if you can't be witty, then at least be bombastic

I'm going to be a father!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 25 May 2012 21:28:43 GMT

Trillian found this darling house spider and her eggs in one of the cabinets working hard to guard our food! She is part of our army. I did a few macro shots of her egg basket too -- looks like we're about to have 50 babies!!! Cigars for everyone!

She's about the size of a lentil, her eggs might be the size of pinheads.

Clickenzee to make into a gigantic radiation-enhanced spider

Clickenzee to see mah babies!

Thanks to whafford for being the voice activated light stand.

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Get Roswell's DNA in your house!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:02:15 GMT

Here's your chance to have some of Roswell's DNA in your house (without me mailing you a hairball).

Meet Cat Murdock, the kitten without fear, who was rescued by yagathai during a terrible thunderstorm.

Cat Murdock comes from the same feral cat colony as Roswell and although Roswell's been spayed, her sires were ... prolific ... which is bad for the mouse population of West Philadelphia but good for you if you're looking for a well dressed companion who will wake you up nearly every morning for the next decade. She's spayed, FIV/FLV negative & gets along well with other cats.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!!!

Cat Murdoch is friendly & fearless and currently in Philadelphia. She'll love you and climb everything in your house. We'll probably do the adoption through City Kitties though they don't know it yet, so people who are interested can email or post in the comments.

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Dear Magic Hotel.... DC crash space & photo assistant

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:51:50 GMT

Dear Magic Hotel,

I am going to be in Washington D.C. on May the 27th, 2012 photographing the DC Rollergirls. I need a place to crash Saturday night (I'm coming in the evening of the 26th). Sofa's fine, I'm easy. Cats/snakes/turtles/fish a bonus.

I'm also looking for a photo assistant/driver for Saturday (this is a paid gig) should be someone with a working knowledge of the DC metro area. Love of photography and roller derby a plus.

There's no reason these have to be the same person/place.

North Star Rollergirl Teratoma shows how rollergirls do everything.
Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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update

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 19 May 2012 16:12:23 GMT

I have gotten so hopelessly behind in updating that I am just going to start a new life.

cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:08:35 GMT

I always try and photograph classical musicians the same way I do rock stars. This gets easier when they are rock stars.

With Victoria Voronyansky, Michele Groff Kelly, and Kimberly Rowe (on the harp).

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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Trillian's New Play

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sun, 13 May 2012 21:53:59 GMT

So trillian_stars has a new play which opened last week and closes on the 19th.

It's called Carter's Play & was written by Josh McIlvane who also wrote Boat Hole, Deer Head and a very funny play that the nature of my blog doesn't allow me to name all of which Trillian has been in.

Carter's Play features a play-within-a-play. It's about a theater company putting on a performance of a new play written by the director that's always on the verge of getting shut down for lack of money (so it's actually like a play within a play within reality). The play in question is called Terminal Diner (which I actually think would have been a much better name for the real play than Carter's Play which seems ambivalent without being ambiguous.) Terminal Diner is about Cyrus and Margo (who are Matt and Chrissie in the enveloping play) get trapped in a diner in Kansas during a terrible thunderstorm and flash flood, as the water begins to sweep away cars and cows their personalities become unwraveled in this crucible. As Terminal Diner plays to a number of different crescendos the action will often stop, the characters change identities and the director appear to discuss the action, but the cast is unwravling as well, writer/director Carter is one by one sleeping his way through the cast and crew, including the wife of the theater owner and trying to keep everyone from finding out about everyone else.

The play-within-a-play gives a terrific opportunity for the actors to be able to express a grand range of emotion from the dramatic scenes in Terminal Diner then to the also dramatic but very different "real life" of the actors. If you're in Philly you know what to do.

Show dates: May 9 (preview), 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19. All shows at 8pm, except Sunday May 13 at 2pm

Venue: The White Space at Crane Old School, LP, 1417 North 2nd Street (2 blocks North of Girard, just north of Northern Liberties area).

Trash Day at the Hall of Justice

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:27:07 GMT

I wonder about a lot of weird stuff all the time. I wonder what superheroes are doing when they're not fighting crime. I wonder "if the trash can is full at the Hall of Justice and there's no robot butler around, who empties it?" I figured Batman would empty it because he has an overwhelming sense of practical civic duty. Superman could crush it into a singularity if he felt like it, but I think he's probably always thinking about other stuff. Then I started wondering what Batman would look like if he was carting the Justice League's trash out to the curb and the trash truck had just pulled away. And then I thought of Jared Axelrod, the comic writer & costumer.

And then I knew exactly what it would look like.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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Roswell / Yasbeau Wilce fanfic contest!!!!!!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:46:25 GMT

The third book in my favorite YA series is out & YOU can win an autographed copy!

Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light has hit the shelves and I couldn't be more excited! The final book (or maybe not final if we all clap very loudly) in the Flora Segunda series. Both trillian_stars and I were consumed by the first two books, their wonderful heroine and the crazy, beautiful, weird world they're set in a world at war, Fora's mother is a general, everyone has a secret past and magic is real.

How do you win a copy of Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light you ask.

To win this, write a story (or create a piece of visual art), 350 words or less that contains Roswell plus any of the following:

1. An endlessly large house with uncountable rooms and a magickal butler
2. Chocolate
3. Sparkly Red Cowboy boots with snakes' heads on their pointy toes
4. A secret society of spies called rangers
5. An alternate version of Gold Rush California ruled by the Aztecs
6. A long journey by boat
7. Pirates in very flamboyant hats

Post your story here as a comment in this entry. The contest will be judged by Ysabeau Freaking Wilce herself.

Contest ends at Midnight EST Sunday, May 20th.

Ysabeau Wilce novels photographed with Roswell to enhance value

Some of the past contests, for inspiration:

Erin Morgenstern's Night Circus

Cherie Priest's Boneshaker

Kaz Mahoney's The Iron Witch

Chris Howard's Seaborn

Peter Straub's A Dark Matter

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How to not spend $600 on a grip for your Nikon d800

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:39:49 GMT

Ever since I started using an SLR all my cameras have had vertical grips on them, the grips have extra batteries and some of them have an extra release button. The one for the d100 actually had a freaking MEMO RECORDER in it that attached a .wav file to whatever photo you'd just taken so you could take a photo then say "Mrs. Betsy Johnson, 77 from Memphis TN waving a flag at the Peanut Brittle Parade" and have all your notes in the field. I've no idea why they got rid of that.

Anyway, I went to order the grip for my d800 and the thing is freaking six hundred dollars which is absurd because it's got about nine dollars worth of electronics in it. All I really wanted it for was to hold the extra battery since I never use the vertical shutter (plus, in all honesty it just freaking looks WRONG without the thing). I looked around on the Interwebs and nobody's making an aftermarket grip for the d800 yet (someone's eventually going to make one for about forty bucks).

I had a md10, the vertical grip for the Nikon d200 in a drawer, someone borrowed my d200 about two years ago and never gave it back so it was lonely and useless. The d200 grip has a battery connector that protrudes up into the camera body which meant it wouldn't physically fit on the d800, but it seemed a similar size and the tripod screw was in the right place. So I smashed the protruding bit off with a hammer and it screws right onto the bottom of the d800 and, take this nikon, you can hold TWO extra batteries in that thing -- they won't power the camera, but my d700 grip never rolled over from one battery to the other, you had to take the stupid grip off and swap them out when your power ran down.

So I'm counting this as a win.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

(The cool duct tape is the result of a camera dropping accident at a Dresden Dolls show years ago, not only do I have a vertical grip but I get to CARRY OVER THE STREET CRED from my old camera.)

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The d800 has arrived!

cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:53:18 GMT

I was hoping that my Nikon d800 would show up before the last group of roller derby portraits or before the Amanda Palmer shoot but it showed up the day after. The big difference between this and my 4 year old d700 is that it's 32 megapixels rather than 12. The files are enormous and it's got everybody curious.

Here's a shot of trillian_stars we did in the studio last night and it's linked to the full res 14mb image if you're curious as to how those things look. I'm sure we'll have more in the coming weeks, and a full blown review.

Clickenzee to ENHUGEN

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Busy few days....

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:55:37 GMT

So, it's been a busy few days here at the blimp mooring station high atop Fortress Hennepin.

Saturday I was in New York City with Amanda Palmer doing photos for the new album -- they came out wonderfully and if you supported the kickstarter you got one of them in your email update last night. The others will come out soon. There was much twittering of the events, so if you go back through my stream you can find a sort of blow-by-blow.

That was a really long day with a Top Sekret Shoot tacked on at the end. Estrella-Mar, who assisted (and drove), got the brunt of a lot of that and ended up staying two nights here with us.

Sunday was a shoot for the two new upcoming Ego Likeness albums, the long awaited "East" and a full length I don't know if they've told anybody the name of yet, so I'll stay quiet.

I posted this photo from the shoot as soon as we were done and it, within 8 or 9 minutes, became my most "liked" photo on Facebook, which is pretty remarkable. I do like it.

Hope you're all swell today. Roller Derby Update sometime today on the Roller Derby Tumblr.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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In defense of Expensive Things

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 04:46:57 GMT

So after much preparation and planning and plotting, my friend and occasional co-conspirator Amanda Palmer launched a Kickstarter this week to fund her new album, Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra. She was asking for $100,000 to do this, press, mixing, promotion, etc. And we all knew that she'd get it. It's Amanda Freaking Palmer for crying out loud, she sold an empty wine bottle for $300 once. This isn't unusual.

There are a few things that are unusual though. One is that she raised half a million dollars in two days and another somewhat unusual thing is that one of the Kickstarter rewards is a book by Neil & myself featuring photos that illustrate one of the songs and that this book costs ... one thousand dollars a copy. That's a one with three zeros and it's not a joke. After this happened my inbox started filling up with mail that is on the cusp between "very angry" and "bewildered" - one person writes "I feel like you have sold out art by catering to people who can spend this kind of money," another says (somewhat cryptically) "artists I used to care about, meh," It's obvious that people feel very strongly about this and I wanted to address some of these questions because it bothers me when people are upset.

Firstly, in the name of full disclosure I should point out a few things: I had little to do with the pricing of the book, apart from saying "I think it will be very expensive to make a book like this" and providing some layouts, I'm not sure if they'll use mine or not; I don't get a cut of the book sales, but I will get paid for whatever photo work I do for the album, and it'll be better than I got paid when I did an album cover when Amanda was on a major label, so it's a general pool sort of thing and I have a vested interest, plus I genuinely do want to see Amanda make mad gobs for money as a reward for her incredible talent. If you ask me, she should be able to bask in luxury for the rest of her life for Delilah alone.

This is probably the biggest thing, so I'll say it first:

1) The album, the music, the thing that this is all about is a dollar I'll say that again you can download the album for a dollar. The goal of this project is to get music to people and people can get it for less than the price of a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts. One of the reasons that you can download the album for a dollar is because the people who are paying $1,000 for a limited edition book are subsidizing the cost of the album download.

2) I don't know if my photos are going to be in the $100 art book -- my guess is probably or at least some of thembut I don't know.

3) The buyers get to set the price of items sometimes. This is the way the free market works. Someone puts out a book for a thousand dollars, nobody buys it, the seller eats the production costs and learns a valuable lesson. Just because you want something priced in a particular way doesn't mean that it will be, or that it should be. Picketing Chevrolet and saying "I want a $3,000 Corvette" won't get you a $3,000 Corvette, though it will convince Pontiac to produce the Firebird. Vote with your wallet.

4) Some people have more money than you, they buy things too. Some people have less money than you; they think it's crazy that you'd spend $2.60 on a cup of coffee.

5) $1,000 isn't as obscene a price as you may think. $1,000 wouldn't get me a print from any of my favorite photographers -- Mary Ellen Mark, Anne Liebovitz, Sally Mann, their photos start at $1,200.

6) Don't you dare dare dare say "her husband is rich, she doesn't need to make money". Do I really need to say this?

7) If you don't want a $1,000 book, don't buy it. If you want to see the photos, they'll be at a number of exhibitions along the way. And on top of that:

8) Someone will probably bootleg this book. If you're dying to see it, you very likely will, the pages might be in the wrong order and the images may look fuzzy, but I suspect it'll get out.

9) I've got a ton of photos that you can buy for $10 and you probably haven't.

10) This album isn't worth half a million dollars. This kickstarter transaction isn't between you and the amount of money it's raised, it's between you and the reward you've chosen. Do you want the reward the kickstarter is offering? That's it. Kickstarter isn't a charity website where people ask for money to do nothing -- kickstarter provides tangable rewards for people funding art projects. You pay money, you get something back. If people want to pay a dollar and get an album, they do, if they want to pay a thousand dollars and get a limited edition book, they do. It's not an open guitar case on a street corner. Just because someone's made some amount of money doesn't make your reward for backing less valuable. The only question is is this reward worth the money they're asking for it?.

11) Amanda Palmer works harder than almost anyone I know. She keeps a relentless schedule, she's away from her family for months at a time, and she's almost single handedly re-formed the musician/fan relationship in the past eight years. I realized this long ago when I saw her at a concert say to the audience "take out your cell phones, right now, and text your email address to this number. That way I can get in touch with you directly, without the record company in between us." It was a simple thing, but it was extremely important. She's worked hard for your money.

12) Buy something rare and exclusive, it's wonderful. It doesn't have to be a $1,000 art book, it can be a $3 painting. Put it in a corner in your house that people have to stumble upon to see. When you throw a party and see someone standing in front of it tell them the story "I bought this three years ago at an art show in Pawtucket, the artists name was Eugene...." That's exactly what the person with the $1,000 limited edition art book is going to be doing, and it won't be any less wonderful for you when you do it. I promise that.

This is the story of someone doing something right, working hard for years, being clever, inventing a new way in an old world. I'm happy to be a part of it; thousand dollar book and all.

All the artist, writer, photographer friends I have always say "never read the comments" -- because invariably when there's some great article about something you're doing in the New York Times three comments in someone's calling you an idiot. It comes with the territory. For whatever percentage of people think you're doing great things, there's a percentage, fixed in space, who think you should be welded into a barrel and buried in a nuclear waste dump. I wish it wasn't like that, but if you pleased everyone you probably wouldn't be doing things right.

Sure she's got half a million dollars, but you can still get the album for a dollar, I'm going to.

If you have thoughts -- angry or not, I'd like to hear them; I am, despite the best advice of my friends, reading comments.

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How should I best spend my time tonight?

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:07:58 GMT

Tonight there are three things that I ought to be writing about for tomorrow's blog post. My roller derby travel diary that should go up soon, it needs to get finished and have photos attached, there's also a top sekret project that's not top sekret anymore that just isn't ... known that i should flog (and there's good news about it tonight) and there's also an inbox full of email about the Amanda Palmer kickstarter and my $1000 a copy book.

Of the three I feel most compelled to address the Kickstarter issue, but the other two need attention too. What do you want to read about?

View Poll: what should i talk about tomrrow?

New book

cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:46:00 GMT

So much going on it's hard to prioritize, but I guess the big news is that Neil Freaking Gaiman and I have a new book coming out. As a reward for the new Amanda Palmer album kickstarter. The book is called "The Bed Song" and it's a fumetti about that song.

That's the good news. The bad news (for some of you) is that it's a limited edition and each copy costs $1,000.

Not kidding.

Here's the blurb, and a thumbnail of one of the images.

Extremely limited edition book written by Neil Gaiman, with lyrics by Amanda Palmer, and, most importantly, fine art photographs by Kyle Cassidy. The edition will be limited to 666 signed and numbered copies. We will make our best efforts to give out numbers in the order that the Kickstarter support is signed up for (the earlier you order, the lower your edition number). PLUS a Kickstarter-backer edition of the album on vinyl AND CD, PLUS a signed copy of the art book, PLUS a digital download & thank-you card.

Ever since I've known her, and it's been nearly a decade, Amanda Palmer has really been at the crest of the wave of whatever the record industry was turning into and kickstarting her new album without the benefit of a record company is just another dance in front of a bunch of baffled people in New York who still think things are like they were when they signed Led Zeppelin.

She's going to get far more from her listeners than she ever would have gotten from a record company and, in return, they're getting a whole lot more back. She launched the kickstarter at midnight and, last I checked, it's already half way funded. It's going to pay for the album recording, the tour, it's going to pay for me to take photos of the band. It's a good thing, and this is the way that things are going to happen for a while now anyway.

So ... I have a new book on the way. It's beautiful. It has naked people in it. And Neil Gaiman sent me a script for a comic book.

That's not all, but that's all for now.

Do something special today.

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Rollergirls

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:50:58 GMT

I'm in Minneapolis at the business end of a successful Kickstarter - photographing rollergirls. Spent yesterday crawling around a marvelous ancient building with a bunch of women in skates and then went to the North Star Rollergirls' practice at the convention center, which looks like the inside of the spaceship in Close Encounters -- I brought a LOT of gear and even with a very capable assistant, after hauling it all around all day I feel like I've been in a clothes dryer with a pair of shoes.

Right now I'm in the spare bedroom of Emma Bull & Will Shetterly which is grand, because I've been reading Shadow Unit which is just wonderful in the way that the X-files was wonderful when it was wonderful.

I'm about to get up and do the whole thing all over again today. But I'm going to be chowing down on asprin. The Fabulous Lorraine tells me that today will end up in a hot tub, so that's the carrot.

Be well. Here's an outtake from yesterday. It's Teratoma from NSRG.

Oh, also, I've made a new derby-only blog, it's linked below if you want to follow that on tumblr. Rock on.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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living like a refugee

cassidy@netaxs.com — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:27:02 GMT

Prospero summons the Tempest at Curio's new production.

CLickenzee to Embiggen

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Clark Kent Update

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:33:20 GMT

Clark Kent the formerly-almost-dead cat is doing well! This is from The Cat Doctor's facebook page:

Good Morning Cat Doctor:) Clark and I have great news to share!! Clark went to vet last Saturday for a re-check/progress check and he is doing great!!! The vet was so pleased and happy with his weight which is steady at 9.1 lbs, his mouth and gums are nice and pink...no anemia...so the meds are doing their job:) The best is the bloodwork results...Clark's red blood cells went from 28.7 to 34 which is normal!!! The Bun went down from 76 to 60 and Creat. from 3.7 to 3.5! There is still more work on those last two, but everything is going in the right direction!! Clark started sleeping ON the bed which is major progress too:) The pictures are of Clark playing with a new toy, handmade by his Auntie Inese:) Oh...and he even runs through the rooms just like his sisters!!! Clark sends purrs and headbonks to everyone!!!

Dear Minneapolis Magic Hotel & Assistant Store......

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 02:33:36 GMT

My Kickstarter's fully funded! I'm leaving on Wednesday the 23rd (that's next week) for Minneapolis and I'm looking for two things:

1) a sofa to crash on Wednesday night

2) a voice activated light stand and driver (this is a compensated gig if you find yourself wondering "should I take off work??") - someone who can pick me up at the airport -- and be able to find various places in the twin cities, schlep lights, wrangle model releases, take some background photos & video -- must love rollergirls. Photographer preferred, but no reasonable mad-person refused (ideal candidate would be a photographer who's also on one of the derby teams and knows everybody). This is Wednesday afternoon - evening and Thursday afternoon - evening.

I could rent a car and get a hotel but what's the fun in that?

*** NOTE: couch owner & assistant do not need to be the same person ***

I'm photographing the North Star Rollergirls on Wednesday and the Minnesota Rollergirls on Thursday from there I leave into the wild lands with Moxie McCmurder and the Fabulous Lorraine and possibly Birdchick and things get hazy and wonderful from there. But it will be fun, I can promise.

In other news in case you were wondering what things are like around here....

My life: Sit outside on the porch and read a novel.
Roswell's life: Eat bugs that fly inside the lamp shade.

Either way, we both live like gods.

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Chelsea in 3d

cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:46:48 GMT

Yesterday I got an email from a reader that Jezebel Magazine had posted one of my photos of Chelsea Clinton. As I like Jezebel Magazine I was happy about this and I'd released the image under Creative Commons (it's now her Wikipedia photo). Then someone emailed to say they'd also seen it, but it was printed without attribution. Which made me sad. I fired off a tweet and heard back quickly from the editor of Jezebel who assured me it was an associated press photo. I checked and ... sure enough, it wasn't my photo. This one was yellower, had a shadow on her lip and the background was slightly different although it seems to have been taken at the exact same time.

Photographer Brian C. Janes made a 3D mashup of the two.

It's freaky.

Click to see slightly larger

In other news, my Minnesota roller derby kickstarter will be over in four hours.

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cassidy@netaxs.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:39:22 GMT

trillian_stars has spent a lot of time thinking about the Titanic over the years. As a child her brother corresponded with one of the survivors and I must admit that since I read Raise the Titanic in high school I've thought about it a lot too. So ... we wanted to do something to commemoriate the 100th anniversary of the sinking. It seems like a number that should be noticed. We'd thought of going to Laurel Hill cemetery where at least one of the survivors is buried and having a picnic but it's kind of hard to get to and eventually we decided to have some friends over and listen to music from the White Star Songbook (there are 315 songs on it that all the musicians who played for the White Star Line had to know). So we had a somber fancy-dress party, imagined that we were on the ship and followed the grim proceedings on the History Press' real-time Titanic Twitter feed.

I'm often of the "build it and they will come" sort and I wonder if the people who invented Twitter had ever thought that historical events would be relived in parlors around the world ... we listened to music and yagathai would update us

#officer We are going down fast at the head, the captain's 
predictions may not turn out to be accurate. God help us all.

It was a sobering experience when Yags announced that the ship was lost beneath the waves. At some point in time we all experience tragedy and I don't know if it does us any good trying to understand other people's but I think it does. It makes us, I suspect, more compassionate and I think that we find solace in talking about things with our peers and it's always good, I think, to stretch back and learn about something from the past.

Anyway, it was a nice party filled with interesting people. I took photos of some of the guests; here are two.

Rachel:

Clickenzee to Embiggen

Theresa

Clickenzee to Embiggen

Another of our guests was the miraculously talented composer Melissa Dunphy, although we'd certainly heard her Gonzales Cantata, it was the first time we'd met. She and her husband Matt were charming and somehow during the course of the evening I mentioned that though I had a ukulele, I never played it because I thought the sound was atrocious and I'd probably prefer a mandolin. At this point she mentioned that she and Matt did a whole series called "The mandolin request time" on youtube because she'd gotten a mandolin and figured she'd teach herself to play.

I'm not sure which my favorite is, so I'll link to Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It".

Ace of Spades

and Beat It by Michael Jackson:

So went our lives. Tomorrow Colonel & Dr. Stars are coming over to help paint the porch, I shall finish our taxes and we shall beat on, boats agains the night. I hope your week was swell.

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cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:30:25 GMT

So this week our rosebushes died. Or rather, they were diagnosed with an incurable, fatal viral infection called Rose Rosette and we had them killed -- dug up and burned -- before it spread further. I don't know why I'm so saddened by the loss of a plant, but I am. I don't know how old they were, the one in the back yard was enormous, ten or twelve feet tall and twenty five feet wide, it might have been 75 or a hundred years old -- in any event both of them were here long before me. (I spent some time trying to find a photo of the giant rosebush, I know I have one somewhere, but the only thing I could come up with is this youtube video of my next door neighbor playing annoying elevator music and whistling along loudly with it that I took in order to shame him on twitter.) (EDIT: I did find one photo of Gary walking past the giant rose bush in 2005.)

Rose Rosette is a strange infection that started appearing in the US in the 1940's ... new growth on the plant has an enormous number of rubbery thorns, the leaves are dwarfed, the blooms are mottled -- you can tell that something's not right, but for a year or two it was a small oddity, we couldn't figure out what it was, I thought perhaps it was some interesting genetic misfire, but when the whole bush this year erupted like this our gardner, Wendy, hit the books and discovered the truth. Not only is it always fatal to the roses, but it's contagious. I was in New Jersey when trillian_stars texted to say that she'd found the tell-tale signs of it on the rose bush in the back yard too -- it was oddly crushing and we mourned their loss while landscapers dug them up and took them away.

Click to see larger.

(another shot of it here)

After it had been hauled away I found myself thinking This was never our rose bush, we didn't plant them, they didn't say anything about us, this is an opportunity to plant something together that is us. It's pragmatic, it's true -- now I can plant 30 feet of Venus Fly Traps or belladonna or peach trees or telegraph plants or resurrection ferns and while I'd never really thought one way or the other about those rose bushes their absence is a bigger void than either of us had really expected.

Click to see the rose in all its glory.

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cassidy@netaxs.com — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 18:03:26 GMT

It was five years ago today that I went to see a production of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fell in love with trillian_stars and cleverly invited myself to the cast party.

(We looked like this back then if you're curious.)

This morning she was a superhero gardner and I was dragging studio lights into the yard.

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

Alien Bees 400 in a 63 inch Photek Softlighter II on full power about 3 feet from subject. I really thought that thing would pump out a lot more light than it does, in retrospect, I should have gotten the 800, though it's served me very well indoors.

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Roswell

cassidy@netaxs.com — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:03:50 GMT

Since everyone asked -- you can read Roswell's entire story, starting on the day we found here here.

WARNING: Contains kitten photos and the heartwarming generosity of strangers.

True Story

cassidy@netaxs.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:21:19 GMT

When I first got Roswell she was a feral stray kitten whose eyes were swollen shut from an infection. She hissed & spit and hated people. After her eyes were treated I had to chase her down twice a day, throw a towel over her, wrap her up like a burrito and pet her for 30 minutes. After about four days of this she decided that she liked it.

Roswell trying to decide if this belly rub is unpleasant or not.
Clickenzee to Embiggen!

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a tale of three books...

cassidy@netaxs.com — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:02:09 GMT

Years ago I came across a copy of Desert Legends: Re-Storying the Sonoran Borderlands by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan with photographs by Mark Klett. It was probably in 1994 or 1995 -- my photography was myred in a direction we might call "going nowhere" -- I was doing little still lives and some bad street photography I was, largely, directionless. Desert Legends was like seeing "up" after only knowing about forward, backward, left, and right. It was a collection of essays accompanied by beautiful large format photography of the desert and pretty much right then, I knew what I wanted to do in life. I wanted to take photographs and find words that went with them and told mysterious and beautiful stories.

Fast forward a couple of years and I had a book contract, I was driving across the country working on Armed America, a photo book about people with words and in many ways, I owed it all to stumbling across that book in that bookstore at that moment -- how riddled our lives are with chance....

In fact, while crossing the country, I did a travel diary that was a direct rip-off of Desert Legends and I sent that off to friends & family at home so they could see what I was doing -- by this time I'd long abandoned post-cards as a method of trying to keep people up-to-date on what was happening. I also put a photo of saguaro cacti in the frontispiece of Armed America as a silent homage to the thing that started the thing, I dont' think anybody but me knew that until right now.

And so I had a book come out that did really, really well and I got more or less famous overnight because of it, and people always return my phone calls now and I did a few other things with cool people and the world carried on.

Fast forward a few years and I received an email from a photographer named Brian C. Janes who said, more or less, I was very inspired by Armed America, would you mind if I swiped the concept and made a book about burlesque dancers? -- I'm sure I told him about Mark Klett and how Desert Legends had inspired me and Brian went off and now, a couple of years later, Brian's got a book published and it's filled with pretty pictures and it's beautiful and you can buy it.

Clickenzee to go to Amazon

I've got another book coming out and because I have another book coming out Franklin & Marshall College invited me to come talk about it and after I'd talked about it, they said I ought to come back the following week because there was going to be another photographer there who they'd love it if they could introduce me to; would I like to come back and have dinner with this guy named Mark Klett who did lots of books about the American Southwest?

And so it spins around and some day someone's going to tell Brian C. Janes that they were inspired by his book at a young age and it made them go off and do something wonderful and by then it'll be invisible -- the connection between the world as it will be then and a table in a dusty bookstore in Philadelphia in 1994 under a sign that says "NEW, PHOTOGRAPHY" where I picked up a book and saw the world in a different way.

Me & Mark Klett years after the thing that made the things happen for me.
Clickenzee to embiggen.

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