Late night at the Amphora

I’m just back from meeting up with my friend Jen for a quick cup of coffee. In a humorous replay of our college selves of fifteen years ago, we bummed off to the Amphora a few blocks from her parents place in Vienna, Va. True to form, we had a little hummus, a little coffee and caught up on life, love, and careers — this time it was my turn to be somewhat dejected about my circumstances.

Jen and I have a brilliant relationship; we agreed years ago to:

  1. Never hassle one another about keeping in touch, birthdays, etc.
  2. Always tell the other what they want to hear. We have plenty of people in our lives for good advice, what we really need is someone to tell us we’re right…

Jen’s always been good at number one above, but never remembers the second rule when it comes to my girlfriends. On the plus side, she’s always believed in my talent and ability, and tonight was no exception. Frankly, I was a little down, and hanging out with her was a good pick-me-up; sometimes we all need a cheerleader in our lives. Thanks, Jen.

Àpropos de cinéma

Having read High Fidelity a couple months ago, I became interested in top 5 lists, and created the following list of my favorite movies:

  1. 12 Angry Men (the best courtroom drama movie that manages to hardly ever enter the courtroom)
  2. Heathers (nod to the 80’s films from my formative teen years, besides I need a sardonic comedy in here somewhere)
  3. Big Sleep (film noir with Bogey & Becall, had to do it)
  4. 12 Monkees (obligatory Sci-Fi, just beat out Blade Runner because I find Darryl Hannah’s thrashing at the end too over the top)
  5. Mr. Deeds goes to Town (tough call, but I’ve got to nod to my childhood with a little Kapra)

Painfully missing:

The above list lent itself to a “best of each decade” list, but in doing so I ended up with different results (since I had more slots to fill):

This list is now romance heavy, (Star Wars and Croupier made appearances on the first draft of the list, but got dropped in favor of Chinatown and Dark City). I’m reserving judgement on the best movie of 200* until it’s all over.

Back home

I’m back home after a week in New Orleans. Thursday I was at Xavier to do a little recruiting for the University of Maryland graduate school, the actual reason for the trip to New Orleans in the first place. We only met with 15 undergraduates, and most of them were not eligible for the summer program we were there to discuss. I ended up feeling pretty useless since no one really had any relevent questions for me. On the bright side, it was good that we were there the week before Mardi Gras since next week the Xavier students are off Monday thru Wednesday, and will probably skip the rest of the week. Next year we’ll have to do a little more pro-active pre-planning, and get more sophomores and juniors.

Speaking of next year, I’m not sure I’ll want another whole week in the Big Easy; I got kinda tired of the whole thing after 2-3 days. It didn’t help that I was staying dead in the center of Bourbon Street, and the music blared until 5am everyday. I did have a rather large pang of regret leaving today since the weather improved readically, and the average age of the tourists was finally droppping into the early thirties/late twenties as I was leaving. Also I clearly missed the best of the parades; as evidenced by the New Orleans promotional piece playing on the plane from Chicago to Baltimore. I suppose I’ll have to schedule the trip closer to the actual day next year.

Genius in silver

You find out the oddest things on the web; it works out that the largest collection of pictures of one of my favorite photographers (Henri Cartier-Bresson) is in New Orleans. A Gallery for Fine Photography in the French Quarter is a small gallery that hosts in impressive collection of photos from two of the world’s most famous photographers, Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in addition to many works by notable photographers. Their inventory is online (registration required), but small web images don’t do these images justice. In visiting the gallery I was surprised at two things: genius is seeing the beauty in anything and modern imaging techniques don’t hold a candle to silver-gelatin prints (black & white to you and me).

In viewing the images by these masters, the pictures by Ansel Adams surprised me the most — my favorite photos were not the typical landscapes you see by Mr. Adams, but instead still life photos. Particularly, Buddhist Grave Markers and Rainbow is moving and beautiful without the need for color to emphasize the rainbow’s impact on the photo. An even further departure from Ansel Adams famous landscapes were Pipes and Gauges and a portrait of Brassai, the former probably would not have worked in color, and the latter certainly could not have benefited from the change.

The exhibited work by Henri Cartier-Bresson was more in keeping with photos I’d seen in the past, and indeed included several of his more famous shots. Certainly, Rue Mouffetard and Behind the Gare St. Lazare are photos I’d seen in books by Cartier-Bresson, but the virtuosity of the photographer is evident in each of these pictures. Mundane in topic matter, each seems to suspend a thought, an expression, and hold the viewers gaze locked in contemplating the moment. The motion of those depicted, the transience of the scene are paradoxically held up and examined for all time; life frozen in silver-gelatin forever.

Also striking about all of the images in this collection is that both men worked in black and white, and the resulting images hold a tonality and richness that is not conveyed in other forms of reproduction. I have yet to see a press or inkjet solution for black and white printing that compares to the range and subtlety provided by the traditional silver-gelatin photographic process. Indeed it is not clear that the sensors in digital cameras can even reproduce the analog smearing effect the speeding gentleman in Behind the Gare St. Lazare achieves. Someday other reproduction methods may capture the feel black and white film, but until then, black and white art photography is still the domain of wet darkroom processing.

If the opportunity ever presents itself, stop in a have a first-hand look at the works of two great men, and the many other brilliant photographers whose work hangs at A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

When did I become a romance councilor?

I’ve spent the last four days trying to convince someone that their potential May-December romance with an eighteen-year-old would be a bad idea. The fundamental problem isn’t about age or even about life experience — it is really about the people involved.

The guy spent the last 4 days telling me all about all the things that their relationship is messing up in her life; some trivial, some not so trivial. He tells me about how mature and intelligent she is, how much he’s attracted to her, and how he knows the relationship is not a great idea because she’s so young, and they would have to maintain a long-distance relationship for the foreseeable future. What I never heard in the all that time was how he was contributing to her life, just how great she was since it’s been a while since he’s been attracted to someone this much. While I’m glad he’s having a good time, and she is enthusiastic about the relationship, it’s seems pretty clear the relationship is a destructive one for her. My advice has consistently — and increasingly pointedly — been to let her down easy and move on, but it’s been like throwing rocks into a stream — the effects are all on the surface and vanish almost immediately, but throw enough rocks in there, but hopefully he’s hearing me on some level.

I had originally thought that my concerns were about the disparity in life experience between the couple, but tonight’s dinner changed my perspective entirely. I don’t know if I looked at them one too many times, or if it was that I was eating alone, or if they were just that drunk, but the couple sitting at the facing table engaged me in conversation. After a minute or two of talking they had bought my dinner, shots of tequila all around and I was seated at their table. It turns out that they are engaged in a May-December romance as well, and their families would be none too pleased to find out about it; it seems that she went to school with his mother in younger days. They face a greater age difference then my aforementioned companion and his young paramour, and even greater distance issues (he’s military), but my advice to the two couples differed radically.

My dinner companions were exuberant about how their relationship has transformed both of their lives for the better; how before finding each other they despaired for the possibility for happiness, and how much that happiness has come to mean to them. Furthermore, their concerns over the relationship centered around the burden the other would bear in dealing with their respective families; they had no hesitation about their feelings about each other or in dealing with their own personal consequences. I felt no guilt, no hypocrisy in encouraging them to pursue their relationship in spite of their families.

I can only attribute the difference in my responses to the unique situation of each couple. Am I jealous of the first couple’s relationship? I don’t think so, I can’t see myself becoming a destructive element in someone else’s life (again); possibly, I’ve been there too many times. Am I letting my own past color my opinions about the relationships — probably, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I’m pretty sure that there are no easy answers, and all relationships are more about the people involved and are therefore entirely unique.

I should probably just read more books, talk to fewer people, and shut-up and mind my own business…

Zydecko, blues, and gumbo

Arrived in New Orleans yesterday; I caught a standby flight and made it here 12 hours earlier than planned. Peter Chang joined me on the trip since he couldn’t catch his flight to Iraq. He managed to get thrown off my flight and came in 2 hours after I had landed. We’re staying at a hotel right on Bourbon St. in the French Quarter; so we’re right in the heart of the action. I’m not expecting to get much sleep in the next few days.

I hit the streets with less than 2 hours sleep, and met up with Bill (my friend Jen’s husband), who is in town for the NADA conference. The next 8 hours is a blur of hurricanes, blues music, and wild revelers. I crashed around midnight — I know, I’m a slacker… Last night I also discovered that I mis-scheduled this trip, and we’re here a week early; Mardi Gras isn’t until next tuesday. Oh well, maybe it’ll be easier to survive the week before Mardi Gras instead of the event itself.

I hear I missed a wintery mix of rain, sleet, and snow back home — my loss.

Whew, done…

Bugs squashed, IE conquered! The forces of goodliness and rightdom have triumphed over the mechinations of evil!

It works out there was a combination of a Microsoft “feature” with a conflict in how my code operated that caused the description block to vanish before it was displayed. It worked everywhere else since other browsers follow the standards. Suffice it to say that if Microsoft had been even vaguely standards compliant, I’d have been done two days ago.

I’m declaring the photoblog design and code, “done”—at least till I can get IE5 installed. Now I just need to take some photos…

Unfortunately, tomorrow is my first official day of classes for the semester, “blech.”

Pulling my “hair” out

Internet Explorer sucks. I’ve finished most of the design work on the photoblog, and now I’m testing it out on a variety of browsers. Firefox—check, Opera—check, Safari—check, OmniWeb—check, Internet Explorer—major havoc. ARGH!!

I’ve cleaned up most of the weirdness in IE6 (can’t check IE5 since it seems to be impossible to have both installed at once), but the mouse-over information for images isn’t being set. When a user moves the mouse over a full-size image on the photoblog, it’s supposed to add description information over the image. Every other browser supports the code easily, IE is a massive problem due to well-documented CSS/JavaScript/DOM bugs, some of which have been around for 2-3 years. No software vendor that isn’t a monopoly could stay in the market without even addressing basic feature failures. To make matters worse, the act of testing the pages in Internet Explorer has introduced (or at least exposed) several spyware applications on my computer. Happy, happy, joy, joy—not.

For those of you still running IE, switch to Firefox; more features, faster performance, and less spyware. There’s just no excuse…