two more photo shoots wrapped. i can expect delivery of my cds in the morning with my images at the 7am call. i should go to be early tonight, stayed up until 2 am talking to vic, planning and trying to figure out what we`re going to do.
i managed to get everything i needed to done for plan to be at least marginally successful. i got fingerprinted, got it fedexed to trinidad. hopefully i`ll get it back by next wednesday.
now i just need to work out how i`m paying for my ticket. today was a lot better. even though we were shooting small children. the old adage never work with animals and small children, i think is even more applicable in an advertising environment.
we were working with a five year old this morning and managed to get her co-operative for about an hour at which point she declared she was bored and didn`t want to do anymore. a little coaxing and we got a few more images that were useful.
this afternoon we had the pleasure of a three year old boy, he was cute but he`d missed his afternoon nap and was in no mood to play nice after 45 minutes. we figure we can photoshop together what we need from the images we have.
it`s always so entertaining to see the finished product. all the retouching, all the touch ups, a nip here, a tuck there. this is why i said the first matrix is advertising. nothing you see is real, it is all an illusion.
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advertising, photo shoot
in all my rage yesterday, i forgot to mention that both the shoots yesterday went well.
the really cool thing is that the photographer is shooting digital. he`s got a 22 megapixel digital back connected via firewire to his laptop. it`s a modified 4×5 camera with a digital processor where the film loader would be and shoots in raw format
talk about instant gratification. we could move people around, lights, anything we needed. shoot, preview, adjust shoot, again. it`s fantastic.
i`ve always know about the system but this is the first time i`ve seen it in use. i got cds full of images the morning shoot when i got to the evening shoot. i`m thrilled by the possibilities.
i have two more photo shoots today, in between which i need to get fingerprinted, get them notarised and faxed to trinidad, of course on par with everything else, nothing is easy, i have to go to downtown kingston, not a trip i`m looking forward to.
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immigration
showered, fed, doing breathing exercises.
i am the man with a plan.
this too shall pass.
i have one plan and if i have one plan, that means i`ll come up with others and sure enough they`re already forming.
or as uncle says `one more thing`
it`s always one more thing isn`t it.
fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck!
FUCK!
nothing is ever fucking easy. after how many phone calls to the embassy and promises to call as soon as they have my packet and a fucking call today, mind you. no we don`t have your packet. fucking morons.
vic gets a call to say, oh yeah, we have the packet but you`re certificate of character is out of date and needs to be renewed before we can issue your visa and btw you have to do this before feb 9 or you`ll have to do your medical over and if you don`t mind you have to come in, in person.
there a few problems with all of this:
1. i can`t afford to go back to trinidad to get another certificate.
1b. [update] i don`t have to go, i just can get it updated, but it`s going to take two weeks.
2. i can`t really afford to barbados [but i`m going to have to]
2b. i can`t afford to take the time off to fly to bardbados either.
3. if i miss the window, [which gives me all of next week to get the shit together, while doing this current project which needs to be finished by feb 6] which is feb 9, i can`t afford to do another medical again either.
so at any angle we have been ass fucked with a sandpaper and barbed wire condom without so much as a peck on the cheek.
if anyone has any suggestions, i`m willing to listen.
i have a plan, but all the variables are completely out of my control and the blood is thumping a little to loudly in my temples at the moment for me to come up with alternate version.
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immigration
today marks the beginning of four days of location photography.
my first photo shoot here starts in about two hours. i`m a little nervous, i`ve never worked with this photographer before, we`re shooting models on location, also new to me.
but this is what i live for, the challenge. the concept is done and approved, this is the execution, the details, making sure everything is the way you want it, all of it has to pull together.
from my limited interaction with the photographer he seems skilled and willing to take instructions. i really hate the know it all ones who ignore your suggestions. but i suppose i use the same argument, you`re the client, i`m the professional, fuck off and let me do my job.
i`m looking forward to the next couple of days. i`m not an adrenaline junkie, per se, but i do enjoy working under pressure and the thrill of the deadline. and this job is going to the wire. after the four days of photography, i have to produce finished art for outdoor material – bus sides, bus backs, billboards, plus newspaper advertising in time for the launch feb 8. tentative approval date for client is a week from today.
i`m not sure why all of this makes me so giddy, if it`s my first campaign here, the general quality of the work, my level of involvement in the project or all of the above. i feel good about it and not that i don`t always give my best, but there`s a little extra effort on my part to make sure that it all comes together on time.
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art direction, photo shoot
i`m serious.
prostitution should be legal and taxed. george carlin summed it up best, “fucking is legal, selling is legal, why shouldn`t selling fucking be legal?”
seriously, i think it would help on various levels. in an ideal society, you`d have to be of legal age, get registered, get tested regularly, display your certificates, a simple supply and demand situation.
with the age verification and registration it should help keep anyone underage out of the business. it`s not necessarily going to stop some sexual offenders, but in the case of violent clients, it can be reported and anyone still found trading sex slaves and paying for sex with children, can be lost in the deepest darkest dungeon.
i`m still processing this on a purely emotional level, i suppose it would require some investigation, but i think it`s a viable idea.
we need to start with education however. there are too many hang ups about sexuality.
we need to start with our children, i`m not saying teach them the karma sutra, but we have to get to recognise their bodies without shame or stigma, none of the pee pee and na na, bullshit. teach them about their bodies, how to identify it and what an appropriate touch is.
as they grow older teach about the choices, abstinence is an ideal, but we were all teenagers once, so it would better to equip the with all the facts and try to stop burdening them with guilt.
we need to put aside our own hang ups as well, the systems we have in place now are not working, can it really hurt to try something else?
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prostitution
i don`t really talk about my children here, because i don`t think it`s appropriate, but it`s not so much the measure of impropriety, it`s the fear i have for them.
i would kill anyone that anyone that tries to do them harm. i`m not an especially violent person, no matter how much i rant here. it`s just an outlet, i vent and i move on. when it comes to my children i make no bones about it, i will kill someone.
i`ve said before and i reiterate, i firmly believe that children should be dressed their age. i`m liberal in a great many aspects of my life but i`m perfectly willing to go medieval to protect my children. i think anything two consenting adults chose to get up to in their own company is fine.
however pedophilia is the most depraved and appalling of sins in my book and i`ve been reading this new york times article and i`ve had to take it in stages of because how badly it upsets me.
All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were both psychologically and physically abusive. Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist`s patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners — toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens — as well as what she called a “damage group.“ “In the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,“ she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it`s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.
what kind of depraved, damaged human being would find sex with children desirable, there is no rehabilitation, there is no counselling, these people have to be eliminated, plain and simple. there are some people that would blame the lack of morals in society today, but i don`t i think something is fundamentally wrong with these people.
these are the people i fear. i worry about them everyday, if i could lock my children away in a tower until they were of age i would. but we`ve taught them as best we can, how to say no, what`s an inappropriate touch, not to go anywhere with anyone they don`t know, but reading stuff like this you wonder if it`s enough.
i know their situation is not even vaguely similar to the children in the article but that something like that happens in the world everyday is enough to fill me with dread.
addendum: a pair of interesting looks at the original NYT story, here and here
it`s monday, you`re probably struggling through your day,
here is the cure to what ails you, take a couple of these and leave a comment.
i should warn however, that these are in no way safe for a work environment. use with discretion.
i love music. i`m a fan. i can`t say i never played air guitar, but i was more prone to play air`bass.
my fantasy job in the music business would be sound engineer however. i love good quality sound where you can hear the individual components contributing to the overall harmony.
most of my music collection is on my laptop, 20Gb of mp3s that run the gamut from metallica and tool to ella, miles, nina and the duke to wagner, bach and beethoven to fatboy slim, moby and paul oakenfold to stevie and marvin to slick rick and missy to johnny cash plus a large collection of soundtracks that allow me to indulge in my musical eccentricities.
i`m a child of the 80s, so i grew up with the big hair bands and the popular music of the era, but i also had a large brit pop influence. we had a six hour countdown show every saturday, the host was a british expat and would cover billboard pop and country as well as the british charts. i remember getting my first `job` in the early 80s so i could buy a radio to listen to the show. my mother didn`t want to listen to six hours of `that noise` every saturday so she struck a deal with me, if i was willing to do the chores i could get my own radio. i did and for years whatever i was doing on a saturday i was locked on to it.
but that wasn`t the be all and end all of my musical education, on sundays my mother would go through her fairly extensive record collection and introduce me to a variety of things. we had a record player where you could stick in five lps at a time and as one finished, the other drop onto the turntable.
bob marley, miles davis, ella fitzgerald, marvin, aretha, the sounds of motown, soundtracks from the sound of music, my fair lady, singing in the rain. i would be on the couch reading while my mother made lunch and the records would play on. when i got to high school and everybody was `discovering` marley and the conscious lyrics, i was amazed, because the first bob marley record i`d heard was punky reggae party which was pretty much a party song.
i also spent a great deal of my formative years at my aunt`s house and her children were already in their late teens by the time i was aware of music, so i had their musical influences as well, abba, hendrix, pink floyd.
added to all of this was the music i discovered on my own, prince, metallica, doug e fresh, run dmc. my basic rule of thumb for music is that i was willing to give it a listen, not for the lyrically quality a lot of the time but for character of the music. it`s how it affects me on a visceral level.
i can`t make a blanket statement like a lot of music today is shit, but it certainly lacks a lot of charm and character, i don`t listen to much of today`s r&b because when you`ve been weaned on the classic most of the stuff out there is just a waste of studio time. it`s formulaic crap and that tends to go across the board.
the mass commercialisation of music and shorter attention spans have lead to mass production, it`s not art any more it`s about what sells. take it inagadda da vida, it`s a 17 minute drug and alcohol fuelled opus. in today`s three minute airplay ready market it would have never gotten made. same thing for concept albums, yes there is there`s the new outkast double album but that isn`t norm. in the 70s, a band wasn`t a real band until they`d done a concept or experimental album.
even though metallica has become the bane of music downloaders everywhere and became in my humble somewhat soulless and unoriginal after the black album did a magnificent piece of work with s&m which features them play with the san fransisco symphony orchestra, it`s an amazing piece of work and shows a level of creativity that is notable absent from the industry.
god i`m just going on. and i haven`t even covered the local music scene. my hands hurt and i`m hungry, so i`m going to stop here and continue later.
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music
and we can nibble on a wall or two even.
i hadn`t planned on posting again for the day, but this required getting off my chest.
i just had dinner delivered. pizza. hawaiian. the delivery guy asks “are you going to eat that?” i look at him puzzled as to why i would order something, pay good money and not eat it. the bewilderment at his question was obviously showing on my face, he adds, “there`s ham on it”
and it dawns on me, my hair. right.
since i moved here i`ve come to realise that in jamaica, rastafari holds the patent on dreadlocks or something equally insipid. this is not the first time it`s happened.
ok let me back track, if you don`t know according to what sect of rastafari you belong to, you don`t:
eat meat at all
eat swine
eat salt
eat food prepared by a woman menstruating
i`m sure i`ve missed some but it basically changes depending on who your talk to.
on with our story. yes, on with our story.
i went to burger king one day for lunch and order a whopper with bacon and cheese, again the question, “you sure you want that?” i shrugged it off.
but in the last week, i`ve had to answer the same question posed to me by various people i interact with on a daily basis. the conversation goes like this:
“are you rastafarian?”
“no.”
“ok”
“are you christian?”
“no. i don`t deal well with organised religion”
“ok.”
“so why you have your hair like that?”
“because straw… [insert odd look here] nevermind, i made a decision to grow my hair, a social experiment, a statement…”
“oh ok”
and the conversation usually degenerates from there.
i have to laugh or i`m going to cry, as i said last week, assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. dreadlocks does not a rastafari make. i`ve never been a vegetarian, i eat pork. lots of it actually, as often as i can. i`ve been growing my hair for eight years and will probably cut in two years. i haven`t made a decision about that yet. so i can safely say. i predate revlon rasta trend by about at least a good two years. and while i`m on the topic about assumptions people make about me because of my hair which i forgot to mention last time, i`m not a some jacque st. john caribbean stud either, but that`s the subject of a whole other post.
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dreadlocks, rastafarian
