at the end of the year there is usually a tiny pocket of time when everyone else has some time off as well. not everyone, obviously, just many of the people i am lucky enough to work with. and if they do not work, i have a bit of time to also "not work" which means that i can work on my own little projects and odd ends of what i do.
right now my little computer must really hate me for this pocket of time. it has to copy a whole music library of a lot of music and movies to an external drive, just so i can pull in an "aperture" library file onto the internal drive. oh, and aperture, the software, currently still needs to add thumbnails and previews to almost 30000 images. i want to reduce the amount of clutter images in my library, but in order to do so i need fist to see what i have there in all the folders and wrinkles of the hard drive.
the fans on my little mac book pro have been blowing hot air for a good while now. the firewire cables are finally earning their name.
we managed to go to the met today. it was a calm visit. or as calm as it can be when fifth avenue turns into a living human sausage. good thing there are still bubbles in the museum which despite of articles and promotions in the new york times and in many other places do not seem to attract the typical american tourist new york visitor family.
african art, polynesian art, south american works... not very popular. yet brilliant. very much so. and pretty contemporary too. many of the pieces looked as if they were hundreds of years old, and yet they were not even 40. perhaps because they came from places where there are no articles and promotional promotions and salons and an audience too lazy to... hmm...
there were also objects that looked as if they had just been pulled out of a design lab yesterday, and yet they traveled all the way from a village on a very tiny island and were created without the use of a thing you are staring at now.
now i am going to synchronize my new ipod buddy. will feed it all that compressed drm'd up data that pretends to be songs and pictures and things.
and then i am going to select some freshly organized files and throw them into the trash.
oh, and did i mention that we also picked up some of the rolls of film shot in the last few weeks? and some of it was shot without the safety net of a light meter. and boy, does it feel good to look at these little pictures. put there by the magic of machines and chemicals and light.
i sort of just happened to be there.
but perhaps actually not? how does that process of making a picture really happen.
oh, industrial crazy talk.
December 2007 Archives
there is a storm hitting the windows right now. the sky is a dark white, yellowish, sounding like sheets of steel tin bouncing against the sparks of a large bonfire.
the newspaper just landed outside of my door.
saw my parents yesterday. showed them around the apartment. they looked very happy. i helped my father with his mac a little bit. we looked at their neighborhood from space, we also looked a bit at ours.
oh, and we did not really leave the house.
their new imac arrived and even though there were some challenges with the power management in the room where my father installed the computer at first, we eventually managed to install leopard, the new operating system and we managed to power up the little cameras above our screens.
it was great. no, it was beyond great. it was one of those moments that feel like the end of something and the beginning of something else.
my uncle in poland asked if i could install skype on my parents' machine. he also now has a camera placed on top of his monitor in the room to which i was first brought from the hospital about 38 years ago when not many of us were thinking about live personal transmissions and computers and any of that.
there were still storms, of course. the sky would turn a dark white sometimes. and the room in which i am writing this existed already as well.
soon the sun will rise again.
and then it is going to set.
without ever doing either.
