Don’t come full circle, roll on down the road

March 31, 2009

OMFG, Crown Heights Brooklyn

I haven’t been updating this blog very much as I’ve been incredibly busy at work.

It surprising how much effort producing the death throes of a company requires.  This is to say that my employer will be shutting its doors tomorrow afternoon and I will be joining millions of other Americans in solidarity on the public dole.  Its been six and a half years since the last time I got laid off and circumstances have changed considerably.   This time its a real estate bubble while my previous experience with unemployment was due to a tech bubble.   Either way, the unbridled greed of the few was involved and a lot of innocent people got the shaft.

So yes, OMFG is in effect.

September 2002 was also when I started to take photography seriously.   I had just purchased a Olympus 2100UZ which was a 2.1 megapixel camera with a 10x zoom lens and semi-manual controls for $500 in a fit of optimism two weeks before I was handed my pathetic severence package (this time there is no severence… I got jack shit).  Right before I got laid off I had also purchased some rather pricy tickets to God Blast America, a noise show at the now defunct North 6 in Williamsburg.  Being anti-social I figured it made sense to start taking pictures since I was going out to a lot of shows at the time.

Slogun, God Blast America

I can still remember trying to take photos with a camera that maxxed out at 400 ISO by underexposing by three stops and not knowing what the hell the little -3.0 in the viewscreen meant when I kept slamming the shutter button constantly pissed off that the camera was always a second too late for whatever moment I wanted to capture.  Six and a half years later and facing a nonconsentual vacation of indeterminate length what amazes me the most is that I didn’t give up photography like I gave up writing fiction, ceramics, drawing, pastels, stained glass, the guitar, the piano, or any of the other creative pursuits that I had dabbled in and then gave up in a fit of self-depreciation when I didn’t immediately produce work as good as what I saw others turning out.

Perhaps I was just bored enough to keep at it.

I’m just glad I did keep at it.

Hare Krishnas, Union Square

Things have changed for me quite a bit in the past six years.  Instead of staying up all night in warehouses destroying my hearing with mind shattering noise I’m after this sort of thing.  As they say, I’m too old for that shit these days.

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