En Attendant Ana at Fuzzy Cactus
En Attendant Ana at Fuzzy Cactus, May 25, 2023
I’m still thinking about how great En Attendant Ana were at the Fuzzy Cactus last Thursday. They mostly played songs from their latest record, Principia. Other than those, I most wanted to hear “Do You Understand?” from Juillet, which they played. I wish I’d taken notes about the setlist, but they didn’t leave out any of my favorites. At times, they were so tight and hyper-good at their instruments that it was overwhelming and made me want to be great at something. In moments like that, I believe that the band in front of you, doing their thing better than anyone else, can be The Best Band in the World. They closed with “Wonder” and then the encore was “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day” by The Pogues.
I brought the Leica M2 with the Voigtlander f/2 Ultron and I was glad I did, because the lighting was so low that I had to shoot at 1/2 second at f/2 with Tri-X 400. Plus, we were lucky enough to be right up front with an unobstructed view of the whole band. We’ll see if anything came out when I process the film.
After it was over, we went to the merch table where Margaux and Camille were selling CDs, albums, and t-shirts. I bought a large shirt and the vinyl copy of their “Lost and Found” record. We thanked them for coming. This show was a gift!
Lost data in Logseq today
I think I’m done with Logseq. I have a second pane open all the time with sub-bullets that are just block references to completed tasks either in Daily Notes or inside dedicated pages. Today, one of those block references turned into a red GUID enclosed in parentheses when I hit Ctrl-R by accident (because I thought I was refreshing a web page in another window). In this case, the formerly block reference pointed to a block in a dedicated page. I opened that page in VS Code and saw that it was indeed empty except for one asterisk (I use org-mode files in Logseq). I looked through my backup folder at that same file and saw that yesterday it had a whole bunch of tasks and notes in it. Who knows how many other pages like that have silently lost data?
I would stick with org-mode files in VS Code going forward, since I have so much invested in that format, but there’s no reason to without the smarts of Emacs behind it (or a Logseq that didn’t make me nervous). So I’ll most likely go with Markdown notes made nicer by one of the many VS Code Markdown extensions. I’m sad, though.
The regret of being incurious
From Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files, Issue #235 - Why the fuck are you going to the King’s coronation?
I am not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist, nor am I an ardent republican for that matter; what I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.
Nick Cave is more punk now than he ever was. I love that he gently refuted the criticism loudly lobbed his way by fans who demanded an answer from him, and were shocked that he would entertain going to the coronation.
Some of my biggest regrets are from being incurious about situations and people. Fearful that I’d be somehow tainted, or my “values” would be compromised by attending or watching or even reading something that didn’t align with what I believed or how I thought I should be treated. When did I let my world become so small?
Darkroom notes from April 12
I’m still slow as molasses in the darkroom, but at least I’m keeping careful notes.
This week’s print was one of my favorite photos ever. I took this at the 2016 InLight exhibit in Richmond. The artist had hung framed glass (or maybe they were just windows) from the ceiling of an indoor parking area, lit them with lights, and I think I remember clouds being painted on them. I put the Olympus XA on a chair or box and let it grab whatever very long exposure it thought it needed, which gave it a cool time-smearing effect.
It’s hard to print because there are blown-out details we’re not seeing in the highlights at the top of the framed glass and in the woman’s face. The photo shown is print P1 in the table. P2 (not shown) was a little better because I burned in the window and the lady’s face, and the print’s left and right edges, but I overcorrected and the edges look too straight. P3 (also not shown) was the best one, where I gently burned all four edges of the print, but a little demon crumb of extra photo paper landed on the darkest part of the print while I was exposing it and I didn’t see it until after processing. Oh well. Yet another thing to watch out for next time. Really, though, when I burned in the glass and the lady’s face, I should have switched to a lower contrast filter to get some more details back. We’ll just have to imagine what that would have looked like.
Canceled Glass.photo subscription
I canceled my membership on Glass.photo just now. It’s a very well-done, thoughtfully designed service/app, but I just don’t ever think to look at it or post to it. The users are polite and I only had good interactions with them, but for me it’s not as interesting as Instagram (for all of its many faults) or Flickr. Partially that’s down to me, because I didn’t take the time to follow enough people or dig into their newer category/camera filtering features.
One thing that always turned me off was the main browsing screen (which I won’t show here because I don’t want to give the impression that the photos on it aren’t interesting). It’s all images with zero metadata context unless you tap and slide on a photo to see who took it, or press on it to dive into more details. Flickr and Instagram do that better. I like seeing who made the photos as I scroll through the feed.
Photos on Glass tend to be very safe and non-confrontational (as far as I’ve seen). That may have something to do with Glass being bound by Apple’s rules to not allow any nakedness. That’s not such a great loss by itself except in the cases where it keeps some photographers from signing up at all. It makes Instagram look downright edgy by comparison.
I probably would have found more to like if I’d stayed longer and dug into it. And the fact that they made it viewable on the web is great, but it still feels closed off somehow, in a way that Flickr doesn’t. I still pay for Flickr and already wish I spent more time there, so Glass seemed non-essential after this long.
But I still recommend trying it. It’s nicely non-toxic in a way that Instagram can’t claim to be.
Nails (1979)
Directed by Phillip Borsos
1979 | 13 min
What a delightful short documentary. Found it on the National Film Board of Canada’s Roku channel. Sarah read this description and said, “Well, that sounds like you.”
This Oscar®-nominated documentary short tracks the shift in the relationship of an individual to his work between the 19th century and today. Focusing on how nails are made, we first see a blacksmith laboring at his forge, shaping nails from single strands of steel rods. The scene then shifts from this peaceful setting to the roar of a 20th century nail mill, where banks of machines draw, cut, and pound the steel rods faster than the eye can follow.