how now brownpau
Most of this beautiful Sunday was spent hiking around Robert E. Lee Memorial Park with a few members of Koinonia, MICA’s Christian students’ fellowship. It was a great time to walk out among the trees, sit down on the crisp leaves, and picnic on cheese and crackers by the amber light of an autumn sunset. Pictures here. I’m not in any of them because I was behind the camera.
Projects and papers in every direction I look:
– Thesis class: Research paper on Natalie Bookchin and her net.art.
– Crisis Cenntury class: Paper and/or multimedia presentation on blogs in the context of new media and modern culture.
– Motion Typography class: Three 10-sec. idents for a fictional videoke channel, involving type, photos of people singing, and video footage — to be shot tomorrow, I hope.
– Interactive Design class: finish up multimedia project on the Laudomia chapter of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and conduct user testing.
This doesn’t count the plethora of websites I’m helping to code at work. I don’t think I’ll be getting any sleep until just before Christmas.
Leaves carpet the ground in Robert E. Lee Memorial Park, Baltimore.
Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP.
If you ever look at only one of my photolog entries, this is it. It’s also my permanent desktop in school. He’s such a cute cat.
I just bought a new webcam, since my old cam had no OS X drivers, and Macam couldn’t handle video input from the Aiptek.
Not much related freeware for OS X out there yet, though, and the price was a bit steep. But I’m hoping this thing makes itself worth it for a few digital art projects. I’m using Evocam for image and video capture. Down side is that there’s no online archiving, so I can’t show recent pics anymore. But the current pics are excellent quality.
Water plants, scrub bathroom, clean toilet, water more plants, vacuum carpet… I think I want my own future domicile to be a very small, easy-to-maintain kind of place.
And I want genetically enhanced pets who only poop clean, round, odorless pellets.
My landlord is out of town this weekend, so the burden of household chores fell on me tonight: watering the plants, throwing out the trash, feeding the cats, cleaning the kitty litter boxes, sorting the mail. That done, I settled down in my room, with a cup of cocoa in my hand and a purring cat in my lap, to watch Finding Forrester while the laundry dried.
What an excellent piece of work, masterful even in its unassumingness. It does not seem to present itself as an epic in scope or execution, yet the film carries what would be an otherwise common story across that fine line between the formulaic and the classic. I would venture to say that Sean Connery was not even needed for the role of William Forrester: the part was written quite well enough to evoke inspiration from even lesser talents than he. (Not to say, of course, that Connery was not a splendid performer in the role of the sage eccentric. I got much practice in the Connery Accent, repeating his lines after him throughout the film. “You’re the man now, dog!”)
Thanks to Valerie for lending me the tape. Now I shall hie to bed, as I must wake up bright and early tomorrow morning to clean the bathroom.
With regards to the question of “What Would Jesus Drive?”, I refer you to the lyrics of If There’s a God in Heaven, He Drives a Silver Thunderbird, which I heard sung by Marc Cohn:
Don’t you give me no Buick / Girl, you must take my word / If there’s a God up in Heaven / He’s got a silver Thunderbird / You can keep your El Dorado / Man, the foreign car’s absurd / Me, I wanna go down / In a silver Thunderbird.
Case closed.
A note to tourists in Washington, DC: please walk faster. This is not Disneyland; your tour groups are blocking the capital’s vital sidewalks with your 0.35 mph human obstacles. As much as possible, try to match pace with native Washingtonians, who walk at about 5mph below the posted freeway speed limit. Faster if it’s a cold day.
(Visiting New Yorkers, on the other hand, may want to consider slowing down, so as to avoid the relativistic space-time distortion that occurs at near-light speeds.)
This morning — yesterday morning, I mean, since it’s past 1am — I finished up my kinetic photo shoot. “Kinetic,” because it involved my moving around and taking time exposure sequences on foot. The main sequence, for example, involved walking the full length of the National Mall, from the Capitol to Lincoln Memorial, taking a picture every two hundred or so steps. The resulting sequence, when animated, is a warp speed run down the Mall, zooming by the Washington Monument and Reflecting Pool before stopping at Lincoln Memorial. Revolving kinetic sequences around the Monument and various other DC landmarks were also done.
It was a good day for it. Much walking was done in the cold, cold wind, and it was fun to sit on the steps of the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorial and pull out my iBook to transfer photos on the fly. I’ve put most of them together into time-exposure animations in Director; now the challenge is to finish the rest of the multimedia project by Wednesday. Which is why I’m up at 1.30 in the morning, blogging from the MICA MA Digital Lab.
No rest for the weary.