RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

My google homepage “Quote of the Day” feed occasionally puts up quotes from famed Jupiter Resurrectionist, Arnold Toynbee. Here’s today’s:

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
- Arnold Toynbee

And people wonder why Toynbee ended up on so many tiles.

Not long ago I had the privilege of shooting the Fairmount Arts Crawl. Although it was a sprawling event that covered an enormous area, I could have stayed at the Neighborhood Potters wheel all afternoon. Here are a few shots from the demonstration wheel:

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When you go camping in Acadia and you live in Philadelphia, here’s what you do:

You get in your car in early evening and you drive. You hit North Jersey at the end of rush hour. By the time you leave Connecticut, it’s night. Massachusetts and New Hampshire fly by in a haze of rest stop Starbucks. When you get to Maine between midnight and 1AM, you still have 4 hours of driving to go.

I rarely talk about music here, but I became a Radiohead fan in those 4 hours. I’d put Amnesiac on the pre-Ipod CD changer thing. It came on around 3AM. I was on a small highway in rural Maine. My girlfriend was asleep. I was alone on the road. It was the perfect setting for an alien abduction. It wasn’t my favorite album and it still isn’t, but for that hour it was just about the greatest thing in all of creation.

And then you reach your destination.

You’ll approach Seawall campground just before dawn. Before you get in line for an early morning campsite, pull over just past King’s camp store and walk out onto the rocky beach. Smell the air. Listen to the waves. Watch the stars fade as the sun rises over the ocean.

This time of year I start to crave Maine. I just talked to an old friend up in Portland and she kept bugging me about when I was going to come up for a visit. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t live there and vacation here.

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Want to hear something that will like totally blow your mind? I mean something so big that you’ll be all like, wow man that’s proof of a higher power and shit. Or it’s just coincidence. Either way, here it is:

From earth, the angular size of the sun and moon is virtually identical. That means that the sun and moon appear to us here, to be the same size. This produces the amazing coronal displays seen during a total solar eclipse. The odds of these 2 objects lining up so perfectly are truly astronomical. (no pun intended)

This is even more outstandingly fucking fantastic when considering that around 5 billion years ago when the moon was born, it was much closer to the earth. It moves away from us at the rate of about an inch a year. That means that we humans exist in that incredibly narrow band of time that allows us to witness a total solar eclipse. The odds of sentient life to exist on a planet where this phenomenon exists, during the infinitely small period of time when it does exist is like, wow.

I’d be willing to bet that the presence of total solar eclipses make this planet far more unique than any of the life on it. When we enter the galactic version of the global economy, this might be earth’s biggest draw. Tourists will flock from light years around to witness the beauty and majesty of earth’s 1 in a trillion miracle of light.

What I’m saying is get your ass out there and witness one of these things before you die. Your next chance is August 1st. The only problem is that you have to go to China. Here’s a map of every eclipse between now and 2025. Plan now!

I’m knee deep in work, but I had to share this. Best headline ever:

Great tits cope well with warming

At least one of Britain’s birds appears to be coping well as climate change alters the availability of a key food.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) commented that other species are likely to fare much worse than great tits as temperatures rise.

Every month I check my stats and pull out my favorite search referrals. These are search terms that people enter into google or yahoo or possibly even lycos to find my site. Over the past few months, the hits have gone from 30% insane to only 5-10%. Whether that’s reflective of the site’s recent content or of new algorithms over at google I don’t know. Whatever the trouble is, the recent insane search deficit has forced cuts in the totals. Down from over 30 just a few months ago, here are April’s top 20. Enjoy:

20. my own birds repellent frequency
19. custom storm trooper suit
18. his massive buttocks
17. r.i.p love park
16. party and bust a nut
15. tiny blowjob
14. construction hardhats for sale in reno
13. bigfoot sightings 2007
12. fuck buddies near oil city pa
11. dog crap pickup kempton
10. ball shaving
9. pictures of dogs with penis out
8. black and white photos love
7. what are these indicative of voice tremors pitch changes facial twitches and shaking
6. anorexia africa
5. drawings of jewish people during jesus’s time
4. spacecraft music
3. gay donkey porn
2. netti v casual encounter
1. did the nazis have a motto

In May of 1962, Centralia PA’s volunteer fire company was busy with their annual set-the-landfill-on-fire Memorial Day spectacular when something went horribly wrong. A vein of coal ignited and spread to the mines beneath the little mountain borough. Forty six years later that fire still burns.

Since then, Centralia’s population has dwindled from about a thousand to about a dozen. Why? Occasionally the earth will split open, sucking anything on the surface into 150 foot chasms of fire and poison gas.

By the mid-80’s most of Centralia’s population had been relocated by the federal government. In 1992, the state of PA claimed eminent domain over the remaining properties. Those that were abandoned were torn down. Those who chose to stay do so at their own risk.

Which brings us to last Saturday. I took a trip with fellow photographers Albert Yee and Andrea Gingerich to the ruins of the burning town. None of us died, and a good time was had by all. Enjoy the photos:

This is my favorite photo of myself. It was taken by Andrea Gingerich during a weekend trip up to Centralia, PA. I’ll post my own photos later on in the week, but none will be as good as this one. I love it:

When moving out on my own, I had visions of base, raw survival. One bad week and I’d end up like that bird in the post below this one. On the streets, dead and discarded. It turned out a lot better than that.

On May 1, 1998 I moved to my first apartment. For all you slow witted people, that was 10 years ago today. It was a $650/month 2 bedroom at 46th and Osage. I worked at a video store and ate a lot of Rami’s lunch-cart falafel. My deep seething and totally unfair hatred of Penn students was also born.

My then unrealized goal was to move to West Philly and to find a job with Penn. After that I could enjoy their staff benefit of free classes and work my way to a free elitist degree. I eventually found my job and started classes 8 months later.

West Philly was a lot different back then. Penn still had a virtual wall up around its campus. There wasn’t much glitz around. The cute little renovated rowhouse across the street from my apartment was still a rundown place for local crackheads to gather and argue into the night. You could buy a house then for 1/5 of what it would cost you now. The bowling alley next to the video store was still an abandoned warehouse where my colleagues and I went for “coffee breaks.”

The apartment was great. Like any self respecting 19-year-old we socialized heavily. Weekend get-togethers swelled into small parties. There was sex, drugs, debauchery, dancing, drama, video cameras and thank fucking god, no such thing as youtube. But stupid college kids we weren’t. Half of us weren’t even in college. And beside that, there was also plenty of discussion of photography, music, movies, theology and art. But we weren’t a bunch of know-it-all, pretentious assholes either. There was a respectable balance.

Most of all, I liked lying in bed in the dead of night with the window behind me cracked. I loved the sound of the train off somewhere in the distance. I still do.

But back to May 1. In what would become a ritual, when the truck was returned and the heavy lifting done, my roommate and I got a six-pack and some take out. Ten years ago today, I opened one of the windows in my massive new bedroom, cracked a beer with my roommate and sat there feeling something I will never feel again.

Out of the trees:

A little too soon:

It’s a normal reaction, but taking this last photo left me feeling very sad. I wrapped the baby bird in a shroud of litter and left it in a nest of dried pine needles in someone’s sidewalk flower box. There’s no place in the city to bury a baby bird. There’s nothing to eat it.

Today it’s raining and I’m feeling annoyingly personal. Occasionally when I’m in these moods, I’ll pull an old journal from a dusty box and see what I was doing however many years ago on this date. It turns out that 4 years ago today marks one of the most important events of my recent life. Since this is a website and not some bullshit personal blog, you can all go to hell if you want to know what that event was. Seriously.

But anyway, I flipped back to May of 2003 and found this item that I don’t mind sharing:

They were two parts of the same building, facing in opposite directions. She could look out and see trees and hills and cattle grazing inside of an electric fence. He started out at the on-ramp of a road that led to a glistening human skyline just short of the horizon. She held up an important wall. One side of her pressed against the exit. He was a detachable window frame.

And that’s as far as I got.

On Tuesday of this week, I traveled down to Cape May, NJ to go birding with an old friend. Believe it or not, Cape May is one of the best places in the United States to watch annual migrations. But this post doesn’t have too much to do with birds. This post has to do with an experience I had at the Farley Plaza Rest Area along the Atlantic City Expressway.

As a crazy person who’s already discovered 5 Toynbee Tiles at 4 rest areas in 3 states, I was sure to drink an extra cup of coffee so that I could justify a stop on the A.C. expressway. Being even more insane, I was then able to spot these sparse, nearly unidentifiable fragments and positively identify them as the remnants of an old original Toynbee tile.

Fortunately my friend Mel (who had just wandered out of the car to photograph grackles hopping around in the rest area’s lawn) was nice enough to pull over and let me take the archival shots.

My girlfriend is tired of my posting articles she emails me, so in the interest of full disclosure, this is from one of those emails. It represents… well just watch it:

This is an interactive post. I need you all to do the following:

1. Shut down your computer.
2. Go outside

That’s all.

Last night I waited 5 hours (3 spent on my feet, completely immobilized by a crowd of 35,000 people… I think the Bush Administration calls that a “stress position.”) to hear Obama’s stump speech and get this um… awesome 300mm shot, which I then cropped down from 12.8 to 0.6 megapixels. All in all, the 15 minutes he spoke was pretty cool. The people I waited in various lines with were all nice, but 5 hours? Damn.

The atmosphere was like a non-competitive sporting event. Next time, I gotta get a press pass.

Yes I’m really saying that I judge my own shots from the pre-”debate” rally at the same standard as the New York Times. Actually Times photographer Béatrice de Géa has a slightly nicer Canon camera and a much wider lens… but in my own defense, I was told by a cop to get back on the curb before I could get the wider shot myself.

Here’s mine:

And here’s hers:

And acting as judge and editor, I like just like my Obama shot better than theirs. Mine:

Times:

And since this is my site, here are a few more of mine:

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On Sunday night I went to and photographed a trifecta of performances at Tritone. The night included a set by the broken-jawed Justin Duerr, a trash bag fashion show put together by Jamie Campbell and her 10 beautiful models and a headlining set by Seizure 17.

It was a great night of performances that produced some excellent photos. Except for the fashion show, I shot without a flash. In a dimly lit room, with underexposed shots, it’s hard to capture much color information outside of red and black. For example, here’s a shot from this morning’s New York Times, taken by Damon Winter at last night’s infuriatingly pointless, soul-crushing talk-radio level “debate.”

Ed Rendell is a red faced man, but in that shot he looks like Satan. And Chelsea should really get that jaundice taken care of. There isn’t a white balance adjustment in the world that could find the right color information in that shot. The information just isn’t there.

My strategy for Justin’s set was to convert to a sepia kind of tone through color manipulation and desaturation. I also did some b&w conversions and some other creative tinkering. All in all, I really like these shots. Fashion show and more are coming soon:

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There’s nothing more boring than reading about someone’s dreams. With that said, I’ve been having some real strange ones. They’re filled with beautiful light. The world looks like its shot in HDR. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out how to download the photos I’ve taken there, onto my computer here. Like the shot I took last night of a hydrogen bomb test somewhere north of Philly. Although I still question the government’s new designated detonation area, the shot came out great.

Or the flock of parrots I saw flying around center city. I didn’t have my camera, but those photos would have been great.

Until I can get that dream-shot, here are several tales of real urban parrots:

Most famous are the Parrots of Brooklyn. Somehow, some way, colonies of Argentinean parrots have established themselves in NYC. Theories range from overturned parrot-carrying trucks to a great airport escape 1967. Federally backed eradication efforts have been unsuccessful in quelling the parrot menace, and several colonies still exist.

Then there was the lone parrot of Mt. Airy. This solitary representative of its species made do by joining up with a flock of pigeons. It hasn’t been spotted in years and is assumed captured or dead.

Escaped parrots crop up here and there around the city. A friend once saw one hanging out down at Penns Landing. Just yesterday, a post of phillyskyline told of an escaped cockatiel in West Philly. I recommend that Melissa try looking for Sport wherever pigeons may congregate. Maybe Clark Park or under the el tracks?

That’s all for now.

Back when I was a baby, I used to sit at my parent’s bedroom window and look out onto the street. Few things on Greene street in Germantown impressed me as much as Septa buses. They made such a big impression that I invented my own word for them: “Da!.”

The bus was an impressive beast. It was big, loud and it shook the whole house. When I was 11, lying in a bed on a farmhouse in Northern California, I woke up to an earthquake. In my middle of the night delirium I assumed it was just a Septa bus and went back to sleep. Ancient people believed that earthquakes were caused by the gods. I assumed it was Septa. For better or for worse, Philly’s transit agency has shaped some of the most fundamental aspects of my existence.

For a couple of years now, I’ve wanted to write my own Septa autobiography. My idea was to use public transit as the yarn with which to weave together my own Philadelphia experience. Shitty metaphors aside, it’s actually not a bad idea. I don’t own a car and didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 27. I’ve lived in this city my entire life and have ridden Septa to nearly every corner of it. These are my stories.

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The 23 Trolley

Wikipedia used to say that the 23 was the longest trolley line in the world but since the last time I checked, someone has removed that sentence. Either way, at about 14 miles it’s a long line. Starting way up at the top of Chestnut Hill in the northwestern corner of the city, the 23 travels southeast on Germantown Ave, hops over to 12th near Broad and Erie, winds its way down center city and South Philly before terminating a couple blocks from the stadiums.

You could drive to New York in the time it takes to ride from one end to the other. Until high school, I never rode it out of the northwest.

While the XH on Greene Street was the first Septa route to get my attention, the 23 was the first line that I actually remember riding.

It was Germantown in the early 80’s and I was with my mom near Germantown and Chelten. Considering my age (about 3) I remember it well. The thing that made the 23 stick in the mind of a toddler was that it was a trolley. It ran on tracks. It was loud. It threw sparks where the trolleywheel met the overhead wires. It was fucking awesome.

The cars were the very same 40’s era airstream looking things that were recently refurbished, painted green and put in service on Girard Ave. In the early 80’s though, the 23 trolley cars were in prefurbished condition. The floors were dirty, the seats were ripped and they smelled like 4 decades of mildew.

In other words, they were built to last, but maintained by Septa.

As a very young child, I only rode the 23 trolley a handful of times. As far as I remember, all the trips were from my home in Germantown up to Chestnut Hill. Other than the way it looked, felt and smelled I remember very little about those trips.

I noticed that people in Germantown were mostly black and people in Chestnut Hill were mostly white, but I didn’t know why that was, or how that mattered. All I knew was that I liked how the trolley glided awkwardly up the cobblestone road. I liked the open space in the middle and the plush seats that curved with the body of the car. I liked the ribbed rubber mats on the floor and the big windows that looked out over Germantown Avenue. I liked how high above the street I was and how people looked at the big orange trolley as it rumbled past them.

When I was 11, my family moved to Mt. Airy, the neighborhood between working class black Germantown and rich, waspy white Chestnut Hill. In Mt. Airy, we lived a block from the Avenue. I’d go to the corner with my friends and put pennies on the tracks. I know this sounds cliqued, but we really spent afternoons that way… sitting on the corner, smashing pennies with streetcars. At night I’d lie in bed and listen to the trolley rumbling at top speed towards Chestnut Hill. There was a downhill straightaway just past my block, where the drivers could hit 40-45mph in the middle of the empty Mt. Airy night.

In 1992, after years of fits and starts, the trolleys were officially discontinued. By the time I was riding the 23 to high school, the route was all buses.

Next up, the 23 buses.

This post comes via Geekadelphia, via Phillyist, but just in case you haven’t seen it, Septa has traded in its moderately honest old slogans like this:

With a new brutally honest one: