rodney's weblog

polaroids

After investing large sums of money throughout the year on professional-grade digital camera equipment, the one camera I end up using the most on holiday break is my Polaroid One600 Classic. There's just something fiercely personal about snapping a Polaroid shot and hearing the haphazardly built mechanism inside the plastic camera shell eject a picture. It's also kind of fun to tell people that you're actually not supposed to shake the picture to "dry" it or help accelerate the development process - according to Polaroid.com, shaking or waving the photo can actually damage the image. Writing on the picture with a sharpie also gives the picture an intimate quality that you can't so easily obtain with digital. I am a little skeptical about the longevity of Polaroid film, but that's a problem that can be easily remedied with a scanner.

h2o

I drink a lot of bottled water, and I have this wasteful tendency to open new bottles of water before finishing off previously-dranken-ones. I seem to open a new bottle every time I become thirsty, and once that thirst is quenched (usually only requiring 2-3 gulps), I sort of unconsciously assume that the remaining water in the bottle is no longer good. I think I also still have that fear of drinking my own backwash, a mostly-false theory perpetuated during high school when people often took huge swigs out of each others sodas because they were too cheap or poor to buy their own. In reality I'm pretty sure the majority of the liquid remaining in the bottle is not backwash, unless you're a slob.

The result: a bunch of opened bottles containing perfectly drinkable water strewn about my floor that I eventually gather up and throw out. Maybe I should switch to those 2-gallon dispensers so I only drink as much as I need at the moment.

Definitely one of the most irritating things about being in a house with 5 people are the varying thresholds of heat that each person can handle. Since my feet are like ice right now, it seems like the solution we've settled on is to just keep the heat off. I'm not sure what's worse - the fact that I'm freezing or that I'm too lazy to walk 3ft to put on a sweater and a pair of socks. I'm reminded of those (frequent) nights where I know I should be going to sleep to avoid fatigue the next day, yet I stay up, accomplish nothing, and pay the piper the next day. I guess it wouldn't be home without a little bit of self-induced torture.

nitpickings

I don't know what it is, but Vladimir Ashkenazy always seems to nail the tempi of classical music exactly to my tastes. I have this problem with feeling as if most recordings are always too fast, as if a lot of modern performers and conductors feel like they just have to rush through everything at blitz-lightning speed to show their technical wizardry. Sometimes fast is great - even fantastic - but there are just some pieces where blasting through the hundred some bars in < xx:xx minutes simply doesn't do the piece the justice it deserves.

One thing that immediately comes to mind is Kajaran's and Ashkenazy's take on Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement. Kajaran charges through the piece with some kind of vendetta; when the listener feels like he needs to take a split second to take a breath, Kajaran doesn't wait. Ashkenazy OTOH takes his time and makes sure that every note is given sufficient attention - as a listener, he somehow lets you take it all in. The rich homophony in this movement is key, and Ashkenazy seems to totally get that. Watching the Kajaran video really bugs me, sometimes the music doesn't even match his cues and his arm movements look more like he's trying to swim breast stroke rather than conduct a symphony. Ugh, atrocious. Comparisons below - first Kajaran (total length 8:15), then Ashkenazy (total length 8:47).

ADD anyone?

A scene at a McDonalds on my drive back to Norcal:

Me: "Hi, can I get a Filet-o-Fish, and that's it."
Him: "Ok, would you like anything else with that?"
Me: *repeating* "No, that's it."

* He reaches over to fumble around with something on the next register over, then comes back *

Him: "Ok, so a Filet-o-Fish and a medium drink?"
Me: "..."

china

I finished posting most of the pictures I took in China over November. Take a look.