my soundtrack is white noise.

Listening to: Animal Collective — Brother Sport


I get the most random spam comments. But not really, if you think about it. Lots of Russian spammers. I felt my existence validated when someone named “nigeria” left me an unspecific comment. (If you’re a real person, I’m sorry, but every Nigerian knows not to trust nigeria_people2007@yahoo.com.) My mother’s trust in Nigerians was renewed when Pop’Africana sent me an address confirmation email, after I’d almost forgotten that I’d ordered the magazine.

My spam email, for that matter, is slightly more interesting. I get lots of spam from JG Wentworth and AT&T, but more interesting are those from Christian dating websites, US healthcare, Bosley — fight your hair loss! — and “depression help” centers. I don’t recall stating anywhere on the interwebs that I was a balding Christian American without healthcare, but I’m almost certain that any depression would worsen if one’s credit card number were stolen. Once I received a series of spam emails from a supposed lawyer, informing me of the details of a lawsuit I was sure I’d never started. But I’m gullible and paranoid and they kept me up at night for a while, making me wonder if I were really suing someone for the rights to my artwork and had forgotten all about it.

On Friday I lived in a dream-world and ate black-raspberry ice cream  at 10pm in an ice-cream parlor with my dance team. Yesterday I watched Little Shop of Horrors and marveled at the stage lighting and harbored a deep resentment against everyone, especially my roommate and her/our loud friends who prevented me from watching Skins in my room. Late at night I ate Lucky Charms and some of the several pounds of dark chocolate chips I received in the mail, but today I am tired and worn-out and have only my spam to remind me of who and where I am not.

 

2011
02/20
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bish got blog.

Listening to: Phoenix — Rome

It’s that time again. Yes, portfolio-building time. I told you recently that I just updated my Carbonmade portfolio, but apparently that wasn’t good enough — my photography teacher has now tasked me to create TWO portfolios, one of my best fashiony work and one of my best randomosity. With 50 freaking photographs each. Did I mention it’s due tomorrow, and I haven’t even started yet?

But the main point of this post was to tell you that I’ve started an auxiliary blog, The Ridiculous Things Store, since apparently the writings. page on here isn’t quite as functional as it could/should be. The Store should be updated more frequently than authoraiINK here (because have you noticed how posts have been slowly waning? school does that to you.) with snippets of writing and poetry. But don’t worry, I will still post my rants/photography/occasional sartorial choices here. And maybe one day Blé will post too.

 

2011
02/17
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and the cockles of my heart were slighly less chilly.

Listening to: The Posies — Love Comes

 

First off, I’d like to wish everyone a happy Commercial Romantic Holiday. As you may have guessed from that introduction, it isn’t exactly my favorite mark on the calendar, but SOME CATHOLIC DUDE DIED SO YOU BETTER PROFESS YOUR LOVE OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE SINGLE FOREVER. Not that you shouldn’t celebrate if you really, you know, want to. I, for one, wore all black — black dress shirt, black pants, black boots, black blazer, black earrings, and being black. But it was also really warm today, so I kind of ended up regretting it. I was dissuaded from sending one of my classmates whose existence confounds me a valentine reading, “I hate you :) ” surrounded by a pink highlighter heart because, apparently, “teenage boys have feelings too.” One of my friends did send me a candy-gram, though, which gave me a warm fuzzy feeling that I soon realized was acid reflux from eating too many strawberries and cream.

But on a less quasi-holiday note, one of my dear friends from dance was kind enough to let me photostalk her one day after practice. The above photograph is one of the fruits of that endeavor (which was actually quite successful, if I do say so myself). So at least I know that I won’t be empty-handed for class tomorrow, once everyone isn’t feeling so lovey-dovey.

2011
02/14
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efficency up by 200%.

Listening to: Metric — Front Row


Just some quick housekeeping. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of winter. But it’s never too early for spring cleaning.

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve updated (or, rather, reverted) the blog layout, because the previous one was just too cluttered for my taste and I kind of missed the simple blogginess of the very first one. Also, spent awhile reorganizing my Carbonmade portfolio — you should check it out — and changed the photographia. link back to Carbonmade, because I don’t really like Flickr at all and am sort of debating taking my photos off there in general.

Also have been lurking around Vimeo a bunch today, because I’m taking my photostalking to the next level and getting a Flip camera as an early birthday present as to achieve my dream of never-ending photographs. So I can capture life in motion as well as in still. (as an aside, Nirrimi’s two short films — but they’re more of what I think of as “never-ending photographs”  — on there are kind of amazing. oh, what the heck, see one here:)

2011
02/11
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to help in your escape from pattern.

Listening to: Björk — Mouth’s Cradle


AARGH.

And, to top it off, an old photo because my interwebs aren’t working. But before we get to that, the weekend:

School let out for a few days on Thursday, so I went back up to Montréal and killed a significant portion of my brain cells on Sims3 binges. Lots of cold, lots of snow, lots of peanuts (maybe prompted by the book I was reading at the time, Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross). I got my dress for the winter formal (more on that later), a bunch of tights, and a bunch of belts. Also started reading Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol by Tony Scherman and David Dalton, which is a pretty good if not jargon-loaded biography of, you guessed it, Andy Warhol. (Also made me think of The Dandy Warhols, few of whose songs I can play on the radio right now). It kinda makes me want to start silk-screening my own photographs.

Speaking of my photographs, I’m thinking of getting an Etsy or finding somewhere else to sell them online to finance my artistic endeavors, such as film buying. I was discussing this at class today, and my teacher said that his baseline price for student art was $50 dollars, but would any of you actually fork over that much for a photograph? Any price suggestions?

Which brings us back to the original complaint. Today, as the first day back from break, epically sucked. First period I took a math (con)test and, due to my immense skill, answered a grand total of 10 out of the 25 questions. My English class group project, which is putting on a scene from Taming of the Shrew, is going horridly, thank you — the other half of my group decided to sleep through class in a foreshadowing of the rest of the project. And some people are just too… is infuriating the right word? Well, someone’s asshole rating went up today.

Conversely, things seem to go worse when I drink coffee in the morning.

2011
02/08
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a shameless manipulation.

Listening to: Eluvium — Reciting the Airships

Usually, I don’t do much manipulation on my digital photos. Sure, where necessary I’ll touch up on brightness and contrast or fix some really ugly yellow light, but I DO not airbrush or extensively ‘Shop in things that are supposed to, well, actually look like photographs. So, when I stumbled upon Nirrimi’s Color Shop, I just had to stop and think for awhile. Now, we all know that most of fashion photography is a shameless manipulation, but — really? Seeing how you can make even the most mediocre of photographs amazing with the click of a button makes one wonder what’s the photographer’s actual style behind the lens and what’s made to look a certain way post-production. (And also — $35 per action? An action that I could make myself in two minutes? Well, I guess that nothing’s too expensive if there’s someone willing to pay for it.) I’m not against the process, really, or even the Color Shop itself — Nirrimi is still one of my favorite contemporary photographers and a huge inspiration for young artists — but the whole thing, I dunno, just shakes my faith a little. Makes me wonder.

But I was so fascinated with the concept that I spent a bit of time making a few of my own curves/actions on the GIMP, one of which I used on the photo above (does that change the way you think of that photo? because it does for me). Here’s a really low-quality GIF that I spent oodles of time making for comparison:

So, what do you think? Yay, or nay?

–> So, we’ve been kinda surviving the Snowpocalypse over here. And by “kinda,” I mean that our school set classes back until 9am yesterday (even though it was a half day and all the games were canceled, they refused to cancel classes), and half the school called left because the ‘rents thought that OMG MY SNOOKUMS IS GOING TO FREEZE. Break actually starts today, so once I finish packing I’m leaving for the city.

2011
02/03
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this is the hook: it’s catchy, and you like it.

Listening to: The Postal Service — This Place Is A Prison

 

“Hi, Students: Today is as close as you will get to a “public school” Friday.”

The key word being close. Yes, there was a weekend; but it was far from being particularly restful. No: this weekend was Winter Carnival, more commonly known as Dorm Wars, and indeed we spent the past few days engaged in an epic battle of skill and wits and tacky skits. This year’s theme was music, so each dorm picked up a genre and joined the fight. Our genre was techno, Swedish techno to be exact, and while it may seem a bit obscure it was quite effective. We made t-shirts and figure-skating routines and picked teams for such classy endeavors as the mascot-suit relay race and spent two days at odds with anyone with the misfortune to live in a different residence. Last night, after a going-away party for a member of the dance team who’s leaving for the Peace Corps, we huddled in the common room to call in trivia answers and send unfortunate souls on cross-campus treks to find the number of portraits outside classroom 210. I failed to single-handedly solve the Cosmic Riddle, but so did my arch-rivals, so all was good. Now everyone is dealing with the aftermath of two days of (mostly — barring the usual cattiness of a select few of the girls’ dorms) friendly competition.

It was a photogenic weekend: I took a  full 36exposure-roll of film, but they won’t be here for quite a while because the camera store in town is open on neither Sundays nor Mondays. By the time I get these prints back, I will have taken another full roll — this one of Montréal, that lovely city to which I am privileged to return on Thursday. I am not quite sure where January has gone, but I am sleep-deprived and caffeine-withdrawn and almost — almost — sick of the snow which, though up past my knees, continues to fall.

2011
01/30
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