Old School…
Yun-Fei Ji
February 21st, 2010 § 0
During the ‘Blizzard of 2010 I had the pleasure of photographing Beijing-born American artist Yun-Fei Ji for the weekend arts section of NYT.
Lots of fun outdoors to be had.
Run for Haiti
February 21st, 2010 § 0
This weekend NYRR put the word out and 10,000 showed up to run for Haiti, over $400,000 raised simply by tying on some running shoes.
Speaking of tying on some running shoes, I did make a certain “commitment” for later this year…a certain day in November.
Jamie Oliver’s TED wish
February 14th, 2010 § 0
This is a great presentation and something I have come to believe is necessary.
This all ties in to running and the marathon last year, to Team for Kids, and an iPhone app that Jamie Oliver created with recipes and tips.
This is a screen cap from the app, 20 Minute Meals. It’s really a great little app, lots of pictures and videos, plus updates with new recipes come too. I got the app when I was training for the marathon and decided to forego takeout as much as possible, in addition to it being cheaper. It was so fun making all the recipes that I found myself dining in nearly all the time.
If you watch the video Jamie makes the case that we have not passed to our children the knowledge they need to cook, select foods, and make healthy choices. Even adults, and I count myself in there, do not know their way around a kitchen. David Letterman can joke about “Know Your Cuts of Meat” but in truth that is about all I do know! I could not tell you the difference between a shoulder and a rib roast, chuck, round, whatever, the nomenclature is greek to me. And I come from a family where we had very (too!) regular family meals around the kitchen table, cooked by my mom and by my dad. Fast food was limited to once a week, we’d call it fend for yourself, or ersatz, usually friday.
That’s a cookbook I wrote out as a kid. I liked grilled chees with pickals and a glass of milk. Still do.
The whole Team for Kids mantra is get children moving early and often, because we have an epidemic of obesity going on. Oliver makes the same point in the video above, and he says we are not doing enough in schools to teach kids about food, not doing enough to supply healthy meals in schools, which are often the bulk of the meals kids get, and we are not doing enough to pressure fast food and the food-industrial-complex to get the crap out of our food that they put there to increase profit.
For you out of town readers, living in Brooklyn I have always observed that the poorer neighbourhoods got the worst food, the worst vegetables, the worst meats. The closest grocery to me has great staff, but un-appealing veggies. I see them trying. It might be me single-handedly buying more veggies than anyone else!? And with more and more people turning to food stamps in this recession, it is only going to get tougher- what WIC will purchase is often nothing I would touch. So it is no surprise that when real food is unappealing, and when you don’t know how to prepare it properly, a family will turn to crap because the kids will eat it.
This is nothing that is sustainable or desirable. Oliver points out that the biggest killers in society today are not violent crime, or ‘terrerism, but the diseases of obesity and bad diet. By a huge margin.
Jamie’s mantra is pass it on, which is what I am doing.
Site Update 2010–The Year We Make Contact–
January 19th, 2010 § 3
A New Year and a New Website…well, another update.
What’s that Crazy Font you say! – Well Sir, Madam, it’s “Eloquent Regular” by Jason Walcott after the long lost Pistilli Roman. Just the perfect Tonic to Pick You Up I say! Peppy? And How! Well, where can I get some? Veer!
There is some confusion on the intertubes about who created it first-either John Pistilli or some other blogs say Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman-I am sure some typophile can correct me. Depending on how it is deployed it can either look playful or ‘eloquent’ or classic like Bodoni/Didot.
It gets a little funky small so I am not sure about the blog header, but I wanted consistency.
And yes, designed by me. The function parts come as before from Slideshowpro and Director, it is based on their layered thumbgrid demo for those that care, with some custom ActionScript thrown in. I posted before about it here.
The site coding is from Freeway Pro. I don’t know of any other web design software that allows a total idiot like me to make a decent website.
Every site is a trade off, for me my goals are to get people to see a lot of work quickly and big if they want to. So the update saw me redo every image for the site at 900 px wide-This is about as large as I want to go.
Also performed an upgrade on the portfolio-
Went for a couple portfolio meetings yesterday and one editor was surprised by the physical porfolio-she was seeing a lot of laptops. Really? Talk about No Plastic Sleeves! Speaking of, yes those are acetate sleeves, the International House of Portfolios kind (iHOP). I’ve read a lot kvetching over there about the practice-but Really? You want to change the order of your book or one image and you can end up reprinting most of the book? And what if you don’t want to print on any of the double side offerings- or on matt paper? I love Harman Gloss. It is what I print on Period. And it ain’t two-sided. You think I’m gonna glue that sh– together? Really? You think acetate is going to lose you work? Really?…I think bringing a laptop in is gonna lose you work. You have no idea what it really looks like.
Another editor said they were seeing a lot of Blurb books. For the price it might be cheaper even. But then you give away control of colour I would expect, and what you can print in CMYK is nothing like what you can print on inkjet or c-print. Which brings me to my final point; minilab develop and scan. I had a roll done recently just to see what was up, what was out there. Picked the wrong lab. L&I on 22nd. Can you say rip-off? 18$ for dev+scan-get this a whopping 15mb scan. Do you know what that really is? 2 Megapixels. Yes, your iPhone has 2mp resolution. But they call it 15mb-which is a to confuse the point, 1700px x 1100 px is ~5mb per channel RGB- there’s you double digit file size-15mb! Thanks a lot! And colour-don’t get me started! But it did make me think about what I am seeing from the gang rediscovering film-
wonky purple shadows, no detail, stained highlights. Excuse me while I book an ad shoot. Off to look for another lab.
Newton
January 19th, 2010 § 0
Whatever Apple has up it’s sleeves today, remember the Newton.
Everyone likes to say it was ahead of its time, and even when that time came, it was still ahead. Yes the date there is 2006, when I ebay’d it. I was not the first owner either. Who knows how many had put data into it’s “soup”. That was how the Newton stored information, in one giant archive. You could search anything for anything and every application has access to the entire soup. The only reason I post about it on the eve of Apple’s announcement of the iWhatever is that it bears mentioning that this idea of a tablet really points backwards to a paper-society. All the metaphor were there, the handwriting recognition, pen input, you could fax from it, you could even email from it but that was not around really when the Newton was new. It was a digital paper pusher. The iWhatever will be very different I am sure.
For AH, a day in the life.
December 22nd, 2009 § 5
Don’t get on the plane.
Room with a view
Pick one
a cloud follows me wherever I go
its just alec baldwin
how many jokes can you come up with that involve Tiger, POTUS, and Putter?
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? well…Frank Rich has a nice column about Tiger and the decade in the NYT
David Sedaris always makes my holiday brighter. With apologies to Eggleston.
you may recognize the colour scheme from my website. ?
When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out-its turn now!-through the keyhole. Yes there is someone in that house who is keeping watch, a man is working there while I dream away. He leads a dogged existence, whereas I am pursuing futile dreams. Through the light alone the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to the night….a rather large dossier of literary documentation could be studied from the single angle of the lamp that glows in the window….” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.