Thursday Feb 5th, 2009

The world is changing but this blog remains the same. Sing out hare hare, dance the hoochie kooCity lights are oh so bright, as we go sliding - some of this was written by Robert Plant

There is something that has been bothering me. This piece of shit blog which I write and evidently people keep checking back to see if I update – which you know that I won’t not ever on time – is not really relevant to the world at large. The world is changing while I miss the sunrise and sunset in my basement apartment. The only difference between day and night to me is that sometimes I call friends and they are sleeping at 3 in the “after” after afternoon and they get angry. Sometimes their parent’s get mad because I have called so late; these are the friends I call “old high school friends”. I usually do the “ “ with my fingers in the air. It kind of looks like a bunny rabbit winking. Where was I?

Oh yes, so there is a "man" in a position of "power" now "in" th"e" United States. A man of colo"r". He polarized the world with his catchy phrases and beliefs. I do not need to say who this man is. For those of you who DO want to know who it is; that man is Samuel L. Jackson and that saying was “I want these motherfucking snakes of this motherfucking plane”. Was that last year? I want a sun screensaver just so I know what year it is.

The first photo at the top, I took Wednesday. She is a lovely girl named Valery Gore and she has an album “Avalanche to Wandering Bear” that she is promoting at the moment. I wanted to do some sort of low budget science fiction shoot with her. There are table legs I found and some weird Plexiglas things that I have somehow collected. I put lights in them and told her to search for something that was right above the light. I also told her to gasp because I felt that whatever was out of frame was fabulous. I  made her lay on her back while I attempted to do an above shot, I told her to climb through a forest of broccoli and avocados I put out and I also made her growl because the table leg was now a rifle that I would maybe photo shop in at a later date. Did I mention people actually pay me to do this job?

Keep that in mind as you scan the photo near the bottom of the list. You see, this is another artist named “Timber Timbre” or Taylor. My talented friend Marlena Von Kazmeer used her magic brushes and put scars and dirt all over Taylor’s face before we made him remove his shirt (to reveal an AMAZING one piece shirt and pants!) Then we grabbed a cigar and he smoked most of the cheapest cigar you can legally buy in Toronto while I photographed him. He is a very quiet man, who wrote a very amazing album that is self titled. You should all buy it because it makes the snowy day seem very pretty. I did THAT the other day.

On Sunday I took the photos below, I photographed the first stages of a shoot I did with “The Superstitions”. They are a great young band who I felt was in need of some great photos which matched their ambitious sound. They sound nothing like anything playing in Toronto at the moment – and though I love the city and its music – sometimes I appreciate a breath of different air. There is no fresh air in Toronto – it’s a city.

The comedy show which I frequent every single Sunday was dead this Sunday. Laugh Sabbath is funny, it’s brave, its five bucks, and it is WAY more interesting than the Super Bowl. Not so, said the 2.48 Million Torontonians who did not come to Rivoli on Sunday. “I like commercials and two teams that I didn’t know existed last week to fight it out for some sort of award or victory stew or something”. “What did you say? Oh Sorry I was busy laughing at laughs by hard working comedians! What’s that? You broke my mug? You Bastard! That was my LAST mug! You want me to drink out of the measuring cup don’t you? I am TWENTY EIGHT! I am NOT drinking out of a measuring cup…GO BUY ME SOME CUPS! AND I WANT THESE MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES OFF THIS MOTHERFUCKING PLANE!” The show was good and talking to comedians after the show about “funny-ness” is really really awkward under all circumstances.

I want to re-name my cat again to “Mew – Zack”. The cat is dumb, and doesn’t respond to anything but me shoving it off my camera and cursing in my made up mad language which consists mostly of “Blahs” and “ARghs” and a teeth clenched “ah hah” with a squinty pirate eye. The singer Esthero once winked at me and told me she liked pirates. I didn’t know if the wink was sexual or a pirate impression or her covering up some sort of eye tick. Little did she know that I find pirates and eye ticks very sexy. She has a pirate tattoo which is kind of lame.

Lenka is the girl with the typewriter a few photos above. She is from Australia. She did a set at the Drake on the 2nd. I was cleaning my kitchen table with imitation Windex© that I poured into a real Windex bottle, when my roommate’s friend told me the show was in 2 minutes at the Drake which is next to my house. I was told the wrong date by my editor and ran over to photograph the show and then set up a shoot the next morning with Lenka at her hotel on King St. I brought my typewriter with me as a quick prop and she wrote some cute things on it as I photographed her. I only had five minutes with her before she had to go. Her show was amazing. Truly amazing. I didn’t mention to her about my cat’s possible name change – but I didn’t have much time and I don’t think she would have cared.

The blue record photo is a feller named Luke Snyed and his band. I think he likes the photo and when he e-mail’s me back eventually I will find out. This photo looks pretty simple, but it took about a good 6 hours to get it to look like I wanted it to without using photo shop to create the effect. In the end, I still had to use some photo shop because it looked cheap. I haven’t seen them live yet, but I am assuming his music is pretty cool because he is pretty cool. He had spine surgery two days prior to the shoot and ran on command very well.

I threw in some photos from a party I photographed with hot people, rappers and other things.

Oh! This week I had a very spirited conversation with the people in my bank. Apparently they snuck a whole bunch of fees onto my account. They tried to convince me that they had sent some stick-it note or something attached to one of the many pieces of garbage they send me notifying me of the change but I insist they did not. You see I have many accounts, and each one is wonderfully good and wonderfully terrible at ripping me off in many inventive ways. I tried to use this analogy with them; I go to a store and I buy a pack of gum. The teller sells me cigarettes with my gum because most customers who buy cigarettes also buy gum. I tell him that I don’t want cigarettes. He tells me that all gum comes with cigarettes and vice versa. I say, all I want to purchase is gum and he says that by signing up to buy gum I must buy cigarettes. He says that if I read all the information that came with the first pack of gum that I bought when I was 15 years old and first signed up to buy gum then I would see that I indeed agreed for them to charge me for a pack of cigarettes every once in a while when they changed their policies. I say, look buddy – I don’t have much money. I don’t even have enough to buy this gum and your stupid cigarette “safety convenience package” far outweighs my initial investment!! At this point he said there was nothing he could do and I had to agree with him. The only thing he COULD do at this point was perform brain surgery on the exploded blood vessel in my brain.

My current bank problem was not with RBC, and I am not saying this is EXACTLY true because thier website confuses me but for fun here is a list of the various similar savings accounts that RBC carries; Students, Enhanced, Leos's Young Savers Account, No limit banking for students, VIP Banking, Day to Day Banking. Now if you are a senior AND have a VIP account you can get up to $8.5 in rebates. You will need those rebates as I will explain. Let’s run through a little scenario. You need a bankbook statement to keep track of your account. That will cost you $2 a month, or $5 if you request a paper statement from the branch. If you can’t wait for your monthly statement that you paid $2 to arrive in the mail and want one from an ATM then you are charged $.75 or $1.5 if you want a full statement. You see how much money you have – which is now $6.50 less because you needed to see it without a handy computer. You notice there is an additional $5 international charge because you are on vacation and an additional $1.5 charge because the bank machine you are using is international and clearly could not possibly be your bank account because RBC does not HAVE ATMs outside the country.

You see that the $13 you have now paid to see how much money you have has sent you into overdraft. Good thing you have paid the $3 a month overdraft protection. You ask your mother to send you money; that costs you $1.5 because your mother e-mailed you the money. You receive the $100 she sent you – which is minus the $17.50 you have paid for the privilege of just LOOKING at it up to this point. You get depressed and decide to call your bank for credit advice – they charge you $5 to talk about your sad state of money affairs. They suggest you get a detailed copy of your account that is OVER 90 days old to see your spending habits. That costs $5. You see that your gym membership you cancelled is still cashing cheques so you decide to cancel all four remaining cheques. You only are allowed TWO cancelled cheques per year so they charge you $20 for the two other cancelled cheques so another company that is NOT the bank does not steal your money without your permission. You are now satisfied that you have your money affairs in order and it only cost you about 50% of your initial investment. Good for you for saving your money! On second thought, I DO want that pack of cigarettes. Stupid Snakes. Stupid Plane.

I promise to stop ranting. This is a rant about ranting - sorry about that

This has been a stressful Week. Like most weeks I setup an agenda, a to-do list, a composite of the various things I need to do and would like to do this particular week.  I do this every week; usually on the Sunday and write out each item in order of importance per day. I need this on a piece of paper pinned up in my room or I become essentially useless for remembering dates.

Sometimes this list gets upset – actually every single week this list gets pretty much throw up in the air and shot like a plate gliding over a country field by all the various little social and business obligations that creep into my life. The dog that chases the plates sometimes gets shot too and for the sakes of this metaphor (but not this point) – the dog is Lenny Kravitz before he put out his “Five” Album, cut his hair, was sponsored by Tommy Hilfiger in a tour and stopped making really cool analog music and cool music in general. Too specific?

This will be extremely annoying for some of my older readers who are more conservative with their reading. Conservative literature is very linear with one point moving to the next in an orderly flow, while many modern (modern in the “broad” sense) writers employ a more fractured, sporadic approach which some readers find more exciting and faster to read. Most efficient people multitask everything they do, including their reading habits. How many books are you reading at once again? You can see examples of this in popular books like “The Da Vinci Code” which have one page chapters and new ideas and points on each page which push you through the book at a very fast pace. A web search shows that many people say they finish it in about 5 days, which if you factor in moron people who use books as coasters and them throwing off the mean average – I would say most people finish that book by the time it takes to zap a bag of popcorn or destroy my computer system and life.

Next subject – a quick rant. I was sick last week and this week my computers are sick. I have two computers that I use on a daily basis; one is a work station that is not connected to my internet and downloading / entertaining habits and the other is my do anything to laptop. I daily back up my photo work and bi-weekly backup my editing work so I will download anything but porn onto this laptop. Both computers have identical programs on them so I can video edit or photo edit on either of them at any given time. There is nothing wrong with porn, but I really have no time to download and archive an extensive porn collection when I am making my own. Kidding. Really kidding. You do NOT joke about porn with photographers when all it would take is the suggestion of a jerk person for the police to destroy your expansive negative, DVD, and hard-drive library. A simple SUGGESTION of something seedy and illegal would probably take me years to re-catalog my decade spanning work.

I recently got a virus on my laptop that destroyed the operating system of BOTH computers. I had to re-format and reinstall everything on two computers. I wish it was that simple. I have lots of weird devices I use with my computer that take a lot of playing around with and tweaking so they work in harmony with my computer and my equipment. It took me three full 16 hour days to fix my laptop so I can just edit all the photos, write, update my blog to my website, and surf the internet. A full THREEEEE days of doing nothing but looking for discs and talking to computer support people. That is for ONE of my computers. I hate all support people and know they transfer me not because they cannot help me but because you are all out to waste my time and torture me with making me listen to midi keyboard versions of Bryan Adams “Summer of 69”. (Did you know that song was about sex stuff? Bryan Adams was too Young in 1969 to do any of that stuff he talks about. It is about SEX! )I also lost two weeks worth of video and photo editing that have not been sent to people yet. I had internet problems for the last two weeks because I needed to purchase a new wireless router – so my work load is probably pushed back to me editing photos of “Moist” opening up for “I Mother Earth” at the Warehouse (which is now the Koolhaus, which used to be the Guvernment). I think Mudgirl opened for that show – what ever happened to Mudgirl…?!/

Now if you are wondering why I didn't go out this weekend - it is because I would have told that exact story to every single one of you. I would have repeated that to everyone. I think I told about 12 people - some knid of cringed, others smiled, most were spared the boring details of my life that drive me insane.

I am writing this blog because I am stressed and want to get more regular with my updates so I can bring some of my readers back. I am really too busy to write it – but writing is very therapeutic for me and boy oh boy am I stressed! Not to rant – but that is all I seem able to do anymore. Where are you Lenny Kravitz? I am just being a woman for you! Where are you?!!