from the desk of stinkpot

spied this morning: deflated dead rat lying on sidewalk in front of entrance to my lab building.

in spite of mit’s notoriously robust rat population, this still struck me as odd.  sick animals don’t go playing on the sidewalk; don’t they tend to rest somewhere safe?

maybe it’s one of those wacked-out animal rights groups trying to make a statement to the nefarious mad scientists who torture animals at mit.  kinda like sending someone a horse’s head, but much cheaper.  we don’t even study mammals in this building: we only kill bacteria!

[although, it'd be a bit strange if an animal-rights group killed a rodent to make a statement ... then again, extremist groups often don't make much sense to me.]

i just found this video on youtube, taken at precisely the same vantage point christina and i had. chris and i even make appearances if you look closely; my chin and its ugly chin hair appears from the left frame when win is singing. reliving that song and the stage’s energy through this video makes the tingle course through my veins again.

after 23.9 years, i’m ready to blow this popsicle stand. i saw the arcade fire live in concert this week and i can now die happy.

[if you've never heard of the arcade fire, be like ex-lax and perform this smooth move: go to the library and take out their albums. or buy them if you're the kind of person who gets a W4. either way, listen to the colorful things critics say:

It’s likely to incite reams of journalistic hyperbole, but, fundamentally, The Arcade Fire have recorded a great f*cking album that will piss on most other releases this year. “Funeral” is the sort of perfectly-realised record you’d hope from a band at the top of their game. For a debut release it’s unmatched in recent years. Hearing it is to wake from a black and white slumber and to view the world in widescreen Technicolour.

now flashback to tuesday. christina, jesse, and i hop into the car and take the best kind of roadtrip: the one that starts at 1 in the afternoon in the middle of the workweek. i think it's fair to say my favorite place to visit in boston is the outgoing freeway.

four hours later, we arrive at the united palace theater, a startlingly well-preserved performance hall / evangelical church in washington heights on manhattan. staring down like an exquisite stone cheese-grater, its enormous facade stood in sharp contrast to the midday fruit stands and tiny bodegas across the street.

with two hours to go before the concert, we made the most of being back in our melting pot of a hometown: we had chicken and rice and fried plantains for dinner.

bellies full, we soon found the united palace to be like the stereotypical mit student: more beautiful on the inside than the outside. it was as if someone had placed a time machine on grungy 175th street and broadway that led to a resplendent 16th century turkish palace. i took all the adorable indie rock kids with their tight tight jeans to be the eunuchs.

our seats were excruciatingly good. fourth row orchestra, center. in fact, they were within the seating range that a fellow on craigslist had been willing to trade 2 acres of farmland near the jersey shore for. no joke!

needless to say, being that close meant taking pictures was easy:

but, after the first song, something magical happened. lead singer win butler screams, "what are you guys doing standing there? this isn't the theater or something. come closer!" confused (i thought this was a theater?) but swept along by the crowd, christina and i suddenly found ourselves about 2 feet from the stage.

holy shit, win butler's spittle is landing on me!

and look, there's the awesome guy (rich parry) who looks like napolean dynamite!

i love how intense he is. see rich parry wail on his drum:

then, something profoundly uncool happens. a security guard comes out of nowhere and says, "give me your film!" he claims that it's prohibited to use "professional cameras" (i had my nikon dslr) in the theater and that he'd have to confiscate my film. i'm shocked and horrified - the thought of losing my beloved photos knocks the wind out of me. short and stocky, the guard is also quite rude: he swears at christina when she tries to intervene.

i plead, "i promise i'll stop taking photos. just let me keep my film."

he snorts, "fine you'll have to leave the theater."

i call his bluff. "alright, i'd rather leave than lose my film."

"well, then you'll have to pay a $5000 copyright infringement penalty."

of course, no signs advertising this were posted in the theater and a guard i had asked earlier said there were no restrictions on photos. in fact, the very guard hassling me had seen me taking pictures earlier and hadn't said anything.

perhaps the only thing more insane than how unfair the situation strikes me, is the sleight of hand i'm trying to pull behind my back. having taken my camera everywhere with me for 18 months now, i can now pretty much use it in my sleep; this turns out to be eminently useful as i open my memory housing and remove my memory card with my thumb and forefinger.

my card is now in my butt pocket.

he challenges, "do you have a photo pass? if not, you can't use that camera!"

"ok, ok, i've got a press pass. it's in my girlfriend's bag! let me find it!"

i thrash wildly through christina's bag, looking for her camera. quickly, i slide out its memory card, remembering i had already downloaded its most recent photos.

"here, i give up. just take the card! let me just enjoy the rest of the show."

"what, do you think i'm stupid? you just took that card out of the bag! let me see your camera - i want to see that the memory slot is empty ..."

i think to myself, "sweet jeebus - this might actually work!"

i show him the empty camera. amazingly, he's convinced - the guard finally leaves me alone and disappears back into a throng of fans. although not after he takes my battery for good measure, promising to return it at night's end. [in the process, my battery cover is actually broken off of my camera. sucks.]

[nota bene: turns out what the guard did was illegal. seizing any of a photographer's possessions without a court order is tantamount to theft. using threats is coercion. if you ever find yourself in this situation and want to take a stand (and don't mind ruining your concert experience), tell the guard to let you go or call the police. offer to even do it yourself. security can make you leave, but they can't touch your possessions. of course, IANAL - but bert krages is. having read this document, i've already penned a letter of complaint to the concert organizer.]

—

having appeased the guard, i did my best to enjoy the rest of the concert. luckily, that wasn’t so hard. at all.

cue the encore song “wake up”: win butler cries “get up here everyone!” immediately, dozens of fans dart around the security guards and climb on stage. christina gives the guard who accosted me an NFL-caliber 360-spin move and prances right next to win butler. i follow and soon find myself right next to them both. christina is busy reaching down to grab a setlist. suddenly, we’re all singing and jumping and dancing on stage with the arcade fire. i look around and see i’m surrounded by “can this really be happening? / my head is going to explode” faces. it was sublime.

and then it hits me. i’m actually glad i’ve had my camera disabled. as much as i love taking photos, a good deal of my photography is based purely on compulsion: i’m a slave to my camera.  thus, many of what should be my best memories are really committed from the viewpoint of a squinted eye looking through a slightly cloudy piece of glass. for instance, take a look at this photo – i never actually saw lance armstrong, although i was right there next to him. i was too busy looking at my camera.

this time, however, i saw everything with both of my eyes wide-open. and therefore, i’d like to think i remember much more: how the floor shook from hundreds of people bouncing off one another; how dusty the air on stage was; the perfect euphoria of my little duet with win butler; looking at christina and then both of us staring up with crazed disbelief at the hundreds of people in the balcony screaming down to us.

so losing use of my camera, just this once, wasn’t so bad. besides, there’s always the internet and other fans’ cameras:

[christina hiding below win butler's chin]

[i'm in gray; christina rejoices after finally finding a setlist.]

and fine, hypocrite that i am, i did eventually give in. i stuck my hidden memory card into chris’ camera, and snapped some photos later on during the song.

thank you arcade fire for a mind-blowing concert – goodnight!

[update: check out video here!]

christina’s birthday was on april 22nd. since she had midterms the following week, we kept things pretty low-key that day. however, we did celebrate in true filipino fashion: we had a breakfast of canned-meats and rice. (spam, corned beef, vienna sausage … say these words aloud to some filipinos and you’ll be accused of trying to talk dirty to them. for reasons i’ve still to determine, filipinos just cannot get enough of processed meats; for instance, filipino student unions on campuses will often have canned meat dinners. delicious!)

an illustration of a filipina and the joy corned beef elicits:

i wanted to note also something i’ve learned today while playing with aperture and poorly shot photos that are way out of focus:

increase contrast and send to black & white, and you can still salvage the shot!

neat blog post about how to start taking good candid photos.  #1,#3,#4,#9, & #10 i think are super-important.

… at reproducing low-end frequencies?  (and assuming they’re good enough, how good your low frequency hearing is?)

i’ve uploaded some files here to give you an idea.

although, i guess if you’ve got lousy low-frequency hearing, it’ll be interesting to see if you can still tell how deep your speakers’ bass is.  perhaps you can just watch and see if the joists in your ceiling begin to loosen.

[ideally, both you and your speakers should be getting down to 20 Hz.]

[and yes, i have sold out and stuck ads on the "tricks" half of my blog. according to my server logs, those pages get loaded over 30,000 times a month.  i'm curious to see if the handful of adsense ads on those pages generate enough revenue to at least pay for my internet service. so feel free to click around on those ads ]

i spent a lot of time puttering around my grandparents’ house in the philippines, poking into corners and rummaging through bookshelves (i lived there for about 3 weeks in february, earlier this year). one interesting book that turned up was a wacky self-help tome written by a german psychoanalyst around the turn of last century. in spite of its tattered cover, the book was remarkably timeless in that it’s vague self-realization guidelines read exactly like those little handbooks you find above supermarket checkout lines. “never anticipate failure” “a clean desk is critical to clear thinking.” “achieving great things is only a matter of determination.”

still, since i had already finished my daily word jumble and, the plots of filipino soap operas – even when spoken in english – are impossible to make heads or tails of, i read the self-help book from cover to cover. and, lo and behold, i did find one passage that i thought worthy enough to commit to memory (hey, even broken clocks are right twice a day, eh?) that section was on travel: basically, the author was saying that you should see new places so that you can enjoy the satisfaction of having what you take for granted be turned upside down.

i’ve decided that i completely agree with that statement; the reason why i love to visit different countries is that i can find events or scenes that are perfectly commonplace to locals, but astound me. [if both the natives and me are surprised - well, those events are lacking in a certain je ne sais quois in terms of contrast, and i don't think are as memorable.]

i’ve tried keeping those ideas in mind while taking photos during my trip. how to capture both the local “everyday” qualities and my incredulity in the same image. sadly, i’m not sure i did a very good job of telling those kinds of stories in my pictures. most of the photos, i’ll admit, i took just because they looked nice. nevertheless, i hope at least a couple of these pictures will convey how much some of the things i saw in the philippines etched themselves into my mind.

[school children in a jeepney on the island of bohol, which neighbors the ancestoral isle of my mother's family, the calibos.]

[on bohol, the motorcycle is like the family station-wagon.]

[sunrises on bohol are the definition of ethereal]

[boatman]

[noel, my mother's brother.  i think i inherited a lot of his personality.]

[woman selling seashells on the seashore]

[a typical house in the bohol countryside: walls are constructed from thatched leaves and thick paper; roofs may also be thatched or tiled with corrugated steel.]

[much more effort goes into decorating vehicles, instead of homes.]

[a jeepney - a common form of semi-public transportation. not a juvenile detention bus.]

[bohol is home to one of the smallest primates on the planet; this tarsier is about the size of my hand.]

[rope bridge across a river]

[a boy beneath the rope bridge.]

[a swimming hole; perhaps upstream?]

[local markets]

[bohols natural wonder: the chocolate hills]

wow, those photos from the island of bohol are drawn from probably less than half of the albums i uploaded. since it’s late and this is already a gargantuan post, i’ll hold off on the remaining photos until tomorrow.

first day of the year it was warm enough to bike to lab in sandals.

i will admit that i try and glance at the headlines on foxnews at least once a week. a solid chunk of america, i hear, gets their news there; making believe the website doesn’t exist won’t help me understand why half the country thinks the way it does. [and that's what i'd argue is going wrong with this country (and a bunch of the world) - no one wants to get inside each other's heads. it's a lot easier to scream, "you're an infidel/terrorist/hemophiliac" and dismiss someone than try to identify and resolve the root of deep conflicts.]

and now that climbed high atop my pedestal, i’m going to skip right off. foxnews is absolute rubbish. forget about the whole right-leaning nonsense – their headlines are insanely sensational; digesting the entire foxnews homepage is like trying to inhale an foot-long pixie stick in one breath. for instance, after reading this article today (granted it was written by the religion correspondent) i felt as if i had deprived my brain of oxygen for 90 seconds:

When unexplained violence takes center stage, we tend to turn to modern psychology to explain it.

But there is an alternative explanation, one that has been played out in film, stage and writings since the beginning of history.

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

Could Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?

this blog is like the pony express – it takes about two weeks for news to get communicated.

for instance, i’m finally going to post some photos i took from the passover seder christina and i crashed at the beginning of april. aside from getting to see our friends and pigging out on unleavened bread, i desperately needed to recharge my jewish street cred. said cred peaked around day 4 of my life, when my mother – who had birthed me in a hospital named “long island jewish” and who had ordered kosher hospital meals because “they probably cleaned the food more” – was visited by a moyel looking for a family with the last name of david. it’s a shame she didn’t let the man handle my baggage; bar-mitzvah’s are such lucrative passages into manhood. instead, i ate a squat sandwich when i turned 13.

still, i guess i lucked out: my mother tells me that back when dad was growing up in the philippines, circumcision itself was the rite of passage. that’s a potentially ambiguous statement, meaning either: 1) filipinos addressed 8-day-old newborns as “sir”; 2) adolescent boys wore skirts to their 13th birthdays. (resolution: trick question – both are correct. for some reason, filipinos call everyone sir; and, well, i don’t have the stomach to even go into #2. google philippines and “tuli” if you’ve got ample genital fortitude.) even today, however, i imagine most adolescent boys in the philippines would do well to keep their legs crossed. the medical clinic down the street from my grandmother’s house had a bright yellow sign in their windowfront: “circumcisions: 700 pesos! [$14]“. scary.

yikes, that was some grisly tangent i flew off on. here’re some seder pictures whose hues i dig.

ok, those photos do a pretty lousy job of explaining the passover meal. which is a shame, since our hosts went through the trouble of photocopying the haggadah, singing honorifics for insane prophets, and cooking enough for all the chosen people in cambridge. still, people make for more interesting subjects than matzo.