blessingx

Santa Clara County Fair. Fujifilm X-Pro2 & XF 23f/1.4. Fun with colors and a tiny tripod.

RIP Filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker

For the Frank Lloyd Wright fans there’s an out of print pop-up book titled, you guessed it, Frank Lloyd Wright in Pop-Up, that has plenty of used copies on Amazon right now for under $10. We bought a few years back for Esmé. It’s kinda fun to have around.

If you need a good laugh...

A good high res sample.

A fun, short Ilford film...

Nova’s Building Chernobyl’s Megatomb on Netflix.

Just focus on the “fortissimo pianissimo.”

I’ll place this under “another.” Bye Slug Bug.

Sigma out with a tiny, non-Foveon, L-mount, FF, modular "fp" camera no one was expecting. Foveon version rumored to be following later.

Reading about shibal biyong. Possible HC rallying cry?

Tom Petty’s Problematic Album Southern Accents https://longreads.com/2019/07/09/tom-pettys-problematic-album-southern-accents/ And related... Broken Record Wildflowers podcast https://brokenrecordpodcast.com/episodes#/episode-7-tom-petty-and-the-creation-of-wildflowers/

Whiskypedia: A Compendium of Scotch Whisky, is on sale for $1.99 today on Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play, etc.

Just one more post, from another’s perspective. “Nicolas Winding Refn is an aesthete; his films vacuous yet gorgeous, replete with all kinds of technical bravado, sly camera movements, images that glisten, over-saturated colors, aphotic darkness, and thrumming music. He’s as philosophical as the college sophomore who just discovered Heidegger (which makes him smarter than the student who just discovered Kant, natch). But his craftsmanship! As Nietzsche said, “All of life is a dispute over taste,” and Refn (or NWR—his directorial credit reads, #ByNWR) certainly isn’t for everybody. His new Amazon show, Too Old to Die Young, is glacial and gaudy, repetitive, a shiny, neon-sodden traipse into an ugly underworld set to an anxious, irascible electronic score and digitally photographed so assiduously, so obsessively, with its slow zooms and precise pans and persnickety compositions that look like modern art installations, anyone who doesn’t nerd out over that kind of stuff will probably find the series insufferable. Characters? Plot? Politics? Hah. This is braggadocio filmmaking, stupid and sublime.”

This may have been in the thread a few years ago, but always good to stay up to date. Also I must be doing something wrong when air and inner spring mattresses get the same durability ranking.

Looks like it a pretty new design for them, but they made interesting choices (I’d ignore the coil count though). Very curious, so let us know. I see they recommend their down/down-alt top pad, which could assist with the above. EDIT: Just realized our new linen sheets are Parachute (GF ordered). If you can tell anything about a mattress from their sheets go for it!

Hillbilly Elegy. I have a million issues with what it doesn't explore, but after just returning from a family visit in rural Ohio, and the direction things seem to be going in those specific townships/villages, I can't deny much of what it does. In the end it's a memoir and memoirs have inherent limitations. Next up is supposedly the one - Nancy Isenberg's White Trash.

Tough call. Since I switched to Capture One from Lightroom, I do more local adjustments/edits there (supplemented a bit with Alien Skin Exposure). So end up in Photoshop only when I need to do the most detailed tweaks, say removing a complicated object, where Photoshop's intelligence still outperforms Affinity. Affinity is close and it's improving, but then again so is Photoshop.

Other references to the loss - Sheryl Crow: Universal Studios fire destroyed all my master tapes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48745638 Here Are Hundreds More Artists Whose Tapes Were Destroyed in the UMG Fire https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/magazine/universal-music-fire-bands-list-umg.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Okay, now mid-way through Too Old To Die Young (Prime). THIS IS SOMETHING SPECIAL. Is it meandering, indulgent, and too violent? Yep. Can I sell it to you as great? I'm still not sure. But if you can put up with its vices, do the practically exhausting work to meet halfway, and float on its language and tension, it's an exciting ride to watch an artist create (and only one will take you here). Like movies (which each of these 60-90 minute structured episodes pretty much are), television is such a collaborative medium, it's exciting to see an actual personality surface. Many critics have issues with this series. I don't blame them. I also don't think there are many television achievements this grand, even in this new golden age we're in. It's pretty dark though. Be prepared.

A couple more from the M240 combo above (with Richard Serra sculpture). Then a couple treatment experiments from the Sigma sd Quattro H (with 50 Art). Assuming these are being viewed on phone so finished in Snapseed.

Anyone watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old To Die Young on Amazon Prime? I’ve only seen the pilot so far, but it’s very [surprise] Nicolas Winding Refn. You know, good or bad, it’s some endpoint. Probably best to watch late into the night, after a couple glasses or other poisons. Prepare to move slow.

If anyone ever gets a link to this please share. Russian TV to air its own patriotic retelling of Chernobyl story “Russian state TV is set to air its own drama about the deadly 1986 Chernobyl disaster – but unlike the HBO series, which has transfixed viewers around the world, this version will claim that a CIA spy was present for the worst nuclear accident in history.”