The flags of the world as pie charts. Click them to guess the flag.

Part of something I posted.

I saw a great film involving photography: Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project ( http://www.themotherproject.com/ ). It is one of the better movies in the subset of documentaries involving film makers/artists exploring their own family, childhood, past etc.(also quite interesting: My Architect, Bruce and Me, Tarnation, though many may find The Mother Project much easier to watch than these examples). The film follows Gearon through a visit to photograph her mentally ill mother, who seems to slip in and out of lucidity, and photographing her children, along with the ordeal in the mid 90s when her photographs were yanked from a gallery show with accusations of child exploitation, and worse, by British police. Ok, it may sound like a downer to some, but I found parts of the movie to be quite endearing, including funny moments, and an interesting look at how one artist deals with family/past/etc. It contains great footage of her setting up shots, and the resulting photographs. I found great pleasure in watching her coax common snapshot fodder into photos that transcend into both universality and the glaringly personal.

Today on ebay I bought eight doll feet and a miniature keyboard (1:6 scale, said to be the low class minature scale, think Bratz and barbie). Yesterday I bought a ton of Re-ment miniatures, all for my current side project.

I keep writing reflective posts about my life. They go unfinished, but caught up in the autosave. During my Live Journal phase, I became paranoid when friends whom I didn't tell I was blogging brought up subjects I wrote about. Certainly when I become eloquent enough to transcend my woes into the finest of writing, the zero readers here will be the first to know.

They are kicking me out of the cafe...

Don't look here for the latest. Allison Stewart started this blog for her upcoming NPR show around the time she left MSNBC. I knew she was doing a show on NPR, but my brain seemed to go on its own time when it came to follow through. Now I have a whole pile of wondrous stuff to read. I just skimmed it, and am certain I will like the whole multi-media project.

I am X'd out for the first time. Joost only works with Intel based Macs. And so it starts, my sad no-money decline into cometary obscurity.

Last year I was offered ten dollars a photo, plus set up bonus etc, to blog on a web site that will remain anonymous. It sells ring tones and includes standard web comunity crap. This was a delicate situation that called for hedging of the bets. The offer was too good to be true, yet too hard to pass up. After two months of taking what I had dubbed "ten dollar photos" and talking almost daily to my company insider, whose husband worked for the company, I had amassed about 130 photos. The disorganized company was not checking the quality of the blogs and when it came tally day for the wave of people who had joined the program at the same time as myself, they saw what people were doing and freaked. One woman had about 800 photos. She had included all the bad shots, multiple angles, and just plain duplicates on an average of 2-6 extra photos per cohearant photo. They started sending out notices saying people's content was not up to par and they would not pay for the work, and the shit hit the fan. At this time, those joining in the first wave had already been paid once. I never got a notice, but my inside contact did. They ended up paying me 1500 dollars, and paying her for 300 photos total in three blogs she'd made. The company moved to better offices and my contact's husband even went to the European city head quarters on business. When he returned his vacation to a music festival, he'd found that they'd fired him. Turns out he had VP status and they did not want to continue to pay him what he is worth. Appearantly he slept for a week after they let him go, the stress was so great as before they fired him, they tried to drive him out. I was addicted to being paid to blog annd researched doing more of the same elsewhere. The day I recieved my check, JMK left his job. My inside contact, as I was calling her before, seems to have a number of things in common, not just the glazed over look after digesting the first seven facts in a tech lecture by our SOs and a keen sense of how to deflect tacky items dragged home by the afore mentioned respective SOs.

Enough rambling.

I am trying to write a short post about the movie "Tierny Gearon: the Mother Project" on a message board, and can't remember the names of any of the movies of the same sort of artist examines disfunctional family directly genre. I can remember "Tarnation" and "My Father the Architect" the latter's title can't be found anywhere, though I distinctly remember watching such a movie. Theres another one about a super-cheap father, hmmm.

Daily trips to a cafe and coffee are getting me working on projects again, but also too hot on the late night fixations on finishing too much when sleep would help. Getting ready to go to a cafe to get coffee, without coffee, may prove to be too hard to do with a quickness. It is a long painful process, like art, but with more peeing, I guess. Unless you are andre surrano. what? ya, its 5am. Ya, uh, right... ok.

I doubt there is a full hour between 2:00 and 3:00 am. Tonight I thought about going to bed at 2:00 am at about 1:59. I then glanced at the clock, 2:40 am.

I am collecting kudos on Flickr for my photos. Sometimes I feel like one of those suckers born every minute. I am constantly reminded that promises made by content stables on the net are only as good until the owner decides to sell and that copyrighted photos are only so to the extent that someone with more money and lawyers can keep at you till you are DOA if they really want the images (its one of the many things discussed often among artists). It appears that Flickr had deleted a post by a photographer complaining her work was stolen, the photo, and subsiquent outpouring of support from the Flickr communities. Many in the Flickr community where I first saw the link, explain to the outraged poster that Flickr is a business, and can't afford to be sued over the accusations in the post and comments. These are people with images on Flickr explaining this, rather mater-of-factly, without any cynicism. I'm going to assume that the removed post means Flickr does not want to get into the whole copyright thing too much. I understand its a business, I mean in the way a place that houses a ton of coppyrighted material would take notice and act like the subject is right up their alley. Who knows, maybe they are gearing up to see if they have a case against the allegedly offending web site. *smirk*

Jmk got a Fon wireless router, 20 bucks with an invite. You can give a portion of your bandwith at home and get bandwidth free from all the other mapped people on the site doing the same. Non members can sign up through stumbling onto your network, pay for your wireless, and you get the money. I am surprised he is into this, it seems like a step in the other direction from free wireless.

Been watching movies with one name titles on sat tv, Rize, Fired.

Too many openings and things this weekend.

Taken on 3am shopping trip. I over spent and screwed up my whole money flow, walking around putting things in the cart like a zombe.

Beauty product crap

That alpha hydroxy crap works. Maybe at first in the way changing products gives better results than long time continuous use, but, it seems to have eaten through a build up of dead skin on my face I was prepared to scrub off with swiss botanical sand blasting scrub. Due to packaging changes I picked up the wrong stuff, well, that and I was shopping at 3 am, but more about that sooner, heh. I know its working cause my face is all tender. That and the next day my face was all oily, meaning pours were unclogged.

Funny photo & blurb.

Just great. I start to like Flickr, and now miscreantsoft may buy Yahoo, who owns Flickr. Gotta check up on those contract laws for companies changing hands. Gotta protect those photos (by putting them on the net, heh).

Allison Stewart is going to NPR and doing some enviornmental docs. Cool, but I miss watching her noon news thing.

I forget things from season to season, year to year, like that I really need to change my scedule to be up early. The evening means too much neighborhood yelling by the window, the kind where you can't tell if its a live argument, the retelling of an argumet, or general conversation. One has to listen to the words, I sometimes think I need to duck. My painting studio is right by the front window. I am easily pulled out of whatever painting trance I muster, in some lower levels of concentration/involvement. Yelling boys pull me out. I feel like I am working directly against the practicality, however marginal, they have going. The news on all day pulls me out. Somehow lately it just reminds me of how futile an exercise painting just may be. The everyman fills all the empty space and the cracks and generally encases me when I move. I cut through as far as I can stretch good graces.