shred citizen journal!

life is as sweet as something really awesome and sweet

July 10, 2009 in adventure time, awesome, photo | Leave a comment

well, i am back from a righteous trip to california. had so! much! fun! i went to 2 weddings, they were both super fun in their own ways, which didn’t make it repititive. took the dog to the beach in huntington. drank coffee at kean. drove the passat down pch while blasting jams on the stereo. made a random mix cd and put it the cd changer for someone else to listen to down the road. i think my brother is the only one who would turn on the cd changer anyways. had a double dip beef and swiss french dip and a custard from phillipes. wore shorts. drove a prius throughout los angeles in a suit (the jacket was in the back, but i knew that i was wearing a sweet suit) and felt like a hotshot (jams were adjusted accordingly). saw the awesome folks. ate hecka good food. saw a wide range of people from the past. ate some sweet carnitas tacos from alejandros late at night. had a number two from in n out. had roast duck in plum sauce. good salmon. danced my first legitimate hora to a slamming israeli ska band for like an hour straight with friends and hasidic rabbis. twice. rocked some french cuffs. walked through venice beach in that aforementioned suit until 3am. took a marina del rey cab 2 blocks by accident. ate doughnuts twice and del taco once, in the space of like 3 hours. saw an epicly long sweeping view of the whole great salt lake from not so high up in the air at dusk. saw downtown detroit and michigan for the first time. ate howie longs not so great chicken wings at the detroit airport. and probably a bunch of other sweet stuff. took a few cell phone pictures as partial evidence…

then i came back and took the worst photos ever of 4th of july in philadelphia. these three i think are just hilarious

actually i kind of like that one, but it could have been so much more! so much more!

i made this photo look like its something youd find in a lomography book. now its considered low brow. get me vice magazine on the line!

this one just makes me chuckle.

then doran came to town. the full experience is best summed up in this 21 second video, which is best watched over and over in full screen.

we went to the delightfully dated and ramshackle ben franklin museum. came in fourth in quizzo at the locust. got stoked on some next level history shit. walked around. watched too many late night hours of mtv reality shows online. they used to call me bikini cory… and i earned it! loves it. ate mexican food. ate at reading terminal market twice. ate jewish sandwiches. i ate amish bbq, which rules. we ate an epic cuban meal and had mojitos. i started an awesomely challenging lithography class. laughed too much and drank beer from 3 states. good times.

as i was walking back from seeing doran off, i noticed they are doing some demolition in the alley behind my building… so i took some photos.

that is all. oh no. wait. theres also this absurdist video i made. ¡cuando cuando!

philadelphia

May 20, 2009 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

yo dudes. today i decided that it would be rad to go to some philly tourist spots and take some photos… im pretty stoked. it is rad to live in a town with tons of history! it is one thing to be pissed at your dad for following some stupid yellow line in boston when you are ten and an entirely different thing to live 8 blocks from the liberty bell and decide to go check it out. history is way cooler when you can split it up into mini-trips within your own neighborhood. as it turns out, i live really close to a bunch of historically significant places. i am by no means done exploring, but this is what i did today… i started off at the liberty bell.

then i went to the brouse, which is sweet

thats what a tilt shift photo would look like if i had a tilt shift lens

franklin court

there were these phones in the franklin court museum where you could ‘call’ notable historical figures.. it didn’t work so well

dude, its benjamin franklins letter press! he printed the declaration of independence on this!

the declaration of independence!

gold gilden eagle

oh to be a rich white 18th century male

society hill synagogue

washington square park at 7th and locust is my favorite park in philly

one million dollars

May 20, 2009 in adventure time, awesome | Leave a comment

i seriously hope this person gets one million dollars.

freaking amazing. thats why i want my loopstation back.

this is why you should always carry a camera

March 10, 2009 in adventure time, photo | 3 comments

today i got the urge to go out and walk around and take photos, and it certainly paid off. this is why it rules to live in an urban area! i started out just taking random philadelphia photos like these:

so my walk brought me to rittenhouse square park whereupon i stumbled across a group of people in wacky wigs… i initially dismissed the group (ive found that a group of crazily dressed people in a park in a major urban center is typically unremarkable) until i noticed the fox news camera crew and the prevalence of long beards and black coats. i then remembered that earlier today, a funeral director had told me that tomorrow would be a jewish holiday, but i couldn’t think of one offhand. i put 2 and 2 together and guessed that it must be purim, a thought that was confirmed minutes after by a rainbow wig wearing, trumpet playing rabbi named menachem. for those not in the know, purim, like most jewish holidays, celebrates a story in which someone hates the jews but the jews prevail, in this case it is the story of a persian jew, esther, thwarting the plans of evil haman, an advisor to the persian king (think jafar in aladdin), and saving a bunch of jews. while this is a pretty common thread throughout a bunch of jewish holidays, this holiday is characterized by costume wearing and revelry throughout the celebratory retelling of the story. (look it up, im pretty sure she gets a book in bible (and a poorly retold veggietales)) as an added bonus, you get to eat some decent cookies called hamantashen. they were walking a route that led back to my apartment, and they had brass horns (my favorite instruments), so i decided to follow them back to my apartment. it was a small crowd, but it was certainly entertaining. ive never heard of a purim parade before.

i guess this has shown me that you should always bring a camera everywhere since you never know when something wacky will go down!

been a while

February 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

so its been a while, ive been lazy about taking photos because most of my time is taken up by school… i just wanted to post this really nice article by roger ebert that he posted on his blog about dogs. it really rings true to me

Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.

link

joshua tree in 200shine!

January 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

today was rad. i went out to joshua tree which is about 2.5 hours from orange county… i had the chance to go out and take some night photography, which was really fun!

these are joshua trees. supposedly they used to be really prevalent in california but everyone thought they were pretty ugly so they chopped most of them down and now joshua tree has most of the joshua trees in california. oh yeah… full moon.

straight into the tree.

this is the led frisbee keith brought with us. it was hilariously entertaining to watch this game of catch. every line is the actual trajectory of the frisbee, it was far from professional.

stars

leaving california on a jet plane

see y’all in philly.

two thousand SHINE!

January 2, 2009 in adventure time, awesome | Leave a comment

well happy new year! 2008 was a year. 2009 is henceforth 200SHINE!!

ps: view this larger at nedroid comics, they are… as you say.. kawaii.

every nobody is a somebody on the internet!

December 9, 2008 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

well, its that time of the semester when art teachers start asking for self portraits…. i’m not a huge fan of self portraits because i can never figure out a way to portray a specific quality of my character. nonetheless, you don’t get a good grade unless you complete the assignment. as usual, i asked for my brothers opinion of my work and as usual he was not terribly impressed. i respect his opinion and critical eye, and since i don’t have time to shoot more film, i think i may have figured out a way to attach some sort of reasoning to the work that i am pretty happy with, in a technical sense. (it is not just that i am trying to connect a series of unrelated dots, i think this has something to do with the reason that so many people, including myself, get a kick out of making any presence on the internet.)

every nobody is (or can be) a somebody on the internet.

there is clearly a heirarchy of nobodies on the internet, some people can amass thousands of myspace friends or get thousands of hits on their flickr site or blog or youtube channel and this recognition fuels them to create more self-serving narcissistic content. its not like they have 10,000 friends in real life. i don’t deny that i enjoy the backwash of this phenomenom. because of myspace, anyone who can record anything can potentially reach an audience of infinite proportion, and the same goes for flickr in the photo community. no one has to decide that your content is “good enough” for it to be thrown into the pool. at the same time, there is plenty of user-generated content on the net that is crap, myself included, although i hope i fall somewhere closer to the mean. but i derive some sort of empowerment from these sites because i feel that no one would have let me expose such a huge potential audience to anything i make 10 or 20 years ago.

because i don’t know how to properly quantify what ever it is that i am supposed to express about myself, i took these portraits and like my brother noted, they all look like myspace photos and they all seem too calculated. i think the thing that makes me enjoy the photos is that they bear some semblence of technical proficiency (and i can portray myself as being “cool” without the noteriety it would normally take to have neat looking portraits). my experience with my digital SLR is much different than with my 35mm. with the dSLR, you don’t have to calculate as much because you can adjust your approach after reviewing every shot. shooting film relies on technical know-how, and since i have very little, i had to think out every shot before i took it. i shot those silly sign pictures below with the dSLR and when i tried to recreate it with the 35mm i found that i ruined every frame on a roll because the tripod was too high. digital technology is empowering nobodies with a lack of technical knowledge and it doesn’t seem to me to be immediately backwards compatible. i enjoy shooting film alot, and i have definately improved over the last few months, but the learning process is much slower. with a little knowledge, anyone with a little bit of creativity can recreate what maybe would have seemed impossible or too expensive 20 years ago. i dont need to have accomplished something for a commercial photographer to come take my photo for a magazine when i can create a simulacrum of the experience and put it on the internet and reach the same amount of people. i am a nobody, but i am creating the impression that i am somebody because i have access to the internet and a little bit of technical knowledge.

film:

digital:

bottom line: i enjoy pictures of me that i feel portray me as being cooler than i actually am, but not in a way that hurts anyone or is too far out of the range of my actual minimal “coolness”… and the internet is a great forum for this kinda crap.

ps: i know i’m not that cool, but i can pretend i am on the internet.