sor you

i found this this morning on frenchaman street.

new orleans moviemaking

gabriel and i arrived in new orleans a couple days ago, greeted by sunny warmish weather. it feels so good to be here. i love changes of venue. i suppose that is my gemini sun shining through. i always loved those scenes in westerns when someone turns a table over and the everything flies into chaos.

i'm working the first week here on a film being produced by a faerie friend. we had our first shooting day yesterday. i was a bit nervous because we are shooting high definition wide-screen, which i've never done before. the cameras are new and excellent, sony xdcam ex. these cameras have no tape, pure solid state. it took me a couple hours to get used to the controls, and my greatest frustration was confusing the start/stop button with the detail focus button, so i'd get a good shot going and would go to focus and stop the shot. but, otherwise, i found the camera easy to operate and love the manual focus, zoom and iris. we do a second day of shooting today.

pix

here of some favorites i pulled from my photo collection.

new orleans or bust

gabriel and i are just about to head off to new orleans with a trailer full of costumes in tow. we'll be meeting friends there for the usual work and celebrations. but, this year i'll be spending a week shooting a video with a television producer friend who is making a documentary about gay mardi gras krewes and their place in new orleans and gay history.

media fodder: here's a clip from a fabulous party a couple years ago. i love this dress that i made out of napkins and scotch tape. the dastardly david ford tore it mercilessly from my body on a near empty street after it had survived for hours in a crowded room.

and here's one of a nice man i met on the street.

magic

"Children see magic because they look for it."
—Christoper Moore

sublime separation

something this morning told me there was a separation in the universe. i'm not sure why i felt this but i woke up feeling a kind of emotional hangover and took a nice long bath, shaved. the older i get the more aware i become of the deep interconnectedness between us all and at the same time the infinite distance that separates us. the latter seems to manifest for me in inverse proportion to the closeness i perceive in a relationship. the more i get to know someone, the clearer the distance between us becomes and conversely in the company of complete strangers i can feel deeply intimate. at times i'll feel a potent intimacy with someone with whom i've lost contact. it's as if in the presence of fulfillment there is absence and in the absence of fulfillment there is presence. it's a beautiful paradox because it always (usually after periods of struggle and pain) points me back to the divinity within myself, the wholeness that i've only experienced from inside, to the principle that one finds the deepest contentment in oneself, that the habitual reach to the outside for balance only unbalances. in the brief moments that i've wintessed my own wholeness i've felt capable of loving everything, unconditionally.

jim jackson video artist

my friend jim in boston makes cool animations based on his paintings. here's one!

integration

i knew that i had a lot of photos. but, i had no idea exactly how many. right now i'm importing all my photographs into iPhoto and it's telling me i have 35,471 so far. until last night they were spread across a bookshelf of dvd backups and an armload of smallish external hard drives. i bought a 500 gigabyte internal drive for my PowerMac and last night imported about 20,000 images. this morning i brought in about another 10,000 and now am finishing up by importing the dvds. i should have room for another 50,000 or so, which will keep me cool for a few years more.

i tried out iPhoto a few years ago and was not impressed. but, apple seems to have improved it dramatically. it operates quickly and is handling my tens of thousands of photos nicely. i love the way iPhoto puts all your pictures into a giant contact sheet. i put the thumbnail size down as small as it will go and it turns into a tapestry.

it feels really good to have all my images consolidated. a few weeks back, working on a magazine, i remembered a picture. it took me nearly all day to find it (it happened to be on a firewire drive that i thought was on but was off, duh). this triggered my research into ways to organize photos. for the past three years they have been organized by a variety of methods defined by my different camera upload softwares. it turns out that i had the answer under my nose with iPhoto, but i looked at quite a few packages before settling on it. the most powerful was aperture--from apple too--sort of iPhoto on steroids, but i had a lot of trouble with it and it seemed very slow by comparison and even corrupted one of my hard drives by creating folders that crashed my system when i tried to open them. i had to mount the drive on my PC laptop and delete the files through windows. the problem may have been related to that drive's windows file system... who knows. anyway, while i liked a lot of the organizational aspects of aperture, i didn't like the way it imported. iPhoto does a great job of sucking up whatever photos are on a hard drive and letting you organize later. maybe there is a way to do this in aperture but i couldn't figure it out and i wasn't too keen on spending $300 on photo management software. so, the short of the long is that with now almost 40,000 pictures, iPhoto is doing great. i hope it continues!

sea life

these are shots i took of gabriel's most recent puppets. they are sea creatures for an entertainment company in california. the glowing wire is electroluminescent wire from coolight and is a lot of fun to play with.

parthenot

i'm working on the redesign of a banal building in my downtown. this occurred to me this evening.

incongruency

i found myself on a cold but sunny day in boston with a zebra wearing this outfit last sunday. there's more to the picture which includes a hobby horse that i'm riding as well as my lucky jeans, which i adore and which fit me like no other jean ever has. the zebra was asleep next to the fence until i approached it. something about my outfit apparently registered as a threat and the zebra snorted and trotted off into the background. i like the mona lisa quality of this snapshot. there is only foreground and background, no middleground. it reflects the economic divide of the united states.

the occasion was the birthday of the twins, jaden and isaac. they are now one year old, walking and saying a few blurry words. their moms are doing a great job bringing them up.

tube

i found this lovely tube in santa barbara. it's located off mountain drive, up in the hills behind the the city in the crook of a hairpin turn. i'm not sure what drew me to it but once i cleared the brush away from the entrance and peeked in i couldn't resist crawling in. it was remarkably clean. back east the tubes aren't usually so pristine. the light filtering in, casting shadows on the concrete ripples, fading away to black and then reappearing at the other end captured my attention for quite a while. i also shot some self portraits in it.