Published July 6th, 2008
in Uncategorized.
Given that screen estate is always limited, “lightbox” viewer applications are a very economic way to show image galleries, flash movies, and the like. I believe I’ve tried all the better viewers (named GreyBox, Slimbox, Thickbox, iBox…), and ended up using Shadowbox. Unlike some others, this one is very flexible, and the code is clean and fully standards compliant - heureka! Still, I am not sure yet if I find “popup” boxes in general, and those that come in the disguise of a “lightbox” in particular, too gadgety to show my work. I did my best to make the presentation less distracting, which is one of the reasons why I now use white throughout my site. Examples for how I used the viewer are here (image galleries) and here (flash movies).
If I don’t like the result in a couple of weeks, I’ll write new code from the ground up for my entire site, only using html, php, and css. After years of Flash and JavaScript, that should feel like a cleansing ritual!
(P.S.: These foreign traffic cones from yesterday - no Photoshop, they looked exactly like this.)
Published July 3rd, 2008
in Uncategorized.
There seem to be two kinds of people: Those who try to accumulate things (think of the basement in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), and those who try to get rid of them. I am of the latter kind. I once helped clean out the office space of a photographer who had lived well beyond 80. And this week I helped clean out the home office of a retired professor who has been dead for a few years now. Think of endless shelfs so dense with stuff that they turn into a black hole any second. Conclusion: Not only for ease of moving while I am alive, but also for the convenience of those who will have to take care of my things once I’m not, I want *everything* (photos - sans those hanging in the MoMA of course -, writings, tax files, a lawsuit against a client who failed to pay his bill, books, etc.) to be on my iPhone/iPod. If I make it past the year 2050, by that time the two-terrabyte-version should do. At that age, I don’t really expect to be replaced by another boyfriend. But in any case, think of these convenient possibilities: (1) iPod gets buried with you, (2), iPod gets synchronized with new set of data, (3), iPod is put in a shrine near the fireplace. I’d prefer all three of those to having anybody sift through a large pile of stuff that has built up over a lifetime…
Published July 2nd, 2008
in Uncategorized.
After our somewhat strained meeting at the Mercato Centrale in Firenze, I invited Jens for a homecooked meal. He was eager to leave the plains, running off to the mountains, but I had a strong argument. I was going to make some rather mountainy (is that a word? – it must be!) food, a kind of brioche filled with apricots, part of the Austrian ancestry of northern Italian cooking. But I was going to do so only under one condition: that he documented it, every step along the way. Jens has annoyed me lately by his new commitment to make, on principle, only photographs that are *useless*. How am I to write about delicious treats if I do not have images to go with it?
Austrians call this wonderfully simple food ‘Nudeln,’ that is, ‘pasta,’ which basically just means ‘things made from dough.’ It is such a generic piece of baking that this generic name is quite appropriate. You can make it with almost any fruit, and in comes in all kinds of shapes. The key is to make some truly soft yeast dough, and to find some ripe apricots or peaches or plums. If the fruit is hard and tasteless (as it sometimes is even in Italy), cut it up and cook it for a minute in lemon juice and a bit of sugar.
Once the dough has risen, you take a small amount, roll it into a little ball, and put your fruit in the middle. Now it goes into the baking pan, soon to be joined by more of its kind. At the bottom of the baking pan, put some butter and a tiny bit of sugar. That makes for a nice crust. Bake it until it looks nicely brown, and when you take it out of the oven, sprinkle a bit of powered sugar on top. Jens thought it was worth it, not just the work that I put into it, but also his temporary willingness to photograph the banal.
