Month: May 2011

Categories
comics

For you comics folks out there

I’ve talked about “Sammy the Mouse” by Zak Sally before in this blog. It’s a really odd tale (so far) with really evocative art. Fantagraphics has published the first three volumes in a beautiful format. Zak wants to make a book that collects the first three volumes, and he wants to do it himself. No really, himself. He’s going to print it in his garage, the warehousing, and the packing and shipping himself. Sounds like the only thing he won’t be doing is the binding. Actually, he will be making 10 hardcover versions. He’s hoping to raise the money for the project on kickstarter. It’s well worth checking out.

 

 

If you like comics, this is a great project to support. It’s cheap and well worth it!

Categories
freedom politics

Osama the trust fund brat

From Dana Vachon at the Daily Beast:

 

“Osama bin Laden was already made an old fool by the Arab Spring. It was a million young bodies, their unsated creature needs, a generation of Arabs who were only 9 or 11 when 9/11 happened, that pushed the Middle East into modernity, in the end. It was taxi drivers and street vendors and people with no jobs. And they revealed bin Laden for what he always was, a trust fund brat peddling delusions of past grandeur as a cure for the present’s pains.”

Categories
odds and ends

Dreams and how my brain works

I dreamed that I was in a photography class the other night.

My cousin Beth was in there with me and I explained to her in extreme detail how to use achieve accurate focus on an enlarger. I went through everything, the grain focuser, lens alignment, focus shifts as you top down from wide open, optimum apertures, vibration control, etc. This is pretty arcane knowledge at this point, and I was correct in every excruciating detail. What I failed to notice was that I was trying to focus onto previously exposed and developed film. That doesn’t even make any sense. I had one of my slides on the board and was getting frustrated that I couldn’t focus the image on the slide by shining light on it. The reflection was getting to me, the last thing I remember doing was looking for a polarizing filter to get rid of the reflection coming off the film. I had conflated copy photography and printing.

I woke up wondering how I could dredge up so much technical stuff accurately, stuff that wouldn’t even occur to me without actually trying to make a print and be so far off on the main event in the darkroom. It would be like knowing all about carburetor overhauling and then wonder why a mixture of water and molasses wasn’t doing real well in the car. Strange stuff…

Categories
odds and ends

Bin Laden

I’m glad to see the general tone of reaction about his being killed being toned down a bit in the days after the event. Frankly, I was a bit shocked at the glee that had been expressed. Most of the commentators I follow have now come out and said pretty much the same thing. I can’t say I’m unhappy that he’s dead, but I can’t get too happy about any killing. I was actually afraid to post that feeling the day after we heard the news. I half expected someone to ask me if I couldn’t enjoy Bin Laden’s death, whose death could I enjoy? is there a word to describe the fear of irony?