foxtongue: (Default)
Jason Webley gave us such a gift this evening, a beautiful, marvelous experience, far beyond what anyone could call a concert.

Not to knock the concert, which was a blasting cap of a show, topping out almost everything else I've ever seen, (literally dancing in the aisles, jumping up and down levels of crazy amazing, that show. It just did. not. quit. ravishing. Melodies and shouting and poetry and snow made of feathers and surprise guest performances and identical twins and home-made instruments thrown into the audience and.. wow!), but the truly incredible part came after - when he silently walked off the stage and out of the hall, at the very end of the music, his fist tightly wrapped in the strings of a massive bouquet of giant red balloons, and swept almost the entire crowd into the street with him, everyone singing the last refrain of the last song over and over as the band played everyone out.

As we walked, hundreds strong, still singing, all the way to the water, down a cobblestone hill, under an overpass, over an overpass, Rafael and I arm in arm, up at the very front, sharing smiles with Jason, the leaders of a surreal parade that trailed four blocks long, thick enough to block traffic, the tune still soared with every step, as if the song kept our feet from touching the ground, as if the song was what kept us enchanted, a spell that he made but that we created, until we finally reached a smooth stone beach where a yacht was anchored, lit only with candles, fifty feet from shore.

He motioned us all to stop, then, and began to dance quietly where the shore sloped into the waves, gesturing to us with the great red balloons, a poem in motion, throwing our attention to the dazzling, full moon, then whimsically shifting from joyful pose to joyful pose, his heart bursting for us as he was painted with the flashes of a hundred cameras, like a strange, moving art fresco at the side of the sea. Eventually he paused at the top of some rocks, every inch the grand jester, both the king and the fool, suffused so thoroughly with glittering exultation that his face was a miracle, and finally began to say goodbye, certain, I suppose, that everyone had arrived.

He continued the act without saying a word, tying his treasured trademark hat to the balloons and, with a series of Chaplin-esque gestures, releasing them bumping into the sky. He lay on the rocks, watching them go, the red of the balloons weirdly lit by the moon, the saddest, most happy, fiercest gentle creature that ever lived, all the while as we, his crowd, kept singing, until they were nearly out of sight. Some people cried. (He might have too. It's hard to say, even though I was close, one of the very front line.) Next he began to strip, unbuttoning his shirt, peeling off his pants, unhooking his shoes from his feet, then he waved to us, we the hundreds, crammed onto the beach, spilling out, farther back, still singing, some stuck all the way back on the street, and we waved back, felicity incarnate, and many shouted, "goodbye!" and "until next time!". He looked at everyone, posing as he did so again for our cameras, as if it had all been rehearsed, the camera flashes picking him out for our eyes, then turned, satisfied, and bravely waded into the cold, black sea, the blackest thing, the coldest, and swam for the boat.

And that was that. Except that it wasn't. Telling you what happened doesn't explain what it felt like, how extraordinary it was, how perfect and clever. I could tell you how we cheered when he reached the yacht, how the crew that eventually emerged was dressed all in theater blacks or what it was like the police arrived to break us up or why my shoes got soaked or even more about the astoundingly good concert, but these are details and, in a way, unimportant. We were transported, as truly if we slipped sideways through space in that theater and briefly inhabited another world only a few molecules away, but happier in every respect. That was the magic. We were there as audience, but we were part of it and essential, all of our voices required, all of our eyes and hearts and minds.
foxtongue: (Default)

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs.


We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference.


Kevin Karsch, a Computer Science PhD Student, and his team at the University of Illinois are developing a software system that lets users easily and convincingly insert objects into photographs, complete with realistic lighting, shading, and perspective. According to their documentation, aside from a few annotations provided by the user, like where the light sources are, the software doesn't need to know anything about the image. Even keeping in mind much demo videos are spot polished, I'm still astonished at how seamless it all seems. This could very well be ground breaking work.
foxtongue: (moi?)
365:2010/01/22 - good morning!
365:2010/01/22 - good morning!

As of next week, I'm going to begin selling archival prints of my photography!

Never having done this in any serious way before, I'm not exactly sure which pictures I should be offering, so I turn to you and ask, "what are some of your favourites?".
foxtongue: (sci-fi kitchen)

a friend's baby
Hey Jude: Times Square subway sing-along

I just bought a white topped IKEA table desk at a very steep discount off Craigslist to replace the desk I sold several years ago. This, for a multitude of reasons, is far more exciting than it has any right to be. Lung helped me bring it home and wrestle it upstairs to my apartment and even into my room, for which I am deeply grateful. The desk, more of a table, really, is not very big, but my room is smallish, so almost every piece of bedroom furniture had to be moved to accommodate it. My entire body hurt from how much work it took, but it's so amazing to finally have a workspace again that all the hassle was completely worth it. (Even the bizarro Trial Of The Talking Computer, which apparently complains out loud of overclocking failure when it needs a new BIOS battery.)

My next big step will be to get my website up and running again, this time with a focus on photography, with a page, too, devoted to the various Thread of Grace projects. I am slow with websites, though. I begin to have a general design figured out, then find myself lost among the apparently endless methods of developing a gallery backend. Realistically, I don't much care what it looks like, as long as what I end up with is easy to update and allows people to link to each image. Simple, understated, a bit of text with each picture. Uncomplicated. (I've started looking for that pop up gallery everyone's been using for the last couple of years, where the image slides up over the page, and there's tiny little > and < for right and left). In the world of fanciful imaginary land, however, I'd also like an automatic flickr feed widgety thing in a sidebar somewhere, thumbnails that offer a preview when a mouse hovers over them, and a significantly prettier interface than most templates offer. An overnight degree in graphic design, plane tickets to somewhere tropical and warm, and an oceanside horsie ride wouldn't hurt, either.
foxtongue: (post party sleep)
Seven o'clock. Huh. Last time I looked it was only six, and the time before that, somewhere around four. The night drowned in the hours I was working on photography, clicking through pictures, polishing, discarding. Carlos bought one of my test Plywerk runs, a large black and white print of Vancouver in winter, a man standing to the right of a snowy street, elegantly silhouetted in the midst of chaos just off screen, a glittering sea of girls in club dresses with high heels up to here, shivering on the arms of loud men, boys really, too drunk to fuck, too young to care. My first photography sale at the new shop, the first, I hope, of many. I remember the very small sound my camera made in that moment, somehow saved for me by the miraculous insulating properties of snow. Even in the midst of a thousand voices shouting into cellphones, desperate, dangerous, all seeking cabs, I could still hear it, that minuscule, hesitant click.
foxtongue: (concentration)
recycled multi-frame picture frame chalkboard

Recycled multi-frame picture frame chalkboard, available for sale at A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (concentration)
Silver Peacock Feather Embossed Recycled Frame Little Chalkboard

Silver Peacock Feather Embossed Recycled Frame Little Chalkboard, converted from a picture frame to a chalkboard, available for sale at A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (concentration)
the first sunset of 2010

plywerk mounting plywerk mounting plywerk mounting


the first sunset of 2010, an archival print mounted on 5x7 inch bamboo panel, available on Etsy at my new store, A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (canadian)
Threadless is doing one of their suprise $10 shirt sales.


Speaking of shirts, I have been amassing materials and designs, readying the next launch of A Thread of Grace inventory, but I have done a very silly thing; I have regretfully left all the actual shirts behind in Vancouver by accident. Which, my unwavering loves, is why I have been posting chalkboards and photography prints rather than clothes, what my shop is ostensibly all about. Thankfully, however, those tiny things, though not enough to pay my rent, are evidently interesting enough to snag me a spot of grocery money! Hoorah! And now that I'm stocked up with materials, I should be able to jump right into production once I'm back in Vancouver.

The Olympics seem so very hit and miss, wonderful yet awful, that I'm even more torn about returning to Vancouver than usual. It's been almost flat amazing to be so out of reach of all the rah rah corporate saturation, patriotic fluff, and Olympics controversy. Controversy that is unlikely ever to be resolved, given I have hope that the city will be improved by hosting the Olympics, even as I know how badly Vancouver tends to cock things up. Vancouver's a city with very few good ideas and perpetually poor execution. Like how it finally has a rail line to the airport, but it runs up Cambie instead of Arbutus, and it doesn't stop at all between 9th and 25th or 25th and 41st, where people need to go. Like how we're hosting the Olympics and showing off our cultural might while cutting 90% of all arts funding.

Case in point, I'm looking forward to seeing what the giant downtown party is like and trying out the free Olympic Zipline, just as much as I'm terrific glad to have been absent for the violent anti-Olympics protests. (For once, something exciting in town I am glad to have missed.)
foxtongue: (concentration)
Ornate Recycled Frame Tiny Chalkboard

Ornate Recycled Frame Tiny Chalkboard

SOLD! Ornate Recycled Frame Tiny Chalkboard, converted from a picture frame to a chalkboard, available for sale at A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (concentration)
within me there lay an invincible summer

plywerk mounting plywerk mounting plywerk mounting


within me there lay an invincible summer, an archival print mounted on 4x6 inch bamboo panel, available on Etsy at my new store, A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (concentration)
Recycled Frame Three Window Tiny Chalkboard

Recycled Frame Three Window Tiny Chalkboard

SOLD! Recycled Frame Three Window Tiny Chalkboard, converted from a picture frame to a chalkboard, available on Etsy at my new store, A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (concentration)
Wittgenstein's Steps (mounted on 4x6 inch bamboo panel)

plywerk mounting plywerk mounting plywerk mounting


Wittgenstein's Steps, an archival print mounted on 4x6 inch bamboo panel, available on Etsy at my new store, A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (concentration)
.Sweet Recycled Frame Little Chalkboard

.Sweet Recycled Frame Little Chalkboard

Sweet Recycled Frame Little Chalkboard, converted from a picture frame to a chalkboard, available on Etsy at my new store, A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (Default)
.Forever Be Deer Valentine .Forever Be Deer Valentine .Forever Be Deer Valentine .Forever Be Deer Valentine

SOLD! Forever Be Deer Valentine, made by me, available on Etsy at my new store, A Thread of Grace.
foxtongue: (femme)
356:2010/01/31 - aeroship hers
356:2010/01/31 - aeroship hers


My eyes burn when they blink from staring too long at a screen. Today has been a day of creating and back aches and forgetting to stretch or to eat or to move. It is good, as now I can sit back and see what I have accomplished, which is not insignificant, and feel less like I am wasting my life, using my hours and minutes up, moment by moment, until the day I suddenly wake, years too late, and realize, all through my life, that nothing's been done.

Today's accomplishments are all small things, though cumulative, as I'm in the midst of readying essential files for a laser cutter and readying them for thread, hacking out approximations of finished forms, sourcing where I should go for prints, and other various sundries. My computer, through all of this, acting as teacher, toolbox, and friend. I've also managed to finish a rough draft for my new website, nothing spectacular, but functional, and hopefully not too impossible to build.

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