Phootoography

Tuesdays are long for me until the end of October, since I've been taking an introductory photography course through Arlington County's adult ed program. It's only eight weekly sessions and, being an enrichment course as opposed to a rigorous introduction, isn't too strenuous, but I find that actually doing things for a solid 15 hours a day works against my catlike sleeping reflexes. Still, it's oddly satisfying to go through the work of developing a roll of silver halide film and printing a couple of tests in the darkroom and seeing little images, by some invisible and barely understood chemistry, darken into view on paper in a bath of fluid. Even if you come home with just an underexposed contact sheet and dishpan hands it's hard not to be happy with yourself. Granted, after having developed exactly two rolls of film I'm content to be at a point where I can start worrying about the boring subjects and indifferent compositions of all my shots. Posted images forthcoming, hopefully, once I have a complete print or two and the technical means to get them into the computer.

I just bought a used copy of a Moog Cookbook CD of (mostly) mid-90s pop covers; Jack's friend in NY played us the opening track, a rendition of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun", whose sensibility sits somewhere between "elevator music" and "early 90s Super Nintendo soundtrack". Most of the songs have a nascent sense of menace running through them too, which when I'm driving home at the end of a long day makes me think of what it must sound like if microscopic robot elves are tearing your neurons apart... Anyone needing background on the venerable Moog synthesizer can do their own Googling; just remember that's "Moog" like "Pogue", not "Moog" like "droog". My point here is, this is an album to file under "Music to go slowly insane by", a category that makes up about 75% of the programming for my morning commutes.