connery’s SAS character in The Rock, “ In retrospect I would rather have been a poet. Or a farmer.”

I’m not sure how I feel about what I’ve written in some of these papers.  They certainly seem like they are just scratching the surface of arguments, but perhaps that is due to the limitations of the writing assignments (one page limits, etc.).  If you are still reading this blog post, perhaps you could read one of these papers and comment below.

The arguments seem very basic to me, but I guess I have a good excuse in that I wrote this paper many years and much experience ago. But I can hear the anger through my fingertips as if I am trying more to convince myself than my intended audience. Strange that I would take a class entitled, “Knowledge and Reality: Mind,” and then be so hard-headed about other points of view.

This video was something I recorded in Flight Sim X (FSX) just for fun. The in-game footage was recorded with FRAPS (which slows down the frames per second). Since I’ve recently upgraded my computer, I was thinking of making another one of these machinimas as the quality will be that much better. New video card comes in a few days which may make those wishes an even more tempting prospect.  Stay tuned.

I made this video as a test for the camera placement possibilities within Grand Theft Auto IV’s PC-based editing system. It’s a great editor with lots of control and a few frustrating limitations. But overall, this has been a very fun experience.

For those who don’t know, the game records 20-30 seconds at a time. During that time, it records everything in the game within say a 100 foot radius around your character. While recording, you have the basic 3rd person view. But when you go into the editor and review the footage, you can move the camera to anywhere within that 100 foot radius. You can set up camera moves, lock the camera off, attach it to your player or different characters so the camera moves with them, you can add different levels of hand shake, do advanced blended multi-camera-position moves, and more. In addition to that, you have control over time (slow motion and fast motion), camera visual effect filters (sepia, b&w, and many more), what audio is played (separated into speech, special effects and music). For example, there’s a lot of swearing by bystanders in this game, so the ability to turn off speech from cut to cut while keeping the overall street ambience is a plus. The editor is very fast. I’ve set up some extremely quick half and quarter second cuts in sequence, and the game is able to keep up without any errors.

If you are a filmmaker, this is a fantastic way to get some new ideas. It also shows how much work is involved in shooting a car chase scene. I had hundreds of camera setups for this overall sequence. Obviously, doing this in game is much faster than in real life, but it took me a few days to edit this. Imagine how much time was spent shooting the chase scenes from Ronin.

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

-Pablo Neruda