Command + Shift + 3

I was laying in bed the other night, blast-eye awake from drinking a coffee just an hour before, streaming some movies online. Shawshank Redemption came on, so I couldn't resist watching the entire thing. 

Right towards the end of the movie, when Red (Morgan Freeman) is released from prison and lives a normal life bagging groceries, I noticed something really funny. He was wearing an apron that was an eerily similar color to one that I'd seen before. A quick screen capture, a little Photoshop, and voila..

uhhhh...

YouTube fucking with me, once again. 

"we was like peas and carrots"

Usually before I go to bed I stream a movie online to help me fall asleep faster. 

On this particular day I happened to notice something hilarious right before I fell asleep. 

Forest Gump was on. I usually favor falling asleep to things I've seen a hundred times. It kind of helps to not be distracted when you're trying to get to la la land. However, right as I was dozing off, the feed lagged right on an amazing frame of the movie:

young Forest getting smoked in the face by a rock! YES! It stayed still on this frame for about a minute.

Now normally this part bums me out because of those asshole Southern kids and their rock-throwings, but this screen capture was just too good to be true. I think I was a nanosecond away from capturing the rock itself. On top of that, the photo is just amazing: Forest's jacked face and Jenny's nonchalant gaze into the distance. I couldn't help but add "peas" and "carrots" to the photo.

Is this funny to anybody else besides me? I may submit it to Reddit. Maybe even as a .gif sequence.

somethin's fishy

I just recieved this message on Youtube while trying to watch something.

".....but, but I'm in Canda!"

I Fucked Up a Photo

It was only until recently that I realized where my photographic style is heading / has always been. My father and I were laying on a beach in Florida last week. We'd taken a spontaneous road trip to Naples, FL for a week and found ourselves an afternoon to relax that wasn't actually spent inside a car. There we sat, beneath a 40 degree sun, facing the Gulf of Mexico. I think I was thirteen the last time I saw that water. There was, as there is every summer afternoon in Florida, an incredible storm system developing everywhere around us. Blue skies were turning into black and winds began to pick up. However, this didn't stop most of us from visiting the beach.

Directly next to me was my Mamiya 645 medium-format camera. I purchased it in early May and it hasn't left my side ever since. It literally changed the way I visualize, approach, and execute photographs. The decision to switch to medium-format simply stemmed for my current distaste for both 35mm film (in terms of it's grain seen upon printing) and digital (I don't know if I've ever put my heart into a digital photo my entire life). My Mamiya is fully, fully manual; some shots I'm not even sure will pan-out because I've tried to shoot them on the fly and each exposure requires careful attention to several aspects.

So there I am: dad, a storm, my camera, a beach, and myself. My dad suggested I take a photo of the oncoming storm. To his credit, my dad taught me composition at a very young age. "Get some of those ferns in the foreground, And" he has said to me at ages five, fifteen, and twenty-five. I agreed with him and pulled my camera out whilst being protective of swirling sand. I veered through the viewfinder and opted for a vertical composition (holy shit folks, this is like the punk rock version of photography). However, I noticed something very personally satisying that was creeping into the frame from below: my fathers tanned, hairy, sweating stomach. This balanced the photo perfectly. From top to bottom: the towering storm system that is contained by the frame, descending towards hoards of umbrellas, bodies and sand, only to be anchored in the lower-third portion of the photo by a glistening male stomach. I quickly made the correct exposure adjustments, cranked the advancement lever and took the photo.

For me, all I could think of was how much this photograph summed up "Florida": Sure, there's a view, but there's also a lot of tanned old people.

And that's exactly what attracts me when taking personal photographs. By "personal" I mean images that are intended for nothing other than advancing my own body of work. For lack of better wording, I enjoying aesthetically pleasing photographs with something fucked up about them. Something perhaps that is small in the frame, but just captivating enough to make you question why it's there. To continue the story, I wanted my dad to take a photo with my camera, in an effort to experience a sort of "passing-the-torch-full-circle" moment between the two of us. The only direction I gave was "shoot that way", to which I pointed towards the other end of the beach. As he walked away, I noticed a large family tearing down there beach gear to go home directly in his path. I thought it would have made a great photo to see an oncoming storm and a dissatisfied family heading for the hills. He walked right past them. Seeing as I wanted him to take the photo he wanted (which was not doubt a conventional landscape), I kept my mouth closed and watched him handle a camera older than any of his children.

I want to say this is a rather recent discovery, but not only have I been practicing photography in this fashion, I've been living it. For instance, whenever I put on an outfit, I make sure there's usually one fucked-up aspect to it ie. a nice collared shirt/sweater combination with some nice jeans and white shoes that have been painted black and have blown so far open you can see my socks. Like showing up to a well-dressed b.y.o.b. event and holding a 40 oz Olde English. So, to say that this recent "refining" of a photographic style is news to myself, it really isn't, because I live it every time I walk out my door.

should have been a writer

Haircuts Are Kind Of Like Avocado's

By Andy Schmidt

Haircuts are kind of like avocado's.
You're excited when you first get it, and it usually costs a small fortune.
It's hard to pick which one you want.
It looks great, but there's something just not right about it.
You think it will grow faster by keeping it in the sun more,
and by the time it's just the way you want it,
it's fucking ruined.

The End.

always a good time.

This is what happens when my family gets together with a MacBook close by. This time we were in Jasper, AB.

From left to right: myself, Aunt Laura, Bike, and mom in the background.

Enjoy.

heading to the village pt. 2

Well, it's Sunday, and that means it's time for another trip to the clothing donation bin.
Here's what else is hitting the racks today.

1. Black H&M jeans. I wore them almost every time I worked or played a show. And it shows. Blown-out crotch for days and faded beyond belief. Peace out.

2. Outrageous blue plaid shorts. I pulled them from the "Goofy Golf Shit" pile I have in my house. Did I ever wear them?

3. From the same pile, a blue cotton golf shirt from the London Hunt Club. Within my lifetime, they wouldn't allow black people to play there. Fuck them. I'd rather burn it.

4. Khakis. A truly full-circle thrift store moment.

5. A white t-shirt with headphones on it. Maybe three people will understand this when they read it.

6. Black pants with most of the buttons blown-out. If I were to go commando wearing these things my dick would swing all over the place.

7. Miscellaneous green t-shirt. Get out of my life.

8. Brown corduroy skate shorts that I bought off the internet for my 18th birthday. They're done.

9. Black t-shirt, because I have more of them than any other item of clothing.

10. White dress shirt with the flimsiest collar ever. It looks like sad dog ears.

11. Timber Creek flex khakis. No reason really.

12. Green Vivanno t-shirt. Too many memories of spoiled U of Toronto students with high demands.

That's all the room I have for now. I think I have room for one more trip. Until next time.

Ode to Pablo

Yesterday, I experienced one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

I was sitting in my brothers room and noticed he had an acoustic guitar leaning against his wall. This guitar is in rough shape: it's missing a string, it goes out of tune easily, it's hard to play and is generally the butt-end of a lot of instrument jokes in that house (they've been contemplating selling it for probably three years by now).

So, like most instruments I see, I picked it up and began to tinker with it. The guitar was sorely out of tune. I actually can't imagine a guitar going that out of tune naturally on it's own. So for the first time in my life I attempted to tune it on my own without the assistance of an electronic tuner.

Doing this is somewhat a tricky task even for experienced ears. Most often you begin with the A string (the second-lowest string before hitting the low E), mainly because it is least likely to go out of tune on a guitar. Didn't matter much anyway, it sounded tuned up to almost a C. This is where the gratifying part began.

Years ago, we used to play a game where there would be one person striking a chord, and two others blindly guessing what it could be. The easy part about this game is that chords are normally strummed downwards and you can assimilate certain chords from others by how they "ring-out", meaning that most guitarists know what the high E and B strings sound like when played together, so if you hear those two played you can assume the chord struck was in the range of E,A or B. This can be easily heard on guitars - unlike pianos which resonate more as tones rather than the plucking of strings. However, you can't tune a guitar by strumming a chord (actually you can it's just very, very hard to do). So you have to begin with single strings.

Beginning with the A string, I tried to hear an A chord in my head. I always thought the easiest way to do this was to just recall a song that opens with an A chord (a million songs do, pick your own). Then, it may sound odd, but you have to tune it to your memory by playing the note over and over in your head until the sound you visualize matches the sound you actually hear. From here you tune the remaining strings in relation to where they are from the A using a series of harmonics and simple methods. I tuned the entire guitar, save for the missing string.

After playing for a little bit, I asked my brother to look up an online guitar tuner for me (he was at his computer). These sites don't tune your guitar, but rather play simulated tones that you tune your guitar to. He played me the E note from the computer and I strummed the E string on the guitar. I was off by a half step (imagine the distance between a black key and a white key on a piano). This is actually my favorite part of the story.

I was so close to tuning the guitar to the exact notes, but I didn't. I love that. I remember a time in my life when I'd pick up a guitar without any knowledge of anything musical, play a fake chord, and scream Creed lyrics to make my friends laugh. Now I can practically tune one by ear. If I had tuned it perfectly I wouldn't feel the same excitement as I do now, because I know I've
made progress but not quite enough.

Cellist Pablo Casals was well into his 90's when once asked by an interviewer why he practiced, even at that age, for hours a day.

He said "I'm beginning to notice some improvement"

heading to the village

Today I ran out of hangers. I thought it was probably time I make room by donating some clothes that I never wear and have no use for. Here's the list of shirts I've decided to give away, in no particular order, that will fill my bag until the next stop.

1. The brown/white striped dress shirt with the brown paint stain on it.

2. TSA Brand black hoodie with no sleeves that probably cost me over $100 but does not belong on my body past grade 10.

3.Blue collared sweater that was left at my old Starbucks that I'm pretty sure is for girls.

4. New York t-shirt that I wore almost the entire Hue east coast tour. It's just not in good shape anymore. And it smells weird.

5. Absolutely asinine Marine dress shirt with the gold embossed boat on the back. I bought it as a joke and never wore it once.

6. Striped sweater that looks like it belongs to Ernie. Have been contemplating its demise for years.

7. Cream plaid shirt. It's actually pretty nice. Looks like a cottage vacation. Too small though.


8. Ribbed grey sweater I bought in grade 8. It looks amazing still but I'm not in 98 degrees.

9. Light blue dress shirt that was bought for me as a gift but it has these bands of shiny material woven throughout it. Not down with that.

10. A Penguin wool sweater from back when Penguin clothes weren't cool and the symbol was simpler and smaller. Shrunken beyond the point of no return.

11. Brown sweater vest that goes with nothing.

12. Brown dress shirt from when the Gap was obsessed with stretchy clothes. It's part Lycra, and Laura once told me it's like hugging a diaper.

13. Sand colored Stussy button up I bought in France in grade 6. Didn't fit me then, doesn't fit me now.

14.A brown shirt that should only be worn by people living in the NWT.

15. One of the very first Skate4Cancer shirts ever made. It has an owl on it. Should belong in a museum. It used to be white but I would have no problem calling it piss-yellow now.

16. A huge black t-shirt I got from playing a show at an iPhone app launch party. Outside of letting my girlfriend wear it to bed, I have no use for it.

That's all the space I have in my bag. Until next time.