Saturday evening found me over by the canal on the Princeton/West Windsor border, Sunday afternoon I was back nearby at the Updike Farmstead (previous posts – here and here). Both areas qualify as falling within the remaining buffer and both will remain so since they are protected areas.
Delaware-Raritan Canal, February 27, 2010
Post-sunset, same spot, it was all about the color.
Updike Farmstead on Sunday:
Updike Farmstead, February 28, 2010
Old growth forest, deer tracks.
I brought Bix with me on both outings. On Sunday, there was a large herd of deer watching us. At first they hid in the trees. But then on our way back, the deer, having had enough, darted out across an empty field and back into the woods. I have never seen a herd this large, 2-3 dozen strong. Bix, whose fur is so overgrown he can barely see, missed the action visually but was all too happy to explore the tracks left out in the open.
Isabel, Leah, and Bix; making latkes. Princeton, NJ, December 12, 2009
Kelev tov means “good dog” in Hebrew. If you are looking for a nice story of understanding this holiday season look to Miky, the rabbi, and the policeman – a Western coming soon to a theater near you.
I spent most of this week shooting portraits in Williamstown, MA. It was fun to be up there and out of the usual locales. Williamstown is wedged into the upper left corner of Massachusetts. Ringed by mountains, its a place of great beauty, and quite isolated considering that it’s part of the denser populated Northeast.
One of the gems in town is the Williams College Museum of Art. I hadn’t been there in close to twenty years and I’m glad to say it didn’t disappoint. One of my portrait subjects, Mike Glier, has a show of landscape paintings exploring environments from the arctic to the equator which happen to fall on the longitude line which passes through his studio in Hoosick, New York. The paintings are rich and engaging. I liked how each location was clearly distinct, while still working together as a whole. His New York body of work has shades of Stuart Davis underneath it. Very nice.
Mike’s work is shown along with another Williams faculty member, Amy Podmore. Amy’s got a range of work from sculpture to video. What got me the most was her video entitled, Disappearing Acts – Powder and Milk. One half of the screen is Amy in what can be best described as awhite, plaster looking, breast dress. It has fifty or so breasts on it arranged in four rows. Amy spins in a circle as milk spots out of the nipple on each breast. The other half of the screen finds Amy in the same location. She is wearing a white loose fitting pants outfit with many pockets, each filled with white powder. Amy jumps around and bats at the pockets creating a large white cloud. She’s clearly having fun on both sides of the screen and it’s infectious. What could be forced is funny, and odd, and you can’t help but watch it.
In other galleries at the museum are works by William Morris Hunt, Alec Soth, and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Hunt and Soth are in a Niagara smack-down. Hunt painted the falls in the nineteenth century. Soth photographed them in the twenty-first. Hunt’s work is impressionism and it felt dated and blah. It was clearly skilled but it was no match for the beauty of Soth’s best work. I’ve been reading about Alec Soth for years and have seen his work in print and online. Neither matches seeing it in person. It’s beautiful and the key pieces are stunning.
Niagara Falls, 1878, by William Morris Hunt
An image of the falls, shot in winter, 4′x5′, is just glorious. The web can’t do it justice. There are tourists on overlooks, there’s a richness in layers of mist which is impressionism today. Unfortunately, much of the show is Soth’s motel work. I think someone needs to pull Soth aside and say, no more motels, no more motels at night, no more motels with old cars in front, and no more motels with brides (you can see a gallery here.) It’s not that this work isn’t attractive, I just feel like I’ve seen it before and that it’s a cliché.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s work is one video, Juggernaut, projected in HD on a large wall (~18′ high by 32′ wide.) It was shot at the salt flats of the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. The blurb on the wall had some gobbley-gook curator speak about how the reserve is actually for whales and that by Manglano-Ovalle choosing to work with the salt flats and not the whales there is some connection to the whales. That did not ring true for me, it sounded like a leap, and it wasn’t needed. The video is engrossing enough on its own. Just over five minutes long, it presents a bleak white, flat landscape. The camera is moving slowing to the right while industrial trucks are moving slightly faster to the right. You see the trucks from the tires down but it’s clear these arehuge machines. The sound is a layered combination of noise, static, and voices.
We caught Mike Stern and his trio at Chris’ Jazz Cafe in Philly last night. Great show. No matter what kind of music you are into, if you get a chance – see Mike and his group.
One change with new web site and blog is the ability for both to format themselves on the iPhone and on other touch-type smart phones. This makes for quicker loading and painless viewing of both sites when seen by those on the go.
JonRoemer.com on the iPhone:
Learning to See on the iPhone:
For JonRoemer.com this is a feature built into the web site’s structure. It replaces my hand built, hand maintained, iPhone site which ran concurrent with the old JonRoemer.com.
For the blog, being on a Wordpress platform, flexibility is the name of the game. I tried three mobile versions of the blog, each promised a simple design, but only one delivered on design, ease of use, and worked out of the box. The mobile theme I’m using is WPtouch iPhone Theme. It has many options built-in, all accessed via WordPress’ settings menu, it couldn’t be easier. If I had to change one thing with WPtouch iPhone Theme, I’d want the ability to not have the calendar month and day as an icon with each post on the homepage. That’s it. This Wordpress Plug-in is incredibly well made and well documented.
The two other iPhone mobile themes I tried were Carrington Mobile and Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin. The former looked to be even simpler in feel than WPtouch but it did not reformat blog photos for smaller phone screens leading to half of each image being cropped out. The latter promised to automatically create a site that mimicked Learning to See but other than orange links it looked nothing like Learning to See and it too had image problems. It dropped many images when viewed on the phone leaving placeholder icons instead.
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Apologies to Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. of children’s book fame. If you have kids or grandkids, if you ever babysat kids who are in the board-book stage, you know their work. Hopefully, I won’t have an angry author and illustrator looking at me.
