MeMag - Me Magazine

Today I finally forced myself to add a section for CD cover design to the main CookieFactory website.

I rarely do any updates to those pages anymore and each time I do it I have to spend a great ammount of time figuring out the structure of it. Five years old, the website isn’t exactly in vogue anymore. I had forgotten how impractical working with plain html is. One has to add everything manually to each separate page and then redo them all once the traditional stupid mistakes have been implemented. Very boring.

Also, in my infinite wisdom, I have managed to design that entire site without any color profiles to any of the graphics, so each time I make a small change to a button and save it, it gets a slightly different hex value than the original files. I think the solution may be to not create any more design so that I won’t have to update the damn thing anymore.

Finally came across an online version of my favourite arcade game: Puzzle Bobble aka Bust-A-Move, which is a sequel to Bubble Bobble and unarguably the second most addictive game ever devised (after Tetris).

This actionscripted flash version is the most accurate online clone I have ever seen of any arcade game. They must have copied it from the original rom-files pixel by pixel. (or is that sprite by sprite?)
However… this is a lot harder than my NeoGeo Pocket Color version of the game. The bubbles are very sticky and you have to find the exactly right angle before shooting.

Another easier option is this clone, more varied with smoother gameplay.

Another fun puzzle game is this online demo of Bloxy.
Now if I could only find a decent non-java online Tetris…

Discovered through In4mador!

Reading a the May 24th blog entry on this weblog suddenly made me remember a dream I had a while back.

In the dream I was walking up the path to my parents’ house when I suddenly remembered that I had killed someone earlier, only I couldn’t remember who or why. All I remembered was pushing hard on a lot of thick blond hair in order to fit the entire woman or girl into a big black plastic bag. And then burying this bag in a small marsh.

This sudden memory gave me a real panic attack. I was overcome with shame and fear of getting caught. The thought of my parents learning of what I had done was unbearable. But I was only worried for myself, not for the dead girl. I was certain that the police was waiting for me at their house already. I hurried up the path so that maybe I would get there before they had time to tell my folks every shameful thing I had done. This was the entire dream.

After I woke up I was uncertain for a long time if I had done it or not.

Last year, when my mother and I went on a day trip to our old holiday cabin to close it for the winter, I made the mistake of casually mentioning to my father adterwards that the lock on the door was a bit sticky yet I had managed to oil it and get it back into shape. So throughout the winter this lock has constantly reappeared in conversations between him and me. Each visit I have made to my parents’ house has included the same tour where my father shows me the same can of oil and gives me detailed instructions on how to dismantle a lock. For months now, ever since the snow melted, he has ben nagging my mother and me to go back to the cabin and oil the lock. This trip has of course been difficult to plan since he also insists that he is dying and that he cannot be left alone even for a few hours.

Yesterday the pressure of the lock had gotten to the point where my mother and I had no choice but to head out there to re-oil the damn thing. So bringing a bag full of tools and the previously mentioned oil can he has prepared, we get into the car and drive out there in the freezing cold and rain. When we get there, the lock opens with a smooth precision click like it is supposed to. And why shouldn’t it? I did after all oil it last fall. I decide to disobey and not dismantle it since looking at it, it seems doubtful that it can be reassembled correctly afterwards. Nevertheless I have to re-oil it from the outside and take photographs of it in order to prove to him that the lock is indeed in place on the door. His lock repair-kit includes a small digital camera to be used for this purpose. This lock-photography is of course completely futile since

A. The photos of the lock from the outside shows nothing of the inside mechanism whasoever and
B. Because my father is virtually blind, or so he claims, and he cannot see the photos anyway.

Sigh. After the trip to the cabin I have to go to their house and give a full report on the condition of the lock. It turns out that my father has also decided that the two of us are going to take a ladder and climb up onto the roof in order to clear a drain that he is convinced has been blocked by fallen leaves and pine needles. I’m a bit confused as to where all these leaves would come from since the roof of their house is much higher up than any surrounding trees. In my experience, gravity tends to pull things downwards. Nevertheless, it has ben decided that we are to climb the roof in the pouring rain to clear this drain. It has to be done immediately while it is raining, he says. If there are pools of water collecting up there it will turn into a leak.

At this point my mother puts her foot down and says that there is no way that he is going to climb a slippery ladder onto the roof in the rain. “It’s not raining”, he claims. He then demands that she fetches his boots so that he can get up there without getting his feet wet. My mother refuses. This eighty year old man has after all been sitting in the same chair more or less 24 hrs a day for months claiming that he is too sick and weak to move. He is in no condition to climb slippery ladders. She points this out to him and he immediately leaps to his feet with a little victorious hand motion like a gymnast completing an impossible backflip. Again he demands the boots. She refuses and he starts swearing loudly. As usual. But this time she won’t budge. I still have to climb up to the roof in the rain tho, in order to remove the imaginary leaves and needles. If not my mother’s life will be living hell until finally he will force her onto the roof. I climb the ladder. Check the drain. All clear.

I then have one more chore to do which is to put an absurd amount of vaseline on the hinges of his bed so that it won’t creak when he turns over in his sleep. I know full well that these particular hinges have nothing whatsoever to do with the creaking. It creaks because it is a weak flimsy old wooden bed that is hardly capable of supporting his weight.

After this my father returns to his chair in the room with closed curtains, turns all the lights back off and puts his dark sunglasses back on. For some reason his blindness seems to be more prominent whenever he is sitting in the dark with his shades on. But at this point I don’t care because I am free to leave and can head home to sleep. Peace is restored. For a while.

This one… this is another one that won’t make it into my upcoming gallery. It’s sort of pretty, but it’s one of those irrelevant nature photos that I really hate. Every tenth photo over at photo.net look exactly like this. The world doesn’t need another one like it.

The thing is that when one sees something beautiful and one is carrying one’s camera then one sometimes has to photograph it. And when one has a weblog where one has decided to post things that could have been good photos, then one sometimes has to post things like this in it. Then perhaps one can get it out of one’s system. If not there will be reshooting and waiting for something interesting to appear inside the frame. There will be hours and hours of waiting until finally a swimmer or a mermaid or something appears. And the sudden shock of seeing the frame come to life will be to much and no camera button will actually be pressed in time. Then the anger and destruction will start. Better to avoid all of that.

Came upon this abandoned animal as I was out walking. When I saw it I thought I would be able to sum up my entire childhood and subsequent pathetic life in this subject, but it didn’t turn out very successfully. The bear was in a difficult position and I didn’t want to move it or move the trash that lay in front of it. I never move anything. For some reason I’m unable to do that. Several young people came by and showed great concern over the bear’s well-being. I told them that everything would be ok.

Have you ever been to Japan? Of course you haven’t. Japan doesn’t exist. It is a mythical fictional country like Shangri-La or Disneyland. It has to be. Any other explanation would be too absurd.

And still… still there are contradictory clues to this theory, like the groups of small, identically dressed people with cameras who walk around in european museums towards the end of the summer. Their behavior is obviously too strange to be probable, and yet they are there. Everywhere. They seem like real people. They move around almost like human beings do. Sometimes they even talk among themselves in what appears to be some bizarre made-up language. They never talk to anyone outside of the group. Never ask for directions even though they seem constantly lost. Yes, they look human, but until I see one of them eat or sleep or in a state of vomiting drunken stupor on a friday night, like regular folk here in Norway, I’m not convinced.

But if they are real, then then who are they? Where do they come from? My theory is that they are aliens. Japan is a planet, or possibly a large spaceship that travels the galaxy, studying intelligent life and spreading consumer electronics.

You can spot something japanese right away because of the design. Anything coming out of Japan has a unique Japanese look. At my local grocer, they have a crate of Japanese apples in this week. You can tell right away that they are. They just look Japanese somehow. If you watch Japanese movies, you will notice that everything has a distinct Japanese design. Even trees and straw and other vegitation look Japanese. Insects. Domestic animals. Birds. Everything. Movies, of course, are not real. But the apples are. Somewhere in the universe there is a factory that produces them.

Some day I want to go to the planet of Japan. Life there will be good. I will live in a one-room apartment with my polite japanese wife who works twelve hour shifts in a department store. And there will be children with green and red hair who wear school uniforms and spend their life in front of some gaming system that hasn’t arrived in Europe yet. I will be a salariman and work in a cubicle and spend a lot of my life sleeping on bullet trains on the way to and from work. I will amuse myself with groping. I will die of karoshi at the age of fourtythree. But I will be content because I shall have a useful place in society. Which is something I don’t have now.

Five Japanese must-see movies:

Dangan Ranna by Hiroyuki “Sabu” Tanaka

Onibaba by Kaneto Shindô

Woman of The Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Shall We Dansu? by Masayuki Suo

Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa

You also need to see every movie made by or starring Takeshi Kitano (except Getting Any?)

Useful links on Japan:

Nandakke: Whatchamacallits
Japanics: Mass hysteria in Japan
(Both links are sub-pages of the qUirKY jaPan HomEPage)
Hentai dictionary: Japanese perversions, fetishes and AV slang
www.engrish.com: Japanese English-mistakes in Japanese advertising
Japanese product design: Toys & candy
Japanese see-thru skirts: The current rage in Japan
Godzilla: King of the monsters
Hiroshi Watanabe: Japanese photographer
Toni Ok: Rockabilly is alive and well in Japan
The Japanese Fashion Experience: Morbid Outlook’s review of Japanese goth trends
Japanzine: Online magazine on Japan

And finally… the west seems as fascinating to the Japanese as Japan seems to westerners. Hollywood celebs are offered huge ammounts of money to make an ass of themselves in Japanese commercials, secure in the knowledge that their fans in the west will never see these films. (Click logo to enter. Reccomended viewing: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s energy drink commercials and Sean Connery’s ham commercial).

Toni Ok-link found through Randy’s Bamboo Room. Chinami Nakajima and Yock River discovered through Cipango

Recently my mother came across an old cigar box full of old glass plate negatives of family photos. They are just over a hundred years old. So I have been scanning them and preparing them for her so that she may print them out and make albums and calendars and things like that. And she tells me who they all are and what they did and where they lived and so on. I find my attention drifting off somewhere else. Other people seem to have a keen interest in photos of friends and relatives. Me, I love to look at the photos but I really don’t care who they are. It’s just not important to me. In some ways I prefer to look at photos of people I don’t know because the mystery of who they might be is so much greater. Yes, I am moved by other peoples lives but somehow it doesn’t matter much to me if I’m related to them or not.

I have been photographing people myself ever since I was a child, but it occurs to me that I have taken very few photos of my own family. They’re just so static, -always sitting in the same chairs in the same house. We don’t move around much in my family. With friends I often have the opportunity to capture them in situations; drunk, kissing, talking to other people. But I don’t photograph them because they are my friends as much as because being my friends they are less likely to attack me for taking their picture. With all of my photos over the years of friends and acquaintances, I still only ever look at the shots that I think are good photos in themselves. I never look at them because the photos represent memories. Maybe that is unusual.

If you are interested in other peoples lives, you may find these links useful:

Photos of an unknown family that probably owned a liquer store (warning: annoying loud background sounds)
Snapatorium
Photobooth Photos c/o The Boat Lullabies
Bighappyfunhouse

There are also a lot of sites that collect letters and street posters and similar random discoveries. I can highly recommend the book Found, published by Found Magazine which offers unique glimpses into other peoples moving, sad and often extremely disturbing lives.

Testing the new lens. I tried putting a Proxar close-up filter in front of it to get even closer. Some distortion, but not so much as to be annoying to look at. Think I should probably do some tests to learn how long shutter speeds I can use with this setup and still manage to hold the camera steady. But I hate test-shooting and I always manage to have some inspired creative moment in the middle of it that makes it impossible to determine anything from the result.

Nearly all films I have shot so far this year has had white stripes across them and I have no idea what causes it. But so far it hasn’t worried me much since I haven’t really made any great shots yet anyway. Also, for some reason, the white stripes seem to avoid the best exposures and go for the really bad ones. Lucky. But I should probably do some clinical scientific testing to find the cause of it.

This was shot very close to where I live, behind an old warehouse building. This is the third time I have used this location. The light is very good there in the afternoons and it’s very quiet considering that it’s in the middle of the city. Also there is a great choice of different wall textures. I’m starting to think of it as my own personal outdoor studio. Of course… they are planning to tear it all down sometime this year. Typical.

My childhood heroes have now been turned into bars of soap. Notice how freely people use the word “only” in front of the price tag whenever they wish to sell something really worthless.

“Bath with all of KISS (only available as a 4 pack special edition) for only £29.99″

Found through Exclamation Mark

When I was sixteen I spent the summer in California as an exchange student. The most noteworthy thing about that summer, besides it being the first and last time I’ve ever been on a date, was the discovery of an original LP of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass : Whipped Cream & Other Delights. I had never seen anything that beautiful… the girl, the design, the incredibly rich green colors of the cover.

In the latter half of the ’60s, Herb Alpert was the fourth best selling artist right behind the Beatles, Elvis and Frank Sinatra. There is little doubt that the cover artwork on Whipped Cream caused his sudden rocket climb up the charts. The album spent eight weeks at no. 1, over a year in the top 10 and almost three years in the top 40.

This year it is released as a remastered reissue with two additional food-oriented bonus tracks. The cover is still missing the original LPs A&M Records logo though, which is a shame since it was an important part of the original artwork. Still I want a copy. (I also want a time machine and a large cake spoon).

Vinyl Record Day recently held a survey to learn what people saw as the greatest album covers of all time, and Whipped Cream & Other Delights was voted second, after The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper cover.

Meanwhile, Dolores Erickson, the cover model has a web page milking her ’60s fame for all it’s worth. One good thing about her web page is that you can see some of the other album covers she posed for.

Read more about Dolores here. MeMag endorses all swingin ’60s chicks.

I do not own a cell phone. I do not want a cell phone. I do not understand why other people want cell phones. I have been offered several of those things for free over the years by people who are frustrated at my unavailability. “If you had a cell phone I could send you messages”, they say. “I know”, I say. Nuff said.

If like me you have ever wanted to grab someones phone away from them in a café or on a bus and then procede to insert it into a bodily orifice where reception is probably bad, you may find this link a funnier less violent solution.

“After reading a story in the NYT, Jim’s wife Heidi came up with a method to fight back against the obnoxious cell phone users that we all have to deal with in stores, restaurants, trains and pretty much everywhere else. Can design ride to the rescue?”

SHHH, the Society for HandHeld Hushing. (these people also make some lovely CD jewel cases, that I would probably buy if I could afford it)

At the moment I am completely out of ideas of my own. We had a brainstorm yesterday and several great ideas came up. None of them were mine. I now have to figure out how to make one of these ideas come to life. Quite frankly I am not comfortable doing things that I didn’t suggest myself. Especially since these ideas all seem to demand a fair ammount of equipment that I simply do not have. And there doesn’t seem to be a budget for any equipment rental or model salary or anything like that. I now have to find a studio that I can borrow for free. Or at least a portable studio flash with a battery pack. I guess I have to learn how to use a telephone to charm people. I shudder at the thought of this.

Selected rejected drafts: Top row: More vampy takes on the make-up vanity theme. Bottom row: My attempts at doing something with some tiny plastic baby dolls that they wanted on the cover.

So I arranged another photoshoot with the girls. By then it was decided that they wanted a theme of vanity, so during the following week I made several cover drafts based on the photos I had shot of them putting on make-up and jewlery. Here is the one I liked best myself. Although it probably looks more like a cover for a slightly occult version of Carmen than a grungy rock cover. Rejected.

This was my initial idea for a CD cover for the debut album of an all girl rock band. They felt however, that it wasn’t rock’n rolly enough to represent them. Me, I think it works well. Also for me, it felt like a thing that was meant to be… I walked by this place and saw the wallpaper and red couch through the window. And it turned out that this bar locale is owned by a guy who is one of this very album’s producer’s best friends.

Had a similar experience last year with this cover… I could think of only one café in Oslo that had the right wooden walls and the right kind of evening light coming in the windows and it turned out that that place was owned by the album producer’s neighbor. Sometimes things just come together. Except with this cover, it didn’t after all.

In a country like Norway there is quite a bit of segregation between what movies are shown in the theatres and what movies are released on DVD. While the state-run cinemas focus mostly on more highbrow “art-house” movies that our beloved government has decided are good for us, only the most mainstream of foreign movies are released on DVD. As a population we are really intensely shallow. Most people will go to a cinema and watch some of the deeper non-Hollywood stuff because everyone else is doing it, and they will also watch absolutely any domesticly produced films out of shere patriotism. But when they rent or buy, they want their Hollywood action heros.

So a weirdo like me who may want to see something like this, will have to buy it online. With 25% import tax on DVDs added to the costs of shipping an item all that way across the ocean, the final cost of each DVD is almost doubled. Still it is cheap compared to an imported movie bought is a typical special interest store here in Oslo.

The task then is to find the online stores that offer low shipping rates and reasonably short delivery times. And here we get to the point of this post: how absurdly difficult it is to find an online store that doesn’t screw you one way or the other. For instance, I have spent the last four months waiting for an order from the ironically named dvdsoon.com. Is there anything more useless than a store that takes your money and never actually gives you anything in return? They should consider a name-change to dvdpossiblywithinhtenextsixmonthsifwefeellikeit.com. They claim that the item is in stock until you order it. Your card is charged right away. Then you wait for a few weeks until they tell you that the movie isn’t in stock. You can change your order for something else, but that won’t be in stock either so there really isn’t any point. What a rip-off.

So far the only positive result I have had has been through Amazon. Even though I’m not usually one who support huge multi-national companies, I have to admit that there is something to be said for consumer rights. So my advice to new online shoppers is simply that they should buy everything from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk and forget about the rest. At least until the internet is at least ten years older and more stores will have proper secure servers and shopping carts and order and shipping rutines that actually work. I’ve also been told that it is theoretically possible to live without watching a couple of movies each day, but until I see some hard evidence to support that, I remain sceptical.