I normally send pics to Flickr from my phone but I love the new lj interface for the iPhone. I tend to not try new apps unless I can see a clear schema for how I'm going to use them, and I'm a completist, but I like how I can post pictures with personally relevant text and have the content in a more interactive medium.

Anyway. Here's a pic from around the fire pit in my parents' backyard, from the first time we tested it. My dad had just placed an entire dried out baby evergreen tree on the fire, one that hadn't taken when he'd tried to transplant it to their backyard. We threw a few pieces of charcoal on the fire then went to the store, to find something to grill. For a test run, it worked superbly.

The next night we cooked a huge pork tenderloin - it took nearly an hour - and asparagus, then nestled a pot of baked beans on the edge. My grandmother and uncle dropped by, my uncle with his new puppy under his arm, and it was one of the most restorative evenings I've had in a long time.

And let me tell you, there's nothing like cooking over a fire for two nights in a row to make you appreciate the convenience of every other, ever method of cooking.
 

 

 

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

My mom emailed me today, with a link to the first in a series of videos she's making to advertise the props Curious Theatre made for The Lieutenant of Inishmore. They're hoping to rent some of these props out, and I have no doubt they'll be able to, being that they are excellently conceived and constructed.

I must say, I feel this video explains a lot about me.



I'm also quite amused that the related videos are all from huge props warehouses.

One of the things that mystifies me about Southern California is the architecture. Not what the houses and buildings look like but how they're conceptualized - I cannot imagine ANY building on the east coast requiring one to step outside in order to get to the bathroom, simply because it would be impractical and cold in the winters. Here, yeah, I might have to dash through a light rain or put on a hoodie, but nothing truly inconvenient.

That's another thing - I arrived out here in January, during a cold snap. It felt marvelously temperate to me. I didn't touch my coat once between plane rides, didn't even think about it. But I'm growing accustom to the smaller degree differential. Yesterday, heading to the farmer's market, I grabbed a hoodie since it felt a little cool out. My body is adjusting to the new range of weather conditions admirably well. Other than a few overly hot days it hasn't been too bad, and only the two worst of those inspired the harshly listless too-hot-to-think feeling that dominated my NYC summers. It's a dryer heat out here, not as dry as Colorado but less of an adjustment to my system.

I had a crisis of consciousness yesterday. An honest to god crisis of consciousness that mostly involved deliberations about self-representation in the digital world.

I massively, massively under-represent myself online and while I have a feeling I know WHY (reductive version: fear of knowing and being known), I'm calling bullshit on myself. I do some pretty fucking cool stuff, have some pretty awesome things to say about myself and the world and there is no goddamn reason for me to not do so.

As a breakdown of how things will function around here:

I want everything I do digitally to feed into my meganwest tumblr account since I find it to be elegant and cunningly designed, and particularly like the archiving system. Someday I hope to have that tumblr account display at my favorite domain, subtextual.net, but some background shenanigans need to happen first.

The one exception to that will be the photos I put up in my professional meganwest Flickr account. Why? Because feeding that there would mean sporadic huge batches of hi-res concert photography. I will, instead, post in some fashion that will hit Tumblr when I upload new photos there. I intend for that Flickr account to be solely for my concert photography.

As listed at the top of my Tumblr, I exist in the digital sphere a number of places:
me on:

del.icio.us
facebook
concert photography flickr
everything else flickr
the fyrehaus
last.fm
ravelry
twitter
youtube

They're self-explanatory except for the Fyrehaus, which is undergoing its own growing pains but is the place I post anything and everything I want to about music and how much I love it.

The twitter, delicious, fyrehaus posts, flickr photos and this journal all feed to tumblr, which in and of itself can then be syndicated on LJ, which I am doing in this journal in a brilliant effort to create a feedback loop of massive proportions.

Shortly there will be an actual Etsy shop to go with the above, rather than a shell of an account.

I've managed to re-post this a number of times, trying to figure out how to get it to display properly on Tumblr. Learning curve!

There are things I really never thought I'd have to deal with in this job, and bedbugs would top the list. Well, top the list of those things I consider even remotely possible. Bedbugs doesn't top, say, an alien attack or mysterious illness. So, really, it tops the list of stuff I think happens in real life rather than on television.

Bedbugs! I just can't get over it.

It's so humid here. I thought, yesterday, that I'd be able to deal with it - that I'd re-acclimate after coming back from Colorado, blah blah blah. But, no, I'm fed up. I know we're at the hottest point of the summer right now, according to averages, but we had a very hot heat streak in June, so apparently the rules are out the door this year. I do actually think that it'll all cool down from here, but when we're set to hit 94 today, that doesn't mean much.

Once I hit about August 10th, I know I can make it. Unfortunately, that's three weeks away. I'm not going to feel guilty about whatever I do over the next threeish weeks, because the heat makes me grumpy and unproductive. I'll make it up in time.

Wow, am I giddy today. I don't think it's the coffee - I have coffee nearly every day. Well, I have been trying to cut back lately, but . . . still, this is just a cup of corner-stand-man coffee. This is nothing.

It's been a long time since my job excites me on a regular basis, and I don't think that answering emails is really doin' it for me this morning, but it's something concrete and defined, which is nice.

Two years ago my mom, dad, brother and I went to the Matisse Picasso exhibit at MoMA Queens. There were some nifty arrangements there, but it was a little crowded - the most prevalent memory of that day, for me, was watching some of the Andy Warhol Factory footage they had playing in a side room. Film has my visual medium of choice, so it shouldn't come as a surprise, but it does.

I keep a little box of memories. Ticket stubs and front pages of Playbills, newspaper cuttings given to me and stuff I've ripped out of magazines, pieces of paper that carry great weight, but only to me. One of the things I have in there is the program from that exhibit - it's one of the few things that is an entire booklet rather than just one slip of paper (two others being the booklet from my college graduation and the one from my brother's). Written on the front of it is this quote I took down - I can never remember it exactly, but it's about how there are some things Matisse will not be able to talk about after Picasso is dead, for there are things that only he would understand.

I remember seeing the quote written on the wall, a huge script in grey writing. That one thing left me with more of an impression of both painters than their artwork ever will, and that tells me much about how I respond to the written word. That quote is about a friendship that could be consuming or overwhelming or subtle or competitive, but important. Do friendships like that just happen? How much work do you need to put into something like that - I feel like I would look my entire life for something like that, something so important that can't be spoken of with people not involved in it, something that defies words and boundaries - but I don't think those are things you search for, that you can search for. I think those are things you find or create, and discover you have after they're already in place.

Maybe I'm falling prey to a kind of reserved British mentality - when you want something too much you can't work too hard to get it. You can't be obvious about the wanting, wanting is pedestrian, somehow.

And, yes, fuck that and all, but sometimes it is appealing - there's something about not being obvious about your desires also meaning that you can't be ridiculed for them.

Holy cow I can't even believe the stupid mistakes people can make with their email accounts. I, of all people, should stop being amazed at how stupid people can be, but I'm not. Today I'm barely trying to keep my patience as I answer some of the most inane questions known to man.

Bloc Party is good to keep on the headphones if I want to stay energetic and a bit protest-y. The Libertines, however, are far better for when I want to let the energy ebb and flow, and the anger drain away.