RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

A little over a month ago I woke up early and set out for a pre-work bike ride. Since I work at a non-profit, showing up to work straight after an 11-mile ride is perfectly acceptable.

Also, morning rides on the Kelly/MLK Drive loop are also a hell of a lot more pleasant than afternoon ones. Without rollerbladers, dogs, children on scooters, people randomly wandering in front of you, walkers who take up the entire path, oblivious crew brats and all the other people that make me hate people, an early morning ride is actually nice and relaxing.

But a month ago, my ride was cut short by a glint of silver down in the Schuylkill. As I crossed over the MLK Drive bridge just west of the Waterworks, I noticed this flash of light. When I got to the far end of the bridge I was shocked to see that it was a Loon eating a fish. The fish, reflecting the light of the sun was what caught my attention. I had to cancel my ride and get home to pick up my camera.

Why?

Loons are some of my favorite birds. I’d also never seen one anywhere near Philadelphia. You think it just looks like a duck with a cockroaches body? Well listen to the sound they make:

Loon 1

Loon 2

The loon couldn’t choke down the fish… but it tried for as long as I watched it. Some fishermen told me that they come through every year. If you’re looking to catch them on the Schuylkill leg of their migration, just head down to the Art Museum about a month ago and keep your eye out. Until then, here are some photos:

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So Second Life is kind of for weirdos, but when someone takes an idea from Second Life (flying penis) and makes it a reality… and buzzes Chessmaster/Russian opposition leader Gary Kasparov with said flying penis, then it’s fucking awesome.

At a minimum, it’s better than Polonium poisoning. Now at the risk (or absolute guarantee) of sounding like an asshole, wouldn’t something like this be great at a Hilary Clinton rally? I’m seeing a big black one. But maybe I’ve gone too far… Still had to say it though. Sorry.

In September 2006, while wandering aimlessly around the streets of Montreal, I accidentally found the 2005 World Press Photo Exhibition. Five Canadian Dollars got me in the door. The rest was a horribly depressing orgy of brutal, beautiful photography.

While getting out and seeing hundreds of 24×36 gallery prints is great, the 2007/2008 photo + photographer interview feature on this year’s website is pretty damn cool.

Also, as a word of advice to all you people out there with a flash site. This is how you do it. Simple, clean and to the point. Why make it a flash site at all? Be sure to click the little magnifying glass in the lower right.

Check out Tim Hetherington’s soft, blurry, outstanding winning photo and fan favorite, Platon’s portrait of Vladimir Putin. I’d link directly to them… but it’s a flash site. LINK

Look, listen, learn.

My google homepage “Quote of the Day” feed occasionally puts up quotes from famed Jupiter Resurrectionist, Arnold Toynbee. Here’s today’s:

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
- Arnold Toynbee

And people wonder why Toynbee ended up on so many tiles.

Not long ago I had the privilege of shooting the Fairmount Arts Crawl. Although it was a sprawling event that covered an enormous area, I could have stayed at the Neighborhood Potters wheel all afternoon. Here are a few shots from the demonstration wheel:

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When you go camping in Acadia and you live in Philadelphia, here’s what you do:

You get in your car in early evening and you drive. You hit North Jersey at the end of rush hour. By the time you leave Connecticut, it’s night. Massachusetts and New Hampshire fly by in a haze of rest stop Starbucks. When you get to Maine between midnight and 1AM, you still have 4 hours of driving to go.

I rarely talk about music here, but I became a Radiohead fan in those 4 hours. I’d put Amnesiac on the pre-Ipod CD changer thing. It came on around 3AM. I was on a small highway in rural Maine. My girlfriend was asleep. I was alone on the road. It was the perfect setting for an alien abduction. It wasn’t my favorite album and it still isn’t, but for that hour it was just about the greatest thing in all of creation.

And then you reach your destination.

You’ll approach Seawall campground just before dawn. Before you get in line for an early morning campsite, pull over just past King’s camp store and walk out onto the rocky beach. Smell the air. Listen to the waves. Watch the stars fade as the sun rises over the ocean.

This time of year I start to crave Maine. I just talked to an old friend up in Portland and she kept bugging me about when I was going to come up for a visit. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t live there and vacation here.

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Want to hear something that will like totally blow your mind? I mean something so big that you’ll be all like, wow man that’s proof of a higher power and shit. Or it’s just coincidence. Either way, here it is:

From earth, the angular size of the sun and moon is virtually identical. That means that the sun and moon appear to us here, to be the same size. This produces the amazing coronal displays seen during a total solar eclipse. The odds of these 2 objects lining up so perfectly are truly astronomical. (no pun intended)

This is even more outstandingly fucking fantastic when considering that around 5 billion years ago when the moon was born, it was much closer to the earth. It moves away from us at the rate of about an inch a year. That means that we humans exist in that incredibly narrow band of time that allows us to witness a total solar eclipse. The odds of sentient life to exist on a planet where this phenomenon exists, during the infinitely small period of time when it does exist is like, wow.

I’d be willing to bet that the presence of total solar eclipses make this planet far more unique than any of the life on it. When we enter the galactic version of the global economy, this might be earth’s biggest draw. Tourists will flock from light years around to witness the beauty and majesty of earth’s 1 in a trillion miracle of light.

What I’m saying is get your ass out there and witness one of these things before you die. Your next chance is August 1st. The only problem is that you have to go to China. Here’s a map of every eclipse between now and 2025. Plan now!

I’m knee deep in work, but I had to share this. Best headline ever:

Great tits cope well with warming

At least one of Britain’s birds appears to be coping well as climate change alters the availability of a key food.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) commented that other species are likely to fare much worse than great tits as temperatures rise.

Every month I check my stats and pull out my favorite search referrals. These are search terms that people enter into google or yahoo or possibly even lycos to find my site. Over the past few months, the hits have gone from 30% insane to only 5-10%. Whether that’s reflective of the site’s recent content or of new algorithms over at google I don’t know. Whatever the trouble is, the recent insane search deficit has forced cuts in the totals. Down from over 30 just a few months ago, here are April’s top 20. Enjoy:

20. my own birds repellent frequency
19. custom storm trooper suit
18. his massive buttocks
17. r.i.p love park
16. party and bust a nut
15. tiny blowjob
14. construction hardhats for sale in reno
13. bigfoot sightings 2007
12. fuck buddies near oil city pa
11. dog crap pickup kempton
10. ball shaving
9. pictures of dogs with penis out
8. black and white photos love
7. what are these indicative of voice tremors pitch changes facial twitches and shaking
6. anorexia africa
5. drawings of jewish people during jesus’s time
4. spacecraft music
3. gay donkey porn
2. netti v casual encounter
1. did the nazis have a motto

In May of 1962, Centralia PA’s volunteer fire company was busy with their annual set-the-landfill-on-fire Memorial Day spectacular when something went horribly wrong. A vein of coal ignited and spread to the mines beneath the little mountain borough. Forty six years later that fire still burns.

Since then, Centralia’s population has dwindled from about a thousand to about a dozen. Why? Occasionally the earth will split open, sucking anything on the surface into 150 foot chasms of fire and poison gas.

By the mid-80’s most of Centralia’s population had been relocated by the federal government. In 1992, the state of PA claimed eminent domain over the remaining properties. Those that were abandoned were torn down. Those who chose to stay do so at their own risk.

Which brings us to last Saturday. I took a trip with fellow photographers Albert Yee and Andrea Gingerich to the ruins of the burning town. None of us died, and a good time was had by all. Enjoy the photos:

This is my favorite photo of myself. It was taken by Andrea Gingerich during a weekend trip up to Centralia, PA. I’ll post my own photos later on in the week, but none will be as good as this one. I love it:

When moving out on my own, I had visions of base, raw survival. One bad week and I’d end up like that bird in the post below this one. On the streets, dead and discarded. It turned out a lot better than that.

On May 1, 1998 I moved to my first apartment. For all you slow witted people, that was 10 years ago today. It was a $650/month 2 bedroom at 46th and Osage. I worked at a video store and ate a lot of Rami’s lunch-cart falafel. My deep seething and totally unfair hatred of Penn students was also born.

My then unrealized goal was to move to West Philly and to find a job with Penn. After that I could enjoy their staff benefit of free classes and work my way to a free elitist degree. I eventually found my job and started classes 8 months later.

West Philly was a lot different back then. Penn still had a virtual wall up around its campus. There wasn’t much glitz around. The cute little renovated rowhouse across the street from my apartment was still a rundown place for local crackheads to gather and argue into the night. You could buy a house then for 1/5 of what it would cost you now. The bowling alley next to the video store was still an abandoned warehouse where my colleagues and I went for “coffee breaks.”

The apartment was great. Like any self respecting 19-year-old we socialized heavily. Weekend get-togethers swelled into small parties. There was sex, drugs, debauchery, dancing, drama, video cameras and thank fucking god, no such thing as youtube. But stupid college kids we weren’t. Half of us weren’t even in college. And beside that, there was also plenty of discussion of photography, music, movies, theology and art. But we weren’t a bunch of know-it-all, pretentious assholes either. There was a respectable balance.

Most of all, I liked lying in bed in the dead of night with the window behind me cracked. I loved the sound of the train off somewhere in the distance. I still do.

But back to May 1. In what would become a ritual, when the truck was returned and the heavy lifting done, my roommate and I got a six-pack and some take out. Ten years ago today, I opened one of the windows in my massive new bedroom, cracked a beer with my roommate and sat there feeling something I will never feel again.

Out of the trees:

A little too soon:

It’s a normal reaction, but taking this last photo left me feeling very sad. I wrapped the baby bird in a shroud of litter and left it in a nest of dried pine needles in someone’s sidewalk flower box. There’s no place in the city to bury a baby bird. There’s nothing to eat it.

Today it’s raining and I’m feeling annoyingly personal. Occasionally when I’m in these moods, I’ll pull an old journal from a dusty box and see what I was doing however many years ago on this date. It turns out that 4 years ago today marks one of the most important events of my recent life. Since this is a website and not some bullshit personal blog, you can all go to hell if you want to know what that event was. Seriously.

But anyway, I flipped back to May of 2003 and found this item that I don’t mind sharing:

They were two parts of the same building, facing in opposite directions. She could look out and see trees and hills and cattle grazing inside of an electric fence. He started out at the on-ramp of a road that led to a glistening human skyline just short of the horizon. She held up an important wall. One side of her pressed against the exit. He was a detachable window frame.

And that’s as far as I got.

On Tuesday of this week, I traveled down to Cape May, NJ to go birding with an old friend. Believe it or not, Cape May is one of the best places in the United States to watch annual migrations. But this post doesn’t have too much to do with birds. This post has to do with an experience I had at the Farley Plaza Rest Area along the Atlantic City Expressway.

As a crazy person who’s already discovered 5 Toynbee Tiles at 4 rest areas in 3 states, I was sure to drink an extra cup of coffee so that I could justify a stop on the A.C. expressway. Being even more insane, I was then able to spot these sparse, nearly unidentifiable fragments and positively identify them as the remnants of an old original Toynbee tile.

Fortunately my friend Mel (who had just wandered out of the car to photograph grackles hopping around in the rest area’s lawn) was nice enough to pull over and let me take the archival shots.

My girlfriend is tired of my posting articles she emails me, so in the interest of full disclosure, this is from one of those emails. It represents… well just watch it:

This is an interactive post. I need you all to do the following:

1. Shut down your computer.
2. Go outside

That’s all.

Last night I waited 5 hours (3 spent on my feet, completely immobilized by a crowd of 35,000 people… I think the Bush Administration calls that a “stress position.”) to hear Obama’s stump speech and get this um… awesome 300mm shot, which I then cropped down from 12.8 to 0.6 megapixels. All in all, the 15 minutes he spoke was pretty cool. The people I waited in various lines with were all nice, but 5 hours? Damn.

The atmosphere was like a non-competitive sporting event. Next time, I gotta get a press pass.

Yes I’m really saying that I judge my own shots from the pre-”debate” rally at the same standard as the New York Times. Actually Times photographer Béatrice de Géa has a slightly nicer Canon camera and a much wider lens… but in my own defense, I was told by a cop to get back on the curb before I could get the wider shot myself.

Here’s mine:

And here’s hers:

And acting as judge and editor, I like just like my Obama shot better than theirs. Mine:

Times:

And since this is my site, here are a few more of mine:

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On Sunday night I went to and photographed a trifecta of performances at Tritone. The night included a set by the broken-jawed Justin Duerr, a trash bag fashion show put together by Jamie Campbell and her 10 beautiful models and a headlining set by Seizure 17.

It was a great night of performances that produced some excellent photos. Except for the fashion show, I shot without a flash. In a dimly lit room, with underexposed shots, it’s hard to capture much color information outside of red and black. For example, here’s a shot from this morning’s New York Times, taken by Damon Winter at last night’s infuriatingly pointless, soul-crushing talk-radio level “debate.”

Ed Rendell is a red faced man, but in that shot he looks like Satan. And Chelsea should really get that jaundice taken care of. There isn’t a white balance adjustment in the world that could find the right color information in that shot. The information just isn’t there.

My strategy for Justin’s set was to convert to a sepia kind of tone through color manipulation and desaturation. I also did some b&w conversions and some other creative tinkering. All in all, I really like these shots. Fashion show and more are coming soon:

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