Back

Okay, so I took down the Twitter module upon my return, but I didn't offer an update right away. Granted, I did write a rather long journal entry on my DeviantART page wherein--I think I overuse that word--I detailed my return trip (recently-caught cold and all), which I didn't feel like simply copying-and-pasting into Blogger (albeit I transferred part of it to my Gamespot weblog, which sees even fewer updates than Blogger). Anyway, I'm back and I thought I'd do a little "return to form" and give a few quick movie reviews. Granted, I'd already seen Watchmen, but my Dad hadn't, which I knew would make for an interesting experience. Movies by their very nature are meant to be self-contained and not requiring prior knowledge of certain subject matters, so it's nice to see how well adaptations fare on this front.

As it happens, he really liked it despite no prior knowledge of Watchmen whatsoever. Then again, I think that's the appeal; the characters of Watchmen, as many know, are essentially parodies of Golden Age-era Charlton comics characters, among them The Blue Beetle, a noted inspiration for Batman. I think Zack Snyder is a really under-appreciated director (previous film 300 is, without question, my personal favorite of the post-2004 Digital Backlot films). If it sounds like I'm pigeonholing or demeaning him by describing him as a "poor man's Paul Verhoeven" (extreme gore, social commentary, sensational sex scenes) believe me, I'm not; I'm genuinely looking forward to his next film, even if it's an animated feature about owls. I mean, even if that one turns out bad, at least I can look forward to Xerxes, the supposed prequel that Frank Miller is currently writing.

We also watched District 9, which had a few editing issues that make me question its nomination in that Oscar category, but otherwise was thoroughly enjoyable. Some people might be turned away by its seemingly light-hearted tone, but those people are missing the point. The film is very ambiguous, in that we're not sure who we're supposed to want to see win, and we're never sure if we're supposed to laugh at something or not. It's kind of like American Psycho; you'll laugh, but you'll feel guilty for it because every shred of decency and humanity in you will be crying out in horrified protest. The violence and gore in the film is on the level with something like a cartoon or a comic book, but the subtexts and social commentaries they frame are on the level with the likes of Good Night And Good Luck, Munich, Hotel Rwanda, or Three Kings. In short, it's a schizophrenic mess of excitement and intelligence... and it's beautiful. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a flawed diamond. It may not have much in the way of luster or clarity, but it'll still cut glass.
To expand on what I said about having problems with the editing, I mean the way in which the movie presents its own "reality" via various camera techniques. For starters, let me get it out of the way that I absolutely hate and despise the word "Mockumentary." It's just such a hideous word, and was so before it became dreadfully overused. What strikes me as strange about it is that I'd never heard the term before The Blair Witch Project and I honestly don't think anyone ever used it to describe Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, so I feel safe in chalking its origin up to the same modern yet ignorant newspeak that gave us "blog" "lawl" and even "pwn." District 9 ultimately presents itself as a documentary, filmed in typical "cinema verite" style with unsteady camera work and talking head interviews. In film, there are essentially three styles of narration, much like in books:
1st person. Films like Russian Ark, Cloverfield, or even Blair Witch Project fit this category, wherein what the audience is seeing is essentially what its main characters see. As such, the cinematography is distinctly "amateurish" and the narrative is ultimately of a limited perspective as we're only, at best, over the shoulders of our protagonists. This exemplifies what's known in literary circles as "metafiction," that is, fiction that is self-aware. The characters are aware that they're being recorded, and are in full control over what does and does not get seen, whether they turn the camera off voluntarily, lose power, or get eaten by some hideous monster attacking them.
3rd person limited. This one's a little tough to peg down because it's extremely broad and describes a great many films. In District 9, we don't so much get Third Person Limited in the sense of a disembodied film crew that follows the protagonist yet never interferes with the goings-on as much as we get a real live film crew that interviews various characters and even follows our "hero" (at the risk of spoilers, I'll just say that the "hero" is "anything but" one most of the time, and characters you wouldn't think to have any merit or values end up showing more humanity than 99% of the humans in the film) around on his little "errand" to evict a group of aliens from a slum that's risen up around their derelict ship. Think of it like the show Cops; there's a film crew but, while the officers occasionally break the fourth wall and talk to the camera, they go largely unnoticed but can only see as far as the officers they follow around.
3rd person omniscient. This throws out the distinctly "meta" qualities of the first two. No film crews following the characters around, no personal video records, no "found footage" or anything to indicate that what you're seeing is any kind of firsthand account of an event. The best way to think of this is "God's-Eye-View" in that the "camera" is invisible to the characters and unaffected by events unfolding around them, as well as being able to move anywhere and even to any point in time in the film's progression. Dramatic irony is basically gone as any event or occurrence is front-and-center, setting the audience a comfortable distance from our lead characters.
The problem I have with District 9 is that it is not very good at distinguishing between these different perspectives. It breaks the immersion when we have to stop and think, "Okay, is the FILM CREW shooting this, or is this just what WE'RE seeing as it happens now?" Given that the film starts off showing interview and archival footage, we'd expect more of a break when the "prerecorded" footage stops and the "presently happening" footage begins. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows may not have been a great film, but it had a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek sensibility when it came to its own internal logic of truth and reality when it comes to film and video. It was not distracting or heavy-handed in its delivery, but not subtle enough to be missed or overlooked on even the most casual viewing.
I really hope District 9 doesn't get the Oscar for Editing, but I hope it wins the other categories. I doubt it'll win Best Picture; it's just not the kind of film that Hollywood goes for, it's all over the map in terms of its tone and message, and while that ambiguity is what I love about it, it's not what the Academy generally looks for.

Okay, that turned out longer than I thought it would, and now I've got to try and get some sleep despite not only still being a bit sick, but also getting a rather disturbing bill from the electric company which basically says that they did not receive my most recent payment. I'm going to call my bank later and see if that withdrawal was ever made. If it wasn't, then shame on the Post Office for losing track of an envelope mailed the last week of January. If it was withdrawn, then the electric company will be shown no mercy. Anyway, my roommate has forbade me from even thinking about it anymore, and to just give the bills to her mom for her to handle. This isn't the first time the company has royally messed things up for us. First, a ridiculous deposit they never tell you the amount of up front, followed by a surprise bill from my roommate's previous account that they basically sat on for four years and six months before making the connection between that old account and our new one. Ugh. Anyway, I've had enough of it; I'm seriously going to start looking into solar panels.

Housekeeping

First, as my old Video Art professor would say, some housekeeping: tomorrow I leave for Albuquerque. As such, my Twitter page will be my only means of making updates. I'm going by train, and that's for three reasons:
1. The FAA is run by lemurs who take turns driving nails into each other's heads.
2. Said nails are apparently made of gold, hence the absurd ticket prices and fees.
3. It takes as long, and costs at least the same as driving (if not less on both counts).
In any case, I'll have a lot of free time. Thankfully, I've got my unabridged audiobooks of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountainhead to pass the time, along with my PSP. I've got Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and I'm going to try my damnedest to get some enjoyment out of it this time.

After a little soul-searching, I decided to renew my pro account over at Flickr. At first, I was apprehensive for three reasons:
1. I'm not really making that many photographs right now.
2. I'm broke.
3. I was spending more and more time on DeviantART.

Now, however, I'm still going to be spending most of my free-time on DeviantART, but since I'm not going to renew my premium membership (unless substantiated third-party "permission issue" reports are given the same validity and treatment as DMCA reports), that resolve did give me a little financial leeway (enough for 24 months instead of 12). In short, I'm going to support Flickr because they know how to run their site and listen to their users.

Also, I found out that a non-pro account with Flickr is a little more restrictive than I'd thought; instead of just limiting the number of sets you can display and photos/videos you can upload within a month, they also limit your photostream to your 200 most recent photos. That was a real shocker to me; in fact, there was an honest moment of panic that over 400 of my pictures had been lost. Luckily, they are stored, and by pruning a few of my more recent images, the older ones take their place.

Flickr was sort of my first love before Becca-chan persuaded me to join DeviantART. My Nikon s50c came with 3 months of FlickrPRO, and I was hooked for the next two years. It's a good and strong community, if spread a little thin, and I really love how in touch the site's creators are with their users. I've harped about this before, I know, but I still consider the way they handled introducing video uploads to be an act of pure genius. It's just clear they put a lot of thought into it before going public, and were very receptive to feedback both before and after launch.

That's another reason I reinstated my FlickrPRO account; I want to help get the Video community more recognition. Although it's a nice video community, I feel like no one's really given it a chance and people are very slow to warm up to it. Most videos are lucky if they get more than 100 views, and I don't think I've ever seen a video with views counting over 1,000. So, I want to do what I can by uploading a few more videos (I posted my Pattern 158 animation there first before posting it and the rest of the trilogy here) to my photostream. I haven't decided what they'll be just yet. I'm just fascinated by the 90-second time limit; I take it as a challenge. It makes me think of how, in my video art classes at UNM, we'd have assignments with one, three, or five-minute time limits, and yet despite repeated emphases on length, someone would always have a ten or even thirty-minute "magnum opus" on the due date. Sure, we would still watch it and maybe even give a fair critique at the end, but it was obvious that, despite any praise or comment, what most of us really wanted to say was "Really? You couldn't keep THIS under 5 minutes? Are you THAT in love with yourself?" In our defense, it wasn't out of complete impatience; one of my really good friends always delivered these technical and artistic masterworks that were, by contrast, criminally short, like 10 or 15 seconds (including titles and credits). I swear, one time at least five of us simultaneously let out variations of "damn it" when one of his pieces ended. I can appreciate that a project can start as a small idea and then grow over time into something bigger, but when that happens, you're really supposed to put that project on the backburner or produce it in parallel to a new, but shorter, project.

Anyway, that's the news for now. I've got a few more journal entries waiting in the wings that I'll post once I get back around next Sunday.

How I found a song against all odds today

About 4pm today, I got hungry and decided to make some pasta. Nothing special, mind you, just some orzo with sun-dried tomato cheese sauce mixed with vodka sauce. I got the pot full of water and turned the oven on when I realized that we were completely and utterly out of soda.
"This will not do," I thought, remembering Thomas Pynchon's college diet of Spaghetti and Soda and being hard-pressed to think of a better combination of flavors than cola and pasta. I turned the oven off, and ran out to Walgreens to remedy this situation.

There was this song playing on the overhead speakers. While normally I tune this stuff out, this one particular song caught my attention as I really just wasn't quite sure of what I was hearing. It was entirely instrumental, and sounded bizarrely electronic. If I had to guess an era, I'd say circa 1970 given that the synthesizer being used sounded like a cross between a Stylophone and a reed organ. It reminded me of an old video game, like something that plays over the end credits when you beat the final boss. I just pictured this little starfighter flying over an ocean while credits rolled over it, all in beautiful 16-bit graphics.

I had to know what this song was.

Asking around would be pointless; I mean, it's not anyone's job to know what plays over the speakers in a convenience store, and I know I'd have hated to be asked that if I'd worked there (no way to know and even less of a way to find out). I pulled out my cell phone and started up the voice recorder function. It was notably inferior to my other dedicated voice recorders, but I didn't have any of them with me, so I'd have to make do. Luckily, the song had only just begun when I remembered that there was a surefire way to find out what the song was as long as I had a recording of it. I got a full minute before the next song started. When I got back home, I moved the file onto my computer. Strangely, instead of a .wma or even maybe a .wav file, it was something called .amr, which I could play back just fine in RealPlayer, but I wasn't able to convert it to anything else. Anyway, I went to Yahoo! Answers, a place known for the "What's this song?" question. I uploaded the .amr file to my website and put the file's link in the question. I pressed 'publish' and went about my normal browsing business while my question gathered answers. About four hours later, I checked back on my question, very surprised to find four answers in so little time.

Sadly, it seemed .amr is a file type that cannot be stored. All four answers said the link was bad. I clicked on it and instead of getting a "Download now" prompt or something, I got an error message that .amr is a file type that is not supported by Freeservers. I thought, "What does that matter? It's just data. I'm not trying to play it in the webpage, I'm just trying to download it." I deleted the question and sulked. It was really disappointing because I'd have this little sound file on my phone that I could only share with people I met in person. One thought that occurred to me was playing the sound back on my phone and recording it with one of my voice recorders. The problem is, because the cell phone's voice memo function was barely an afterthought to its construction, the song was way too faint to be heard, and thus re-recorded properly. Playing back to human ears was manageable, but to another microphone would be impossible.

So, in desperation, I went to wikipedia and just looked up "instrumental." At first, I wasn't expecting anything beyond a simple description, "songs without vocals" or something pedestrian like that. Instead, what I got was a list of instrumentals that made Billboard's Top 100. The thought occurred: "if an instrumental was popular enough to be on the overhead speakers of a Walgreens, it must be popular enough to have been on the Billboard Top 100." There were only about 20, and after the first one proved to not be the one, I skimmed the list and came across:

Telstar, by the Tornados.

"Just sounds right, somehow," I thought. I clicked on the link to the article and within two paragraphs, my certainty rose: "This novelty record was intended to evoke the dawn of the space age, complete with sound effects that were meant to sound 'space-like'." Again, more enthusiasm of being completely on the money rose, and that's when I saw the sample button.

It was the song.

So, what did I do? I hopped right over to Amazon, dropped a Lincoln shy of a Washington and within seconds, I had the song that I'd heard over the PA system of a Walgreens four hours ago, a song with no distinct or recognizable lyrics, and an indescribable instrumentation.

It's funny how things work out like that.

Rampart in 3 Parts Has Gone Live

If there's a single positive thing I would ever have to say about YouTube, it's that I actually really like the annotation and interactivity features. Some people use them to append factual updates to their v-logs, which is very useful given the time it can take to edit and upload a video, not to mention what can transpire after it goes live. One of my favorite YouTube videos is an interactive game that uses stop-motion animation of Street Fighter action figures. It's simplistic, but it's beautiful for it. I'm using the middle-of-the-road feature of annotations where I simply put links to the subsequent and previous entries in the series at the beginnings and endings of the videos. That said, I'd really love to do more stuff that takes advantage of the interactivity features. What gets me is, despite the influence of YouTube, no other video-sharing site has anything close to this. DeviantART has a feature for their videos where you can pause the video and leave a comment at that particular point in the timeline, but that's the closest thing I can find. I would have thought blip.tv would try to trump YouTube, but they don't seem interested.

I really don't know what to think. It's like I said in one of my Twitter posts: Could YouTube be growing on me? O_o

Honest Theft

You know what really gets under my skin?
The notion that to admit to a wrongdoing is to be absolved from its consequences.

Here's what I'm on about:
My roommate tells me she found this really cool piece of World of Warcraft machinima on Youtube. I watched it, and admittedly, it was pretty damn good, very nicely crafted with the sole blemish being its horrendous soundtrack (I honestly paused the video just to make sure it was really the video's sound and not just Windows Media Player running in the background). Normally, the only machinima I've really liked is Red Vs. Blue, otherwise I consider machinima a pretty low art form, especially when it just uses existing game graphics instead of modified or otherwise re-skinned ones. That's not what bothers me: what bothers me is the person who posted it. Not only were they not the video's original creator, but they actually provided links to the original author's YouTube channel (which is here).

Think about that:
Someone created and uploaded a video to their channel.
Someone else downloaded or captured the video and repost it to their own channel.
They then post a link in the info box to the original video in the original author's channel.

Now I know what some of you might be thinking: "But they're giving credit, at least. They're not claiming it as their own." Okay, granted, they're admitting to what they're doing, but consider this:
1) Why re-upload it when it's still available and live on its original creator's channel?
2) They may not be profiting, or getting any real undue attention, from the video, but those view-counters are going up and up. Each and every one of those views really belongs on the original author's page.

If you want to spread word about the video, there are dozens of better ways to do it besides downloading it and re-uploading it in your channel. Grant a favorite to the video; it'll appear in your channel. Put the video in a playlist. Write a journal entry about it. E-Mail the link to your friends.

That's what irks me. People take something that's not theirs, copy it, present it, then shout from the rooftops that it's not theirs, as if they're doing the original creator a favor.

"I don't own this." Then why do you have it?
"I didn't make this." Then let the person who did decide where it goes.
"I own nothing." Could have fooled me.
"Give him creds." While you take his page views?

Page views may not have a real monetary value, but they are meant to be EARNED, nonetheless.

Just glasses and utensils now

This has not been a good day, and it's only been morning for about four hours.

I'll leave out the goings-on with my roommate's irritability due to a mishap at her doctor's office resulting in a lapse in receiving her medication. That's been going on a few days and it's mostly tolerable.

This morning I received some equipment I ordered to help with recording my videos, including a Behringer USB mic. I've officially had it installed for about 40 minutes and I'm already thinking about sending it back.

Here's the problem: when I use my webcam to record one of my v-logs or newer reviews, I use Windows Media Encoder as capture software. The main reason for this is that it lets me configure audio and video separately; I can use one device for video, and one for audio (That way, I'm not at the mercy of the webcam's awful built-in mic). Everything seems fine, I set the audio settings to the USB mic, and the video settings to the Ipevo, and set the recording format. Once I hit start, however, I get an error message:

no specified device driver is present 0xC00D0072

This is just impossible as I've installed all necessary drivers and, prior to starting the recording session, the program acknowledged the device's presence and allowed it to be configured. I went to Behringer's site to verify that I did indeed have the most recent driver. I found little to no support articles about the C-1U and ended up having to send an e-mail detailing the issue with WME. I've gotten the obligatory auto-response that it's been received, but a full reply is going to take about one business day. So, that's up in the air.

Then there's the mic itself. It may not work with WME, but it does work with Sound Recorder and Photo Story 3 (though the latter gives me error messages to the contrary despite recordings). I figured that while I'm waiting on a response from Behringer, I'll see how the mic sounds and get a feel for its sensitivity. Ideally, I'd like to have it sitting on my desk next to my webcam so it's not visible in the frame. As a sort of control for the experiment, I just put held it like a Karaoke mic and recorded that way. It sounded brilliant; one of the best microphones I've had. However, when I tried recording again with it on the desk and next to the webcam, it's a whole new story. I should have guessed this might be the case given that putting it on the desk makes a distance of about 2 or 3 feet between me and the mic. That said, it's still really disheartening that I basically have to lean into the mic in order to get the best sound. I'd have to hold it almost directly in front of my mouth while I'm recording, which also means I won't have a free hand if I have to do a review. Me holding a microphone while recording with a webcam would just look horrendous, and it's just not what I got this mic for at all.

So, after days of waiting, and on top of everything else, I finally get my equipment to find that, even if I can get it to interface with my software and recording system, it's completely useless and impractical.

At least I got some of the dishes done before the UPS guy showed up, so the day hasn't started off to a fully-rotten start.

Watch Batteries While You Wait

I'm trying to break away from YouTube and move video operations to Revver. One reason for this is that Blip.tv makes me want to learn latin because that would be easier than working with Blip. Another reason is the possibility of supplemental income through ad revenue. Granted, I won't become stinking rich, and it probably won't pay any of my bills (I just got a 300USD heating bill, so there goes this week's unemployment check), but it'll be something. Similarly, when I applied for a partnership on YouTube, I was preemptively told I would be wasting my time.

Anyway, I'm writing this as a kind of filler until the videos I uploaded to Revver go live, which leads me to a small problem I'm having with Revver right off the bat. Revver, partly because of their ad-revenue model, is very concerned about people uploading copyrighted material to their site, as opposed to YouTube, which is so unbearably lax that it would rather bring huge lawsuits from Viacom down upon themselves than risk losing half of their user-base, people who just want to see clips of TV shows and segmented movies put up by a gaggle of couch potatoes with capture cards instead of actual content produced by a genuine community. Like I was saying, because of not wanting to be like YouTube, Revver has a very stringent uploading policy wherein once a video is uploaded and transcoded, it has to be reviewed by a member of staff to make sure it complies with standards before going live. According to the FAQ, this process is supposed to take 24 hours, but generally less.

It has been at least three times that and counting since I uploaded my videos. I'm wondering if I should say something, but I figure that by the time I get a response, they'll have gone live and I'll end up looking the fool. Sure, there'll still be the issue of the overall turnaround time, but eventually going live at any stage would make the matter mostly academic. If they're rejected or turned away, then I'm definitely going to speak up; I go very far out of my way to abide by copyright statutes, especially the limitations of fair use.

I thought about uploading a quick webcam video where I'm screaming and ranting about the iPad, but my roommate's trying to sleep so I have to be semi-quiet. My big problem with it is that it's not running Mac OS X (or Leopard or whatever big cat they're up to by now), but instead running the iPhone's OS. So, not only does it fail as a tablet PC, but it fails as a netbook, too. Most netbooks have abandoned using Linux distributions in favor of Windows (albeit it drives the cost up a considerable bit). Furthermore, the great thing about tablet PCs (and why I secretly really, really, really want one) is that, when using the stylus, you've effectively got a digital sketchbook. If I'm forced to use my fingers on the iPad, then it means finger-painting. Who knows, maybe with the zoom function, one could effectively make different-sized "brushes" out of their digits, but it's just not as precise as holding a stylus.

Last thing I'll say about Apple: Apple is a very good name for the company because they are nothing if they're not great polishers.

Back to Revver; I could rant against Apple all day (I don't hate them, mind you, I just find them painfully overrated and equally guilty of being as greedy a monopoly as Microsoft). As for why Revver doesn't have a big market share of video-hosting sites (in fact, no one does unless you're YouTube, it's a really hideous pie-chart), I think a big part of it goes to this review process. I mean, once you upload a video to YouTube or Yahoo!Video or even Gamespot, there's a turnaround time of transcoding lasting maybe five minutes at the worst. With Revver, your video will not go live for nearly a full day, so even the most laid-back v-loggers might find the delay a little difficult to work with. Then again, maybe it gets quicker as time moves on and what I'm going through really is just an aberration. Maybe this overly-long wait time is reserved for first-timers; maybe the review process is faster for regular and established posters.

Well, now we play the waiting game....

A Skinned Mole's Elaborate Remains

I learned what an Exquisite Corpse is in one of my video art classes. Apparently, it's a very well-known type of collaborative art project. However, when I put "exquisite corpse" in a search on DeviantART, I think I only got one result that was an actual Exquisite Corpse, and it wasn't even finished, only the start. That's very disappointing.

Two Webcams for the Price of One

Apart from occasionally begging my dad to let me look through the viewfinder of the VHS camcorder he'd bring home from work, and the Christmas video we shot one year, my first real experience working with video was a webcam. My Dad got it through work for videoconferencing. It was only in monochrome, but it delivered a very solid 30 frames per second, or at least above 15. Of course, that was the frame rate when the video was saved directly to a hard-drive; the frames dropped well below 10 per second during an actual video chat session (DSL was maybe being whispered about, but high-speed was pretty much nonexistent). Now, here we are, over ten years later, and I've learned many things about webcams, the most important thing being that color is a failure mechanism. Seriously, it's sad when a monochrome webcam from the mid-to-late 90s looked better than most webcams I've seen today.

I bought one once circa 2002, but I took it back after one day, citing its failure to get me a full 30 frames per second despite the iMac being well above the minimum system requirements. Again, the old monochrome webcam could get consistently higher than 15 frames per second, but this newer and more modern camera couldn't muster more than 10. Granted, the newer one was a lot cheaper compared to the monochrome one, which I think cost about 130USD at the time.

More recently I was reading a Cyberguys catalog and came across this little IPEVO number and was intrigued by its ergonomics. Later, I found a packaged deal on Amazon where I could get two for the price of one, and thought I'd give it a shot. I mean, surely there must be a lot of progress made between 2002 and today in the way of webcams.

I was wrong... mostly.

When I record directly to the hard-drive, I was really disappointed to see it not even rise to the level of a now-decades-old webcam despite the advances in technology in those intervening years. My PC, which has literally 5 times the processing power and RAM of the iMac, is still apparently not powerful enough to get this camera running anywhere close to 30 frames per second. Instead, it averages about 8.

That said, I'm not going to take it back.

Why? Because I like its quirky design, I like the fact that I got two of them for the same price, and, best of all, I like the picture effects. The picture effects include a black-and-white mode (which immediately earned its staying power on my desk) and something called "TV effect" which adds horizontal lines to make it look like an old security camera. Put simply, I love it. I can't explain it, somehow 8fps doesn't look so contrived or ugly when the video is in monochrome than color.

So, the IPEVO PoV is the newest implement in my lens-based arsenal.

Something I said about collage once (from DevART)

tinkwig
A recent discovery. It's no secret that one of my favorite artists is David Mack (creator of Echo and Kabuki) in no small part for his psychedelic collage work. I actually have very mixed feelings about collage; I won't vocalize my negative sentiments about it, suffice it to say I find it really difficult to find compelling and interesting works in the style. Luckily, my search led me to his page, making the journey there all the more worthwhile. He is a poet of both prose and the mental photography that is collage. His works are snapshots into the depths of the mind, the part that synthesizes and collates and catalogs all the disparate images we absorb that eventually generates the abstractions that become inspiration and genius. It's like watching a chef take handfuls of different and inconsequential ingredients and turn them into a five-star dish that at once disguises its components and embraces them. Akira Kurosawa once said that “man is a genius when he is dreaming.” Well, that's completely true, and this guy's got the "photos" to prove it.