T-Minus 1 hour

hey hey hey…

I’m sitting in a hotel room in the middle of the country, waiting for the minutes to tick down to begin a photography workshop. In an hour, I can pick up a loner camera and a freshly formatted card and begin to wander the streets of Small Town America in search of 40 decent shots and a story to focus on for the week.

I. Am. Panicked.

My Plan A story, the one I thought about before getting here and was giddy to find was still a possibility this morning, may be trashed because someone else beat me to it. Which means it was either (A) Not that special a story anyway, or (B), So awesome that everyone else thought so too. What happens when someone else has homed in on my Plan B story? And my Plan C story? What happens when all the real photojournalists get there first? Soon, we will find out.

We’re all panicked, I think, all 30 of these people here with me. The backs of everyone’s minds are suddenly racing with comparisons, and the “What do you do” and “Where are you from” questions have never seemed so loaded.  The consolation is that by now I know enough about my own insecurities–and my strengths–to know how to circumvent the nerves.

“On photography: never let yourself get comfortable.” Someone just posted that on Twitter in what might be the most well-timed post I’ve seen. Thanks, Katy, for unknowingly helping me calm the fuck down just now. The point here is to be out of my comfort zone, to stretch what I can do beyond its current limits. So no, I don’t want to be comfortable this week, and these nerves are something I should embrace, not fight.

I probably didn’t help matters by having four cups of coffee this morning.

So as proof and a reminder to myself that I do know what I’m doing, here’s a set of shots from the great midwestern city:

hello, traveler

I’m home in PA for a week, running around with a camera and generally staying off the Interwebs. I’m making time to post a few shots, though, and dreading the time I’m going to spend sorting the few hundreds shots I’ve already taken halfway through this little break of mine. I think I’ve hit about 1,000 since Wednesday, and we haven’t even gone to Gettysburg yet.

The one above is from the Susquehanna River this morning, taken after the fog had started to burn off. It really, really is gorgeous up here, and I have to remind myself how not-fun it is to actually live here.

Once more, with substance

A few years ago, a friend and I sat down one summer night and watched “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” It was the first in a these-days-aborted attempt to watch all the movies on AFI’s top 100 movies list. I’d seen a good chunk of them already, he’d seen another batch, and there were about 30 that were new to both of us. We got through “Singin’ in the Rain” (#10), “Maltese Falcon” (#23), “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (#30), “Network” (#66) and a few others with the help of Netflix queues and the AFI Silver Theatre, but somewhere along the way we stopped actively attacking the list. (“Rebel Without a Cause” (#59) is playing tomorrow night at Screen on the Green.)

The lesson here? I approach top 100 lists with enthusiasm, and then that enthusiasm wanes. The lists, in short, are like many other aspects of my life.

The last time I tried similar project for books, I settled on the Time 100. It came out in 2005 and had a few main advantages over other lists, such as the good sense to include “Watchmen” and the noticeable absence of Ayn Rand and  James Joyce (I’m looking at you, Modern Library).  That’s as far as I got, though: settling on the list. I think that was about four years ago.

And so, inspired by someone else’s attempt at that good old Time list, I’m trying again. As this journey of 100 books begins with a list, a few thoughts emerge already:

– Two books (“Grapes of Wrath” and “Watchmen”) are already part of my book project photo set.

–Several authors (William Gibson, Willa Cather, Evelyn Waugh) are well-represented on my shelves, but I’ve somehow skipped the particular books on this list.

–I Do. Not. Want. to read “Revolutionary Road.”

–Speaking of movies, the adaptation of James Dickey’s “Deliverance” isn’t on AFI’s main 100, but it’s #15 on the thrillers. I wonder how many other movie/book crossovers there are among these collections? For their Dashiell Hammett entry, Modern Library went with “Maltese Falcon” (#23 on AFI); Time here picked “Red Harvest.” Oh, and here’s “Gone with the Wind” on both, too (#4 at AFI).

–I swear among the 6 or 7 times I was assigned to read “Beloved” between 11th grade and graduating with a BA in English, I actually did read it at least once. But in those five years, that book was so dissected, so ripped apart, so analyzed as to no longer resemble anything worth reading. I want to try it again for fun without having to hand in a paper at the end of the semester. (No book reports here, right?)

–My favorite part about the Time collection is how few books on it I’ve read

And now, the list:

The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral, Philip Roth

An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm, George Orwell (* but I should probably reread this)

Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume

The Assistant, Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Beloved, Toni Morrison (*yeah, probably ought to reread this, too)

The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep, Henry Roth

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

A Death in the Family, James Agee

The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance, James Dickey

Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone

Falconer, John Cheever

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles

The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (*actually in progress now)

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (please note the Web address you are currently visiting)

A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

Herzog, Saul Bellow

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Light in August, William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies, William Golding

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving, Henry Green

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Money, Martin Amis

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

Native Son, Richard Wright

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

1984, George Orwell

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions, William Gaddis

Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (ugggghhhh)

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller (Do I get half credit for reading Anais Nin’s diary?)

Ubik, Philip K. Dick

Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise, Don DeLillo

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

And so I return

Let’s start easy, shall we? Circle around one another, sniffing each other out, you and I.

A summer, in photographs:

Summer is amazing.

Oh, you’re still here?

Hi, world.

In a development that should come as no surprise to anyone who’s met me, worked with me or otherwise dealt with me, this project has turned into the latest of a long list of neglected ideas and high aspirations that eventually crashed into the earth.

It’s the blog equivalent of a piece of space debris, shot up in some lofty ’70s-era NASA program as the pinncale of American engineering. It hung out up there for years, got old, eventually got replaced and then … floated. Floated in space and floated in the back of a retired mission controller’s mind as he drove to the golf course in a Houston suburb. “Now where did I put that thing,” he thinks as he screeches into the parking lot, driving like the shuttle pilot he never got to be. And then his Lexus is crushed under the weight of a piece of space debris hurtling back to earth.

Or, you know, something less fatalistic.

Five movies in a week*

Nov. 16: Let the Right One In

Nov. 16: La Belle et la Bete

Nov. 22: JCVD and Slumdog Millionaire

Nov. 24: Twilight

i: Let the Right One In.

It had an impossibly high rating of 97 percent when I decided to leave work a few minutes early to catch an afternoon show at E Street. (It’s since gone up to 98 percent.) “Terrifying,” they said, comparing it to some of the scariest things Guillermo Del Toro has come out with the last few years. Others were calling it the anti-”Twilight,” a description I could get behind. Plus, it’s in Swedish.

Nordic mystery, vampirism, youth angst…these are all normally things I can get behind. This time? Not so much. I’d really like to see the movie all those reviewers are flouting, because it seems like it would be awesome.

ii. La Belle et la Bete

French! The ’40s! Experimental film! Jean Cocteau! Ripped off by Disney!

In news that should surprise no one with any awareness of pop culture, there’s a Disney movie about this very same story. It is very popular. There is singing and dancing and Jerry Orbach, and it won Oscars. Strip all that off, though, and this was the source material Disney stole. Think they gave credit for it? Hells no.

If and/or when I ever have kids, they’re getting this version first.

iii. JCVD

Speaking of off-the-wall French filmmaking, No kidding, this is probably one of the most fun movies I’ve seen this year. This one and the one below are coming out as the audience favorites from the festivals this year, and they both deserve it. I secretly want Jean-Claude Van Damme to get nominated for this.

iv. Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle does edgy really well. And he does crowd-pleasing family warmth just about as well. This is the first time I know of that he’s done both at the same time, and it’s good. Not spectacular, not life-alteringly awesome like, say, “Trainspotting” was, but a solid good.

v. Twilight.

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Ugh.

I haven’t read the books. After reading about the last one and its not-even-thinly disguised anti-choice awfulness, I lost any interest in reading them.

I had my vampire phase. Every girl I know had a vampire phase. Mine manifested through Laurell K. Hamilton books, which (like every series of everything ever), got less fun to read as the series went on and as I got older. But I still read the Charlaine Harris books, and I’m digging the “True Blood” adaptation on HBO, so there’s still a part of me that digs that stuff. Maybe it’s better to say I had my lame vampire phase, and once I got through it I settled into an appreciation of the better pop culture vampires, which Jezebel has helpfully collected for me. (Spike! Oh I miss you.) All of this is a long way of saying I’m not dismissing the whole movie because I just don’t get little girls and their love for brooding, pale and mysterious men. It’s entirely possible I would have read the Twilight books if they were around 15 years ago, though I’d like to think I had enough sense as a 13-year-old to have recognized them for the dreck they are.

Yeah, yeah, I’m saying all of this without reading them. Because no good source material could have brought such an awful movie from the normally great Catherine Hardwicke. Can someone explain this to me? What the hell is up with the massive box office for this movie? Great, so suddenly Hollywood realizes women and girls go to the movies, too. But ladies, if you keep turning out for shit like this, we’re not going to get anything better. This is how the boys got “Punisher” and “Daredevil.”

As I sat watching the prom scene at the end and itching to get the hell out of there, I realized that certain things are best left to die at the age of 17, including affection for bad vampire books, chaste boyfriends, and melodramatic swooning. I need to get drunk or something, because the brain cells that thought seeing this was a good idea deserve to die.

Book project

I’m on a roll, originally uploaded by erin m.

Another Book Project entry. Photo-wise, I think this might be my favorite so far.

endtimes

The trailer for “2012” (Cusack alert!) concludes with a demand that viewers “Google search: 2012.” Being a fan of tabbed browsing and already watching two videos and reading to long-postponed articles, I did just that and opened up yet another tab to complete Roland Emmerich’s command.

It’s actually a pretty smart marketing technique. You’ve only got 30 seconds to sell your movie about the prophesied end of the world, so go ahead and spend that time showing off some kick-ass special effects and leave it up to teh Internets to fill in the gaps on the apocalyptic implications the movie’s trying to exploit. Right now, the search is turning up the Wikipedia entry, and a site called survive2012.com, both good primers as far as crazy Internet half-truths are concerned. They’re enough to egg on the endtimes-minded fanboys who would Fandango their movie tickets right now if only they didn’t believe the world was going to end before opening night.

What is most awesome about this the current fifth entry for the “2012″ Google search, this headline: “US election: Palin contemplates presidential run in 2012.

Halloween! Yay!

, originally uploaded by erin m.

Halloween photos live here.

And then there’s this

A recorded-off-TV version of this took up a quarter of a homemade Halloween VHS tape in my childhood. It was second or third, and so to watch the rest of the tape I had to go through it. Every year, I sat down to get all Halloween-y, and every year this scared me like nothing since ever has. No movie, book or TV show I can imagine will ever have the same effect that this horrible cartoon had on me between the ages of 7 and 12.

I give you Garfield.

The trauma starts around the 3-minute mark.

Twenty years later, I’m realizing that the trauma also ends around the 4-minute mark. That’s it? Note to 7-year-old self: It’s ok, really. You’ll face worse things in life than 60 seconds of scary pirate animation.