The Desert - Photos

I'm in the midst of trying to decide what will be the best way to upload/post/share photographs that aren't destined for my photographic portfolio, but which I want to show to all of my blog readers. Any suggestions are welcomed. For now, here are a couple of photographs from the desert, and if you're interested you can go to my recently configured Flickr page to view all six of the photos that I uploaded just now.

Chavs and Iranian Radio

I've been listening to Iranian Radio on iTunes, and I've heard a couple tracks by Leila Forouhar which have seemed good, if cheesy at times. May I suggest "Hamsafar" for next Christmas?

And since I like to think of my blog as both an entertaining light read and a resource, I'd like to state that the film "Night Watch," which is released today, seems rather promising. It's a vampire film taking place in Moscow. Watch the trailer here in magnificent HD (forewarning to be patient to those with slower connections.)

And since I've now begun today's post by recommending two things I haven't actually heard/seen, here's one that I have. Charlie Wadhams has a pretty great song up on his Myspace page. I think he shows promise. And for those of you that are LA-based, it looks like he's playing at Tangier fairly regularly. Dates are on the aforementioned page.

And as far as the Arctic Monkeys are concerned, I like a few of their songs, but I'm not as impressed as I hoped to be. I do like the line "trackie bottoms tucked in socks" a lot though. Quiz of the day: is trackie bottoms tucked in socks a pikey thing or a chav thing? For those who don't know about chavs, here's one person's descriptions of them, taken from urbandictionary.com:

"chav stands for council house and violence. Most chaves have in the region of 50-60 siblings and about 100 step brothers and sisters. Bye the age of 15, chavs have had atleast 20 kids with 20 different people. there voice hasnt broken untill they are 22 and yet they still claim to be able to "smash 'ur f*ckin face in" whenever you look at them. They start un-provocked attacks and drive vauxhall nova's with stolen wheels"

If chav really does stand for "council house and violence" that's news to me. It's a great word either way though. No offense to any of my chav readers, of course.

In other news, I have a promising job lead. I'll be spending the weekend learning a couple of design programs like Adobe Illustrator and getting paid to do it! More details on that as it develops (I wouldn't want to give away too much at one time.)

I'm also headed to the UK on Monday night. Looking forward to some blustery winds and chilling drizzle. I'm not even kidding. Experienced a week at a time, that British winter weather can be kind of pleasant.

Here we had rain in the afternoon for the first time in a long while. It's been a long time since I remember it raining. Now outside everything smells like fresh wet plant life. Lovely!

Next post, there'll be some desert photos, I promise.

Staggering Speeds

I'm in the Mojave desert and so loyal am I to blogging that I've even found time to make a quick post from here. Actually I was thinking I'd like to stay away from the computer entirely during my time here but it's been about 30 hours since my last time in front of a computer screen and I reckon that's adequate. Plus I've got an hour to kill.

Spent the day in Joshua Tree National Park, and if you've never seen a Joshua tree before you should really make an effort. Here there are vast plains dotted with hundreds of the aforementioned tree. It's pretty great. I'll post some pictures when I get back tomorrow.

A few points:

I've never met an unhappy Park Ranger. They all seem genuinely content and entirely happy with their jobs.

I haven't seen a road runner yet (yes, those really exist.)

Desert roads are straight and long and staggering speeds can be reached on them.

The high desert is cold, even in midday. I suppose it is February.

This keyboard sucks.

X Who Played X In That One

Only four posts in and I already have a commendation from the WBSSR!? This is great news (see comment on previous post.) Honestly I wasn't even going for it--blogging about obscure forms of wildlife just comes naturally to me I suppose.

Meanwhile it seems the only people I hang out with on the West Coast are either above the age of 30 or under the age of 8. Fair enough, I guess, but it's a fact that makes me pause and wonder.

I finally watched "Frida" the other night and found it to be surprisingly well done, with a couple of really cool animations thrown in as well. The first one, which has these Day of the Dead people talking about her accident, makes the film worth watching on its own. But anyway, I recommend it. Of note is the fact that a mere hour or so before watching it, I was drinking a rum and coke with Roberto Medina, who plays Frida's doctor in the film, and who happens to live across the street and have a child at Joe's school (one of the children in the recent batch of photos.) So I figure that's a pretty LA thing to have done. Because everyone knows that if someone mentions or suggests a movie in LA, you're supposed to then be able to come back with something along the lines of:

"Oh yeah I recently drank x with x who played x in that one."

And if you can't do that, well, god help you. At that point you can at least be sure that the valet guy is not going to be extra careful with your car.

If you're ever in East Pasadena, I do recommend the Huntington Botanical Gardens. Very nice. Lots of great plants. I was there today with a 30+ year-old and three less-than-8-year-olds.

Black Rubber Bat

So the Murakami story in the New Yorker, entitled "A Shinagawa Monkey," is just a little bit sub-par. It almost feels like a story by someone else, whose assignment in class was to "write like Haruki Murakami." It's got those very Murakami elements in it and is amusing and pretty well-written but it lacks something. He doesn't quite pull it off here, IMHO (that's internet-speak for "in my humble opinion.") But I encourage you all to read it for yourselves and post comments with your responses. That's your homework.

In other news, most days a large black rubber bat hangs by a string from the faucet in the bathtub. The bat belongs to Joe. Today I went in to take a shower and found the bat was not on the faucet but moved to the side. I proceeded to actually place it back over the faucet and felt greatly relieved to have it back in place. Either I'm losing my mind or I'm just really attached to the bat. If I ever move out of here I may have to take it with me or find a suitable replacement. It's a really cool bat.

Speaking of the child, I took some photos of the children that I later bench-pressed (see the first posting) last week, and just got some prints back yesterday. They are now scanned and uploaded. They can be accessed at http://www.gwleigh.com/joe or from the Photography main page. I'm very happy with them so be sure to check them out.

Since I've mentioned a short story and photographs, why not make a shout out to a song which I think is totally great? It's called "Fuleteame el Tanque" and it's by Bimbo. It's a Reggaeton song and if you haven't jumped on the Reggaeton bandwagon yet, this may be a good time to start.

Some pretty great enhancements to my website are planned in the coming 12 days. Why 12 days? Because that's the time I have left in my free Dreamweaver trial, so I want to have things pretty well set before I enter a long period of not being able to update easily. I plan to find a way to get a full copy of the program but it may take some time. But anyway, I've finally figured out how to center my pages in the browser. And beyond that, I'm revamping the photography portfolio to be much easier to navigate and simpler to approach. I'm also going to add many more links and organize them into sections. Some film examples will, hopefully, also be forthcoming. That's just a very time-intensive process, getting them compressed properly and all that on this little laptop of mine.

And I've commissioned my sister to do a tub squid graphic. Any complaints about the lack of a graphic, therefore, should be directed to her. I'll also work on one but odds are I'll like the one she does better. She's been doing some very cool drawings lately and if she ever gets around to scanning them properly maybe some will get posted here.

I've got two job prospects in the works and one is in a fairly advanced stage. I'm just waiting to hear. The prospect of having an actual income is great, but it does leave me a little worried. After all, with a full-time job, when am I going to be able to spend five weeks in Australia or three weeks in the Amazon? Full-time work is not geared towards extensive travel. Yes, we all know this but for me it's a hard realization to come to. The solution I guess is to find a full-time job that requires extensive travel, but not the kind to business meetings. Any ideas?

Get A Chat Room

Nice to see some comments flying around. Tasmaniac: I believe the phrase you're looking for in this case might be "get a chat room." However, I can assure you that odds are, that comment was not written by Michelle F.

So to start the day off right (what, it's already evening on the east coast, you say?) I give you this graphic, courtesy of BBC News:



I'm sitting here trying to determine if the hype around the Arctic Monkeys is deserved or not, contemplating going planespotting, and getting ready to read the Haruki Murakami story in the latest New Yorker.

Good day.

0-60ish

Tub Squid: the name came to me in a dream. A Japanese girl stood before me in an airport with a Burberry hat on her head and a rollaboard suitcase at her side, and said to me, "tub squid."

The above is a partial-truth explanation of Tub Squid.

Coming soon: a tub squid graphic. I'll post it somewhere on my site when I'm done with it. Maybe I'll hide it in there somewhere. In the web design classroom of my imagination, the professor said to me: "Send your site visitors on a treasure hunt and it will gain in popularity."

Enough about the squid.

I got two rolls of film back from the lab and some of the shots are pretty good. Some scanning is in order. Stay tuned.

The guy at the photo lab loved my car. I let him sit in it. He suggested I put a chip in it so I can get some more horsepower out of the engine. While it's an interesting idea, I say the car is fast enough already. As it is, I have to work hard not to go 50 mph on any given street. Speaking of which, I've decided one of my favorite L.A. driving spots is right near LAX, where you get onto the fast bit of Lincoln Blvd with a right turn off Sepulveda. The reason is that there's a stop sign there, and the speed limit is 50, so you get to do a real 0-60 type of acceleration without much fear of law enforcement or errant pedestrians. Getting up to 60-ish in 2nd gear allows for a pleasant 6000rpm engine roar as well as maximum wasting of gasoline. I recommend it.

I imagine many might be thinking, 'I wish he'd stop talking about his car and get back to the squid.' Sorry, no more squid today. But I'll stop with the car too.

In trying to get to understand web design better I've been looking at lots of websites which have things to say about all aspects of it. Most of the time I can basically follow along. But sometimes I feel as if stuck inside a vast murky swamp of jargon and code. Keep in mind that I'm usually fairly good at handling technical things, and can generally find my way around a computer. I am of the generation that's in sync with the flow of digital information. To get an idea of the kind of things I encounter when attempting to understand how to fix things on my website, have a look at this:

"Avoid one common mistake: never do buffered I/O on stdout! This will cause a deadloop! Hence the ``$|=1'' in the above example..."

If any of you reading can make sense of that, not only will I be surprised, but I'll want to talk to you as well, so write to me.

Today we had our second gorgeous summery day in a row.....

Welcome to Tub Squid

Many must be wondering what Tub Squid could possibly be (how many hundreds, I wonder?) Well, never mind that for now. This is going to be a new blog. I'm reviving my blogging side partially because my father has agreed to revive his, which is great news for the blog world, even if most of it isn't yet aware of the fact.

I'll try to make posting here regular, so that all of you that want to become regular readers can feel as regular as possible about it. Regularity in posting = regularity in reading, right? I'm trying to read the latest translation of "Swann's Way" by Marcel Proust and I can't seem to manage any regularity with that, so I guess I can't blame anyone for being erratic about visiting my blog. Enough with musing on theoretical visitors, though. Lets get some content!

Someone moved in next door to me and not only does she have tattoos and a boyfriend she screams at, but she also always waits to move around her furniture until around 12:30 a.m., maybe 1. She moves her furniture while wearing boots. The wall between my head and her boots is so thin that I tend to have the sensation, lying in bed, that she is stepping on my head. I haven't confronted her yet.

That's on my to-do list along with getting a California drivers license to replace my New York one. I might have put it off for months more, but my friend Peter just noticed for me yesterday, when we were buying beer at 7-Eleven (Pacifico, to bring to a Tamale Party), that my license is due to expire in a couple of months. I've heard it requires a written test which is harder than most DMV-related written tests.

Other items on my to-do list: gain "young rising star" status at a hip production company or ad agency, watch my Netflix so I can get some more, pick up the first two rolls of medium-format film I ever shot at the lab (shot with my latest possession/love interest, a Mamiya 6 w/50mm lens), and, well, the list is fairly long.

Oh, hey, now it's approaching 11 p.m. and my next-door neighbour/plague of my life has broken out the guitar.

Joe, the five-and-three-quarter year-old I live with, had three girl-friends over this afternoon. I came back from a meeting at Ogilvy (yes, I have meetings sometimes) and was instantly brought in to Joe's room so I could "be the monster." The procedure for this is: we put blankets and comforters on Joe's bunkbed so that they hang down and create a cave where the lower bunk is, then all the children gather in there, and I proceed to run around reaching through cracks in the blanket and between the wall and the bed growling and barking and clawing at them, occasionally grabbing a foot and pulling a child part of the way out before letting go. I've honed the timing down to a science, and it yields maximum screaming. Kind of fun, but it's also exhausting, and on top of that the children actually don't realize that at a certain point if the monster keeps attacking it gets considerably less scary. So today I reasoned with them to let me stop being the monster and bench press them instead. They were delighted to be bench-pressed and soon forgot about the monster.

So, the moral of the story is: bench-pressing children can be a great solution. Just don't drop one of them.