Enjoy Yourself

I'm in China. No one knows where my luggage is. Rather than spend a third day in the same clothes I went to the local 'everything in the world' store for some Enjoy Yourself™ underwear and other necessities. Yes, I think I will. ~ss.

I Don't Wanna Holiday In the Sun

Berlin Wall - 3/20/09 ~ss.

A Peaceful Commute

Amsterdam - 3/18/09 ~ss.

When Signage Fails

London - 3/14/09. ~ss.

The Montauk Project

On August 3rd of last year we visited Camp Hero, the former US Air Force base located at the very end of Long Island in Montauk. Originally de-commissioned in the late 60's, conspiracy theorists believe the base, along with it's SAGE radar system, continued to be secretly used to further the mind control and time travel experiments started with Project Rainbow, otherwise known as The Philadelphia Experiment. According to legend, Runaway kids were rounded up and used in testing, some having their psychic abilities enhanced to where they were able to materialize things out of thin air. Time portals were created allowing researchers to travel in time and space, even exploring underground tunnels on Mars. Things finally went awry after the Montauk Project successfully connected with the 1943 U.S.S. Eldridge, the ship used for the original Philadelphia Experiment, on August 12, 1983 - 40 years after the ship's initial disappearance and rumored dimensional travel. During this meeting in time, two men, Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, claimed to have leaped from the U.S.S. Eldridge while in hyperspace, landing disoriented in 1983 Camp Hero. Shortly after 'Junior', a monster from another dimension, was unleashed and wrecked havoc across the base forcing all power to the station and the SAGE radar to be cut physically with axes. Some say Junior still lurks around the area near the former Battery sites. Since the 80's, most of the facility has been sealed off, with the bunkers even filled in with cement. A few years ago the grounds were re-opened as a state park with all of the structures off limits to the public. We sneaked through the fences to get a closer look at the SAGE and some of the grounds. The woods surrounding the camp carry a strange atmosphere with uprooted trees and twisted branches that have since grown into a bizarre lattice. I recommend wiki-ing The Montauk Project. It's fascinating reading. ~ss.

Have You Seen?

Scaramouche (1952) - dir. George Sidney

I think my dad recorded this one onto VHS when I was a kid because I remember thinking Stewart Granger was the coolest guy around since about sixth grade. Based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche takes place during the French revolution. Andre Moreau (Granger) is the bastard son of a nobleman, unaware of his parentage. His best friend writes an incendiary manifesto criticizing the royal class and receives the business end of a fencing foil belonging to the Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), the greatest swordsman in all of France, who is in love with his cousin the Queen, who has ordered him to marry the ingenue Aline (Janet Leigh), who is falling mutually in love with Moreau, who may secretly be her brother.  Right?  Moreau swears revenge on the Marquis, but has his work cut out for him since he knows nothing of the sword. He takes up with his on again/off again girlfriend Lenore (Elenore Parker) and her troupe of traveling performers playing the masked Scaramouche. In secret he uses his revolutionist contacts to learn fencing from the Marquis' master instructor. You know how this must end, with probably the greatest sword fight ever caught on film. And, of course, some shocking twists!

Scaramouche kills it. Granger has some of the best written dialogue and timing you're likely to see (think of a more dashing, more poetic Bruce Campbell). Both he and Ferrar give amazing technical performances when it comes to the swordplay, doing their own stunts none the less, and with sharp swords. Ferrar moves like a dancer (he was). There's humor, history, horse chases, love triangles. The costumes are incredible and the music outstanding. Pops knew what he was doing when he dubbed this one on to the old yellow and black Kodak VHS stock. I'm glad he did. I suggest you check it out. But hurry, the dvd is out of print and although I was still able to pick one up through Amazon, there's not that many left. ~ss.

Sunrise Monk

Early morning, Hong Kong, 2008. ~ss.

Lost In The Fire

I recently spent a weekend in Portland with a new, old medium format camera. It was my first time shooting medium format and I guess I didn't educate myself enough on how to take care of the film after I had shot it. I lost a lot to overexposure. Here are a few that made it out alive, if somewhat affected by the whole experience. ~ss.

Summer Rain

They say scent is strongly tied to memory, but sometimes I find weather sends me back more than anything. ~ss.

LazyAss da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci had a problem with procrastination. 

This from an article by W.A. Pannapacker in the current issue of The Chronicle Review. Constantly distracted by new inspiration, da Vinci would often lose interest in completing projects after he had conceptually figured them out. New ideas in engineering, science and the arts would strike his brain and drag him away from the commissioned work at hand, instead filling pages in a sketchbook. It made him appear inefficient, even lazy. He was hounded by creditors he owed work to and made fun of by his contemporaries for his eccentricities (fucking Michelangelo!) Deadlines were missed and pushed, sometimes by years. He wasn't hugely prolific like Picasso who once said "Give me a museum and I'll fill it." The number of paintings that survived da Vinci are about 20, a good percentage of those, such as his famed Mona Lisa, were in his possession at the time of his death. He was still working on them. His famed sketchbook is filled with inventions ahead of their time, yet how many of those were ever produced by him? 

You may be asking yourself, 'What Leo did with all his time, besides grow that rad beard?' According to one of his biographers, Giorgio Vasari, da Vinci was afraid of success. He never gave anything his best effort because if you don't really try you can't really fail. Perhaps. I'm guilty of that mindset. After all, what if you do give your all and find out it's not enough? What happens to your dream then? Best to protect it by not quite giving it a full go. Then you can still have "the dream."  We've come to recognize Leonardo da Vinci as a genius, the genius, but he was also an exacting perfectionist and in many cases he realized that the human hand could not achieve the god-like perfection of his imagination. In many cases, he let perfect ruin good. Maybe that's why he never finished so many works, why he was drawn off task to other shiny possibilities, temporarily again. Is it perhaps true that you can't rush genius? His sketchbook helped him work out ideas he would use in later artworks that we consider masterpieces to this day. If a good, diligent Leo would have made all his deadlines and been constantly producing instead of searching, maybe we wouldn't see him as the consummate genius. Maybe he would have been prolifically mediocre. And we probably wouldn't have that cool sketchbook either, which wasn't even published until long after his death. Man, did this guy do anything?

So I say, procrastinate away!(do it later) Think about things. Work them out. Use your introspection and become better. Circle back and improve it. And remember the above when you wonder why this blog isn't so frequently updated.   ~ss.

we hope for better things.