Listening to tunes

I'm listening to tunes and putting music into folders in preparation for the wooly mammoth 5 nightmare set Notables gig on Sunday. Here are some things I'm listening to that are better than what we'll be playing:

The Vaselines - Molly's Lips
Frank Zappa - San Berdino, More Trouble Every Day
Miles Davis - Spanish Key, Bitch's Brew, John McLaughlin
Le Tigre - Hot Topic, Bang! Bang!
Les McCann - Compared To What
Desmond Decker - The Isrealites
Beck - Loser
Beta Band - Outside
Wu Tang Clan - Bring Da Ruckus, Shame On a N****, Wu Tang Clan Ain't Nothing To F*** With

UPDATE:
You must listen to the Shaggs at 3am. It's transplendant.

Water and coffee!

You get a little bored out there.

Coffee cup on the railing.

More groovy effects!

I did the Photoshop shadow/highlight adjustment on a couple more of the Rome shots. It makes them look like a vintage illustration. I'm usually against dramatically altering an image's appearence this way, but this doesn't seem over-Photoshoppy.

This one needs some Photoshop help- as you can see, the Diana doesn't put the frame exactly square on the negative. I can't just crop the top edge as I did the others because I lose too much of Casey's head.

Another recipe!

This one for Pasties (rhymes with, uh, nasty-s). I make these all the time and they're GREAT! Like meatloaf in pastry. Serve with tons of ketchup. I've lost the URL where this was originally posted. My changes are in italics.

From: TMeyers@darkwolf.demon.co.uk (Terry Meyers)

Sorry that I'm a wee bit slow getting this posted, but I had to dig through my SO's recipe cards. (maybe someday I can convince her to put them all in the computer 8-) ). Anyway, this comes from Freda, Mi. Freda is a small village about 15 miles from Houghton. My Mum's parents were born there, so let's date this somewhere around the turn of the century.

Read this to yourself in a merry rural British accent.

We use this recipe and it works fine, but you have to be *carefull* [sic] with the dough.


Copper Country Pasties
Pastry:
3 c. flour
1 1/2 sticks butter (cold and cut into bits) Use margarine! It's cheaper!
1 1/2 tsp. salt
6 tbsp. water I wind up using double this. Just keep adding tablespoons until you get something resembling dough.

In a large bowl, combine flour, butter and salt. Blend ingredients (with a pastry cutter!) until well combined and add water, one tablespoon at a time to form a dough. Toss mixture until it forms a ball. Kneed dough lightly against a smooth surface with heel of the hand to distribute fat evenly. Form into a ball, dust with flour, wrap in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes.

Filling:
1 lb. round steak, coursely [sic] ground I guess this is how they have to order it from the butcher in the UK. Anyway, hamburger.
1 lb. boneless pork loin, coursely ground ground pork
5 carrots, chopped I find this leads to carrot overload. Try 3.
2 lg. onions, chopped
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
1/2 c. rutabaga, chopped (can substitute turnip)
2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper Aw crap, I already put them in the oven and I forgot to add salt and pepper. Well, I let you know if they turn out tasting like crap.

Combine all ingredients in large bowl. Devide [sic] the dough into 6 pieces, and roll one of the pieces into a 10-inch round on a lightly floured surface. Put 1 1/2 cups of filling on half of the round. Moisten the edges and fold the unfilled half over the filling to enclose it. Pinch the edges together to seal them and crimp them decoratively with a fork. Transfer pasty to lightly buttered baking sheet and cut several slits in the top. Roll out and fill the remaining dough in the same manner. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Put 1 tsp. butter through a slit in each pasty and continue baking for 30 minutes more. Remove from oven, cover with a damp tea towel, cool for 15 minutes.

That's all there is to it. Trust me, these are *good*. As a sidebar to this recipe, my Grandpa told me how the miners used to bring pasties into the copper mines and heat them on a shovel with a candle underneath. It seems a pasty was once the cause of a mine fire in the 1890's. A miner forgot about his meal warming upon a shovel. The pasty caught fire and spread to the timber holding the walls up. (I guess this is another one for alt.folklore.coppercountry, eh, Dan? 8-) ).

Killed 60 men, as I recall. Ah, the stories I could tell you. Frigging hair-raising. Remember to douse with ketchup liberally when serving these suckers.

Lucky Tigers at Billy Ray's!

Lucky Tigers are one of Casey's brother Ryan's bands, and they rule! Highlights of the set include Groucho Marx' "Whatever It Is I'm Against It", "Cookie Day", "I Love Little Girls" and "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds". You have to be lucky yourself to catch them because their name is written in Chinese, as a kind of spiked fist to the groin socket of potential fame and fortune. Here's their MySpace page.

I thought I had the dynamite shots from hell crouched down in front of the band with the 24mm lens. It's OK, not the panzerfaust to the groin I was hoping for.

I climb onto the pinball machine to get this one.

Tha guitarist, who rocks. I don't know his name.

Update: Jeffrey!

Caption!

drummer 2

drummer 3

Tim doesn't have much to say!

Uncomfortable silence all around.

Bob Glendon chills out!

This is exactly the way he relaxes at home in Florida, too: in a brocade vest, Old Glory flying in the background...

I said "YOUR SUBJECT MATTER TENDS TO NARROW SOMEWHAT!"

Excuse me. Another damn, frigging lock wall.

Food! Tray!

Your subject matter narrows somewhat when you're stuck on a riverboat for weeks on end.

More. Lock. Walls.

OK, but this is better than most of them.

Tim eats!

Tim feeds on the scraps of passenger hors d'ouevres!

Food tray!

I got a bunch of shots of the picked-over food tray as well.

Boomish!

Here's a cool band that I foungd through MySpace. They're on the Ocean's 12 soundtrack and some other hip things.

Check them out.

How to blow a shot...

...like a total moron. Can you spot the photographer's error? It must be due to my "Lomography" background that I have not mastered the old actually looking through the viewfinder with your eyes open technique. Jesus...

Op, ghof- not quite...

OK, this is a little more like it, but I lost the cool expressionist light in the background.

Pozole!

I think I've posted this before, but what the hey: here's my favorite pozole recipe, with my additions in italics.

The secret to this soup is in the preparation of the chili paste which gives this Pozole it's characteristic color and flavor.

Here we prepare the paste with dried New Mexico chilies but feel free to experiment with Ancho, Guajillo and Cascabel chilies too.


Rinse and remove the stem end and seeds from:

8 to 10 dried New Mexico chilies, hot, mild or a combination of the two

Add chilies to a large bowl and cover with:

3 cups of boiling water

Submerge chilies in the bowl with a small plate and set aside for 30 to 45 minutes.


While the chilies are soaking, add to a large stock pot and sauté until translucent:

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 small onion

4 cloves of garlic, minced

Add:

1 to 2 pounds pork stew meat, cubed
I usually use shoulder meat. I give it a chance to brown a bit before adding the chicken stock.

chicken or vegetable stock, to cover 3-4 regular cans.

Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer until the pork is tender.

Add chilies to a blender and process along with just enough soaking liquid to produce a smooth puree, then pass the puree through a fine screen to remove any skin pieces and seeds.


Add to the stock pot:

the chile paste

1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano

1 teaspoon dried thyme

2 28 ounce cans white hominy, drained

Simmer until done, 30 to 45 minutes.

I puree in a food processor and stir back in a couple of cups of the soup to thicken.

Serve with:
finely diced white onion and cilantro
shredded cabbage
crushed red pepper flakes

I include slices of lime (squeezed into the soup), tortillas, and Mexican beer. In the past I've also had sour cream and/or a hard Mexican parmesan-like cheese (I forget the exact type). No side dishes are necessary, as the soup is hearty in the extreme.

Here's a link to the original site where I found this recipe.  

Casey in Rome

Casey by the Piazza Della Repubblica again. Cross-processed Provia, shot with the Diana, with cool new Photoshop color adjustment.

Lock walls redux!

 
More pictures of the walls of the locks of the dams of the Columbia River. This time using the new Yashica D, on which I got a great deal except that the shutter release stopped working a few weeks after I got it.

 
Lock wall 2

Lock wall 3

New Casey graphic!

A different picture from the pink shoot, amped up quite a bit in Photoshop. Most of the stuff from this shoot was pretty severely overexposed- I had just gotten my White Lightning setup and hadn't quiiite got a handle on it yet. To get this look I used the shadow/highlight and exposure adjustments in PS CS2. I also had to fill in the background because my seamless paper wasn't wide enough.

Slapping together a portfolio.

These are the finalists. I should probably cut 10-13 of these. Here's a shot of Andrea Niemic. I think this is T400CN- that's what I use for more critical stuff because it's really easy to handle.

We're doing a series of shots with each member of Red Venus Love Army in beret and some goggles we found on the ground. This is from one of the test rolls.  I think I used Arista 400, which if repackaged Fomapan. I usually push my 400 speed BW to 1600.

While we're on the subject, here are my impressions of some of the different BW films pushed 2 stops:
Ilford HP5: looks lovely, nice grain and contrast. I use HP5 for all my serious stuff.
Kodak TMY: looks crappy, pulpy-looking grain, contrast out of control- highlights blown massively, shadows blocked up. 
Fortepan: Not great- seemed to get a weird sooty look and the highlights tended to blow.
Fomapan: pretty good, maybe not as pretty as the HP5. I get this repackaged as Arista for practice/experimental stuff, because it's cheap. 
Neopan 400: I like it a lot- maybe more contrasty and grainy than the HP5, but not out of control. I would use a lot more of this, except I like the HP5 more, and I want to limit the number of films I use. 

Take all this with a grain of salt- in the darkroom I don't have the strictest tolerances in the world, so maybe the bad results are due to sloppiness.

I did some band photos of my friend Mary Sue Tobin's band Paxselin. This one is nice but will probably be cut because Ken and Chad chose to show up to the shoot in such frumpy looking clothing. 

Here's Casey just before our trip to Rome, shot with the Diana and some cross-processed Fuji slide film.  

Casey by the fountain in the Piazza Della Reppublica in Rome, again with the Diana, Fuji Provia cross-processed.  

Another Diana shot, from Toby Koenigsberg's shoot. This is the drummer, Jason Palmer. Cross-processed Provia again- Diana was on 'b' and I underexposed quite a bit.  

A shot of Jeffrey, violinist for RVLA. This shot's for the inside of the CD booklet. 

Another RVLA booklet shot. This is John, the trumpet player. 

Sam, RVLA's cellist. One of the more colorful shots from his beret shoot. 

Nathan, RVLA's keyboard player and producer of the record. Also music czar at Monolith games. He did the music for No One Lives Forever 2 and F.E.A.R, among many others. 

Paul, lead singer for Portland band Intervision 5. Cross-processed Provia shot through the now sold-off Fuji GA-645.  

I asked Nate to make a face like he was really wailing on his old Prophet. Not exactly what I had in mind but I like it.