On the Corner of Porn Street and Porn

Do you often walk into the red light district and think to yourself, "I sure wish these porn shops were closer together!" Are you tired of not having all of your porn stores within 30 seconds or less of eachother? I know I am! That's why there's the corner of 4th street and 6th ave. I went down there yesterday to meet up with some people for dinner, and while I waited found that there were 6 "adult stores." Some were right next to eachother or across the street from eachother, and some were just around the corner. But they were there. And there was a baby in one. But that's it for that moment.

So Monday was a free day, but I used it to work on my project, and today was a project day, but I used it to accidentally pass out on my bed without getting much done. So I figure it works out alright. At risk of sounding like some kind of artsy "lets find a deep meaning in this thing that's actually just a line on a piece of paper" person, I'm going to tell you about my project. I think I've finally got it figured out enough to explain what it's about.

Basically, I'm taking pictures of parking meters all over the city. Or at least as all over as I'm willing to go. I take them in a circle around the parking meters so that I get all angles of it, and when I put them together it almost looks like a movie where you rotate around a parking meter. I'll see if I can get something up of it. What I'm going to do with it is change around the pictures a little bit, so that it looks like we're rotating around this parking meter, but the background is going to be changing the whole times to scenes from around the city. You might be saying to yourself, "Wow, that sounds really awesome. But what does it meeeeeeaaaan!?" That's why I'm writing this.



It is an exploration of place. No matter where you go in this city, there is always an object that is familiar, like a fire hydrant, a stop sign, a traffic light, or a parking meter. I dont know about you, but I always feel like being totally lost really isn't that bad if there's SOMETHING familiar around. Even if it is just a stupid parking meter. Now you might ask, "what about if you're lost in the woods? Trees are everywhere, and they're familiar." And to that, I say "shut up, you're ruining my point." No, not really. I suppose in this case, parking meters can just be a symbol that there is civilization around. If there is a parking meter, you know you're not in some place completely foreign to you. So that's kind of what this project has to do with. I got the idea for it while we were looking at Sophie, the program that the Future of the Book people are making, but I might be able to use Memory Miner for it. I'm not sure, we'll see.

I'm also currently working on another, less meaningful but hopefully still visually exciting project. From what footage I got on the subway before I found out it was illegal to do that, I have enough interesting, semi-low quality (personally I think that'll make it look better in the end) video of the lights passing by outside to make a pretty interesting visual light show type thing. I'll probably make it with Final Cut Pro if I can get it to work, or if nothing else, iMovie. But I do have a problem. I'm not sure whether I should use my recordings from the subway, or if I should put music with it, or both, or what song I should use, etc. So if anyone feels like telling me what to do, that'd be awesome. I was actually thinking of maybe making different versions of it and having people vote, or, for something even more interactive and fun, I was thinking people could send me songs or sound and I could make a customized one for everyone. But I'm not sure if people would want that. Tell me what you think in my comments! Those things are actually pretty useful.

Well, I'm all signed up for a bunch of games for the Come Out and Play Festival this weekend, and I'll be volunteering a little bit for them also. We'll see how that goes. I think that's it for today.