alt

not sure if im alt.

today i was talking to a friend (guy). i wished to express the sentiment usually encoded by the phrase "pussy-whipped". being a feminist, i felt the term 2 b sexxxist. so, i said "pussy-enamored" instead.

in some ways i feel this is more accurate as well, since "whipped" doesn't often mean "impressed to the extent of being under the control of" outside of the phrase "pussy-whipped," while "enamored" does have this meaning and is commonly used.

plz try 2 figure out if im alt in commentz.

on the topic of "being enamored," i read this today in the NY Timez:

“We must never lose sight of what’s at stake,’’ Mr. Obama said. Sounding much like his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, he warned, “As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us.’’

I used to be Obama-enamored, but it's fading.

honeymoonz's over.

Boserup Et Al

"When many more reach the educational level which was previously a monopoly for a small minority, most of them must accept jobs which were not previously acceptable to people with that degree of education, or else they will be unemployed. This is due to the simple fact that the number of non-manual jobs available is likely to increase more slowly than the number of educated persons available to fill them. But this fact is not easily accepted by those concerned.”

Boserup, E., Kanji, N., Tan, S., & Toulmin, C. (2007). Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: Cromwell Press. Part III, Chapter 11, Page 192.

Bad

I only like people who have strong feelings of existential crisis.

But if the person says that are 'into' 'existentialism' or 'like existentialism' I feel hate for them.

Am I fucked.

Brotographic Exploits, Part 2

Brotographic Exploits, Part 2

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As promised, here is the second installment chronicling my adventures as a brotographer in the broed-out streets, bars, and clubs of San Francisco.

Heard for the first time in 2006: “I’m a Photoshop artist”

Heard for the first time on August 16, 2010, on mentholuniversitypress.blogspot.com: “I’m a Brotoshop artist”

This is history in the making.

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As I’ve mentioned to some of my readers, I’ve been not drinking much lately. This can be a challenging choice when I shoot in places where drinking is common, and indeed I do much of my shooting in bars, clubs, and similar venues. I find that the best strategy is to tell others that “I am LDS”. Most people do not know that LDS means “Latter-Day Saints”, short for “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”. The LDS movement is commonly known as Mormonism; however, the term “Mormon” was initially introduced as a religious slur, in reference to the Book of Mormon which forms much of LDS scripture. To be brief: Jews believe in the Old Testament. Christians believe in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Mormons believe in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Book of Mormon. Calling someone “Mormon” is perhaps equivalent to calling a Christian a “Bible-brandisher” or a Jew a “Torah-toter” or a Muslim a "Koran-coddler". In Ely, Nevada (where I spent some six months working in a copper mine in a miniscule town where perhaps 50% of the population was LDS), the term “Mormon” was seen as quite acceptable for in-crowd usage but somewhat rude for non-LDS people to use. Thus, LDS people freely used the term “Mormon”, but it was seen as more polite for a non-LDS person to use the term LDS.

The great benefit to saying “I’m LDS” and then explaining “Mormon” in response to the inevitable “What does ‘LDS’ mean?” is that it immediately removes any suspicion in anyone’s mind that I might be lying. I am thus free to not drink, and beautiful women are filled with desire to corrupt me. There is a third benefit: since I am teaching people what “LDS” means, I can consider myself to be doing a public service which completely eliminates any self-consciousness resulting from my dishonesty and allows me to feel good about myself as a gentleman, a scholar, and an educator.

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I recently got a good taste of red wine as a result of this. Her teeth were stained dark with it, which I didn’t mind at all. Erik advised me that photography would lead to hooking up with random women, and it has. I'm about 90% sure that this isn't "morally wrong" and about 99% sure that it is "fucking stupid".

On the topic of red wine, I recall drinking wine with a friend of mine months ago. He said “This stains your teeth”. I said “Well, you can’t see your own teeth, so you must be telling me my teeth are being stained”. He blushed and said “A little. I fear my teeth are being stained”. I said “Well, your fear has come to pass”. He was very self-conscious after that. Pity. I’m not usually much of a wine drinker. I went to a wine tasting six months ago, which was a new experience. I’d never tasted wine before, though God knows I’ve drank enough of the stuff.

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From time to time, people have thought I am gay. Part of this probably arises from my obsession with Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, and I’ll admit that my feelings for Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan perhaps transcend the norms of heterosexuality. When I came to Stanford, one of the young men in my dorm admitted that he had thought I was gay for the first three months we knew eachother.

At the events I shoot, people seem even more inclined to think I am gay, which is a good sign: It means I am dressing better, moving away from being a JC Penny model and the posterboy of straight men’s fashion. I don’t mind being misperceived; straight women are no less sexually attracted to men they perceive as gay, which makes sense, since gay men are no less sexually attracted to men they perceive as straight.

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When I shoot for a promoter or venue owner, I try to negotiate several things. Besides having my car valeted, I tell the client that I want access to a space within the venue that is well-lit, clean, dry, and protected from theft. I need such a place to change batteries, memory cards, lenses, etc. and to leave my camera bag in a location where I know it won’t be stolen or spilled/trampled on. It’s nice to be able to “get away” from a party for a few minutes in any case, and most people take a breather by going outside, but the streets of San Francisco are not a good place to maintain delicate and expensive photographic equipment.

Usually, venues provide me with access to either the security room (where the security guards monitor cameras) or the dressing room (where the dancers get ready). It’s not as if most venues have a dedicated “brotographer’s room”. I was once given access to a kitchen, and it was all steamy there with water dripping everywhere, so I added “dry” to my list of required attributes for a space.

There is one particular club in SF where I’ve shot a half-dozen times and where I am always given access to the dressing room. As such, I’m doing “camera things” while the dancers are doing their makeup, getting dressed, etc. Sometimes we chat idly; a typical question I answer is “what do you do for a living?” I answer, and usually end up rambling about my work and thereby teaching exotic dancers about Feminism. I think this could be best described with a word that ends in “-ic”, like “ironic” or “apocalyptic”.

Knowledge of Feminism has proven quite useful to me. Last weekend, I did a shoot at a new venue (new to me). It is on the Presidio, far enough from the heart of San Francisco that it is possible to find street parking. I’m not withholding more detailed information because I have a strong sense of privacy but rather because I have a weak sense of direction.

EDITOR’S NOTE: To understand this section, it is helpful to know the following about me: I like curvy women, I do not like skinny women. Some would accuse me of making an understatement.

After the shoot, I was sitting at the bar with a woman who was telling me about her (film) photography and experiences in art school (red flag). She mentioned that she wanted to lose 20 pounds, which was outrageous (she was substantially thinner and shorter than me). I told her not to. She said “Oh, you wouldn’t be saying that if you could see me twenty pounds lighter”. Rather than beg to differ, I took a Feminist stance. I started by explaining the difference between sex (countable) and gender: sex refers to biological differences between men and women, while gender refers to socially constructed differences in such variables as dress, education, employment, etc. The catch is that the difference between the two is not always clear. I told her about a grant I was working on to study gender variables in osteoporosis. In America, osteoporosis is mainly thought of as a women’s disease, and indeed white American women do suffer from osteoporotic fractures at greater rates and younger ages than white American men. However, there is a twist: in many countries and in certain ethnic groups in the United States, osteoporosis is much less a “women’s disease”. It strikes men and women much more equally in regions of the world where there is not a strong social impetus for women to be thin. The reason for this is that dieting (especially in the teens and twenties) dramatically reduces the amount of bone mass a person lays down, which creates a predisposition to osteoporosis later in life. In an environment where women are “supposed” to be thin and men are “supposed” to be big and muscular, osteoporosis is a woman’s disease- not so in other countries, especially in countries where women do much manual labor, most commonly in agriculture.

She agreed to only try to lose 5 pounds instead of 20. A measured victory.

Feminism provided me with tools to argue my case. My guess is that I was much better able to scare her straight (or, perhaps, “scare her curvy”) by raising the spectre of “hip fractures” than by raising the spectre of “I might be slightly less interested in sleeping with you”.

I’m tempted to post a picture of her to “prove” that she would be unhealthily thin if she lost 20 pounds, but I think that would be inappropriate, and I want to continue Menthol’s policy of only posting appropriate content.

Peas out, V4L, Foamcore.

-A2

felt pen on paper w/ wheat paste by erik. tags by various. brooklyn, ny 2010

Brotographic Exploits, Part 1

Today I was reading Vogue (the August edition), which is entitled “The Age Issue”. While reading it, I thought to myself “This should be called ‘The Photoshop Issue’, and instead of doing a feature on ‘Gwyneth Paltrow at 37’, they should do a feature on ‘Adobe at CS5’”. I think in nested quotations.

Event photography has caused me to despise mainstream gender roles, not because they are misogynistic, but because they prevent men from wearing makeup. If only men wore foundation as often as women, I’d have much less image processing to do after my shoots.

It is a chicken-or-egg problem: does photography turn one into a jackass, or does being a jackass predispose one to interest in photography? I suspect that both are true. In any case, photography (particularly event photography) is trouble. The goal, explicit or implicit, is usually to create exciting images of beautiful men and women. This causes me to dislike unattractive people for interfering with my work. In event photography, I have to focus (pardon the pun) on people who are photogenic (i.e. conventionally attractive). In street photography, I can focus on anyone who is photographable (i.e. interesting), and being photogenic is only one of many ways to be photographable. Of course, no one gets paid for street photography. No one wants a picture of “Woman With Hairnet” on their wall or on a flyer for their club. Photography has also made me much more aware of people’s flaws simply because the resolution of my photographs usually exceeds what I can take in at a glance. This is mainly due to my using a prime (fixed-focal-length) lens; in a fair number of my photographs, it is possible to see if someone is wearing contact lenses, for instance. If I shoot a dark-haired woman with flash, I’ll be able to see every stray hair that falls over her face, along with the shadow of every hair. The shadow and the hair converge where the hair rests (on a cheek or on the nose, usually) and then diverge as the hair extends away, either towards the scalp or towards its end. In many cases, what I can see in a photograph is more detailed than what I could see in real life, even if I could get as close as necessary: if I got close enough in real life to see at the resolution in my photographs, I would be too close for my eyes to focus. Look, for example, at the Facebook photo of my eye: you couldn’t see that much detail regardless of how close you got to me.

Event photography is also trouble insofar as it immerses me in an environment that is “enabling” of all sorts of misbehavior. I do recognize that I am the only one responsible for my actions, and also that I am, myself, very much an “enabler”.

For some reason, clients like to try to pay me in unconventional ways, i.e. they offer products or services instead of cash. I always refuse. No, I will not do photography in exchange for yoga lessons, a $250 gift card to a sushi restaurant, jewelry, or a haircut. If someone offered me gasoline, I might do work for trade, but that hasn’t happened.

Two weeks ago, I did a shoot at a bar. When I arrived, I met the bouncer. His photograph appears below:



He was about six feet two inches tall, three hundred pounds, covered with scars- in every sense, not the sort of person you’d want to mess with. While I was talking to my client, the bouncer was nearby, talking to someone else (a member of the staff, I think) about his workout routine. As you’ve all doubtlessly noticed, men who exercise adore telling others about their routine. The bouncer was doing so, and I caught a bit of the conversation. In addition to the typical strength-building exercises, his routine included injecting steroids.

About two hours later, I sat on a couch to look over my photographs. The couch was behind the DJ table. I had photographed the guest DJ several times, largely because he was a total heterochrome- he had two different-colored eyes, as in the photograph below. This condition is quite rare in humans, though reasonably common in cats and somewhat common in dogs:



The DJ removed a large bag of marijuana from his back pocket. I estimate it contained between one-half and three-quarters of an ounce of plant material:



He sat down next to me on the couch and placed a cardboard box over his knees (I think it was a box he kept some of his equipment in) and proceeded to roll a joint. He was having some difficulty, because his rolling papers were crinkled. He had apparently carried them loose in his pocket as single papers, rather than in a pack. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bouncer turn and stare straight at me, and then at the weed. The bouncer started lumbering towards us from across the dance floor, much faster than I had seen him move at any time that night, and probably as fast as he was capable of moving. I was worried. Erik has told me about how smoking weed was “not chill” at the Ruby Room even though cigarettes were allowed. I didn’t expect to be the main target of the bouncer’s anger since I wasn’t the one with the weed. At the same time, I didn’t fancy being anywhere near a roid-rage-fueled encounter between a three-hundred-pound bro and a dreadlocked guest DJ who had broken the club rules. The bouncer was also reaching into his right pocket as he came towards us. I’ve used firearms and I know firsthand what happens when a bullet strikes a living thing, so I was quite frightened.

When the bouncer got to us, he pulled out his wallet. He’d run out of weed and needed to buy an eighth. The cash was exchanged, and the guest DJ grabbed a flyer for the event, put a few buds on it, folded it up, and handed it to the bouncer, who went outside to get high.

The end.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. Please figure it out and put it in the comments.