The New Boredom

Earlier this year I was presented with the opportunity to go ride and shoot stuff at Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park in Cleveland. I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews from everyone that has ever been there. And to top it off we were actually having a bunch of snow around that time of the year so the chance to go ride was pretty appealing.

But none of that mattered because my snap reaction to the invite was “Heck yeah, they have an Ikea in Cleveland! I’m in as long as I can swing by there for at least an hour.”

I wasn’t joking.

Alas, a pile of family matters (not related to Carl Winslow) and a case of identity theft kept me from going on that trip.

Ikea still rocks. Further evidence can be seen here thanks to my buddy Steve Wentz.

Some day I will actually make it to that big pie in the sky.

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Some day I will also have an office. And when that day comes, I will have this plaque made and mounted in that office.

It’s been I think exactly a month since I’ve been lazy and done one of these. So here are some iphone photos from June.

This is fast becoming one of my favorite dishes to cook. But my friend Mike thinks the close up shot of it looks like a a giant infection getting way out of control.

That’s Doug-E up in front of me. This is about an hour or so before I crushed that deer driving home from Crested Butte. Why did you leave me Doug? If only we had stuck together, we would have both made it out of there… or both hit that flock of asshole deer.

I’m not sure if Moga is drunk or not. He was measuring how far it was to spin in a circle. Moga = priceless.

Afternoon nap time.

Sometimes the phone just goes off. I can’t take credit for the accidents but I should know how to do that by now after all those art classes.

Area near Nathrop. Driving by the sunset. Much better than being in a dust storm in the same half square mile for the weekend there.

All I care about shooting right now is sunsets and water. The little headlights peeking in the corner make this for me. The headlights are located there completely on purpose. wink.

See you next month for some more lazy photography.

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I got this huge book of World War 2 propaganda posters from the uber-sale table at barnes and nobel a few months back for something stupid like 3 dollars. It was full of hilariously un-PC stuff like this:

Nothing like a good old world war to just bring out what everyone is actually thinking?

So here’s the thing. I liked Transformers 2 for a lot of reasons despite the fact that I should have hated it for an infinite number of reasons. Basically I thought it was everything that it should have been. A lot of people want to bag on Bay for “molesting their childhood idols” but I think that’s a lot of rubbish and those people need to drink a tall glass of crap.

Thankfully, I’m not alone. Some one else out there thinks highly of Transformers 2. And while the review is glowing with ironic praise, it does make a lot of well supported points as to why it can pass as an art film.

“ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane.”

I’ve had similar experiences watching tons of experimental avant guarde films which are undeniably art films.

Read the review here and weep as you realize you judged Transformers 2 through the completely incorrect paradigm. Then bask in its insane glory.

And given the attitude of much of modern art, I don’t think Bay is really all that different. He wanted to make something so decadent and excessive that it would make your head hurt. A lot of other assholes artists out there are trying different methods to reach much the same end effect. Deal with that.

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I’ve always found it hilarious when taxidermy puts the corpses of animals in neat little anthropomorphizing poses and zany human situations.  Like two rats boxing.

How novel.

You’re going too fast. You can’t see the edge of catastrophe that you’re teetering over. Here, take a look:

Big ups to Spomer and the riders for making this happen. Very cool stuff.

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Ozu, you had some stuff right and by “some stuff” I mean “pretty much every imaginable thing.”

I had to watch Tokyo Story 4 times in school but every time I saw it I fell asleep at different points. Nothing to do with the movie being bad by any means. Mostly just my bad timing of going to class to watch a slow paced movie after all nighters of hustling work. Between the 4 viewings, I managed to see the whole movie. Same goes for Pather Panchali.

This is an awesome little article about a kid in the UK swapping his ipod for an original Walkman tape player for a while:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm

I’m pretty psyched at how sharp some of the kid’s observations were. I’m also surprised to hear the kid mention that he was glad that “most technology” came after he was born. Some day his kids are going to laugh their little smug asses off at dad’s archaic ipod… right?

Anyways, one thing that stood out to me was his mention of the satisfying thunk of physical control buttons. Good to see a kid these days can appreciate this sort of thing. I wonder how many more years we have left of that before kids will expect no tactile response from touch screens?

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I don’t know anything about this photo- who took it, who is in it… anything. I just know that I like the noise and the red and the eyes.

I wish I had taken that photo.