On October 26th, a hole was blasted in the base of 125’ tall Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington. In less than 2 hours, the reservoir behind the dam drained completely and the White Salmon flowed unimpeded by a dam for the first time in 100 years.
Stonewall: Out of the Closets and Into the Streets (by FantasticBabblings
)
There once was a man known as Trump
There once was a man known as Trump
Who inserted his head up his rump.
When it came out for air, there instead of his hair
Sat an orange and serpentine dump.
After weeks of dreary weather it is beginning to feel like spring in New York. Yesterday was foggy and drizzly for most of the day. I came out of my dentist’s office in late afternoon and the sun had come out and it was lovely. I walked home through Central Park and took some random footage.
Shot with Sony Cybershot DSC-HX1V
Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
Artist Suzanne Opton has taken a series of photographs of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan all in the same position, lying on their sides facing the camera. These images have been on billboards around the country. The gallery of images is here:
http://suzanneopton.com/#/soldiers
Public response to the project has run the gamut. You can see more about the project and read comments (or add your own) here:
Sunday I was in Carl Schurz Park on the East River in the 80s, near Gracie Mansion. I was shooting video on the river, but I noticed a small park, maybe 100 square feet or so. I thought I would shoot a couple of stills, but the closer I looked the more I saw.
I Want My Technicolor
I just watched David Lean’s 1955 film Summertime with Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi. It’s a boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy loses girl story, but with complications. They are middle aged, the woman is a virgin and the man is married. It all takes place in Venice. Lean says it was his favorite of the films he made (which include Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Passage to India). Partly because of Venice, which Lean made his second home.
I first saw this on television when I was quite young. I don’t remember how young, but I do remember it made an impression on me. I saw it in a movie theater in New York back when they had revival houses. It was probably at the Regency on Broadway and 68th Street, one of the great old houses that showed classic films in double features with very high projection and sound quality. They often had brand new prints.
One of my favorite aspects of this film is that it is from the golden age of Technicolor, which was one of the earliest processes for color cinematography. There were several stages of development for Technicolor, using various processes of shooting and splitting the light into separate beams and filtering the film stock. Early processes required gluing multiple filmstrips together and running them through special projectors to merge the colors. All required special cameras with prisms and filters. The golden age was Technicolor 4, a three strip process that printed the film in a dye transfer process similar to lithography and the film could be run through any projector. The Wizard of Oz was a great example of Technicolor. Vincente Minelli, himself a painter, made great use of Technicolor in films like Meet Me In St Louis.
Other companies developed less expensive color processes and Technicolor fell out of favor. The newer processes aimed more for verisimilitude. But what I liked most about Technicolor was that it wasn’t naturalistic. It was painterly. The colors were oversaturated, but in a way that reminded me of Renaissance Italian Painting. The technology of cinematography has come a long way, but the artistry of Technicolor still pleases me more.
I wish someone would produce a digital video camera with sensors that could record in a way that simulates Technicolor.
The painting below Bal Masque by Tiepolo reminds me of Technicolor.
