Knuckledragger

(OC) Don't ask me why I made this. It's arguably an insult to Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

I stayed up later than I should have last night watching news clips about Israel/Iran. It's fascinating what one can learn upon escaping the US corporate media bubble. I heard a fairly insightful take on Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi is not a long term strategist. He thinks very short term, he's just (A) been in power and in the public eye for decades and (B) gets a continual tongue bath from most US media. Bibi's MO is [impulsively do thing] -> [deal with the ramifications of his previous action by doing another impulsive thing.] The consequences for this pattern (besides regional instability, bloodshed an chaos) is that to stay in power he has had to increasingly align himself with formerly fringe far right elements of the Israeli political landscape. Bibi's prime directive is to stay in power so he can stay out of jail (reminiscent of a certain other political figure, but I digress...) I have read for years that to really get a proper sense of the true positions of Netanyahu and the Likud party in general, find their Hebrew language statements and run them through Google translate. The results paint a very different picture than what he says in English.

Yesterday, members of the opposition party were set to vote to dissolve the Knesset. That vote failed. Netanyahu remains in power. Also yesterday, the US did an emergency evacuation of personnel from Iran. Tonight Israel has attacked Iran. The news is still filtering out. Reports of large explosions in the Iranian capital. This can and will get ugly.

That statue is, as the kids say, caked up.

I have questions.

This shit is crazy. King of the Hill actor Jonathan Joss fatally shot in Texas after argument with neighbor. EDIT: The second page didn't paste for some reason:

This video is probably exceeds the time and interest of anyone here. I've had it on while working on photos. I have mixed feelings about it. Piers Morgan is an insufferable, pompous jackass and physical evidence that the denizens of my fine state didn't toss quite enough things into the Boston Harbor back in the day. I don't know much about Sean Carroll. Eric is the, uh, less crackpot of the two Weinstein brothers. This is damnation with the faintest of praise. There was a time, maybe 15 years ago where I heard him speak on learning disabilities and thought he was seriously smart. It could be he was, in that moment and on that subject. It's also just as likely that I fell for a grifter. It wouldn't be the first time. In any case, Eric stages a Chernobylesque meltdown here because the "serious" physics community doesn't regard his crackpot theories in the, ahem, gravity he'd like. Sean Carroll is a polite academic type and responds to the full state of Eric's emotional diaper as best he can. Piers, whose job it is to have as much drama as possible on his show, barely manages to contain his smirk while thinking "this is going to get SO many views" to himself. The temper tantrum starts around the 20 minute mark.

In 1996, a then 19 year old woman founded "Haven" a goth night hosted at Club Metro in Northampton MA. I was there in the first year. I still have a flyer from a 1997 event ...somewhere. Club Metro became Diva's at some point, and was the biggest gay nightclub in the area. Space-wise it was the biggest nightclub period. In 2006, Haven celebrated their 10th anniversary and it was insane. I have alluded to the fact that I have taken a fair amount of shit for the nightclub photos I took in the mid 00s. This got stuck in my craw and I (as I am wont to due) overrated a bit. There's a lot to unpack here and most of it is, to be frank, fucking irrelevant. The bottom line is that a lot of freaky shit happened at goth night, I gleefully took photos of it and posted them online. I got rather puritanical reactions from a number of people in the local nightclub scene, earning me a reputation as some kind of leering pervert. In the fall of 2007, I made ~1500 photos private because I was tired of hearing about it. As I have said before my edits to many of the photos I took were crap, primarily because I thought it was a good idea to crop in super close, with zero regard to aspect ratio and framing. Bad editing definitely made the situation worse. Now with nearly two decades of reflection, I've concluded that yes many of the photos were without merit, the reaction against them was primarily from assholes, and I am remarkably bad at not taking things personally. With that said, here's Haven's 10th anniversary. There will be some titty. When I get to a later photo set from Haven, there will be a lot of titty. You have been warned. Diva's had remarkably crap lighting. They had a bunch of flat mirror scanners set to "synchronized spaz" and two 1000W strobes that went off irregularly. The combination made for the worst imaginable source for available light photography. This shot is 1 second with the camera placed on a railing. I should add that all of these photos are ISO50, because at this point I didn't know how to adjust the ISO setting on my PowerShot(!) See the woman in the far left? In '06 I cropped the image to just be here ...resulting in something that would barely be a thumbnail today. She's still the subject of the image, now she just has some context. This is The Enigma. He's a heavily body modified performer. He's actually quite a showman. The goths ate up his schtick. He hammered a nail up one of his nostrils. He ran a drill up the other one. He blasted himself in the face with an angle grinder. He pumped a bottle of what he said was Windex up his nose. People went back to dancing. This guy is not the founder of Haven, but he was the main DJ for many years. He's like 6'5 and rail thin. I used to call him "The Alpha Goth." I know him a bit. He's dedicated to his craft, but we have some ...philosophical and creative differences. The two main people behind Haven. They had a falling out as some point. This photo is absolutely terrible from a technical perspective, but documents the moment in time. I did say there would be titty. 1/8 second handheld. 2 second exposure of discarded Champagne glasses. I really like these two shots. My friend Felicia has been a belly dancer for decades. She did a performance. None of these shots are very good, but they do capture he abilities. Back to dancing. 1.6 seconds with the camera on a railing again. I think someone bumped it. Neat effect. There was one guy with a pair of glowsticks. I took a number of long exposures of him with the camera on a railing. To the credit of Diva's, they had all sorts of places to place a camera. The Enigma is back. Now he's got Peaches with him. Things are about to get interesting. She's got a bed of nails. They also smashed the watermelon Gallagher style, and I utterly failed to capture it. Part of the act was "force feeding" Peaches some of the watermelon. I missed that as well. Thank you for attending Haven's 10th!

I'll get my coat.

Flashback to 10 years ago:

Holy schnickes. Orbital announces half-speed remastered 4CD/4LP Brown album. Orbital 2 AKA "The Brown Album" is the single greatest electronic music album. I say this with zero hesitation. ~$152. Dunno about shipping. This release is a compelling argument to but an expensive phono preamp.

I'm sensing a pattern here.

RIP Rick Derringer, best known for that one song we all can recall instantly. Credit to Bill Szymczyk, the producer, who turned that shit up to "11" in the studio, making it such an earworm. If you doubt me, check out the Edgar Winter version of the same song which is ...fine, but a pale imitation of the later Derringer only version. Also, while we're on the subject, Absolutely gratuitous 70s video of their hit from 10 years earlier. EDIT: I should add that Rick produced the first SIX albums by Weird Al, a fact which by itself should elevate him to legendary status.

Where was I? A different crop of this photo was the background for the website for my lighting company in the 00s. I turned off auto-renewal for that domain last week. Soon it will redirect a gambling site, I'm sure. 1 second with the camera placed on the sound booth. A breakbeat DJ and tattoo artist I knew in the 00s. I put a 300W moonflower light with a yellow gel behind him. A actual turntablist and not merely a DJ. Same 300W moonflower. Hannah under the lights. 1/30th, F/2.8, ISO400. I should add at this juncture that I cleaned up most of these shots with Topaz Denoise AI, which is a very 2020s anti-noise app. 00s noise reduction apps and plugins left a lot to be desired. I don't know who this long haired woman was, but she was quite photogenic. In this second shot, I originally cropped out everything and it looked terrible. Almost 20 years later, the rest of the frame serves as negative space. A very slow Sunday evening. Originally I cropped out everything except for the lissajous pattern. Now the photo is an available light study. As I mentioned previously, 2006 was an insane year. There are quite a few photo sets I haven't even looked at yet. A DJ I knew turned 30 in May of '06. He threw a party at the expensive yet shitty club where I worked sometimes. I couldn't use fog in there.. ...because it set off the fire alarm. Pic from 2005 very related. Early in the night. 0.4" with the camera placed on the bar. I elected not to use noise reduction on this one. I didn't like this shot in '06, but revisiting it, I cropped it square and now enjoy it's near abstraction. Wise DJs bring at least one opening act. The birthday boy picked the fella above, which was a wise choice. 1/6 handheld, which was quite reasonable with a tiny focal length P&S. As above with different lights on. I really liked this one in '06. I still do. The party got kind of wild. Birthday DJ reacting to a request to play ...not house music. This was a meter malfunction. Notice my photo tag. This is an image I did not re-edit. A case where motion blur actually improves the image. 1/15th handheld. 0.4" handheld. I have no idea. It looks neat. 1 second handheld. I braced my back against the wall of the club and held my breath. The answer is still "no" even if you play with your hair. Sneak peak for next time. This is a project that's going to take the last half of forever.

Feliz compleaños B. Kirk Lawson, Esquire! The Mexican with the fattest head most white sounding name ever.

Two things: We are in a palindromic period right now. This is some local havoc. Five Corners, or as it is often known, Flood Corners, is an infamous intersection on MV. This footage is from yesterday. Check out the start, then ~10, 20 and 25 minutes in. I made it a point to not leave the house yesterday.

I've been engaging in a bit of a photographic revisionist history/redemption arc. 2006 was a crazy year. I was working 3+ nights a week doing lights in nightclub (in addition to everything I did all day), and doing other sporadic events as well. It was mostly fun and I made enough money for it to be worthwhile. I cannot imagine doing it now. This was a time period right before LED luminaries became mainstream and most club lights were halogen or arc bulb based. This meant normal people could not operate or maintain them, so there was a niche I was able to carve out for a one man lighting business. All of that would change by the end of the decade. During this time period, I took a ton of photos. Many of them are really awful. To the point, the edits I posted were terrible. I operated under the misguided notion that cropping a tiny section out of a 5MP original (taken with a mid 00s point & shoot sensor) was a good idea. Also many of the photos were of the partygoers and in my opinion even the originals for most of those shots are just bad. In 2007, partially inspired by some scene drama, I privated ~1500 photos on Flickr and got on with my day. There's still a couple people from the mid 00s who have a grudge against me because of shots I took during that time. (There's a long story here about a garage house DJ I knew who had a very attractive and insanely jealous girlfriend. I had a photo of him ogling a go-go dancer, she saw it and got mad at him. He of course blamed me for his dysfunctional relationship.) Oh wait, I still have the relevant photos: ...but I digress. 2006 was also a significant year because it was when I bought my first DSLR (EOS 30D that I made heavy use of for entirely too long.) I bought the 30D because my PowerShot S60 died ...twice. Canon were real shitters about fixing it. I have been going through photos I took in the first half of '06, all taken with the S60. The process is slow and laborious, but it's therapeutic for me (and lord knows we all need some therapy these days.) I have been working from the original images (fortunately, I am a compulsive archivist and data hoarder), doing minimal edits and the then replacing them on Flickr. This is a process that no one besides myself will ever appreciate. Lucky for me I'm an only child and my primary audience. As I mentioned above, many of the shots are not salvageable. Using the built in flash on a ca. 2004 point & shoot while the club is full of fog is a benighted idea in the best of circumstances. I took a LOT of photos during this time period and it may well be years before I've finished this task. The following is a small sample: Spinning fire, Jan 2006. 0.4" handheld. I had no idea what I was doing. Re-cropped square but otherwise unedited. Same party as above. My friend Ed, who is a video artist and electronic musician. He has a tendency to hold still for long periods of time. 1.6 second exposure, with the camera sitting on ...some object (I no longer remember what.) I've got a long story about Ed I might tell some day. Re-cropped square, no other edits. A slow night at a Sunday event I worked in an expensive but ultimately shitty bar. 4 second exposure with the camera sitting on case. Cropped 2-3, but otherwise unedited. Same club a month later. Around that time Technics tried to compete with Pioneer in the CDJ market and made a really weird and poorly received product. They made for an interesting light source however. 4 second exposure again with the camera resting on an equipment case. Re-cropped 4:5 (my favorite aspect ratio) but otherwise unedited. Longtime reggae DJ. He's got a huge local following. I never saw eye to eye with him on a great many things (I could write a fucking book on that subject, but I won't.) 1/4 second handheld. I could hold the camera pretty steady for such a long focal length. The joys of a 5.8mm focal length... Part of the live kit belonging to Ed, the bald fella from a few shots above. Not a good photo at all, but the synth gear is too cool not to include. Sadly, in early 2012 Ed passed out drunk with a lit cigarette and burned his studio down. That was a very bad day. Alcoholism is the worst. Same show, available light. 1/6th, handheld. Re-cropped 4:5, but otherwise unedited. That blue LED Doepfer Schaltwerk was the stuff of legend. Same gig. Ed lit up by my 20mW 532nm green 3 mirror lissajous laser. 1 second exposure. No idea what I used as a tripod. Ricardo, the guy who helped me finish my Saturnine mix in 2009. Seen here in April of '06, using my CDJ and mixer combination. I could NOT find that flight case when I moved. That's somewhat concerning as it's kind of huge. Half a second handheld, cropped 4:5. All of this is the tip of the iceberg. I've probably re-edited ~100 photos at this point. More later.

This is hardly porn, but... I got a Velodyne CHT powered sub for the low price of "you're first in line, come pick it up" today. #MVLife

"Nice system, but does it have enough power?"

The Go-Gos played the Warfield Theater in San Francisco last night. Kathy Valentine posted these shots to her Bluesky account:

In the summer of 2007 I hiked up Mount Sugarloaf in Sunderland. I went up there many times in the '00s, both with and without a camera. The view from it is spectacular and really shows off a pastoral and idyllic perspective of the Happy Valley. The weather was fantastic and there were some hot ail balloons floating around merrily. Unfortunately for me, on this date I took the always terrible Canon 75-300mm lens and I did NOT know what I was doing. The photos came out terribly. I sat on them for nearly 18 years until last month when I sat down and processed them with some modern apps. I had to make deft use of Luminar 4, Topaz Sharpen AI and Photoshop to extract remotely decent results. The sharpening was key, and a faustian bargain. The 75-300mm is never sharp. I wasn't smart enough to up my 30D's ISO to improve shutter speed so a bunch of the shots have lens motion blur. The 30D isn't the most sharp thing to begin with in the best of circumstances. Too much AI sharpening makes for weird and very obvious artifacts. There is no perfect solution. With all of this said, the end results here aren't half bad. I rate this set a solid "Crank up that ISO you dumbass" out of 10. I did take a few shots with the 17-85mm, which is is a Leica rangefinder lens in comparison to the 75-300mm.

No reason I should post this now.