VisualKaos

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging around in my freezer when it became painfully clear that I needed to free up some space.

The time had come when those two, half-used bags of Trader Joe’s chicken breasts covered with freezer burn needed to go. Oh, and the four bags of equally freezer-burned edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and … alright, all those yellow boxes.

I’ve acutally been storing these yellow boxes in at least 3-4 different freezers for years. Some of them from as far back as 1994. How many people can say they have stuff in their freezer from 1994?

It occurred to me, finally, that I was never going to open up those yellow boxes and consume the contents of them. Or the two cans that were stacked in there with them. So I took all those yellow boxes out of the freezer, along with the two cans that were stacked in there with them, piled it all up on my workbench out in the garage.

After removing the two bags of frozen chicken breasts, four bags of edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and all those yellow boxes from my freezer, I found I had lots more room in there to store some other items which used to fall out on the floor whenever I opened the freezer door.

OK, now take a look at the above photograph and raise your hands if you know what it is. Continue reading…

This is a test of Wordpress’ new application for iPhone. This is not an actual emergency.

Stephen King writes a column on the last page of Entertainment Weekly, I think it’s every other week, called “The Pop of King.”

Yes, I read and even subscribe to that degenerate and hedonistic periodical — and the print version at that. Hey, I work in publishing. I’m watching an entire industry, once noble, vital and relevant, spin down the toilet and more than 25 years of my life with it.

I know that my lonely subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone or DigitalPhotoPro or even National Geographic are not going to save those organizations from their ultimate and inevitable demise. But I would bet that the people who pour their hearts into and make a living from the publication of those print products appreciate the fact that there are still some people who like to drape it over their knees and thumb through the pages while riding the bus or sipping coffee or while seated on their personal, porcelain thrones.

This weeks King column refers to a previous column he wrote about his top-20 favorite rock songs of all time. He mentions that Connie Francis’ “Stupid Cupid” is actually on his list and that some of his readers thought that to be “insane.”

So this week he revisits the topic (can he not find anything else to write about? I mean he’s Stephen freaking King, c’mon, our industry is dying here!) and looked at his iTunes library, sorted it by playcount and gave us the REAL list along with the number of times each song was played.

So, I did that.

Don’t give me any grief here, I don’t write this blog as a way to make a living and I earn not a nickel from doing it so I’m not doing my own industry any harm by regurgitating less-than-original ideas. And no trees, that I know of, were harmed in the publishing of this content. If you can call it that.

On to the list! Continue reading…

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Hey, it’s my blog. Nobody said I can’t post a photo of my own damn self. Dooce does it all the time. And she gets like a gazillion page views a day. Of course, she’s actually kind of hot.

I was feeling like posting tonight and I was digging around for a piece of art to launch something in my head and well, this is it.

I know it’s not pretty (unless you’re a Nikon man) but it gives me something to talk about. So if you have no interest in cameras or Nikons or photography in general, I suggest you go here.

The photo above was taken by my colleague and long-time bud Chris Chaffee in the newsroom of the old Press-Courier in Oxnard, CA sometime around 1985.

I’d wish I could say that it’s much earlier because nobody should be wearing a mustache like that past about 1970 unless you are a cop, a firefighter or a huge Freddy Mercury fan.

I’d also like to say that it’s much later than that because I can’t really have been without hair on the top of my head that long ago.

Now that I’ve dispensed with the predictable OMG, the hair! commentary, I can go on.

For those of you who may have just googled Nikon and got to this place on the interwebs I offer you this:

Hanging around my neck are a fair amount of good, old Nikons. And by the way, if I were in water that was over my head, I would surely drown.

There are no less than four Nikon F2s, I can’t recall which ones are which anymore but I believe there are two F2SBs and two F2ASs. Three of them have MD-2 motor drives on them with battery packs (again, can I say, HEAVY?) and that’s all Nikkor AIS glass mounted on those bodies from left to right: 180mm f2.8 ED (sweet), 55mm f2.8 Micro-Nikkor (seriously sweet), 24mm f2.8, 85mm f1.4 and that’s an old 300mm f4 mounted on an FM2 with an MD12.

There’s a Minolta Auto Meter IIIf (I still have that somwhere) at the top and there are two Domke bags thrown in for good measure.

Sink like a stone I would.

Of course, I never ran around with five cameras hanging from my neck but it was typical then, as it is now, to carry two.
And back then you didn’t really have quality zooms to work with so you carried four or five lenes in your bag and a couple of strobes and batteries and chargers, probably a police scanner and misc. other stuff.
By the way, the Nikon F2 system, although bulky and heavy as shit is probably the most durable, flexible, responsive, fast and well-made professional SLR camera ever built. These things were just a marvel of precision and mechanical engineering.

And when you weren’t shooting with it, you could use it as a weapon.

A couple of other observations, notice the fact that I am standing in the middle of the “slot,” this is the position of the last editor to read copy before it gets typeset and the guy who ultimately gets his ass chewed off by the editor when there are any typos or other errors in the paper, and that I am smoking and there is a full ashtray right in front of me.

Yes, you used to be able to smoke in the newsroom, actually I think you could drink whiskey too.

Also, check out those fab CompuGraphic One terminals. Nice. They did nothing but set type and were connected to a mainframe that took up an average bedroom-sized room. These were pretty much brand-new then.

I wish I could read the date on the paper in the foreground but all I can see is that it is a Tuesday and this is the “street” edition.

The headline could have been written yesterday.

This was shot on Kodak Tri-X pan and probably pushed to 1600ASA and processed in Diafine and printed on Kodak EkatmaticSC fiber-based paper developed in Dektol.

The good ole’ days.

My knees hurt.
 

I know, my dear reader, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. So, since I know that both of you have just been on the edge of your chair waiting to read what I’m going to say next, I’ll begin with an apology and a promise that there will be a wealth of brilliant pontification to come and shorter durations between each monologue.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and for no reason that I can decipher, music is playing in my head.

I suppose it could be the last breath of a dream I was having that has run screaming from my memory leaving the radio playing as it fled. Just this morning I awoke with Alice Cooper’s ‘Is It My Body’ from the 1971 album ‘Love it to Death’ playing somewhere between my ears.

It’s not inconceivable that I might have been dreaming about the period of my life between 1971 and 1974 when I used to play that album from start to finish over and over until it became burned into the auditory cortex in my brain. But if I was dreaming anything at all, it was long gone be the time I was conscious enough to realize that I was awake, given another day to be on earth and that Alice Cooper was in bed with me. Continue reading…

At the risk of sounding a little too “Jerry Seinfeld” I’m going to start by asking, “Am I the only one who notices the fact that Leslie Stahl, venerable reporter with CBS News best known for her long-standing gig with 60 Minutes, doesn’t seem to know how to apply her own lipstick?
OK, in her defense, I’d have to guess that Leslie doesn’t actually apply her own make-up before going on camera for 60 Minutes. It’s not absolutely certain but she no doubt has a professional make-up artist doing that for her, albeit only with her direction.
I’m actually a fan of 60 Minutes. I, like throngs of other geezers and boomers, have been watching that TV show for decades. Along with the rest of America, I’ve grown up — or more accurately, grown old with — with the anchors of that show.
Tivo’d from last night’s broadcast, I watched it tonight.
Although it seems that the 120-year-old Don Hewitt and CBS can see that some of these folks have just been around too long and are trying to bring new blood on to the show like the little Brit hottie Lara Logan, and Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper, they still have the frail Morely Safer the gazillion-year-old Mike Wallace and that ghost at the end. Continue reading…

door knob, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

So, Sunday afternoon Linda and I were driving around town, nursing hangovers from a holiday dinner and cocktail celebration hosted by her boss at Flemming’s in Woodland Hills the night before and doing some grocery shopping and Christmas shopping.
We decided that we should make our first stop of the season at the Green Thumb nursery out in Newhall.
Green Thumb, as anyone in California knows, transforms itself every year around Christmastime from a gardeners paradise where you can get anything from houseplants to orange trees to picnic tables, to Christmas nirvana.
Passing through Newhall on the way there we passed by William S. Hart Park, as we have so many times before, except for some reason this time, we didn’t pass by, we pulled in.
I’ve lived in this valley for 10 years now and I never knew that William S. Hart park is the former home and ranch of the silent film cowboy star and director and sits on 265 acres of beautiful, hilly countryside.
When the old man died in 1946, he willed the property, the mansion he built there and all the western and indian artifacts he collected to the County of Los Angeles.
I did know that a small herd of buffalo live there.
OK, technically they’re bison but every cowboy movie I ever saw had indians worshiping and living off the massive herds of buffalo that once packed themselves on the the plains where interstate highways now pollute, defile and otherwise mess up.
I photographed the buffalo, some chickens, goats and other barnyard dwellers and I took this photo of the entryway to one of the old structures on the grounds.
I swear the first thing I thought of when I walked by was, “I wonder how many people have passed through that doorway? How many hands have grabbed that door knob?”
I know, I can be pretty pedestrian sometimes.

pug.jpg, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

At least two things happened today that were just kind of weird.

First, I was listening to a podcast of a Neko Case concert recorded by NPR at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. in April, 2006.
Between songs she was bantering back and forth with one of the other musicians in the band and at one point she said, “I could still get arrested after eating macaroni and cheese.
“I wasn’t paying that much attention so I didn’t actually get the context of this comment but that statement, that she could still get arrested for eating macaroni and cheese, for some reason just kind of recalibrated my ears.
Continue reading…

liberlman, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

Just when we need him the most, Liberalman is nowhere to be found.