May 27, 2010

Arrows with no target

7

I don’t view my projects the same way any­more. I used to work towards a goal, an idea of what I wanted to achieve. But more recently I stopped car­ing about the end result, prob­a­bly due to this new per­spec­tive on…every­thing.

It’s a strange jux­ta­po­si­tion of know­ing that what you’re doing is ulti­mately insignif­i­cant, and find­ing enjoy­ment in doing it any­way. Like a child stack­ing a pile of blocks, only to knock them down.

The wikipedia arti­cle on wu wei explains feel­ing this bet­ter than I can:

The goal for wu wei is to get out of your own way, so to speak. This is like when you are play­ing an instru­ment and if you start think­ing about play­ing the instru­ment, then you will get in your own way and inter­fere with your own play­ing. It is aim­less action, because if there was a goal that you need to aim at and hit, then you will develop anx­i­ety about this goal.

Zhuangzi made a point of this, where he writes about an archer who at first didn’t have any­thing to aim at. When there was noth­ing to aim at, the archer was happy and con­tent with his being. He was prac­tic­ing wu wei. But, then he set up a tar­get and “got in his own way.” He was going against the Tao and the nat­ural course of things by hav­ing to hit that goal.

(This also reminds me of a verse from Leonard Cohen’s True Love Leaves No Traces: “Through win­dows in the dark/The chil­dren come, the chil­dren go/Like arrows with no tar­gets/Like shack­les made of snow.)

Nowadays, I do what I feel like doing and don’t stress out about not fin­ish­ing a project, cause I know I’ll feel like work­ing on it another day. It leaves me more loose ends, but I don’t mind. Luckily, I love cre­at­ing things. Trying dif­fer­ent medi­ums. New ways of express­ing myself.

Tagged as
Filed under
Thoughts
October 24, 2009

The Dawning: Rachel CD Release Concert

2

When Rachel Beausoleil started work­ing on her lat­est album, she approached me about design­ing the art­work. We sat down and threw around some ideas before she even started record­ing, but didn’t come up with any­thing solid because I didn’t have a sound to go on. All I knew was that it was a med­ley of songs, not like her last album where the songs fol­lowed a theme.

One day I came home to find a record­ing of the album in my mail­box, yet to be mas­tered. She named the album after the epony­mous track, The Dawning, which is a jazz arrange­ment of the famous song Aquarius, a per­sonal anthem of hers.

The Dawning artwork front

She gave me her notes soon after, so I put on the album and gave it a good lis­ten, feel­ing a cer­tain clar­ity from her sound. It made me think about dawn, and space, and sun­rises, and hot colours, so I incor­po­rated those ele­ments when lay­ing out the text, as well as some bokeh to give an off-focus glimmer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged as
Filed under
Photos Random
October 2, 2009

Natalie MacLean — Why Subscribe?

0

Natalie MacLean — award-winning wine writer, speaker, judge, and author of the book “Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass” — com­mis­sioned me to make a video to sell sub­scrip­tions to her wine newsletter.

This was really fun to do, as Natalie is very funny, pleas­ant, and nat­ural, both in per­son and in front of the camera.

Shot with a Canon Vixia HF100, and edited in Final Cut Pro. Soundtrack Pro was used for audio edit­ing, and Magic Bullet used for filters.

Tagged as
Filed under
Random Video
October 28, 2008

Rachel Beausoleil at the NAC

0

A demo reel I made for Rachel Beausoleil, using footage I shot of her jazz vocal per­for­mance at the NAC Fourth Stage, as well as snip­pets of an inter­view I did with her. As a way of get­ting more expo­sure for future gigs, she asked for some video that she could shop around to dif­fer­ent venues. I agreed to make this demo reel for her in return for some tick­ets to the show for me and my friends.

It was a won­der­ful con­cert in an inti­mate set­ting. The reper­toire was quite var­ied — from waltz to Bossa nova to bal­lad — but all songs were per­formed as a jazz inter­pre­ta­tions. The setlist included Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and Evangeline by Isabelle Pierre.

Of spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance is that the per­for­mance was on Rachel’s 40th birth­day. She had planned the con­cert over a year ago as a come­back after hav­ing two kids and giv­ing up her time for them.

I can now embed videos in HD after acquir­ing a Vimeo Plus account; they look oh-so-sexy, and even bet­ter in full-screen.

One of the high­lights of the night was Tom Posner’s bass solo dur­ing Caravan (a clas­sic Duke Ellington big-band piece) clock­ing in at almost two min­utes. You can see how sur­prised Rachel is when Tom loses him­self in the music and keeps going on this great flurry of notes. This solo is some kind of awe­some that I can’t even describe.

Tagged as
Filed under
Random Video
October 26, 2008

Nylon Smile

3

In any case, I’ve been work­ing on my projects, though mostly try­ing to fin­ish the ones I’ve started. Sometimes it seems like there’s no end. Aside from an awe­some Friday night (and an hour after din­ner on Saturday night try­ing to digest a big meal), I’ve been work­ing non-stop this weekend.

At the very least, the days have brought much rain, and even more inspi­ra­tion. I miss the snow, but the rain sat­is­fies for now. I’m not even sure if I like how early the sun sets at this time of year. Both day and night affect the mind in dif­fer­ent ways, bring­ing out (or mask­ing) dif­fer­ent parts of you that you for­got were there. Each has its own importance.

At one point, I real­ized that life is a series of Jens, from win­ter to win­ter.

There’s been much music too, so much that I’m think­ing about start­ing up a pod­cast again. But it’s another project, another idea I have yet to do.

I could have writ­ten so much more about each one of these top­ics, but I tried to keep digres­sion to a min­i­mum. They’d end up being full-blown entries of their own, and I’d never fin­ish writ­ing any­thing. For these entries, the ones that ram­ble about no sub­ject in par­tic­u­lar, I always look for lyrics, or titles, or snip­pets from other people’s entries that sort of explain the mood I’m in. Yep.

I’ve been feel­ing dis­con­nected, some­what for­get­ting my Taoist teach­ings. This is prob­a­bly a good thing, as I tend to be focused on the thought and the­o­ries too often, and not enough on the application.

There’s a fine line between res­ig­na­tion and accep­tance. But some­times I feel like I’ve fallen face-first to one side.

To be hon­est, I’ve been writ­ing this entry for over a week now, but my thoughts and ideas keep branch­ing out. Every time I sit down at the com­puter, I delete some­thing that’s lost rel­e­vance, and add some­thing more. Like this.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life
October 13, 2008

Video Love and Hate

2

I’ve been play­ing around with video all week­end, try­ing to get a bunch of things work­ing to no avail, when really what I wanted to do was just do some edit­ing and get a project under my belt.

Among the problems:

  • My Canon HF100 shoots in a pseudo 24p, which doesn’t get imported into Final Cut Pro as true 24p. This means I have to con­vert the video from the cam­era to ProRes, then con­vert to 24p, then bring it back into Final Cut Pro, then begin my edit­ing. Too bulky a work­flow for my tastes.
  • Rendering a few min­utes of video will take sev­eral hours. So I have to leave the ren­der­ing on overnight, occa­sion­ally into the next day, which means I can’t use my lap­top until it’s done. Thank god I have two computers.
  • Clips in the Final Cut time­line become unplayable when using Magic Bullet for colour tints, due to dropped frames.. This means I have to do all my edit­ing, mak­ing sure all the tim­ing is per­fect, then add the colour effects to it, then ren­der. It’s a leap of faith, because I can’t pre­view motion with the colour; if I don’t end up lik­ing the effect, I have to re-render the whole thing again.

I hate giv­ing up these things, but see­ing as how I’ve spent count­less hours research­ing and exper­i­ment­ing for solu­tions with­out any luck, I think I’ll have to for now. Hopefully full-frame sen­sors will become cheap enough that reg­u­lar con­sumers (like me) can afford them, and maybe video stan­dards will actu­ally be more stan­dard. Until then, I’ll have to accept this “highly-rated” cam­corder that still lacks a man­ual focus ring, can’t pro­duce any kind of shal­low DOF with bokeh, and has an annoy­ing amount of low-light noise.

On the non-technical end of video, one of the dif­fi­cul­ties is that I’m always torn between telling a story, and sav­ing a mem­ory, both of which seem some­what mutu­ally exclu­sive. The for­mer tends to be more con­cise but cold and mechan­i­cal, whereas the lat­ter is filled with all the lit­tle details I enjoy but poten­tially boring.

Video is also less for­giv­ing, as fram­ing is more final with­out the crop­ping func­tion of still pho­tos. Then when you move into high def­i­n­i­tion, things like dirt on a car, blem­ishes on a face, stray hairs, become much more noticeable…and invari­ably end up dri­ving a per­fec­tion­ist like me crazy.

I still love the com­bi­na­tion of move­ment and sound and dia­logue that video affords though; it’s the medium that I find comes clos­est to real life.

Tagged as
Filed under
Random
July 22, 2008

Blood Work

3

Vial of blood

This lit­tle vial, along with a few drops of anti-coagulant, is filled with blood. My blood. I needed some for a pho­tog­ra­phy project I’m work­ing on, so I got a friend of mine in the med­ical indus­try to take it from me.

Now I’ve both fig­u­ra­tively and lit­er­ally bled for my work.

Tagged as
Filed under
Photos Random
March 3, 2008

Emergence Exposition Opus 02

6

The last three months led up to this night.

Gallery viewing

Thumbnail: Ysabella's sculptures
Thumbnail: Baby dance
Thumbnail: Ceramic tower
Thumbnail: Ceramic sculptures
Thumbnail: Jacqueline plays piano
Thumbnail: Chocolate truffles
Thumbnail: Louise performs
Thumbnail: Frédéric plays the harp
Thumbnail: Prairie Cat
Thumbnail: Tree sculpture

After attend­ing Opus 01, I knew I wanted to be a part of this.

John, as a true friend, flew from Toronto to be there for the night. Alex, who was doing a med­ical intern­ship at a fam­ily prac­tice in a nearby city, drove there. Even Pearl also dropped by and I got to meet her.

I was so busy talk­ing with my guests that I didn’t even have time to go into the other rooms to see how the other artists were doing. The house was packed with peo­ple again, young and old.

Performances

Jacqueline’s sec­ond piece was Sonata in A Minor, by Franz Schubert (unfor­tu­nately, her first piece was over ten min­utes long, which isn’t allowed on YouTube). I found it to be a rather mas­cu­line piece, begin­ning like a som­bre funeral march, lead­ing to a jour­ney of bub­bling emo­tion, so it was mes­mer­iz­ing to see a girl play it with such con­vic­tion. Pay spe­cial atten­tion to the burn­ing trill at 5:28, which leads back to the main theme.

Misun told me that when she handed Jacqueline a rose after the per­for­mance, it looked like she had run a marathon.

Afterwards, Jacqueline told me after she couldn’t stop look­ing at my penis through her per­for­mance, then quickly cor­rected her­self and said the penis pic­ture, which was hung across from her.

Louise plays the harp by feel­ing only. She doesn’t have for­mal any musi­cal train­ing, so she doesn’t write any of her com­po­si­tions down. It just flows from her fin­gers, and quite well I might add. As a result, her music is semi-improvised.

John kept telling us how not drunk he was, even though you can clearly see­ing him down­ing glasses of wine in this video.

The after party

Thumbnail: Hors d'ouevres table
Thumbnail: Alex plays piano
Thumbnail: Cary and Ysabella
Thumbnail: Alex, me, and John
Thumbnail: Salon window

When the peo­ple left and the doors closed, the real party began for the artists, their guests, and the vol­un­teers. Frédéric and Misun broke out the cold cuts, the fresh and fancy bread, the wine, the cheese and we cel­e­brated a suc­cess­ful night. We had been stand­ing for five hours, so it was time to take a break.

When Dan gave me a read­ing two years ago, and said that I would be mak­ing money off my art within the next 15 years, I never would have believed him.

Note: All media in this post has an extremely warm colour tone. I decided to keep it instead of bal­anc­ing it to neu­tral white, because I enjoy the cozy feel of it, which expresses the mood of the house-gallery.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life Photos Video
February 6, 2008

Emergence Exposition 02 Invitation

7

Carrot feet

The Emergence Exposition: Opus 02 vernissage is com­ing up in three weeks and if you’re in the Ottawa area, you can drop by to see my exhibit!

The show is free. Over three hun­dred peo­ple were packed into the last one. I’ll be the one walk­ing around with a cam­era strapped to his hand.

Four exhi­bi­tion rooms, Four cre­ative styles

Like the exhi­bi­tions of old France, the idea of this gallery-house is to have a mix­ture of dif­fer­ent artis­tic styles.

J’ai eu envie de recréer quelque chose dans cet esprit-là. Il ya un côté intim­i­dant et même assez froid aux galeries d’art. Les gens n’osent pas tou­jours entrer, mais je veux leur mon­trer que l’art c’est pour tout le monde, dans une ambiance chaleureuse.

— Frédéric Daty, gallery owner

There will be four visual artists — metal sculp­tor, ceramic sculp­tor, painter, pho­tog­ra­pher (me) — and three musi­cal artists — con­cert pianist, harpist, soft pop musi­cian. Featuring cham­pagne and home­made truf­fles too!

For more details and a glimpse at some more of my work in this theme, you can read the descrip­tion in the new pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tion, as well down­load the invitation.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life Photos
November 21, 2007

A Chance To Create

11

Good news. Wait no. Great fuck­ing news.

I met with Frédéric, the owner of the Salon, and after show­ing him a port­fo­lio of my pic­tures, he agreed to let me have an exhibit in the next show in February.

As this wasn’t only his art gallery but his house as well, I offered to let him make the deci­sion after see­ing my com­pleted work. He told me there was no need, as he trusted me based on what he had seen in my port­fo­lio, which I felt was a very nice compliment.

As artists (and I use this in the loos­est sense of the word to describe myself), we’re very dif­fer­ent. I told him that I like to study pho­to­graphic tech­niques, espe­cially in pho­tos that I like, and apply those tech­niques to what I want to express or show. When I look at a piece of visual art, I look at mean­ing and intent. When I cre­ate, I keep the same thing in mind. Frédéric, on the other hand, is more of a gut-feeling type of artist. He does what he feels is right, and doesn’t worry as much about the under­ly­ing message.

He asked if I was sin­gle, and I told him I was. “Good”, he said, “That’ll help you focus”. It made me think of a quote by Alexander Dumas:

Woman inspires us to great things, and pre­vents us from achiev­ing them.

I made a remark about how I’d have a forum to develop my ideas now, projects I never pur­sued because I didn’t have a way to get them to a wider audi­ence. He told me that I shouldn’t worry about an audi­ence, and gave me an exam­ple to demon­strate his point: if you cre­ate the most beau­ti­ful thing you’ve ever done and you keep it in your base­ment, it isn’t art because no one sees it1, but to get caught up in that dilemma, and to not cre­ate sim­ply because of that, is a tragedy.

So now I can pur­sue and develop one of my photo project ideas. I have to decide on a theme. I have see how much enlarge­ment I can do to my pho­tos with­out too much loss of qual­ity. I have to decide on the size of the final prints. I have to decide on the frame size and shape. I have to get the final prints framed.

I’ve always wanted to cre­ate acces­si­ble art2.

Perhaps this will be my chance.

  1. An inter­pre­tive answer to the Zen kōan of the sound a tree makes falling down in the for­est, I’m sure [↑]
  2. As opposed to some­thing such as poetry, which is less acces­si­ble to the com­mon per­son. As a medium, film, pho­tog­ra­phy, and music (with lyrics) are more eas­ily digestible. [↑]
Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life
April 2, 2007

First Photo Contest Win

10

Thumbnail: In A Flash Contest Results

Not the grand prize, but I won the por­trait cat­e­gory for my pic­tures of Chaos from Canada Day ’06, and Gerry from my Gerry Project.

Our judges had their hands full. With close to 100 entries, and pho­tos of every­thing from pen­guins to croc­o­diles to war vet­er­ans and other UCC lumi­nar­ies, it wasn’t an easy deci­sion to com­pare these apples and oranges. Ultimately, the judges decided that tech­nique and con­tent counted in equal measure.

To cre­ate as fair a judg­ing process as pos­si­ble, names, grade, and grad­u­a­tion years were left off the pho­tos, and replaced by a num­ber. That way, cur­rent stu­dents and Old Boys all had an equal shot. (To ensure no judge was swayed by the opin­ion of another, each wrote down his or her favourite num­ber, with no prior discussion.)

It was a blind judg­ing, and as a result, my two pho­tos tied with each other for first place with­out the judges know­ing that they were both from one per­son. Not bad for the first pho­tog­ra­phy con­test I entered.

Seeing my pic­tures in print is great, but win­ning isn’t the impor­tant part.

The most sat­is­fac­tion comes from know­ing that I could step out of my com­fort zone to call a stranger and take pic­tures of him, which was the main goal of the Gerry Project.

Being rec­og­nized for the pic­tures was a nice lit­tle bonus.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life Photos
October 20, 2006

The Gerry Project

8

Thumbnail: Gerry 1

Thumbnail: Gerry 2

This is Gerald, or Gerry as he prefers, an alum­nus of my high-school, Upper Canada College.

Gerry was born in Germany, but being a German-Jew, he soon moved to Holland in the years lead­ing up to the Second World War. “My father was rather pre­scient”, he put it. Eventually, he came to Canada. For four years, he attended UCC, grad­u­at­ing in 1940. I was in the class of ’99. After a year at uni­ver­sity, he vol­un­teered for mil­i­tary ser­vice at 19.

“19?”, I asked in dis­be­lief. With a smile on his face, he told me, “You grow up fast”.

He began as a com­mis­sioned offi­cer for an artillery unit. Responsibility of the lives of many men under his com­mand was some­thing he didn’t want, but his knowl­edge of German, Dutch, and English moved him to a more prefer­able posi­tion as an inter­ro­ga­tion offi­cer. His supe­ri­ors would send him co-ordinates of intel­li­gence to gather, some­times behind German lines, some­times in a downed tank, and a pri­vate would drive him in a jeep to obtain the information.

He sur­vived.

From left to right, his medals are:

His proud­est accom­plish­ment is the Maltese cross he wears on his chest — The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, pre­sented by the Governor General her­self. Even though he’s a com­man­der of the order, sec­ond only to knights or dames, he’s extremely mod­est about it. The framed award pre­sented to him lies in a pile of assorted things in his bedroom.

I first met Gerry a few days ago, after find­ing out about him from the bi-annual newslet­ter pub­lished by UCC. The newslet­ter, called Old Times, is a way for alumni, called Old Boys, to keep track of the goings’ on at the College. There was an arti­cle about the school’s prized Victoria Cross medal col­lec­tion being pre­sented to the new Canadian War Museum here in Ottawa. These were the same medals I walked by in the front hall dis­play case every day at school, too young to appre­ci­ate their his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. Gerry was one of the vet­er­ans invited to attend the pre­sen­ta­tion ceremony.

However, my inter­est in Gerry stemmed from a dif­fer­ent sec­tion in the same issue of the newslet­ter, announc­ing a photo con­test open to all past and present stu­dents. The con­test seemed like a great project, not only as a way to prac­tice my pho­to­graphic skills, but to test myself as well. I would have to find a sub­ject related to the school in some way. Gerry, being an Ottawa-area Old Boy, was my clos­est con­nec­tion. Taking pic­tures of some­one, let alone some­one I had never met before, was a daunt­ing idea, and I would have to step out of my com­fort zone to do it.

After look­ing up his name in the phone­book and gath­er­ing up the courage, I called Gerry. He was happy to meet.

I’ll be sub­mit­ting the sec­ond photo.

Update: Here are the results of the project.

Tagged as
Filed under
Photos Random
October 9, 2003

The Nihilistic Adventures of BB

0

I finally got my story fin­ished and posted on BitterBuffalo.com. It’s a fic­tion­al­ized account of how Mikhail Lermontov may have died, a buf­falo his only intel­lec­tual friend. I actu­ally tried three times; the first two attempts were just a tad too seri­ous, so I threw them out. I tried to get all the themes of Russian roman­tic lit­er­a­ture in there, such as nihilism, fatal­ism, and rev­o­lu­tion, but didn’t write too much for fear of bor­ing the reader.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life
August 21, 2003

Disappointing Weather, Weekend Plans, Etc.

0

It’s always dis­ap­point­ing to first learn that weather will be nice and cool in three days, and then find out that the ini­tial pre­dic­tion was wrong the day before. It was sup­posed to be in the low 20’s tomor­row, but now it’s slated to be in the high 20’s. Aaron has a tee-off time set up for us tomor­row, but unless we can find a third party with a car, I won’t be able to go. Aaron stops work­ing at the course in a week, so this will most likely be the last chance of the sea­son to get out on the course, which is a pity since I got my clubs resized last year.

Trolley is com­ing down this week­end, as he has three days off from his job at the LCBO. I’ll be look­ing for­ward to drink­ing, watch­ing some Mr. Show, and gen­er­ally just hang­ing out.

Tom is plan­ning a camp­ing trip some­time in September, and unless I lose a limb, I’m going to go. Actually, the loss of a limb may be com­pletely irrel­e­vant. I love camp­ing but I hate the sum­mer, so any oppor­tu­nity to be out­doors when the weather is cool is prime.

Christine has a writ­ing project up, which I’ll gladly be par­tak­ing in soon. I always enjoy the chance to write cre­atively in a non-competitive envi­ron­ment. What, exactly, has made the buf­falo so bit­ter is another story.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life
April 16, 2003

Getting Dark, AFI, Etc.

0

It’s get­ting dark here, but the light hasn’t com­pletely left the day yet. The sky waxes grey with the set­ting of the sun, and a gen­tle rain is mak­ing the pave­ment shine with the yel­low glow of the street lamps. The smell con­sumes me, and I’m back walk­ing the streets on an unrec­ol­lected gloomy day.

I finally fin­ished off my hon­ours project, so I can rest a bit eas­ier now. The one report is worth two courses itself. It ended up being around 22 pages, which isn’t too bad. The only thing that remains is my geo essay, and I only have about a half page left to write. I went to lunch with Aaron and Wheaties to cel­e­brate a com­pleted course at the Elephant and Castle. A great wait­ress served us, and offered a vari­a­tion on the Strongbow I was hav­ing, which was the addi­tion of some lime cor­dial, or some black cur­rant juice. We all got to try both with the Strongbow, and it was decided that the lime was the bet­ter of the two. The remain­ing black cur­rant juice went into the beer, and Aaron told me that it was tasty.

200 more wins to an arch­mage icon.

I’ve been lis­ten­ing to the lat­est AFI album lately, and even though I didn’t much care for it at first, I’m com­pletely addicted now. There’s some­thing about the har­monies in the vocals that make their sound so unique. I’m not quite used to Davey Havok’s voice though, as he sounds like a child to me. Quite uncon­ven­tional Currently, my favorite song is This Celluloid Dream.

A trip to the Dominican Republic may be work­ing out for the first week­end of May. Since it’s the begin­ning of the off-season, the cost of the entire trip, drinks and meals included along with res­i­dence at a four-star hotel, will be around $900 for a week. Apparently this includes scuba div­ing, horse­back rid­ing, jet ski­ing, and a beach-side view. Currently, only Aaron, Cristina and I are com­pletely com­mit­ted to going, but we need an even num­ber of peo­ple so we’re try­ing to find one more person.

Artfag is cur­rently a red­head. Ummmm…yah.

Jonathan tells me that the full-time job seems promis­ing, but he’s not mak­ing any guar­an­tees. It would mainly con­sist of going around the city to var­i­ous com­mer­cial cus­tomers and trou­bleshoot­ing com­puter prob­lems. The pay will start at around $15 which is not too bad, but not great for a grad­u­ate. He says that I’ll also need a car to be able to get to the loca­tions that need ser­vice, some­thing that I’ll con­sider more if I’m actu­ally able to get the job. He tells me that it’s a good foot-in-the-door for web pro­gram­ming posi­tions in the future. I am very grate­ful, and I’m not get­ting hopes up.

Tagged as
Filed under
Daily Life
Pages (2):12