scary_mary 's post reminded me that y'all might not be intimately familiar with the details of my recent life.

Therefore, a summary:

New Years was good, though I probably picked a really bad week to go on one of my periodic sobriety binges.
I'm working on two shows, one of which I'm very excited about.
I moved in to a new place with Henry and Masha.
I'm dating Masha.
We have a cat named Cows.
I spent this past weekend in the North Carolina mountains learning about photography from my aunt.
With Masha's help, I learned to tolerate snow.
I have perfected several recipes.
My regular job sucks and I'm trying to find a Real Job to replace it.

Here are some of the photos I've taken over this last week.

I'm in Asheville all day. Holla: 404.754.9469.

A Facebook "friend" got a Canon 7d for Christmas. The Canon 7d is a $1500 camera. This is their first camera. I feel sick.

Photographers, I was wondering if you could give me some tips on "nightlife" photography. From my experience on NYE, it's generally too dark in a club to use auto-focus or look through my viewfinder. So I'm usually aiming blind with my lens' focus ring turned to about where I expect it to hit my subject right. Which means I often end up with shots like this:



(focus slightly off)



(focus off, image off center resulting in an ugly crop)



(focus decent on the guy, off on the girl)

Also, my flash tends to hit my subjects really glaringly. Is that something I'm doing wrong? Or is that a problem you always have to compensate for in post?

My setup NYE was: Canon Rebel D400, EF-S 18-55mm lens, Speedlight 430ex ii flash with one of those printable bounce cards and a bit of wax paper to soften the light.

People talk about ecstasy like it's a party drug, but so far it's been more of a Getting Shit The Fuck Done drug.

My roommates are gone for the weekend, and I've been eating ecstasy pills since about 4. So far I've cleaned the house, mopped both bathrooms, combed our new kitten, finished a late music review, and am now in the process of hacking together a wideangle lens from a door peephole and random household supplies. Also I am dancing.

Aaaawesome.

Here are some pictures of my roommate Henry. I took them the night he tried mushrooms for the first time*.







Also, I spent New Year's Eve not drinking and taking pictures for the party at Graveyard. It was sort of fun trying to make the basically idiotic process of taking "party pictures," into trying to find actual good shots. I was mainly unsuccessful, but here are two that I liked.





EDIT: One of my wideangle shots:



* I am probably a bad influence.

We decided to have a second housewarming party.

Gave everyone paint and brushes when they came in, spent 4 or 5 hours drawing cryptic things on our walls. Masha drew a tiny chair on the toilet, Henry spent the night in his bedroom talking to his crush.

Success.

Haaaay photographers - any of y'all need a 16gb SDHC card? I've got like 5 of them, all still in their original packaging, and I'm selling them for $25 each atlanta-buyers, $30 each non-atlanta/georgia buyers.

Here's the card's Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-Class-Memory-SDSDRH-016G-A11/dp/B0012W7HQK

And here is a peeeecture:



Comments are screened, so send me your info there or through PM.

Remember that terrible meeting I was at a week or two ago?

This is a quote from the info page for the art show they came up with:

How embarrassing. I feel like I'm supporting and legitimizing these people by taking part in their event. Even looking at their facebook page to copy their artists' statement made my hate myself. Seriously, students are useless. Art students more so.

Paul Auster quotes Baudelaire in the last pages of City of Glass:

"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world."

There's an analysis of Auster's usage of that quote here.

Holy shit I hate meeting with retarded fucking arts students.

I feel like I've spent the last few years talking to people, and now I'm stuck in the playpen throwing shit around.

I'm trying to write my bio for this art organization's website. I'm drawing a complete blank. Here's what everyone else wrote:

Stuart Keeler is an artist of public spaces with an interest in examining curatorial constructs in developing a stronger link to the production of art in the public realm. Recent projects include: Rauschenberg Foundation NYC; Service Works, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, San Francisco; Interiority, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; i.e. 1A-Hong Kong, Republic of China; and A (new) Genre Landscape, Atlanta, GA.

Louise E. Shaw has been a cultural worker in Atlanta for over 30 years. She is currently the Curator of the Global Health Odyssey Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cinqué Hicks is a writer, artist, and cultural historian who relocated to Atlanta 4 years ago. He engages in independent curating projects and publications, and writes art criticism for Creative Loafing.


And here's what I've got for me:

Ben Grad is a photographer and writer deeply interested in the Atlanta dynamic. He is currently exploring photography of pets being bathed as a metaphor for the relationship between the "citizen" and society.


Eugh. Maybe I should do some work for "Raushenberg Foundation NYC." Feel so inadequate. Need so many more bulletpoints on my resume.

I spent the night on a mountain for the meteor shower. Just got back 15 minutes ago, exhausted.

It was a good time, I saw a few stars, nature is cool.

But I don't think I should ever go out into the woods with a 30-something person crew again. Being around people who insist on talking while the sky's out is an infuriating experience. As I fell asleep, one of them was talking about positivity and crystals. I mumbled "you're wrong," "that's not accurate," and that sort of thing until falling asleep at late dawn.

When I woke up it was raining on me.

I've got to stop using the phrase "shitballs" when discussing grant proposals with my colleagues.

I can't tell you how much I miss so many people right now.

One of the weird things about being a biker is how casually you begin to accept frequent danger. I don't mean the danger of getting in a crash - that's an understandable danger, something that you can control by biking carefully, taking your lane, keeping your brakes tuned, and wearing bright clothes/lights. It's the uncontrollable dangers that occasionally wake me at night.

Last night, I was biking home from looking at my new place (more on this later). It was dusk, which is a dangerous time to be biking. I was riding fast but carefully. Though I was wearing all black, I had front and back lights on my bike, both with fresh batteries. I was riding south on Memorial, a 5 lane road with a central turning lane. I saw a green light at the intersection ahead. The road was deserted except for a car at the intersection's turn lane waiting to take a left. I was a good two blocks away and they had plenty of time to turn before I arrived at the intersection, but they didn't turn. I got closer and I could see the driver, a young black man* looking at me and joking to his laughing friends. The car remained still, and I preceded through the intersection. I was watching the driver, I saw him shift his hands on the steering wheel, I swerved, he shouted something, I took a fast curve into the opposite side of the road, just barely missing his car as he drove through the intersection aimed at where I had been a half second ago. He shouted after me as his car screeched off. I am absolutely sure he was either trying to hit me or at least force me to jump off my bike.

That's what I was thinking about while I tried to sleep this morning. Biking is not a dangerous mode of transportation. Drivers make it dangerous by throwing drinks at cyclists, merging into our paths to "teach us a lesson," nudging the back wheels of our bikes, honking as they pass us, shooting darts/arrows/bb's at us, and driving full speed through crowds of racers**. You people make me too frightened to sleep. You people make the decision to use a bike as my primary form of transportation a question of survival, rather then one of economic or environmental impact.

That's why I didn't sleep last night.


* I mention the driver's race/age because I've found them to be a lethal combination in Atlanta. The first time I was deliberately knocked from my bike was when a black teenager jumped into the street in front of me and punched my shoulder (when he ran, his friends did stay and help me clean the blood off my hands and shoulders/side). I've had stuff (rocks, full drinks, bags of trash) thrown at me 6 times, and 5 of those times the attackers were young black men. I'm sad that the response I've learned from all this is to be immediately more cautious when I see a black teen driving near me.

A caveat: when the attack is non-physical (being called a faggot, horns honked, told to "get my ass off the road") then chances are it's a young male of any race.


** These are all things that have happened to cyclists. The dart, arrow, and bb gun attacks have happened several times in many states, though I've never been victim of one.

This is what happens when you ride Halloween critical mass in the rain:



(This photo was taken by Adam Bruneau of Black Lips/The Spooks/Every Single Atlanta Band In The Entire World. I'm not sure if he's really strange or really normal.)

I'm applying for another one of those "too good to be true" jobs. The last one I got hired for was a research/blog position for a marketing firm, writing stuff like this every month. It's a ridiculous assignment, and I am continually amazed to find a big ol' check in my mailbox every month as a result of a few hundred words worth of babble.

From what I can tell, I'd be producing similar content for this new job... except it's a full time position paying $3000 a month. Currently, in a good month, I make $500. I don't know what I would do with $3000. I COULD FLY TO INDIA WITH THE SAVINGS FROM TWO MONTHS OF WORK AND WHEN I SAY "SAVING" WHAT I MEAN IS CONTINUING TO LIVE LIFE AS NORMAL EXCEPT ALSO SPENDING A LOT OF FREE TIME BATHING IN MONEY.

I'm pretty excited about this opportunity.

Additionally, I have a question for y'all:

1) I am going to be moving out of Fishmarket in late December. My current best living option would be moving in with a lot of girls in a sweet old house. I know many of the girls and I believe we get along okay. However, I've never really lived with girls plural before. Currently we have one female roommate, and when we first moved in to Fishmarket we had one female roommate. But, for some reason, I have a feeling that living in an All Girl house might be different. What do you think internet? Is it different? (also, I would like to hear from girls who have lived in an All Boy house).

2) There's a new hostess at my restaurant. She's pretty, she just graduated in May with a degree in photography, she's a little flirty. (Have you ever met someone and been pretty sure you were going to sleep with them? I'm pretty sure she got that impression when she met me. Which is what I mean by flirty. I mean it's like one of those complicated time riddles - how do you flirt with someone you've already slept with IN THE FUTURE???) Anyway, she says we should get together and geek out about photography some time. Assuming that her offer will either lead to me embarrassing myself by propositioning her OR the two of us happily sleeping together... should we hang out? Or should we stay "professional?"