external monologue

martin's progress

i stopped by the martin's house last night on my way home from BS Hour. lang hadn't been able to come out because they were trying, unsuccessfully, to get their IKEA cabinets installed. when i stopped by they had just reached the point of complete frustration at trying to find right-angles in a 100 year old house. lang explained to me that seeing as most of the house was built before the invention of the circlar-saw, nearly every board in the house had been cut by hand. give a little here, a little there, and before you know it everything has a slight curve to it, and your kitchen has a 2-inch slope.

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thanks to jake, this morning i found someone who wasn't out of D70's and i finally placed my order. the camera should be here within the week if everything goes smoothly...

bird on a wire

yesterday afternoon before going to see fog of war, stephen beck and i went to the senior art exhibit over at UTC. from what i could tell, the majority of the work had been done by graphic design majors as there was little to nothing in the way of more traditional mediums like painting or photography. graphic design has always struck me as something of a pseudo-art in that it lives somewhere between the worlds of fine-art and advertising, and, while i know this isn't a particularly original thought on my part, i sometimes have a difficult time taking it very seriously. not that i don't respect the artists' abilities - the few good graphic designers i know always blow my mind with their creativity and originality - but it always seems strange to think that in most situations, the goal in mind is the sale of a product. hmm... i think i have more thoughts on that, but i'll leave it at that and perhaps pick it up again in comments.

that said, i did find a couple of the projects yesterday somewhat compelling, one of which is pictured above. a student had caged a handful of songbirds in a box full of garbage found along the roadside, and was attempting to make a point about how well animals have adapted to the onset of the concrete jungle in modern-day life. the box was covered with avian epithets like "feathered cockroaches" and "avian rats" but was filled with seemingly unconcerned birds who flitted from one piece of trash to the next, all the while singing.

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robert macnamara is an immense personality. that's what i walked away with last night. in terms of quality, the fog of war was nearly flawless as a documentary - interesting, well shot and edited, incredibly scored - but what struck me more than anything is how powerful and influential a man macnamara was and how he handled that influence. don't get me wrong, i don't mean to say that i think the things he accomplished we're all good, or even mostly good, but i have to say that i sat in awe for most of the film at the sheer enormity of his persona, as captured by director errol morris.

benanna's engaged!

if you haven't heard, and many of you probably haven't, ben thomas and anna williams got engaged over the weekend. it actually happened on friday afternoon and we spent a good part of the weekend celebrating. (thanks to the tortilla factory roof-bar crew for catering to our celebratory needs...) ben is actually one of my oldest friends and, even though we haven't kept us as well as i wished we had in recent years, i'm very excited for him to take this next step... and he asked me to be in the wedding, which is really cool.

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so, i had a great weekend. good times with friends and some pretty great conversations. a group of us from cornerstone spent about 6 hours on saturday tearing down an old carport with the widows harvest ministry. its great to be able to help meet needs like that, but also great to spend the day outside working with such great weather.

tonight we're going to see the next film in the indie film series at the bijou, fog of war. its an errol morris documentary about robert macnamara, and from all reports, its quite good - 7:10pm.

chattanooga charbucks

well, it finally happened. chattanooga has its very own starbucks store, with a drive-thru to boot. i was out running some errands over by the mall, and spotted a couple of the employees hanging up the "now open" sign out front. apparently today was the big day and they had balloons and free samples inside. now, i have to admit, i'm not a big fan of starbucks, as they fall into that whole category of corporate entities that do their best to put mom-n-pops out of business. but, i do have to respect their consistent product, and i admit that when i'm away from greyfriars its just about the only coffee i'll drink. and from what i hear, we're about to get a handful of them here; one on UTC campus, and another in the read house.

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mmmm.... i got to play with a D70 today over at the wolf camera shop. wow are they nice.

no big weekend plans... i just heard on the radio that the play version of glengarry glen ross is being put on at a local theater, so i might try to catch that tonight. and tomorrow cornerstone is tearing down some buildings for the widows harvest ministry.

downtown night shots

tuesday night i dropped lang off at the elkin's house in brainerd where they are staying temporarily until they can move into the new house. on the way home i decided to take the long way home, driving down mccallie ave into downtown and then market street all the to st. elmo. i love the quiet of downtown chattanooga late on a weeknight. i got this shot at the intersection of MLK and market, capturing what little traffic there was that time of night.

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a few things:

you may remember the jarmusch film i mentioned a couple months ago, down by law. well, he has a new one, that he's been working on since the 80s apparently, and it looks great; a dialogue piece with an ensemble cast to make any wannabe filmmaker green wtih envy. the trailer's here.

i'm chompin' at the bit to order my new D70. i've been reading previews and reviews of this camera for what must be going on 6 months now (and saving my pennies), and they're supposed to start shipping today. arghh... can't wait.

roadside rescue

on our drive back from st. louis on saturday, right in the middle of downtown nashville, we got stopped behind a buick lesabre that could no longer handle the stop-n-go weekend traffic. we pulled over and jumped out to push the car to the side of the road from the middle traffic lane that it had stopped in. it only took a minute, and the woman was able to call for help on a cell phone, so we really didn't have to do that much, but it was pretty fun standing in the middle of the interstate and stopping traffic while we pushed.

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a strange thing happened last night. i arrived home around 6pm after work to an empty house - something of a rarity - and had the place to myself for a full hour before going out to BS hour. then, i came back home around 10, and still, it was empty. its strange, but i've gotten so used to having people around the house that i hadn't noticed how much i missed the occasional quiet evening at home alone. not that i'd want it all the time - i do love our communal lifestyle - but it was a pleasant evening.

perkins at the courtesy

you'll remember the late, late night hanging out with perkins that i mentioned yesterday? well, a good portion of it was here at the courtesy diner trying my best to finish off one of the strangest dishes i've ever eaten, a slinger. as best i can tell, its hashbrowns, eggs, hamburger patty, bacon and cheese topped with chili and onions, and from the shape we were all in the next day, it can't be good to mix all those things together.

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i went to see eternal sunshine for a second time last night. i watched it first on saturday night with mesh and josiah and really loved it. i've appreciated all of kaufman's films up to this point, but i think this is the first one i've actually enjoyed. while it still has the weight and darkness of his previous films, it brings a hope thats somewhat surprising from a typically pessimistic writer. like most of his other films, its largely informed by nietzschian philosophy, but in the end takes a final turn that leaves nietzsche rolling in his grave. two thumbs up - go see it.

missing mokko

i've got to start getting into the office earlier if i'm going to be able to keep up with this daily photoblogging. things are so busy here now that from the minute i walk in to the minute i leave, i'm pretty focused on problem solving. good for business, bad for blogging.

the weekend in st.louis was short and pretty exhausting, but thats not to say that i didn't enjoy it. i actually felt pretty sick for most of friday unfortunately, thanks to lack of sleep, dehydration, and a late, late night talking with perkins on thursday. this on top of a slowly brewing head cold that came to a full boil on friday morning. thanks to some ibuprofen and a handful of DayQuils i felt nearly human by the time wedding bells started ringing.

i have many great photos from the weekend, but unfortunately i left my card reader at home. instead, today i'm posting this old photo of roommate morris because he's in japan for a week, and i miss him. come home soon mokko...

the sparkler gauntlet

well, we're getting a late start to st. louis. i hadn't actually planned on being able to blog today, but i've got a couple free minutes so i might as well. i had to dig around to find this photo on the iBook this morning, as i have neither new pictures in my camera, or access to the backlog at work, so, its an old one. its from jenn greens wedding, back in december. this is the sparkler gauntlet they ran moments before jumping in the car and heading off to the honeymoon...

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well, looks like brent just showed up, so i guess we'll hit the road. probably won't be able to blog on friday what with the wedding and all, but i'll be back on monday with new photos.

st.paddy's

some of you may have noticed that i didn't post the "daily" photograph yesterday, which may actually be a first for me. not that i haven't missed days before, but on a work day, when i'm at the office and in front of my computer all day i rarely skip it. yesterday was one of those days where i walked in and the rest of the day felt like a race. clients were calling from the moment i walked in, and it didn't hit me until mid-afternoon that i hadn't blogged. so, for anyone who was counting on a photo yesterday, i apologize, but i think i'll more than make up for it today.

today's photo is another backlog; one i've been hanging onto for a while. i think it's my favorite building downtown: the volunteer building. i probably take a picture of it at least once a month for one reason or another. i'll be getting the car back tomorrow, along with my camera (and a few slices of pizza that have been in there since sunday, ugh), so hopefully we'll be back up to speed later in the week.

for those of you in chattanooga, you might have seen some of my photos in the latest pulse issue. mesh, josiah and i did a series of pieces entitled "drinking in chattanooga," one of which was a documentary-style piece on the brewing of beer. through miscommunication and lack of space my photos we're unfortunately shrunk to a miniscule size for publication, so the editor agreed to put a link to my website at the end of the article. so, if you go looking on the homepage, you'll see a new link to the images and text that we're originally supposed to run. that makes for a total of 9 photographs on this post... enjoy.

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mom and dad are still in town, and we've been living like kings. dinner at st.john's monday night, and la altena last night with a party of at least 15 - my father generously picking up the tab for everyone's burritos and negra modelo's. board meetings start tonight, and i leave for st.louis in the morning, so unfortunately this royal lifestyle will shortly be coming to an end.

hoptime

more photos from the big river brewery piece for the upcoming pulse issue. i ended up shooting about 100 photos for the piece, so i have loads of extras. maybe i can sell them back to big river as promotional photos. these are hops, the ingredient in beer that gives it bitterness, and a variety of other flavors and aromas. this is in their full flower form, their most photogenic state, which big river uses for their porter i think; for most brews they're dehydrated and pelletized before being thrown into the brew kettle. you can read more about hops and beer-brewing in general here.

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as i mentioned on friday, my parents got into town this weekend. we spent the day together yesterday with my brother tim and his wife ari (and their dog harley) who came up from atlanta. my dad has board meetings up at covenant, so they'll be here for the week.

so yesterday my parents noticed how much difficulty i have getting in and out of the passat these days, and offered to get the door handle fixed. we dropped her off this morning (along with my digital camera, so there may be a few days of backlog-photos) and with any luck, she'll be a little less quirky when i get her back.

black helicopters

this picture doesn't do justice to the strangeness of the situation in which it was captured. i was walking down the walnut street bridge with brian and mesh yesterday when suddenly lines of black helicopters started streaming over the horizon. they were staggered into groups of 10-15 and there must have been 5 or 6 passes of these large groups, followed by one bigger helicopter loping along at the end. thankfully i had my camera and was able to get off a few shots before they all flew by. very surreal...

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no big plans for the weekend. hopefully getting caught up on sleep and spending some time with my parents. they get into town tomorrow night.

brewtime

i took photos this morning over at the big river grill and brewery for a piece i'm working on for the pulse. i'll have more to say (and show) about it next week when it comes out. this is down in what they call the cellar: a room full of tanks full of finished beer that all the taps in the building draw from.

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a busy, busy day today. more photos to shoot this afternoon and another story to work on with mesh. must get to it...

music update

once again, i didn't get around to shooting anything yesterday, so here's another backlog photo. saturday afternoon at lang and charity's house i noticed this interesting silhouette while yelling up to lang on the porch. its pretty similar to one i did a few days ago, but i like the juxtaposition of the organic tree shapes and the more rectilinear man-made lines of the aerial and the chimney.

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from the now-playing department: i don't think i've mentioned it on here before, but i gave up buying music for lent this year. typically that wouldn't have meant too much of a change for me, but lately i've been on a bit of a CD shopping binge - sometimes buying a couple albums a week. anyhow, i figured it might be time to take a break and try to enjoy a few of the discs i'd accumulated. however, between friends loaning me new music, and the iTunes store giving away free songs i haven't exactly been successful, but, i have discovered some great music:

Franz Ferdinand - Darts of Pleasure (actually, heard this guy on KEXP months ago -- thanks to beck for importing the CD)
The Starlight Mints (another recommendation from beck)
ELO - Mr. Blue Sky (watch this trailer)
Mint Royale - Shake Me
Bonnie Prince Billy - Werner's Last Blues to Blokbuster (an old favorite with a new freebie MP3)

in america

yukari, sister of yukiko, spent the evening at our house last night working on some paintings for an art class at covenant. the rest of us had gone out to see in america, and she came by and hung out with morris' friend kazu who's in from japan for a couple of weeks.

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from the sappy-sentamentalist department: in america was exactly what i needed last night, and probably what i've been needing for some time after so many weeks of such sad and hopeless films like 21 grams and house of sand and fog. it was so pleasant, and sweet, that i almost felt guilty watching it - nearly scoffing at its characters hopeful outlook on life and the director's willingness to look away from difficulty. but i didn't scoff - instead i just watched and was immersed in the joyful triumphs of a family struggling in a strange land. compared to other recent films, in america feels like a warm comforter on a chilly night, a cup of hot chocolate after a long slog through the rain...

but enough about that... i can't wait for this.

bob the builder

there was all sorts of home improvement work going on in st. elmo this weekend. here you can see bob demarco cutting up sheets of drywall for some work we did at his house over the weekend. we hung a couple of doors and then some sheetrock on saturday morning. on my way home from bob's, i ran into the roes moving from one apartment to another in st. elmo, and then stopped by to see the progress on the martin's new place. on top of all that, the weather is reaching that point where all i want to do is sit outside and stare into space... which i did all sunday afternoon, and got a nice pink sunburny sheen on my (ever-expanding) forehead.

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i watched the sopranos season premiere last night with josiah, aaron, and a few others. i don't think i'd ever really seen it before, but i have to say i enjoyed it and i can understand why people get so excited about this show. there's something very realistic and almost mundane about the lives these mobsters live and i think the genius of the show is probably the fact that most viewers can personally identify with some element of the show, even though its ostensibly about organized crime.

tonight we're going to see in america, 7:15 at the bijou, and according to mesh, its one film not to be missed this season.

cross number 5

this isn't exactly hot off the presses, but my boss jeffrey and his wife heather had their child this past saturday. this brings the cross clan offspring count up to 3: teddy, zachary, and the newest addition lexi, short for alexandria elizabeth briere cross (and plural for Lexus, according to jeffrey). they had the child at home and everything went smoothly. thankfully it was a weekend day so the house was not full of us employee types, which is probably best for everyone. charity took birth pictures, her first real photo assignment, which i unfortunately will probably never get (want) to see. oh well...

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from the linguistic-gymnastics department: (if you're interested in neither linguistics nor computers you may want to stop reading at this point... anyone other than jesse still reading?) this whole Lexus/lexi discussion reminds me of a little debate lang and i got into yesterday. he was creating an FAQ email to clients explaining how to keep viruses off their computers and networks. but he actually used the word virii as the plural for virus, going on the assumption that words with a us suffix are made plural with i or ii. now i know this rule holds true in some situations, but the word virii seemed a bit of a stretch so i went google-diving and came up with this.

kermit the backdrop

lang martin is a hero. yesterday i brought in that broken flash card with all the gobbledygoo on it and, aside from finding a number of I/O errors, he turned out a handful of useful pictures; one of which was the aforementioned kermit-the-frog-green laundry room portrait. charity got to pick the color for this room, which lang was a little hesitant about, but as the night wore on he started to come around. i think this may be one of my favorite pictures of them.

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last night i finished watching splendor in the grass. i can't remember who recommended this film to me; it must have been ari, or cannon, or maybe it was netflix. either way, the reason it was recommended was its similarity to one of my favorite films all the real girls -- which it was similar to, almost painfully so: young love, sexual tension, and the disillusionment inherent in the title taken from the wordsworth poem:

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.

other interesting tidbits: its warren beatty's first film, and its the directed by the same guy who did on the waterfront, elia kazan, who passed away this year and was remembered at the oscars.

monochromatic canopy

i have some bad news. last night i worked over at lang and charity's new house doing some painting, and i took quite a few pictures with the digicam. when i got home, i tried to pull them off the smartmedia card with my cardreader and there was only junk (a bunch of weird text and characters) on the card. then i tried putting the card back in the camera to see if the photos were still there, and it wouldn't start up. it just flashes some error code. so, either the smartmedia card is acting up, the camera's broken, or the cardreader is corrupting the cards. hopefully its just the 64MB card and i can swap it out with my 16MB card and limp along until my D70 arrives. i'm going to try the switch this evening and see what i come up with. if the cardreader is bad, or the camera is, then i may have to get along with backlog photos for the next month or so. i suppose that could force me to be creative, but it may not be too interesting.

the most unfortunate part about the whole situation is that (i think) i lost last night's pictures, some of which were really great: a portrait of lang and charity in their kermit-the-frog-green laundry room, kiko dancing in the kitchen, and isaac flicking off the camera (as per usual). so, instead, today's photo is from our recent snowday: a worms-eye view (is that the opposite of birds-eye view?) of the monochromatic canopy of trees in our driveway.

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but, i also have some good news: Beastie Boys Return With New Album In June...

shoeshelf

i have a feeling this is going to be an entire week of late mornings. i was doing pretty well getting started early last week, but i've lost my "go" the last few days. i suppose getting 5 hours of sleep a night wasn't really helping things, and the weekend, while rich, was pretty draining. and then, 21 grams didn't really help things last night. more on that in a minute. today's photo is of the shoe shelf in our foyer. since moving into this house, we've implemented a no-shoes policy; partially as a nod to morris' eastern influences, but also because it helps to keep the house a bit cleaner. this means all shoes stay stacked by (and around) the back door, along with a handful of slippers for residents and guests (some of you will remember the infamous doggy-slipper shot).

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so, i'm still trying to recover from 21 grams last night. its not that it was particularly violent or disturbing in its subject matter. to be honest, i'm having a difficult time putting my finger on what was so affecting about it. it left me feeling much the same way as innaritu's other film, amores perros. he tends to focus on the inherent fragility and instability of our human lives in a way that makes you, well at least me, squirm in my seat. its not that he shocks you with unbelievable plot twists (its actually a fairly simplistic story) as much as subtly building a sense of dread at how awful things can get. three-quarters of the way through the film i'm practically begging for it to be over, knowing exactly where its headed. i walked out feeling sick to my stomach, and i still don't know what i thought of it. is being "affecting" enough to make a film good? and can you walk out with knot in your gut and still like it?

poker

well, the weekend with perkins was a complete success. here's a shot from the aforementioned friday-night poker game: josiah, mesh, perkins, and charity (among others) crowded around the table up at our house. i think the best part of the weekend may have been all the meals we had together. apparently in the year and a half that perkins has been away, he's tuned into quite a chef. he prepared a number of tasty meals - crepes for breakfast on saturday, baked salmon saturday night, and asparagus pasta on sunday afternoon. a feast-ful weekend.

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i don't have much to say about the oscars. i wish city of god had won something. i'm glad mystic river did. and as much as i liked return of the king, 11 oscars seems a bit ridiculous.

21 grams tonight at the bijou. be there...