Sir Grump Munch

November 29, 2005

Headed South...DEEP South.

Since the last entry, I've gone on several scooter photo excursions to the south and west sides of Chicago; I've posted about 110 of these photos to my Flickr account and will post another 30-40 hopefully before the end of the month.

The scooter really is a fantastic way of stopping every block or so on a second's notice to snap a photo, and I like to do this alone so as not to annoy passengers or complicate things with a second scooter. These are poor and sometimes hard neighborhoods where you don't see a white face for miles at a time. The only drawback might be the vulnerability of the scooter, being out in the open makes me an easy target (as opposed to a car where you've got locks and windows and are less conspicuous overall). So far no problems or run-ins, though some of the best, most amazing signs are in areas where there are large groups of people hanging around, people who might not welcome a white weirdo on a Vespa pointing a camera over their head to take a photo of a "vernacular" lettering sample on a sign (especially if they're teenagers). And I don't blame them. So I try to cover ground several times on the chance that I'll find the area desolate or go at a less active time of day (early Sunday morning, etc.)

And speaking of Flickr, I'm going to try to start whittling away at my insurmountable collection of digital photos and uploading/tagging them so that eventually I can start pulling some of them back onto my site here taking advantage of the tag and description data. Especially the sign photos and Chicago photos, many of which overlap. I have 200+ new and pending vegan food photos waiting to be uploaded to this site but probably won't use Flickr for that, we'll see.

Otherwise, I've gone on a few...dates(?) with some interesting girls. I had a personal ad on Craigslist for a while, got a varied mix of responses from there; some good, some bad, many strange. Not sure if I'd recommend it as the best place to try, but that's for you to decide.

I've been going out a fair amount, reuniting with some of my scooter friends. I've also been reading and watching movies when I can, I finally finished Studs Terkel's Working and enjoyed it a whole lot. Highly recommend it. Now I've picked up a copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, one of the first pieces of fiction or literature I've read in a while. Didn't get a lot of liberal arts in college so I've missed out on a lot of "classics" in the canon. I don't intend to read all or even most of them, but I'm interested in this book for two reasons; one being the fact that the brilliant film Pickpocket owes much to it, and secondly because of all the talk of Dostoyevsky in The Office.

I've been wasting a fair amount of free time on Myspace, sprucing up my profile, leaving friends comments, and bitching about the quantity of unbearably-bad DIY pages with music, video, huge photos stretching tables to 2 or 3 screens wide, awful colors/fonts, etc. I've mostly-abandoned Friendster as a social networking site. They both suck in different ways, but Myspace seems to be more popular at the moment. Remember MakeoutClub? I barely do, until just now I hadn't visited that site in about 3 years, I expected the domain name to be for sale.

Recent music purchases: Mos Def and Talib Kweli as BlackStar (finally, after so many years), Husky Rescue's Country Falls, Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (again), as well as some Trojan-y dub tracks from iTunes. Also scored some nostalgiac tunes by way of Wesley Willis, Bad Brains, Nirvana, The Jam, more Dead Kennedys, Prince, Stompin' Tom Collins (aka "The Johnny Cash of Canada"), Pizzicato Five, The Rolling Stones, Cornershop, and more.

I stayed around Chicago for Thanksgiving, spent Tgiving afternoon with Vanessa and we had a simple Tofurky meal together. She was catsitting for a coworker in a modern cinderblock palace that afforded us this nice view of downtown Chicago in the setting sun. Also spent a good amount of time last weekend with Jen, scooter riding, sightseeing, shopping, and general city-dwelling. Goodtimes.

Strangely I've given 3 different "interviews" of sorts (over e-mail) with graphic design students from different classes and places. I feel bad because my website portfolio hasn't been updated in about 3.5 years, got to add some of the Scooterworks / Genuine stuff one of these days... I guess I don't really think of myself as a "professional" designer, though I am by definition, it's how I pay the rent and put food in my stomach. Just feels weird professing to students about "The Real World of Graphic Design."

Posted by pj at November 29, 2005 10:17 PM