349 posts tagged “chicago”
Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know that I got a new photoset up at my Flickr account recently, a collection of random shots during a winter walk this week through the Uptown neighborhood here in Chicago where I live; they came out really nice, I thought, so wanted to let you know about them. Here's what I have to say about the set over at Flickr...
"Can I just mention again how flabbergasted I am by the richness of this camera's black-and-white mode? Maybe it's because I shot almost exclusively in black and white in college (for financial reasons, natch), which is why I think about it a lot more often than others; but the fact is that my little Coolpix just on any given day can naturally capture the kind of super-rich range of graytones I would've killed for most of the time in my old film-and-paper days in the '80s. The fact is that almost no 'digital darkroom' work was done at all on these images; that's a far cry from my old physical darkroom days, when extensive work would have to be done nearly every freaking time I walked in there."
Anyway, hopefully more personal updates coming here more regularly this winter; but for now, at least lots of new photo updates regularly. I hope you enjoy.
I keep forgetting to take these while I'm out, but I finally took my first series of photos yesterday for use in panoramic software, resulting in the stitched image you see above. Do make sure to take a look at it in its biggest size; that's the precise thing I'm excited about with this S550 and panoramic shots, is that I can finally do ones that are high in quality from one edge to the other, ones I could actually print and frame if I wanted, after doing a fine-tuning of the settings and getting a really smooth shot (which admittedly today's example is most certainly not). I've got to get more into the habit, but I'm really hoping to present a lot more of these, and to hopefully take more care with future ones and get the elements more perfectly aligned.
This is the 3300 block of North Clark (north to your left, east to your right), halfway between Belmont and Roscoe in the Lakeview neigborhood on the northside, or in other words three city blocks (six human-sized blocks) south of Wrigley Field. It's precisely because this block is so typical, I think, that makes it a perfect example of why nearly every block on the northside sometimes seems cool and unique; notice here the great combination of old Industrial-Age buildings and modern, how several have been gussied up in a "Painted Ladies" style color scheme, how many of the first floors have been renovated into very contemporary pubs and restaurants and boutiques, how the entire thing is surrounded by tall, mature trees. Chicago is a very thriving, very alive city, in an American Midwest full of dying Industrial-Age cities; and you can see that even on just random corners of residential neighborhoods, which the block in this image very definitely is. I have to confess, I really loving in a section of an urban environment where I'm surrounded by scenes like this, an active city environment that relies on the cultural, architectural, and culinary diversity of immigration combining with the jobs and money of the creative class, sitting on a broad sturdy base of history and gravitas. Maybe that's a bit too flowery a way to put it, but you hopefully see my point.
One of the many reasons I'm so excited about owning my brand-new Nikon Coolpix S550 is because it has so many manual settings, an important thing for me as a former fine-art photographer in film and paper form, as well as a photography major all through college in the late '80s and early '90s. See, these digital cameras have all gotten incredibly good now at automatically sensing all the conditions of that shoot, and automatically adjusting its settings to achieve the so-called "perfect shot" every time; but what artistic photographers do is deliberately tweak with those settings in ridiculous ways, for deliberate aesthetic effect. And so I've been itching to start doing some long-form tests of my new S550, to see to what kinds of extremes exactly I can push these camera's settings.
For example, the three things that actually determine the quality of a photograph are the shutter speed (how long the lens is open), the aperture (how wide the lens opens in the first place), and the film speed (expressed by either the American standard ASA or the European one ISO). See, the way that film actually used to work was by getting coated with photosensitive chemicals, and then adding tens of thousands of tiny flakes of silver that would turn black when exposed to light in these chemicals; that literally defines the shapes in your image, your "negative," that when projected onto paper produces your positive "print."
How "fast" or "slow" a type of film is, then, reflects how many of these grains of silver are embedded in that film; a low number like 64 will have just an insane amount of almost microscopic grains, while a high number like 2000 will have a lot less grains, much bigger in size to make up for the difference. So the less grains you have, and the bigger they are, the less light needs to be exposed to them to turn them black; and so that's why films with high speeds like 2000 are used for low-light situations, also sports situations, but why they always seem so grainy to the human eye when viewing them. And then conversely, the more grains you have, the longer an exposure to sunlight they need to face, but the finer the picture; and that's why it's known as "slow" film to begin with, because it usually requires slow shutter speeds to work, in order to allow enough time for all that sunlight to expose all those tiny little grains, which means that you can usually only use such film under very sunny conditions.
So then if you want to compare all this to the wonders of the modern world, these next several shots were all taken under the fully automatic mode; where I simply ran around pointing the camera at crap and pushing the trigger, and the camera itself in a tenth of a second would instantly analyze its surroundings and adjust all its settings for what it thinks is going to be the most aesthetically pleasing combination for human eyes. And you know what? My little freaking camerabot ain't that bad! All of these photos here, I think, are just astounding in their complexity; a much richer range of graytones than I was usually ever able to coax out of my physical film, back in the '80s when I was a photography major and developing my own film in the student darkroom every evening. plus with the perfect amount of light let in each and every time. Why would anyone complain about these functions on modern cameras, when in the old days you could easily waste half of your entire roll on pictures that didn't have these exact right manually determined settings?
Thanks for sticking in there with this extra-long report!
Why do I love the underground arts so much in the 2000s? Here's why I love the underground arts so much in the 2000s...
This is what the real power of the underground arts is in the 2000s; not just that one has the means to make projects, which even my friends and I had the power to do back in high school in the 1980s, with our little zines and our little punk cassettes, but that the finished product is exactly and utterly the same as even the most mainstream media corporation out there, from a technical and distribution and promotional standpoint. When both your shows are recorded with the same equipment, cut with the same software, released in the same format, distributed through the same network, and with listings there that are virtually identical, the only things separating an underground artist's project from a multinational corporation are things the underground artist can actually win at -- intelligence, knowledge of the subject, passion for the subject, a pleasant personality, sex appeal, etc etc. An underground artist can win against a soulless corporation in all these things; and when everything else has been leveled to create an even playing field, that's when you suddenly start talking about real power being put directly into the hands of artists and small groups.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; it's a great time to be an independent artist or small artistic organization, maybe in fact the very best time in all of history. My little experience at iTunes today just reminded me of that all over again.
Egads! The police aren't releasing any details, aren't saying whether they died of an OD or if this was a crime gone bad; still, strange to know that you were literally sitting across the street from three loser junkies while they died in a transient hotel room, at the same exact moment they were actually dying. It somehow fits the rather apocalyptic mood that's descended over our entire country this week.
I've talked about the following online several times before (including here at VOX just a little further below, or perhaps on the next page depending on when you're reading), of how I believe in this new mental condition that's recently come about because of the Web 2.0, which in an attempt to coin a phrase I call "Global Displacement Syndrome" or GDS; it basically can only come about in people who consume a massive amount of amateur creative content from around the world at once, usually through online means, just hundreds of photos at Flickr and hundreds of videos at YouTube every month, just like I've been doing more and more in my own life over the last several years. Because when you do something like this, you end up getting not only the cool high-end artsy stuff like usual, but also just a ton of casual and informal media from around the planet too, photos from birthday parties and school events, cellphone images of a neighborhood statue posted a hundred times a year to some moblog or Photobucket account, showing that statue in a hundred different states of weather and daylight. And I've said before, getting that kind of regular multimedia input into a neighborhood halfway around the planet from you makes you...well, not exactly a local, you can't exactly call it that, but no longer a stranger or simply a tourist to that city either, with you now knowing a lot more about that city each day than a simple tourist would know.
When you get too much input in your life like this, when you spend too much time thinking about it all like I have, then your brain can get into certain strange mindsets at certain times, which for me always seems triggered by things like warm summer afternoons, pot, laid-back European dance musicians, and a host of other things. And that's a mindset where it suddenly becomes difficult to determine rationally just what city you're in at that exact moment in your life -- whether it's Chicago or London or Frankfurt, Sydney or Seoul or Ljubljana, Rio or Toronto or Cape Town. In fact, it's like you're not in any of those particular cities at all, but rather a strange and mystical world where all these cities have combined into a tenth, entirely fictional one, one where you and all your online friends from these other nine cities are all living at once, a place just as real and concrete in your head as the actual physical city you're currently located in. And when I'm under the spell of GDS, like I've said before, I sometimes have these really strange experiences here in Chicago where I physically live; for example, when I look out the window next to my computer here at home (the image seen in this entry, taken just a few minutes ago), it's hard for me to tell whether I'm still in Chicago or maybe suddenly in another one of these cities just mentioned, that if I were to actually go downstairs and open the front door of my building, hell, who knows, maybe I just will find Barcelona or Oslo or Saint Petersburg right beyond.
I find myself getting into this mindset more and more with the passing years, the longer I'm exposed regularly to all these hundreds of casual photos and videos online from around the world, all the underground bands and artists I follow around the world all at once. The Social Singularity? The Coming One World Culture? Or just the sad result of too much Flickr, 420, and time alone? Hmm.
[I wrote this earlier tonight for inclusion at my main personal blog, located at jasonpettus.com, the oldest presence online I now still maintain. But the guy who hosts my sites for free there is in the middle of switching them to new servers (Linux-based, more-MySQL-friendly servers); and that has my upload process at MovableType all screwed up right now, which is preventing me from posting this journal entry at my main blog right now. Which is why I've decided to publish it here for now instead, because I'm all gung-ho for what I've said here today, and want to publish it to the general public while I'm still feeling all gung-ho for it, which I know for a fact will wear off in just a couple days from now. Which, er, is why I wanted to publish it. So...um, there.]
(WARNING! Today's journal entry is especially confessional and dirty, and this from a website explicitly known for being confessional and dirty. Those who only know me as a nerdy conservative arts administrator, and who are unaware of my past as a liberal gonzo sex columnist, should take particular caution today.)
Regular readers know that I listen to podcasts on a daily basis, and that one of the ones I like the most is called the "SModcast," put together by filmmakers Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier (one of Smith's old college buddies and the producer of all his films, for those who don't know), which is basically like a Kevin Smith film come to nonfiction life; he and Scott basically sit around in front of a microphone for an hour each week, talking about whatever random shit just happens to pop into their heads, the two of them slowly building these elaborate hypothetical situations that they're constantly presenting to the other, just to see how the other would react and what crazy shit they'll have to say about it. And I was listening to the latest episode earlier today, while I was running my errands, where among other things they got to talking about sexual orientation, and started asking all these outrageous theoretical questions to each other about what defines it all. What if you're a dude, for example, and have spent your whole adult life sucking dick, but suddenly switch to pussy in your thirties or forties? If you switch back to dick after just one pussy, does that pussy still count, and are you now bisexual instead of gay? What if you've never actually had sex, but all your fantasies are about sucking dick? Is it fair to say that a person has a sexual orientation at all if they've never actually had sex? They're ridiculous questions, of course, handled in a juvenile and hilarious way by the two of them, which sums up Smith's career as a filmmaker in a nutshell; not that he's any genius, but that he has a natural knack at posing interesting questions, and wallowing in certain subjects for awhile even while never really coming up with a cohesive answer.
At a certain point in the discussion, Smith declares his own opinion about it all; that as far as he's concerned, unless you've actually handled someone else's genitals in a sexual way at least once, it's unfair to say that that person has any sexual orientation at all, and should instead still be considered a sexless child. And Mosier replies with, "So, like, unless someone sucks a dick for the first time, right?" and Smith replies, "Well, no, dude, I'm saying the first time someone even rubs their dick against your knee or whatever." And Mosier laughs at this in an absurdist way, as if thinking, "What teenager out there is rubbing his dick against other teenagers' knees?" But I gotta tell you, very honestly, as soon as Smith said that, my own mind immediately flashed back on an experience I had back in high school, one I haven't thought of literally in decades, not only one of the very first legitimately erotic experiences I had with another person, but still one of my favorite sexual memories of all time. Plus it's a story I've never talked about in public before, and that's unusual when it comes to my past as a confessional nonfiction writer, so thought it'd be fun to talk about it here at my journal today.
See, I was one of those classic late bloomers; nerdy, dysfunctional, straightedge and afraid of the world as a teen, slowly coming out of my shell during college, then really making up for lost time between 25 and 35, finally settling down in middle age to a place where most other people my age are, no matter what the order of our experiences. (By the way, this is but one of many things I treasure about moving into middle-age, the chance for all the people in my age group to finally mellow out into deep empathy with each other, since by 40 we all seem to have finally had the same collective set of experiences; despite how today's entry might possibly sound by the end of it, I do not miss my youth in any way whatsoever, and in general am highly glad to be moving into middle-age myself.) The story of my undergraduate sexual awakening is pretty typical (dorm + liquor + adventurous girls = yay!), but the point I want to make is that my high-school years were defined mostly through the filter of sexual frustration, an overwhelming prism that colored every single other subject in my life back then.
Like many others nerds, I was a band geek, at a high school that had a highly competitive marching band (one of the endless surprisingly competitive things in the American Midwest that full-grown adults encourage among children on a regular basis, for international readers who don't know); and like any other band geek, my autumns in rural Missouri mostly consisted of paling around with my fellow band geeks, piling into old family cars from the '60s and '70s that had been downgraded over the years into the status of "teenage child's main car" -- for example, the car I drove daily all throughout high school was a 1978 dark-brown Mercury Marquis with bright chrome '60s-style tailfins, one that could comfortably fit eight or nine teenagers if you can believe that shit, as long as a certain amount of people were all piled up and sitting on each other's laps and crap. This is how it always seemed to be in friends' cars, in fact, during trips to and from school and during road trips, during Friday nights out to the graveyard or diner or whatever other nerdy straightedge punk/goth band-geek thing we were doing; it always seemed to be seven or eight or nine teens all piling into one car together very dangerously, instead of doing the sensible thing and traveling in two or three cars to our destination. Ce la vie, I suppose the French would say; or to put it in the American vernacular, "What's the point of even being a teenager, if you can't pile into a giant outdated family car seven or eight or nine at a time?" Indeed -- what's the point of even being a teenager, if you can't do this?
And it was during one of these trips that yet another one of these casual-acquaintance band-geek friends needed to scoot in and sit on my lap during the ride, a tough and wiry little female saxophone player I didn't know very well, a redneck with short blonde hair who was tough and mean and smoked at the age of fifteen. Sheesh, the things that went on back then, you know? Hard to believe that I went to high school in the '80s and that our campus still had an official legally-sactioned smoking area for fifteen-year-olds; hard to believe that such things were accepted and tolerated even so recently as 25 years ago. Anyway, so this tough redneck smoking short-haired sax player crawled in like usual, after all us guys first got in and were sitting across the backseat as usual; except that instead of sitting kinda crookedly and in as chaste a way as possible under those circumstances, like all the other girls back in high school did it, this girl sat directly on top of my own lap in a very Euclidian fashion, so that our...um, parts lined up. And then proceeded to stay in that position for the 45 minutes it took to get from my rural high school to her rural home, while making several pit-stops along the way to drop off others and fill the gas tank.
And it was...whoo. Oh shit, I'm getting all squirmy just thinking about it again, 25 fuckin' years after it first happened! And now that I'm really thinking about it in an analytical way for the first time in my life, I realize that it's because it was the first moment in my life when someone else's sexual organs went from theoretical in my brain to very real and concrete, the first time I really understood in any way whatsoever what it's like to interact with another person's genitals. Because, man, 25 years later, I have to admit that I still distinctly remember the physical sensations of this girl's inflamed vagina on my inflamed penis, even through two sets of jeans, even in full view of seven other teenagers and trying to pretend to them that nothing was happening. I remember her oh-so-gently shifting the hard seam on her denim that ran between her legs; how it pushed against the head of my penis oh-so-subtly, how I realized that it was pushing against her clitoris at the same time, that the sensations I was feeling led to no other interpretation than that the seam was nicely bisecting the folds of her...er, womanhood, and that those two halves were currently located just on either side of the insanely hard teenage cock of mine that was itself about to rip out of its own 501 confines and it own insanely well-designed seams.
That's the thing I really want to emphasize, in order for the main point I'll be making later to make sense, that as an enlightened '80s teen I was already fully aware of the biology behind the baby-making process itself; I had understood the female parts from a medical sense all the way from seventh grade, the medical sense of the male parts too, completely understood how a baby was actually made and how to prevent that from happening if that's what you and your partner decided. But shit, that's a long way from understanding how sex actually works, you know? This experience I'm talking about today, the one with the tough redneck sax player sitting on my lap, was the first time I had actually been confronted in the physical world with someone else's genitals; the first time, for example, I understood that the pussy of a horny woman emits its own heat source, which in reality was also the first time I really understood (I mean, very seriously, very internally understood) that yes, females get horny too. The first time it truly occurred to me that women might in fact desire men in the same desperate, almost out-of-control way that men desire women. The first time it occurred to me that a woman might, you know, God forbid, like me in that way.
Now, for those expecting a great payoff to this story, I'm going to have to unfortunately disappoint you; this woman and I never hooked up, never in fact even acknowledged the experience we had in the car that day. Or, well, other than her at a certain point literally grabbing my outer thigh with her hand, the thigh that was next to the car door and away from everyone else, and holding on for a few minutes while I lightly brushed against her hand with my own; this was the closest we ever got to acknowledging to each other the teenage sexual experience we were going through in the moment, the closest we ever got to plainly admitting to each other how incredibly turned-on we were at that moment. And really, if I want to be completely honest about my high-school life, I need to plainly admit that I was not exactly the antisocial geek I like to sometimes portray myself as; if you really look at what actually happened to me in high school, in fact, you'll see that in reality there were actually a whole string of tough, lower-class, introverted redneck girls who expressed a very nakedly aggressive interest in me back then, girls who would go on in the '90s to be the exact sullen riot-grrrl bassists and slam-poets I fucked on a monthly basis all throughout that decade, girls who would've happily given me the chance to literally get some pussy every two or three days all during high school, if I had only had the courage to respond to their insanely obvious flirtations.
This is the thing I've never liked to admit about my high-school years, because it doesn't fit into that funny, easy-to-understand story, of the introverted nerd who no one loved and who only came into his own as an artsy undergraduate. But the fact is that it's my own neuroses that largely held me back in those years, a subject for example that I think author Joe Meno explored fantastically in his first novel Hairstyles of the Damned, despite me giving it an only so-so review at CCLaP. (And don't worry, all you Meno fans; I ended up giving a much better review to his later novel The Boy Detective Fails.) While these women were giving me insanely obvious hints as to their attraction, all to no avail, I myself was giving insanely obvious hints of my own attraction to others, again to no avail; and thus is the nerdy, dysfunctional, immature circle of high-school life, will the circle be unbroken, amen, amen. I could've literally been swimming in pussy in high school, I realize a quarter of a century later, and with women I secretly found really attractive too; and that was the whole problem, of course, is that I found them only secretly attractive, namely because I wasn't mature enough to understand why I was really attracted to them, and thus was never in a position to actually act on these impulses.
This is why I say that I will ultimately never really miss my youth, although I confess that I too am sometimes guilty of nostalgic reminisces about it all. And let's face it, that the only reason I've been thinking about this so much recently in the first place is because I'm once again going through a long dry spell; it has in fact been a whopping four years since I've last had sex with another person, or indeed even kissed another person or even intimately touched another person. And that's for a variety of complicated reasons, which boils down to "I'm not in a position to do so;" and that's no so bad unto itself, but does tend to drive me a little crazy during the height of the summer here in Chicago, that period of the year when it's hot and sweaty and muggy every single day here, with a whole nicely-tanned city population running around the sidewalks wearing almost nothing at all, while I'm biking every day and being very active, taking in about three times the amount of food I do during the winter when I'm inactive, three times the energy, three times the...er, horniness. Um, yeah. There, I said it. I need to get laid. There, I said it.
Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do so, for reasons I've detailed here in the past: Because I'm mostly unemployed and usually broke these days, for example, making traditional dating out of the question; because I'm a small-business owner now, for another example, so have given up the sexual-swinging I partook in from 2002 to 2004, so that no conservatives or other enemies can use such a thing as a weapon against me and the running of CCLaP. And because my mouth is all fucked up these days too, because of going through a bunch of dental work these days which basically involves the implanting of 32 fake teeth, which has me extremely self-conscious these days about the entire idea of kissing another human being. And if you can't kiss another human being, what the fuck is the point of having sex with them? Which is my third point, that it kinda defeats the purpose to actually hire a prostitute, plus there being a much more important reason why I could never fuck a prostitute; because back when I was a broke Henry-Miller-worshipping raconteur myself, I too when younger once traded money and economic goods for sexual favors in a variety of situations (never as formal prostitution, although many times as an artsy alternative; see Miller's "Rosy Crucifixion" series for more). And all of those experiences left me extremely creeped out, which is why I could never in good conscience actually pay someone else to arbitrarily have sex with me, no matter how horny I am at any given moment, and no matter how few options I have for having sex in a non-prostitution way.
And that's maybe the final irony of the entire situation; that given the way my brain is working these days when it comes to the subject, it might very well ultimately be futile to have sex with a prostitute anyway, as far as the ultimate goal of simply being less horny in my life. Because, as today's entry has hopefully fuckin-yak-yak-yak proven now, what I've recently realized is that it's actually intimacy that I'm profoundly missing, not just the sex act itself. And that's funny for me, frankly, as I right now face the longest time in my entire post-virginity life I've gone without sex, a mere half-decade after I was a cultishly popular sex columnist who did more crazy fucking than you could ever hope to do in your own life, you goddamn loser; that when all is said and done, what I'm really pining for in my life these days are those teenage intimate moments like I described earlier, those moments when almost nothing explicit is going on but everything emotional is happening. In fact, I was just talking about this with a fellow middle-aged friend of mine, someone going through her own crises these days, family-related ones which is why I won't be going into it in any more detail; let's just say that she's finding it rewarding these days to dump a bunch of shit on me, and I'm finding it rewarding to dump a bunch of shit on her, and this is what's making it rewarding for the two of us to occasionally spend an evening together these days, drinking and blabbing secrets about our crappy lives and dumping a whole bunch of unexpected shit on each other.
The last time I hung out with this woman, I ended up detailing this whole way I've been feeling about sex lately, which funnily enough makes most of my female friends sorta unpleasantly shake their heads when I mention it and say, "What the fuck are you talking about?," while making my male friends nod their heads in recognition while I mention it and say, "Yes, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about." And that is -- I've been feeling lately like I've been getting back in touch again with a lot of what I consider the "female side" of my sexuality. Or, to put it a little more bluntly....Now that I've gone four years without any intimate contact whatsoever, I'm starting to think of the entire sexual cycle, the entire lovemaking process, not as an elaborate ritual towards the two of you eventually reaching orgasm, but rather as a self-sustaining activity unto itself, one that should be enjoyed on its own terms even if it never does lead to a "Level Two."
And this leads then to yet another weird confession: That in these post-sex years I'm going through right now, these years where I instead delve whole-heartedly into the entirely nerdy and erudite world of language, words, writing, literature, semiotics and semantics, what is really becoming both a priority and a tangible fantasy for me sexually is precisely the non-language, non-intellectual, non-semantic part of sex. Er...you know. The world of grunting and squealing. The world of pushing and pulling. The world of bodily fluids. Er, other people's bodily fluids. Er, other people's bodily fluids sprayed across your own body parts. This is a universal part of sex, no matter which gender or orientation you're talking about, no matter how little or how much that particular person emits...stuff, from their...body, when they're...glad to see you. Even when it's a tiny bit, even when it's a whole lot, even when it's disgusting, even when it's non-existent; it's the fact that our partner wants to share that moment with us that ultimately gets us turned on, not whatever it is that actually happens in that moment.
I've been thinking about that a lot in the last couple of days, to tell you the truth; of just how turned-on I was, for example, back 25 years ago, during this random packed car trip in high school, even with nothing actually happening, even with her and I never once even officially acknowledging the experience to each other. And really, isn't this human sexuality in a nutshell? Isn't it really all about the elaborate stories we build in our heads, regarding whatever specific subject just happens to turn us on? And this, frankly, is ultimately why I love Kevin Smith as a creative professional, why I will most likely spend the rest of my life being one of his apologists, and explaining very patiently why you should actually secretly love that one movie of his that everyone else just happened to passionately despise (which can be said more and more about all the movies he's made past his original Clerks -- but whoo, talk about a subject best tabled for another time). Kevin Smith makes me think about weird shit, which I believe is ultimately the only justification you need for being a big fan of his; yes, his scripts are mostly trite, yes his production values are virtually non-existent, yes he's basically the arts equivalent of some frat-boy loser extending his perpetual adolescence longer and longer and longer and fucking longer and fucking longer and FUCKING LONGER.
I will always love Kevin Smith, though, because he makes me think about stuff that no other public intellectual makes me think about. He makes me think about teenage virginity-era sexuality versus adult cynical sex-columnist sexuality, and he makes me think about it in a way I rarely hear other sex writers talk about it, much less some fuckin' mope like him. Plus he makes me think about it in a complex way, no matter how simplistic he himself is. I admire that, and I respect that, and it's what makes me watch every fucking Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier movie that comes out, because believe me, I've seen every single one of them now (except Jersey Girl, of course, because no one's seen that, a fact I hope to finally change in my own life this fall). It's why I continue to think of these subjects as important ones to muse upon, which is the reason I continue to write entries of this type at my personal journal, despite being far away these days from the confessional trainwreck pop-culture journalist I used to be back in the '90s.
(Sorry this took me so long to post! Reason below!)
As anyone who's ever run a popular blog can tell you, the moment you do start running a popular blog, you IMMEDIATELY start hearing from all those annoying fucking word-of-mouth marketing companies out there, all of them desperately trying to get you to try out their product for a couple of weeks, in return for you writing about the experience at your popular blog. And thus it is that I find myself these days with a superduper expensivoliola Nokia N95 "smartphone" on my possession, which the Nokia people are really hoping that I will put to the test, and really push to the limit and see what exactly it can and cannot do.
Which unfortunately for Nokia I've now done, and have come up with an unfortunately corporate-unfriendly answer, which I know that the word-of-mouth-marketing people there at Nokia really don't want to hear me say -- that if you own a Macintosh, it's pretty much useless to buy a Nokia N95, SERIOUSLY IT'S FUCKING USELESS, because the Nokia N95 won't play a single video that your Mac creates or understands, nor will it play a single song or podcast that you happened to get through Apple's iTunes. SERIOUSLY, IT WON'T PLAY ANY OF YOUR MAC SONGS OR VIDEOS, and seriously it's pretty much pointless to own a Nokia N95 if you own a Macintosh. I know, I know, Nokia doesn't want me to say this, and we'll see if I ever actually get reimbursed for the surprisingly high 30 fucking dollars I'm going to end up paying just to ship this Nokia N95 back to this weasely little word-of-mouth marketing agency; we'll see, I guess, whether I ever get those 30 bucks back, or whether I'm going to have to get back on this fucking blog and talk yet fucking again about how this fucking word-of-mouth marketing agency stiffed me out of 30 fucking dollars, after they claimed that this entire process was going to be a stress-free and financially-free one for me. Yeah. We'll see.
But meanwhile here's the first video I shot, which I swear to God I tried to upload in its original, higher-quality MP4 form; but for some reason, both SixApart and YouTube are scared to fucking death of the MP4 version of this video, and will only let me upload the cheaper, more pixelated 3GP version; for those who would like to see the better version themselves, they can simply click/right-click/copy-and--paste the following: http://www.cclapcenter.com/archives/bikeloopnokia.mp4 . Seriously, the much larger MP4 version is so much better than the 3GP version, I don't even know where to start. Please check it out if you're on broadband and have the extra time/resources to do so. Grr, MP4 broken uploads! Seriously, Six Apart and YouTube, fix this!
After an insanely long cold streak here in Chicago, one that saw temperatures in the 30s (5 C) all the way up to the beginning of June, I'm finally out on my bicycle again daily; and that has me trying to get back on the summer schedule I was maintaining last year, i.e. more going out, less pot, more time in the sun and less behind my computer. And among other things, that's meant getting back into the habit of posting blog entries on the go more often, so that I'll have an excuse to get out more, to find crap to write moblog entries about in the first place. But nonetheless, I've been terrible at actually getting more moblog entries done, so I've instituted a new rule in my life, to send at least one new entry a day from my Palm to my VOX account, even if I have nothing in particular to say. Anyway, here's today's, done while sitting on the Irving Park Road bus; and here's hoping that this'll get me back in the habit of posting each day, including times when I have much more intersting stuff to say.
