Ultimately, especially in light of the divisive legislation we got to experience yesterday with the expensive, redundant and socially backward Amendment One, the Triangle is still just a bubble of progressiveness in what seems to be a sea of 19th-century pragmatism.

Progress: the acne on the face of North Carolinian tradition

One of the major reasons I’m so infuriated about this is that the wording of the amendment not only redundantly double-bans gay marriage (already banned in this state via statute), it also weakens the rights of all domestic partnerships not bonded by marriage. In short, an unmarried heterosexual couple living together could potentially have problems with:

- domestic violence protections
- child custody/visitation rights
- having private legal agreements made during the partnership recognized by a court of law
- funeral arrangements, wills, trusts, and medical powers of attorney
- having one partner covered by the other’s insurance

Again, this is not explicitly stated in the amendment itself, it’s only implied due to the intentionally vague wording, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the aforementioned points were first tested by the insurance industry. The amendment proponents have (temporarily) protected their sacred marital ideology, but screwed over so many other people in the process with absolutely no justification for doing so.. other than, of course, being completely uninformed.

I must admit that once upon a time, my stance on this issue was slightly more conservative – mostly because I lacked a plane of experience with which my brain could translate the idea of one man married to another man, or two women at the altar. I’d never seen it, hadn’t grown up with it, never really even considered it. When pressed on the matter a decade ago, I responded by stating my belief at the time that marriage was one man and one woman, and if two men or women wanted to bind themselves together they should use the term “civil union”, or whatever made-up term was apropos. It certainly wasn’t of the grade of sentiments we are seeing today, which are often laced with born-and-bred bigotry, righteous pulpitism and/or rampant misinformation. It was simply my lack of experience, being too young, not considering the big picture.

The most alarming thing is that of the 61% voting in favor of this amendment, the majority not only seem to lack that crucial social ethic, they also likely don’t know what issue they actually voted on. Consider the following.

When asked by the Public Policy Polling survey to identify what Amendment One actually does:

- 36% answered correctly that it bans both same-sex marriage and domestic partnerships
- 26% answered that it only banned same-sex marriage
- 10% answered that it would legalize rather than ban same-sex marriage
- 27% had no idea

The poll was taken in March, so it’s possible that some of that errant 64% eventually figured it out, but I tend to temper my optimism in these matters. How many of them knew that same-sex marriage has been banned in this state since 1996? How many of them were simply blinded by the idea of two men or two women at the altar without realizing what a “yes” vote would do to a man and a woman who chose to live together but not to marry? It’s anyone’s guess, but the results show a vote of widespread ignorance.

Some of the more curious day-after reactions I noted online this morning were photos of African-American and Latino churchgoers gloriously celebrating the amendment’s passage, as though all the lessons of the Civil Rights movement have been completely, utterly forgotten. The rights of non-white folks were once oppressed by the same institution that penned this legislation; to express delight in stamping out the rights of another minority does a disservice to their previous generations, who laid everything on the line for everyone to be treated as equals. Obviously they don’t have any recollection of the 1875 marriage amendment preventing whites and blacks from marrying. That’s how much social progress this state has made in 130 years.

Following that, I spent some time mulling over arguments in favor of the amendment itself, and after scraping away all the religious chaff, I found very little that smacked of validity. The tradition of “one man, one woman” from civilizations past and present was argued, but to use any tradition as a sole basis for legislation is pretty unprecedented. Social stability was another, but as I’ll point out in a moment, marriage and social stability don’t exactly go hand-in-hand to begin with. Then there’s this amazing quote I read this morning, by one of the female supporters:

“Procreation is impossible without one man and one woman.”

As in, the ban against gay marriage is the one thing still promoting the biological necessity of the two sexes intermingling with one another. Allow gay marriage, and the floodgates will open: men will only marry men, women will only marry women, no one will reproduce, and over time the population of the human race will dwindle to nothing. While we’re at it, we should consider outlawing vasectomies (not that they always work.. ahem) and marriages of infertile couples, to ensure that all married couples are properly reproducing.

I also found this popular anthropological argument:

“The cultural purpose of marriage is to take children from childhood to healthy adulthood.”

To loosely translate: same-sex couples are supposedly incapable of parenting children. Even with a basic understanding of social dynamics, it’s clear to me that a child who has two mothers or two fathers could turn out differently than if they had one parent of each sex. But they could also turn out differently by just having bad parents, or divorced parents. And how does any of this dictate that a child can or can’t be a productive member of society? Try polling inmates at a maximum security prison and see how many of them were parented to adulthood by traditional married couples. I’d seriously love to see that statistic.

Then, naturally, the one religious argument I keep hearing, over and over and over and over and over..

“The Bible states that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

Yeah, it does. It also states that when a man and a woman are married, they shall not part until death, without exceptions – yet 50% of marriages don’t quite go the distance. Guess everyone forgot that sanctity doesn’t always apply – only when it’s convenient.

If you break it down to its very basis, marriage (in my humble view) is an institution of romance, not of religion. It is the culmination of a couple’s experience with one another, a pact that states that these two people pledge to always care for each other no matter the circumstances, go on dates, cook wonderful things in the kitchen, split bottles of wine over sunsets, relish Sunday morning sleep-ins, share ideas and troubles, travel to exotic places together, make up after disputes, and ultimately make each other better, happier human beings. In this day and age marriage does not necessarily impel, nor is impelled by, the acts of child-rearing or religious affiliations – plenty of marriages exist that perform one, both or neither.

Furthermore, as an institution it already is – and shall forever be – polluted, if you will, with non-believers, divorcees remarried several times over, celebrities trying desperately to stay relevant (see: Kim Kardashian, 72 days), trophy spouses, estate-poachers (see: Anna Nicole Smith, $450 million), domestically abusive degenerates, cheaters (see: John Edwards, for a local example), filthy-rich divorce lawyers negotiating peace treaties, and those utterly bereft of emotional maturity. That precious “sanctity of marriage” mule – which gets perpetually flogged in these debates – permits two drunk people to legally marry in a Vegas chapel, after spending half an evening doing shots at a bar and the other half bonking in a seedy motel. Two men or two women who have been inseparable for years, care deeply for their adopted children and will truly love each other until death? Not so much.

Sorry, 61% of North Carolina. You got it completely wrong, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re going to be on the wrong side of history yet again. That day may come sooner than you think – public opinion is gradually changing, our sitting President has finally brought his gay marriage views out of the closet, and the older generations only have so much time to perpetuate their outmoded morality.

The good news is that the organizers actually listened to my (and certainly many others’) comments regarding last year’s setup and widened the tent area, as well as spaced out the breweries by adding a third tent solely for local North Carolina beers. Perfect. This resulted in a lot less elbowing through drunkards, eliminated the desire to stay at the same brewery for 5-10 minutes on end to wait for a break in traffic, and on the whole made the crowds and lines far less irritating. The bad news, unfortunately, is that so many breweries ran out of product within 2-3 hours that it completely destroyed the point of having a 4-hour event. At least this year I was able to actually get to most of the ones I wanted to drink before they threw in the towel, but by 9 PM the two larger tents resembled ghost towns, with upwards of 50% of the breweries having already packed up and left. We paid $45 a ticket for 4 hours of beer, and half the breweries couldn’t be bothered to stick around for the entire evening. This is absurd.

Furthermore, despite my best effort to make a plan (the result of prior experience with lacking availability) to hit up all of the most interesting creations I could find, in some cases I discovered that either the breweries did not bring the particular beer noted in the guide, or they didn’t even show up at all. These kinds of things don’t seem to happen in the Durham version of the event, so I’m left wondering whether it’s the breweries’ fault, or that of the organizers. Though it’s a very convenient event within walking distance of my condo, I’m still not sure it’s worth $45 a head despite the fact that I again discovered some very delicious concoctions.

This session’s top five:

1. B. Nektar Zombie Killer. Let me put it succinctly: if I buy merchandise from you, it is because you have accomplished something rare and laudable, by inspiring within me an enlightenment that I wish to pollenate about the world at large. I shall wear my B. Nektar garment with pride, in hopes of eliciting inquiry from those unbeknownst of the delicacies that lie therein. And of course I speak largely of the brand, not necessarily what’s beneath the shirt.
2. Fullsteam Beasley’s Honey White. On average, Fullsteam brews things that disgust me; more than once I’ve nursed a nearly full pint of something like Carver Sweet Potato or Summer Basil – originally venturing to try something different, only to be left questioning my own judgement – drinking maybe ten sips’ worth before indiscreetly abandoning it like an old mattress, or an orphan, at an unoccupied end of the bar. This time, despite this brew’s direct link to a restaurant I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to patron, I didn’t.
3. Firestone Walker’s Reserve Porter. A simple, straightforward porter served out of one of those fancy corked bottles that likely, in a past life, housed a malt scotch or some other form of drinkable gasoline that would burn off my lymph nodes. I drank it thrice, partly because in the waning hours of the event there was nothing else left.
4. Sierra Nevada Ovila Quad. I found that this brewery carries a bit of stigma from beer drinkers “in the know” (whatever that means) – a couple times I either encountered resistance when recommending this, or overheard other such intelligentsial whims as “psh, Sierra Nevada” and “gag me”. I try not to judge based on others’ bias, so I had a shot of this 10.4% monk-brew and found my center of gravity among the fracas.
5. Bellhaven Scottish Ale. Certainly not a popular choice among patrons (practically anything left after 9pm can be considered as such), I had several cracks at this and confirmed that a good red is always a go-to in my book.

Due to scheduling conflicts for a lot of folks, I was the only one to arrive prior to the start of the event, and thus bore witness to the beauty of being one of the first animals released into the tents. I ran riot through the first, taking in roughly 15 samples within the first half hour, while the lines were nonexistent and before anyone else I knew made it inside. Later on, after meeting up with friends, friends of friends, friends’ friends’ friends, acquaintances (ie. many degrees of separation), random people with whom I’d taken pictures last year (see: Kevin, nee “Gingerbeard Man”), owners of local haunts (like the Tasty Beverages purveyors who handwrote their logo on a piece of tape and stuck it on Slick’s derriere), and others whom I thought I knew – in theory – but not well enough to re-introduce, we ate some annoyingly overpriced grub and then basically called it a night. Someday, Raleigh Beerfest will really be 4 hours long. Yesterday was not that day.

I didn’t take a whole lot of photos this time around, since everyone kept disappearing on us:

[View with PicLens]

Perhaps due to the saturation I experienced in completing my latest mixtape and/or the general overproliferation of dubstep (case in point: the new MSIE 9 commercial featuring a track that sounds like some painful label-birthed collaboration between Nero and Maroon 5.. coincidentally, my frustration with said browser caused me to finally switch to Google Chrome a few months ago), the genre features very little in my latest list of muses. I’ve mostly kept abreast of the persistent 80′s reimaginations (despite all our attempts to forget things like Ronald Reagan, slap bracelets, nuclear meltdowns, hair resembling lions’ manes, Rick Astley..), the best of which are thankfully coming from artists like Mux Mool, Andre Obin, Tycho, La Roux, et al, and the worst of which are, interestingly enough, coming from Madonna.

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1. Chemical Brothers – “Hanna’s Theme (Vocal Version)”

Indirectly, I ought to thank Boardwalk Empire for my discovery of this amazing track, one of the best I’ve ever heard from the Chemical Brothers; Boardwalk was (up until Life’s Too Short and The Ricky Gervais Show) the only reason to add HBO – and thus an extra $16 a month to our already irritatingly large cable bill (trust me, I’m already looking into ways of making use of internet TV to lower it). Slick happened upon the movie Hanna one evening, a weird and largely unmoving story about some Scandinavian GMO girl bred to be a pasty-skinned teen assassin. Over several showings I caught maybe 15 minutes of it in total, and my attention span’s pilot light simply kept going out. This song that ran through the credits was far and away the best thing about the movie; the crushing lurch back into the verse at 3:39 is a winner.

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2. Black Diamond Bay – “I Dreamt We Were Bank Robbers (Planas Remix)”

Planas has a good handle on dubstep that sounds like it’s supposed to: dark, territorial, cinematic – something to soundtrack those nights when you find yourself duct-taped in the trunk of a mob Cadillac, being driven out to the bluffs for a round of questioning. Skrillex, Rusko, et al – they all want to revive the rave (which as I recently learned, and partly experienced at Starscape a few years ago, is alive and well, with anonymous synthetic hallucinogens to bridge the extremes between projectile dancing and cuddling) – and that’s just not in the cards for me.

The original track by Black Diamond Bay is the most solid (and least meandering) on their album, which I found to be a disjointed and largely unlistenable mess of conflicting ideas.

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3. John Maus – “Quantum Leap”

I add this to the list knowing full well this will not resonate with most people. General reactions to my playing this song – hell, anything by John Maus – have approximated “weird”, “irritating”, and “dude, lay off the echo already”. Understood. But, I have to say, every now and then I don’t mind when an artist just lets loose and does what comes natural, even if that nature happens to involve a lot of Human League synth arpeggios, early-80s Cure posturing and Devo wonkiness.

Also, I have a soft spot for the TV show Quantum Leap, so thanks to that, this ranks higher than it otherwise might have.

(If you really hate this one, try “Hey Moon”, a duet with Ariel Pink, which substitutes a pretty piano line for the high-whining modulated synth solo here. Still tons of echo though.)

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4. Sub Scape – “Turn Me On”

As a minor caveat to what I said a few paragraphs ago, just because a dubstep track could find its way into a glowstick-flinging, acronistic-drug-ingesting orgy of ironic disconnectedness (nee: rave), doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Sub Scape happens to do this a lot, catching my ear with sounds that would normally make me turn up my nose (somewhat akin to my love of arugula despite an ingrained hatred of similarly bitter purple lettuce). His latest EP is definitely worth a few listens, even if I get annoyed when somebody cops one of my favorite Autechre tracks (see: synth sample on “Apple Candy”).

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5. Andre Obin – “Soft Rain”

This song is a fantastic follow-up to “Lemondrop”, which I posted on my last summer playlist – love the atmospheres here, even though the vocals get a little bit too breathy for my taste.

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6. Missill – “Invincible (feat. Spoek Mathambo)”

Spoek continues to feature in my playlists because he’s just damn interesting, even if I don’t really care for a large percentage of his output (who names their album Father Creeper anyway?). If you’re curious about the line “Obama got nothin’ on me”, it harks back to a 2009 Youtube “rap” made of Presidential sound bites – just look up the phrase and you’ll find it.

(Sidenote on the video: I assume that Missill’s projection is a reference to Krieger’s Virtual Girlfriend from Archer.)

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7. Beacon – “See Through You”

For as unimpressed as I was with their live act (opening for Tycho at Cat’s Cradle in February), the Beacon “No Body” EP was my go-to for about a month after the show. The accompanying video is a rather odd, geeky virtual-reality interpretation of a late-90′s rap-artist production inspired by blatant chauvinistic tendencies, minimalist clothing and yacht culture – like Biggie Smalls harlots filtered through World of Warcraft or Second Life. I’d say it’s NSFW but does it count if the women aren’t real? Is delighting in a computerized representation of sexuality enough to get one canned from one’s employment? Oh, the confusions of modern philosophy.

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8. SBTRKT – “Wildfire (feat. Little Dragon)”

Little Dragon vocalist Yukimi Nagano is the most recent addition to the list of singers of Asian ancestry who sound completely different from (and thus, far better than) the stereotype (which, if you need a reminder, is on full display here). I’ve heard at least one track where I understandably mistook her for T-Boz, and on this track she gets pretty close to mid-90s Brandy (ie. pre-Bran’Nu phase).

The rest of the SBTRKT album, by the way, is quite a yawner.

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9. Tycho – “Hours”

As previously mentioned, Tycho was the main act after Beacon at Cat’s Cradle, and didn’t disappoint with the projector visuals even though they got a bit repetitive towards the end. His blog has been a huge inspiration artistically, musically and thematically; the music sometimes seems to be an afterthought to all the work put into the style. “Hours” is one of his best, and always puts an extra spring in my step.

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10. Holly Throsby – “On The Wharf”

This one will definitely throw you for a loop if you’ve listened to anything else in this playlist. I love this acoustic bit because there’s an innocence about it that I rarely hear – or even desire to hear – and it’s a brilliant change of pace to the electronic whimsy to which I regularly subject myself. Furthermore, her Australian accent comes through clearly, and, well, it’s just damn pretty. “A Heart Divided” is the song featured on the Melbourne advertisement (seen during every commercial break of the ESPN Australian Open productions), and since I watch tennis constantly during majors, it stays in my head for weeks.

Boeuf Bourguignon

There are three major things that Paris last summer instilled upon me: snotty waiters, sexagenarians tanning in speedos, and apricots. Granted, I did have a multitude of awe-inspiring experiences in those two very short days of my visit (e.g. the Louvre, Montmartre, and the Versailles gardens, for starters), but those three items are succinctly burned into my memory without any need (nor desire) for photographic reference.

Whether I ever return to see the rest of France is a question for another day (the answer most likely being yes). The question of last weekend (yeah, I know, I’m slow with these posts) was whether I could reproduce French food that I actually didn’t eat while I was there.

Boeuf Bourguignon, whether done by the book (see: Julia Child and a bazillion variations therein), or by haphazard accidency (generally my preferred cooking style), is one of those amazing human experiences that lies perpendicular to the Law of Diminishing Returns. The more I eat it, seemingly, the better it gets. Even whilst full – stomach distended, esophagus frantic with complaint – desire rages on within me for a proper lick of the bowl. This rarely happens with any other dish.

There exists a tiny but wildly popular nook called Leunig’s Bistro that I used to frequent while I was living in Vermont. It’s one of those places where, if you decide to rough it and show up without a reservation, you will more often than not find yourself awkwardly tucked between the hostess and the door for no less than an hour, weathering blasts of bastardized Quebecois wind (when locals show up for their reserved tables), before the hostess finally tells you that no more tables will be available that evening, sending you back out onto Church Street in search of something comparatively second-rate.

My most recent experience there came in September of 2010, a last visit to Vermont before I was to end my tenure on their state tax project; I opted for the Cavatappi Carbonara for my last meal, an affair that was strangely punctuated by a man repeatedly driving by in a Subaru, blasting Kenny G out of his stereo so loudly that the saxophone solo must surely have melted his eardrums.

Similarly, their Boeuf Bourguignon made quite an impression on me, such that when it came time to choose recipes for last week’s meals, it suddenly dawned upon me that I hadn’t eaten anything like that in years. I went scrambling into/onto/upon the interwebs in search of a worthy recipe, and ran smack into Julia Child, the overarching non-French authority (it would appear) on French cuisine. So be it.

In all honesty, I used one of the myriad Child-like recipes as a guide, though due to unforeseen circumstances I ended up winging part of it, and thus have only guesses involving quantity for most of these ingredients. Despite my best efforts, it turned out to be remarkably rich, savory, delectable – all those Food Network buzzwords – and in proportion to its deliciousness I presume it was also intoxicatingly unhealthy.

Ingredients:

cooked bacon crumbles (quite a few – we pulled some from the Whole Foods buffet)
1 1/2 lbs short ribs, cut into cubes (save the bones)
1 large onion, peeled and sliced into trapezoidal chunks
2-3 carrots, peeled and chopped into cylindrical chunks
1 1/2 tbsp flour
beef broth
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 garlic clove, minced
1 1/2 tsp thyme
2 bay leaves
white pearl onions, peeled (I used the frozen ones from Trader Joe’s)
1 lb fresh mushrooms, sliced (omitted without a second thought)
red wine (some odd mix leftover from our New Year’s party)
1/2 lb baby potatoes

Cost: ~$30

Serves: 3-4

Prep time: varies.. keep reading

Recipe:

1. Prep the vegetables (chop onions and carrots, thaw pearl onions if you bought the frozen ones, mince the garlic, etc). Take your time with this.. it’s a slow-cooking dish anyway.

2. Prep the beef, or in my case, open up the package to find that the beef has turned green already. Of course if it’s anytime past 11 AM, you may as well just stop here and wait another day; by the time it’s done cooking it’ll be way too late in the evening to actually eat it.

2a. 24 hours pass – buy new beef at the store.

3. Chop up beef into cubes – don’t worry about size, they’ll fall apart during cooking. Wrap the bones and bay leaves up in a cheesecloth and set aside.

4. Saute the beef cubes in a skillet until browned, then place in crock pot. It’s important that they go in the pot first.

5. Add onion slices and carrot slices to skillet and saute lightly.

6. Add tomato paste, thyme and minced garlic to skillet; season with salt and pepper. Add flour and broth and mix well.

7. Pour skillet mixture into the crock pot over the beef.

8. Add pearl onions, potatoes and crumbled bacon to crock pot.

9. Add wine and submerge cheesecloth (with bones and bay leaves) somewhere in the mix. Add more beef broth if you think you need it.

10. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hours. Do something meaningful with your life in the meantime, like studying French so the waiters in Paris will (maybe) be nice to you when you return.

The usual suspects

Squeezing tomato paste out of a tube is a bit odd

Fresh short ribs.. hooray!

Slick wraps the bones and bay leaves in cheesecloth

Beef on the bottom

Veggies on top

]]> http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/03/12/boeuf-bourguignon-parisians-and-other-things-that-test-ones-patience/feed/ 0 http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/19/sushi-time/ http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/19/sushi-time/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:01:41 +0000 Marc http://digitalflare.org/blog/?p=185 I confess: the idea of eating raw fish used to disgust me. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that, at the behest of a ladyfriend, I opted to “man up” and try sushi, thus introducing a few new seafaring creatures to my relatively limited omnivorous palate. My tastebuds and olfactories are complicated; lobster registers as largely flavorless (unless dipped in butter, in which case it tastes like ungodly expensive butter), the smell of tuna makes my spine tingle in a manner consistent with hovering poltergeists, and any fish heavier than mahi-mahi tastes like a sailor’s armpit (I’d imagine). Salmon is really the only thing that I find utterly delicious about the sea; everything else you might as well feed to the dolphins until they learn to grow legs and join us on land.

Slick, by contrast, is a sushi fanatic – it’s the one food she claims she can eat every single day of her life (were it financially feasible) without fail. (Mine is dark chocolate, of course.) For Christmas, I bought her a full-on Joyce Chen Sushi Kit, complete with bamboo roller and rice spoon, two bamboo serving trays and a very sharp sushi knife. Ms. Chen apparently saw fit to authenticate her handiwork by placing one of her long, straight, black Asian hairs into the kit itself. I am not sure whether this is their standard but it’s the first time I’ve ever found a hair in a shipped product.

The results of our adventure turned out surprisingly well; Slick did all of the slicing and prep work (we only had the one sushi knife) but she did allow me to make my own roll. Both attempts produced decent approximations of offerings one would find at their local sushi place – although I’m pretty sure we didn’t save any money by doing it ourselves.

[View with PicLens]

]]> http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/19/sushi-time/feed/ 1 http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/07/the-revolution-will-not-be-focused/ http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/07/the-revolution-will-not-be-focused/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 07:28:53 +0000 Marc http://digitalflare.org/blog/?p=184 For months I’ve been following the developments surrounding the Lytro camera, which has claimed to bring about a purported “revolution” in the way people take photos. Whereas conventional cameras record only the color and intensity of a light field, the Lytro camera also captures the direction of the light. This allows for some really intriguing opportunities for post-processing: changing the focus, viewing in 3D, shifting perspective, and surely many others.

Initially, I was quite inspired by the project; it’s not often that science provides the opportunity to advance a field by such giant leaps and bounds. The technology and the algorithms involved are no doubt quite complex and enthralling.

How terribly unfortunate it is that the resultant camera, the photos and the $500 price tag (among many other things) simply don’t live up to the hype. Rather than asking their investors for more money to fund their endeavors, Lytro appear to be pandering to the pocketbooks of naive souls whose closets likely already overflow with the domestic detritus of modern living (also known in some circles as “hoarders”).

The first and foremost problem I have with this camera is.. well, me. I am not a professional photographer by any (repeat: any) stretch of the imagination, but from a creativity standpoint I am someone who not only requires a finished product, but delights in the process of creating it. The Lytro camera is the antithesis of what I love about photography – after the picture is taken, you (or anyone else who views it) can adjust the focal content to your heart’s delight, putting the focus in places where it has no business being in the first place, temporarily turning an otherwise mediocre photo (judging from the content in their gallery) into a throwaway, then back again. They refer to this (rather misleadingly/overzealously) as a “living picture”. Post-capture focal adjustment = alive? Please.

Thanks to a proprietary file format (whether necessary or not, I don’t know), you can’t do anything else to it. You can’t add extra exposure to dark areas, enhance colors or – most annoyingly for a camera that costs $500 – take video, which is a lot closer to how I would associate the words “picture” and “living”. Add ability to animate (either by looping or using a forward/backward slider), shift perspective (which they say is possible with a light field) and maybe throw in some Huxley-esque “Smell-O-Vision” and then we’ve got ourselves something more “alive”.

The Flash app that allows you to click to refocus any part of the photo is a pretty nifty piece of engineering, but my amusement with it lasted maybe a total of two minutes. It’s difficult to believe that with all that science inside, it produces something so underwhelming – I’m left thinking of a favorite Louis C.K. bit where he so pointedly illuminates how people can no longer be amazed by anything – because the idea of capturing a light field in its entirety (color, direction, and intensity) is seriously, seriously cool (hence my initial excitement).

No information is available on equivalent ISO speed (how quickly the sensor absorbs light, although since it has no shutter I assume it’s nearly instantaneous) or resolution, except for the term “Light Field Resolution” which is “11 Megarays”. Display resolution is universally stated in terms of pixels, not rays, and I think it’s a bit disingenuous to mask the fact that this is effectively a 1-megapixel camera (judging that you can only export to a 1080×1080 pixel JPG) that costs $500. The picture quality certainly reflects this, again if we judge by their own aforementioned gallery, which displays relatively grainy photos, one after another, even though they claim to be able to produce “HD quality”. It’s provided that a 16GB Lytro can hold 750 photos, so one can extrapolate that each file ends up being roughly 45 MB, which is about 15 times larger than what my 10-megapixel Canon produces on normal settings; I don’t know how much of that is the refocusing engine (included with each picture) or the actual light field data. They only posted one example of capturing real motion (the water fountain) and there is still plenty of blur in the water stream, so I’m guessing there’s still a measurable delay in actually capturing the entire light field. A properly set digital camera would capture that water stream in striking detail.

Reading through the Lytro blog and getting a feel for where the project is and where it’s going, I get that this is only the beginning for them and have no doubt there will be major improvements down the road; however, I strongly disagree with releasing a product in such an infant state, basically wasting the wealth of data that it captures. You capture a light field, refocus, refocus, refocus, share it online with people you never talk to in real life, color them impressed with the size of your disposable income, rinse, repeat, pay your credit card bill and throw your camera in the closet next to your True Blood DVD’s and Guitar Hero drums. For comparison, what if Microsoft had released their revolutionary Kinect system (which captures your bodily movements through a camera and echoes them in the video game) immediately after they figured out how to reproduce a jump (and ONLY a jump) on screen? They would’ve been laughed at.

After all is said and done, this camera, in its current initial state, is merely a novelty: expensively meaningless as a standalone product. If you can’t figure out how properly focus a photo (even using a point-and-shoot, which of course does that for you), or (as was kind of the case with some of my NYE shots) you’re too drunk to bother, then this camera would really appeal to you. I would much rather see this technology (ie. capturing light direction) applied to really good cameras, where it could really enhance post-processing.

At the very least, the folks at Lytro need to develop their enormous potential much further before they declare any revolution as having begun (Napoleon, France, 1815).

]]> http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/07/the-revolution-will-not-be-focused/feed/ 0 http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/02/photos-new-year-2012/ http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/02/photos-new-year-2012/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:00:32 +0000 Marc http://digitalflare.org/blog/?p=182 A new year can be a blessing for people who tend to stagnate over the course of time, and a curse for those of us whose body parts are susceptible to the aging process (at least 85% according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons). We celebrate this event to acknowledge the earth’s completion of a full revolution around the sun, in essence symbolizing that we have come “full circle” and despite our best efforts to change, do better for ourselves and to others, we always end up right back where we started. Also, it is apparently a fantastic time of year to watch grown women, dressed in shimmering miniskirts (that attract moths), undersized Jersey Shore DTF dresses (that attract guidos), or neon Nicki Minaj wigs (that attract Hello Kitty fetishists), staggering drunk down the street, each step punctuated with a flatulent sob after last year’s resolution to find a boyfriend failed miserably for reasons one cannot possibly conjecture.

The holiday does carry a large cultural significance: the Babylonians, for one, believed they could affect the luck they would have in the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. Unfortunately, by that measure, anyone who ate the artichoke and crab dip at our party is probably going to have a bad year. I made it myself from a crappy recipe, and since I hate artichokes and I hate crab, I had no concept of how poorly it turned out. To those who started off their year with that, Slick and I apologize in advance for your pending misfortune.

In light of our location in Raleigh, and all the street/club noise we would undoubtedly endure (girl-sobbing being the least of our problems), it was an easy decision to invite an egregious number of folks to occupy our condo for a few hours, imbibe, make pleasantries, and creepily spy on passersby from our balcony through an old pair of field binoculars. When all was said and done, we successfully had packed about 32 people (a cumulative estimate) into our living room without much trouble. The amazing thing about ‘mature parties’ is that, on average, nobody vomits, passes out or attempts seedy maneuvers with members of the opposing gender in a spare bedroom. On average.

Photos of the proceedings (low angle):

[View with PicLens]

One of Slick’s Christmas presents to me this year was a GorillaPod, a rather novel contraption that allows one to attach a camera to practically anything. It has all the strength of a standard tripod, with the added versatility of rubbery grips and enough bendability to give a gymnast an inadequacy complex. Brilliant little thing. Both Slick and I (telepathically, of course) got the same idea to wrap it around the flimsy plastic mount to which our living room blinds are attached; to my amazement, it stayed in place and held my Digital Rebel XT in place all night without budging an inch (or causing the entire blinds arrangement to collapse on an unsuspecting party guest).

This feature, when combined with my handy camera remote, allowed me to use my camera as a “big brother” eye with a high-angle view of the party. I found great amusement in catching people off guard with this ubiquitous flash unexpectedly going off at random points of the evening; the resultant photos (in which my “pool party blue” shirt appears to migrate around the room) are reminiscent of some twisted version of “Where’s Waldo” for people with tritanopia.

Photos of the proceedings (high angle):

[View with PicLens]

]]> http://digitalflare.org/blog/2012/01/02/photos-new-year-2012/feed/ 1 http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/12/06/blood-on-the-traxx-silicon-valet-mixtape/ http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/12/06/blood-on-the-traxx-silicon-valet-mixtape/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:29:54 +0000 Marc http://digitalflare.org/blog/?p=178

First things first: I love my Señor Gazpacho musical moniker. Unfortunately, it’s a name that lends itself to things like illegal aliens, mystical African seances and random off-key horn arpeggios, possibly conjured up under the influence of a mescaline binge, proselytizing the finer points of maniacal Latin call/response samples to astral projections of Native American spirits.

None of that, of course, has anything to do with dubstep, with which this mixtape has everything to do.

I stumbled upon my first dubstep tracks sometime around early 2008 with Megasoid’s remix of Ghislain Poirier “No More Blood” (maybe more lazer bass than dubstep, but a stepping stone nonetheless), and soon after found what became two of my all-time favorites, Distance “Traffic” and the machine-gun-toting MRK1 “Daywalker”. I’ve been wanting to do a dubstep mixtape for years, but could never bring myself to do it because I was pretty certain no one would be interested in it unless there were something to offer besides heady staccato beats and eardrum-grinding warbles.

Luckily, dubstep has since evolved to include more pop melodies and head (somewhat) mainstream, although many artists keep their tracks pinned firmly to the “horror beats” territory. I purposefully tried to stay clear of the inaccessible and/or ravey stuff (like Boreta, Skrillex, etc), and at times leaned on hip-hop as a means of balance.

The mixing process began around January (when I completed my last mixtape); I made promises to people by February, got distracted with nonsense in March and April (as in: learning French, flying tiny planes, planning a Europe trip), returned in May only to tear apart and put pieces back together a zillion times over, completed roughly 85% of the finished mix before I went back to work in July, then spent another five months playing a fascist dictator to the last 15%, going to such ridiculous lengths as researching music theory to supply key changes that didn’t make me cringe.

I have to admit, it’s quite thrilling to release oneself from a gravity, only to be thrust back out into a galaxy of self-spawned black holes of creative impetus. Yup. That’s my life.

Tracklist as follows:

01. Ceeker “Body Rocker (Carly-D & Dr. Knobz Remix)”
02. Tim Healey & Calvertron “Rock It Roll It (Dirtyloud Remix)”
03. De Niro “Another Prayer”
04. Jakes “Time Ends”
05a. Terror Danjah “Menace”
05b/06a. Barbara Panther “Empire (Lorn Remix)”
06b/07a. Camo & Krooked f. Shaz Sparks “All Fall Down”
07b/08a. Her Majesty & The Wolves “Glaciers (Roksonix Remix)”
08b/09a. Xilent “Choose Me II”
09b/10a. Marlow “Love Kills Slowly”
10b. Noah D “That Hardcore Track”
10c/11. Lil Wayne “Lollipop (Nasty Ways Remix)”
12. Morgan Zarate “Hookid”
13. Feed Me f. Tasha Baxter “Cloudburn”
14. Sub Scape “Nothing’s Wrong”
15/16a. Mexicans With Guns “Icaros”
16b. Akira Kiteshi “Givin It Up”
17. Rustie “After Light”
18. Kahn “Illy”
19. Sub Focus f. Takura “Coming Closer”

Download at Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/bloodonthetraxx

You can download all 19 tracks separately, the single-file continuous mix, or both, or neither.

]]> http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/12/06/blood-on-the-traxx-silicon-valet-mixtape/feed/ 0 http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/11/17/photos-janines-wedding-asheville-drews-wedding-hanging-rock-state-park/ http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/11/17/photos-janines-wedding-asheville-drews-wedding-hanging-rock-state-park/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:35:53 +0000 Marc http://digitalflare.org/blog/?p=179 Ah, the autumn – a time during which Caucasians begin to metamorphose both in color (from tan to white) and in body composition (Thanksgiving dinner cometh), just like the flora of the earth. Of course we don’t exactly go through a complete life cycle and emerge as something pretty come springtime – we basically just cocoon for a couple months and then return as the same bulbous caterpillars, rife with vacant resolves to shed egregious waistlines, cease recreational smoke inhalation, and use less retirement money to fund shopping trips.

As ever, my Google Calendar for the past couple months was simply brimming with colorful activities (some red, some blue, and even some orange!). Janine and Mario’s wedding in Toronto was probably the classiest event I’ll ever attend, and to honor that fact I duly made an arse out of myself – in one way having been forced to by the MC and in another way having poured enough Disaronno and wine down my gullet to be complacent with said procedure. Two weeks later, after catching some of the autumnal prettiness of Asheville (a southern reimagination of Vermont) I was treated to 90 minutes of constant laughter at Louis C.K.’s live show such that I nearly asphyxiated. Two weeks beyond that, I participated in Drew’s wedding, causing yet another reception spectacle by highstepping to “Welcome To The Jungle” whilst transporting a drunken bridesmaid on my back. Then came Halloween, with Slick and I ad-libbing as a demented Insidious-inspired doll girl and some anonymous, begoggled, muzzled, lunatic torture victim, respectively. Then, camping, hiking, and the delight of finding an unpopulated rock face with an unadulterated view of the sunset and the valley below. Finally, Phantogram and Exitmusic at Cat’s Cradle – and standing not five feet from the graceful Aleksa Palladino (also of Boardwalk Empire fame). If there were ever a true antithesis to the Occupy movement, it is I.

Photos from (some of) the aforementioned proceedings follow.

Janine’s Wedding:

[View with PicLens]

Asheville:

[View with PicLens]

Drew’s Wedding:

[View with PicLens]

Hanging Rock State Park:

[View with PicLens]

]]> http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/11/17/photos-janines-wedding-asheville-drews-wedding-hanging-rock-state-park/feed/ 0 http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/10/12/durham-beerfest-tongue-brothers/ http://digitalflare.org/blog/2011/10/12/durham-beerfest-tongue-brothers/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:21:01 +0000 Marc http://digitalflare.org/blog/?p=177 Beerfest is a tradition as aged as modern man himself; the first distillations took place immediately after the Byzantine creation of the world on September 1, 5509 BC, partly to celebrate the final ratification of the laws of physics and partly to get all of us newbies in the mood to learn proper reproduction techniques. Since then, beer has been a primary reason that people were forced to invent things like religion, gambling and hot dog stands, just to keep us all from going mad. Only just recently has the beer genre given rise to more sophisticated palatine contemporary art, which, as in Paul’s case this year, occasionally reanimates itself as a form of visual surrealist art.

At the Durham Beerfest this past weekend, the dessert tray truly found itself front and center: bubblegum, banana bread, creme brulee, watermelon, and pumpkin pie all made appearances in a variety of offerings (some of which were unspeakably delicious). However, there were quite a few traditional brews that got my attention as well; the astonishing thing was that most of them were in the local North Carolina brewery tent. I was slightly disappointed that no one bothered to hang a “Bud Light” sign next to the port-a-johns.

My five favorite fermentations from this year’s outing:

1. Wells Banana Bread Beer. Brings back memories of Frank the Tank from Old School: “It’s so good once it hits your lips!” I stood in line for what felt like forever just to try this, and then I did it again.. and a third time. Having a six-pack of this in my fridge at all times would solve the obvious problem of what to do when I can’t decide between eating banana bread or drinking beer. (That is, after all, why beer was invented.. to solve problems.)
2. Kuhnhenn Imperial Creme Brulee Java Stout. This is quite clearly a gateway beer to more unscrupulous combinations such as Lemon Meringue White Ale or Dairy Queen Oreo Blizzard Porter, which in theory would replace the taste of beer with an actual dessert masquerading as beer. Yet, against my better (impaired) judgement, I gobbled it up repeatedly.
3. Roth Forgotten Hollow. These men wore lighted viking hats the entire evening and pillaged my taste buds with this dark and lovely cinnamon porter, that wasn’t overwhelmingly sweet and at once reminded me that I still need to buy Christmas presents.
4. Mash House Irish Red. I’m not sure which is more shocking: that this is brewed in a restaurant/brewery right down the road in Fayetteville, or that I just said “oh, that’s really good” and then went right back to the Banana Bread line.
5. Crispin Fox Barrel Blackberry Pear Cider. Reminiscent of Crispin Glover, in that it’s perfect in small quantities, but too much of it will definitely mess with your head.

The proceedings went by rather quickly, especially since we only arrived at 6:30 due to a taxi foul-up (as in, they all decided to park outside the venue at the beginning rather than actually driving people to it); however, I was notably mispronouncing words by about 8:30, which was right on schedule. Jake opted to temporarily employ a backwards walk which surprisingly resulted neither in anyone spilling beer, nor crying over it. Paul, as he would later be brought to realize, won the nonexistent battle for consuming the most samples – and wearing the most hats. Slick was almost disappointingly well-behaved (except for shoving the beer guide into her cleavage) and, for the first time in four Beerfests, didn’t shout anything obscene at the volunteers or Johnny Crash the participants. I, for my part, wore a very nice pair of desert boots in case anyone wanted me to model them, but this year there were no takers.

Photographically speaking, this is how we rolled:

[View with PicLens]

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