Attention Deficit David

Old Lambs Eyes

I'm not a big fan of New Year's Eve, there is something about the inability to stop the big descending ball that strikes me as dreadful (in the original literal sense of dreadful) and I tend to get a bit melancholy.

That's not to say that I haven't enjoyed celebrating the new year, I've had some great times, especially the many trips I took to foreign cities with my friend Jon. We've been in some really interesting places when the date change has come, and I've got some great stories.

Once Jon and I entertained an entire Polish student exchange program in Paris having met up with them on Champs Elysee. We were tear gassed by the cops, walked all across the city and squeezed all two dozen of them into our double-bunk room at the hostile in Republic.

Another year we celebrated in Trafalgar Square in London, this time with Abby and some other friends, although that almost resulted in a fist fight caused by a sudden need to urinate. Well that might not have been the cause, per se.

We rang in the new year with the bells of a long-silent church spire in Vienna that decided to revive the aural celebration to commemorate the launch of the Euro in 1999. And the best trip was when Abby and I rung in the New Year in Mexico (although the actual night itself was a tad boring, and involved a lot of time passing at a bad restaurant while eating ground up worms.)

But the actual passing of the years is always a bit sad. The sole exception to this has been the 2001 to 2002 year change, I was really glad after September 11th to see that year slip away. Maybe a bit of it has to do with my birthday being at the beginning of February—essentially the new year rings in my aging.

This year was a hard one for me, and for a lot of people I know. Personal crisis after crisis, coupled with the relationship trials of those around me made things surprisingly more difficult than in many years past. So it's with a bit of glee that I look forward the new year. I don't think things are going to be perfect in 2009, after all we're facing a horrible economy, the continued horrible economy and a lingering conflict in countries where we don't belong.

And it wasn't a total write off for a year. I had a lot of fun traveling—I got to go to the Olympics, Amsterdam twice, Germany, Hawaii, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Miami, Toronto, Boston, D.C. and more. I got to run a company with my good friend Wil, and we had a lot of fun traveling all over.

Still, it was a tough year.

But we've got a new president coming in, possibly a new era and I'm looking forward to that. I'm hoping life will calm down a bit (and that business will pick up—when do we small business owners get the Federal bailout money after all?) and that I'll continue to be healthy, the strep throat I've got now not withstanding.

So, should you be standing around tonight at midnight waiting to sing in the new year, here is the original lyrics of Auld Lang Syne, as written by Robert Burns in 1788. (And if it isn't Scottish, it's crap!)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne ?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my jo,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
And surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot,
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i' the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
And gie's a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

There's something wrong with this seatpost, but I can't put my finger on it.

There's something wrong with this seatpost, but I can't put my finger on it., originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

Untitled

My dad was rather eccentric, which is the term used for crazy folks who happen to have a lot of money. Anyone who lived through the era of The Great Cleaning after his death (when we had to figure out exactly what to do with so many firearms, band aids, magazines and bobby pins) knows what I mean.

Luckily the extent of that genetic eccentricity passed on seems to primarily manifest in me as a a big hit of Seasonal Affective Disorder and the attention issues for which this blog is named.

Still, it's odd when I find myself doing things that he used to do. One day I was standing in Piermont Bicycle Connection upgrading some bike component or other. I had a pretty vivid flashback to being a kid in any of a number of gun stores while my dad upgraded some rifle or shotgun of his by replacing the foregrip or trigger assembly for one gun with that of another one in the store. Shop owners didn't tend to discourage this as he usually ended up just buying both items anyhow.

Luckily I wasn't buying thirty cases of duck calls at the bike store, or I might have found myself being a bit more worried.

Yesterday I bought myself a new Philips light therapy device, it's a LED panel with blue diodes designed to do the same thing that the large light boxes used to treat SAD do, but with vastly less light. Some studies going back a number of years have shown that the mind reacts most strongly to the blue lightwaves and so I'm going to give that a shot. That's when I flashed back to sitting in front of the TV in my dad's house with his big homemade lightbox on. I haven't thought about that lightbox in decades—he ordered full-spectrum bulbs from a health store distributor and put them together in a figure he made. I had forgotten that he had that, and I'd never thought about why he had it.

Then there's the big collection of books on Buddhism he had (and Taoism too, but more on Buddhism perhaps because there tends to be more written on that subject) and the ones I'm reading myself as I work on being more present and less, well attention deficit-ey. Looks like he was probably dealing with that one too.

Course, none of this means that I'm going to go out and buy myself a bunker and stock it with Amway, but it's interesting to see things I didn't realize I recognized from my past.

Anyone want a thousand boxes of toothpicks?

My new chapeau

My new chapeau, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

Video Playback

9500 miles of flying. Two hours of video tape. Several days of postproduction: 

http://aperturenetwork.com/showthread.php?t=21909

Motorcycle Parade in Hawaii

Motorcycle Parade in Hawaii, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

If a coup falls in the forrest...

So thanks to a PRI show (on one of two radio stations my car picks up here in Hawaii, what the hell?) I found out today that there was a huge power struggle in Canada this week. Check out this line from The Star

Jean's decision casts in doubt the viability of the opposition coalition that had united to topple the Conservatives. In a rare show of force earlier this week, the Liberals and NDP signed a document agreeing to form a coalition to govern the nation, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois.

I'm sorry, that sounds a lot like a coup to me. An opposition coalition is joining forces with the French Separatist movement to take over the government? Did anyone know that America's Hat is having a rebellion? What's this all ah-bout?

Also, if you're interested in seeing what's probably the worst video made by a party leader ever (what's with the bookshelf, and the crappy-ass quality? Are you in hiding?) check this out. Be prepared to make fun of Quebecois accents. About half way through he starts to stumble over his words, and they didn't edit it at all. I can't imagine what the first take sounded like.

http://www.thestar.com/fpLarge/video/548264

Even better, this grade-school quality video caused even more of a stir when it was delivered to the network late, only in English, and in the wrong format. Anchors had to ad-lib for thirty minutes waiting for the tape. The timeline of this is here.

Dear Canada - You don't get to make fun of our democracy any more.

Not surfing is hard work

To round off the massive—though not as massive as last year's—travel schedule, I decided to take a quick trip to Hawaii (thank you recession for the stupidly-cheap fare) to shoot some video as a prototype for a job we might be doing soon. I'm in Honolulu at a nice hotel right on the beach.

Today I hooked up with my friend jeff Flindt, surfing photographer extraordinaire who lives up on the North Shore. Next week is the big surfing competition up there, and I shot video of Jeff going out to paddle around in the water as he shoots surfers.

Jeff's been doing this for 11 years, so he's got quite the hookup. I don't know surfing from podiatry, but I do, having shot the mountain bike scene for a few years, appreciate just how awesome it is to be able to completely integrate oneself as a photographer into a sport. Jeff is part of the culture, and he took a lot of time out of his schedule today to bring me over to the Quiksilver team house and introduce me to everyone there from the surfers to the "staff," and they're all great, friendly guys. And since they were nice enough to allow me to take pictures from their porch (and generally get in the way) I shall now type their name a few times, and give you a link to their site. Quiksilver, Quiksilver, Quicksilver.

I don't know the surf scene enough to know how important the guys I was hanging out with actually are, but I can tell many of them are really important, and they were all friendly enough to let a stranger just hang out with them.

I had to get up at 5 in order to get up to the North Shore in time for "first light," which wasn't so hard for me because due to jet lag my soul is still somewhere over Wyoming en-route to me, so my body just felt like it was getting up at a normal time.

My GPS totally crapped out on me, the first time I haven't been able to find a place based on its directions (and if I had read the manual, I'd have been fine—I couldn't figure out how to enter an address with a dash, like 56-305 Something Street. As a result I ended up on a spur road about 5 miles away from my destination, in the dark, having to call Jeff.

The day's shoot was great. I don't usually shoot video but since we don't have a second shooter here, the gig was all mine. Jeff's got some cool gear, including custom-made waterproof housings and it's fun to watch him get geared up. He spent a good few hours in the water, during which time I lugged around his 600mm lens and shot surfers and local surfer-watchers alike. Picture for those who like to ogle boys is here, girls with tattoos is here.

Jeff took a break at about 1:00 p.m. and we headed over to a great plate lunch, something I hadn't heard about until our President-Elect talked about it on T.V. The joint we hit today was a bit more upscale than most, very good food, very plentiful, very cheap. Lots and lots of surfers around, including many clearly baked dudes with incredible-looking women in tow.

Jeff pointed out the entrance to where the Lost beach is filmed, pointed out the Foodland grocery store where he saw the guy who plays Locke, and pointed out all the team houses, of which there are plenty. We went to the Oakley house and I talked an Australian photographer through some OS X issues for a while. The house is modern and well appointed, not really what you'd expect from a surf promo house, but definitely in the aesthetic of the Oakley brand.

Because its such a great promotion, each of the team houses is stocked with free beverages from companies like Red Bull and RockStar. I had a free, gigantic RockStar at the QuikSilver house and about ten minutes later wanted to punch a pony in the kidney, the shit is so powerful.

After lunch I drove around the remaining circumference of the island around looking at the water, which was directly outside my window for more than twenty miles before I headed up into the mountains and directly into rush hour traffic, which my GPS then got points for helping me avoid.

Then I started to flag after the day's moving around, but I suffered through another sunset (completely different than yesterday—where the hell did all the boats come from) and another Japanese meal in a place where I was the only caucasian.

Tomorrow I think I'll shoot some video from a hike up Diamond Head, more B-Roll for the video we're doing, and then at night I'll go back up to Jeff and shoot some more talking head of him. This paradise thing can be really exhausting.

Just in case you've decided that you hate me now because of the travel, here's a diversion. I was talking on IM tonight to a friend of mine from the PDN days who is now, with her husband, doing a project where they travel Asia shooting spas. Yes, I said that right, their job is to photograph spas. Then my friend Martin from Apple told me about an expedition a mutual friend from National Geographic is doing where they're taking some eighty people in a converted 757 around the world (in 24 days) to shoot some of the most incredible places on earth. It only costs a hair below $60,000. So there.

Paddling for shore

Paddling for shore, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

God's wading pool

God's wading pool, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.