Moving Day

Hello, dear reader! I’ve moved my blog to new digs at www.meilevenson.com. (Yes, a bit namecentric). There’s a new design and all of the old posts are there. I won’t be really updating this one much more, but come on over to the new place and check it out!

search keyword cloud

New hair cut makes me look like a kid. Which at my advancing age is not bad, right? I’m quite amused by the keywords that find this here blog: mother daughter, leg tattoo, japanese tattoo, tigar tattoo. None that really pertain to these ramblings, I must say. Just another random blog filled with random thought from yet another random human. And so it goes.
My foray into the light was quite successful. I’ve made some great headway on The Baron in the Trees. Who knows, I may finish it before my birthday at the end of the month. The availability of free Wi-Fi is wide spread. And so back to the Baron and his sad end.

olympus trip 35

When I first started with the photography last year, I kind of went mad with buying film cameras. Every week, I would come one with a toed up camera in hand and a wild look in my eyes. I don’t really use all of them anymore, many are not functional and kind of musty smelling.

I’ve really taken a liking to Olympus cameras, I have 3 of them now. The lens are sharp and there seems to be more of them around than the Canons or the Nikons. Plus, the styling is quite nice. I found this one at in a pile of crap at Thrift Town. It came with the smelliest bag and strap in the world, I had to throw it in the trash before getting on the vomitous 33 Stanyon. This camera is a point and shoot, with zone focusing, which I’m finding kind of tricky to use. But when things are in focus and the light is right, it takes some purty pictures.

massive girl crush

I haven’t been writing that much about music because there hasn’t been a whole lot that I’ve been excited about. All I can say about St. Vincent is this: go and buy Actor RIGHT NOW. Buy it on vinyl with the mp3s. You won’t regret it. She’s like Sufjan, but less precious, or like Joan Vs. Policewoman, but more shimmery. If you need more convincing, there’s my favorite song off this album:

ghostly flowers and the return of the fog

My beloved fog has returned to our fallow shores, just in time for summer. I’m up to my ears on scarves and sweaters.

justin herman plaza

It is with a broken heart and a heavy hand.

A heavy hand tracks the empty pool

The empty pool, a faulty shutter and a languid aperture.

A languid aperture and with a broken heart.

my new obsession

Through Flickr, I found this amazing and fun bit of software called Poladroid (http://www.poladroid.net). It replicates the effect of Polaroid instant film using jpegs. Since Polaroid stopped making film, this is kind of a cool (and free!) alternative and an excuse to start using my crappy digital camera again. If you download this, make sure to donate a few bucks. It’s totally worth it and will provide hours of entertainment.

what we talk about when we are taking pictures

So, dear reader, your faithful blogger is kind of in a mire: a creativity mire. I feel like I carry my camera around like a pretty accessory, but haven’t used it in any interesting way. My last couple of rolls were taken along the usual routes that I walk, going to work, leaving work, going to the store. Yawn. So maybe this is why people take classes: to get assignments. My enthusiasm is a little damped, too, by the discovery that my favorite camera, the Olympus OM 10, has a sticky shutter which is messing up my already toed up pictures. It’s surgery time!

my problem with academia

So I finally got around to scanning and uploading my final project from my beginning photo class. There are many things wrong with it, like I was so burned out by the end that I didn’t care that it’s filled with typos. And the pictures are over exposed. And they are mounted crooked. Which leads me to the point of this rant: I don’t know if I’m meant to be in a classroom setting anymore. I have the fatal combo of thinking I’m better than my classmates and a sloppy approach to things that I don’t get paid to do. The best part about the class was the darkroom, City College’s is done up right.

brain hiatus

In the past few weeks, I’ve become sloppy and careless with my work. I’m going to chalk it up to the workflow which BdR likened to a bucket emptying over the head, but still. As a pro, shit like this is not acceptable (to my personal fascist work ethic). So here’s hoping that the brain comes back soon.