The White Rabbits definitely stole the show for me.

AND... most of them are basketball fans! Whooo would have guessed it?

I must say that Hamilton Leithauser of the Walkmen has quite an overwhelming stage presence to match his overwhelming name. I can't say that I like either very much, but you can't deny that he's certainly a performer, but perhaps not in a very appealing way. If you've never seen them live, imagine Bob Dylan in a three-piece suit, shouting, no, screeching words thoughtlessly arranged in desperate attempt at being recognized as some kind of an indie idol. Sound enticing? I didn't think so.

Did/does anyone listen to Dylan for his angelic voice? Yeah, not that I know of either. As one reviewer at Pitchfork writes, Leithauser "has apparently been studying up on the Bob Dylan guide to pronunciation (M Is for Mmphmblgmbn!)"

Haha. Quite accurate, if you ask me.


I know, Cho, I know, but music is fair game, despite art being subjective. We've been over this.

Yeah... this show was two weeks ago. I'm the worst.

(The walkmen... drummer and front man)

I know I'm a week late in rounding up my Virginia posts, but this last one is nothing less than great. As you can see, it has nothing to do with my photography, which is a bummer because it is better than all my VA photos combined.

Everyone knows how much I love exciting, quirky, awesome people, just doing their own thing, living in their own definition of reality. Well, I met the epitome of that in Reston, VA, in the wonderfully brilliant/insane, patented iconographer of the AOL running man.

Dino is amazingly talented in so many things from drawing icons to locating and reselling vintage mod furniture. There are countless Dino stories I can tell, just in meeting for a short amount of time. Example? About a year ago he gave up his cell phone in light of using pay phones all over the world, ending up in Mumbai as his unplanned, last pay phone call.

Anyway, the above is a screen shot of his attempt to auction off his AOL job for a dollar on eBay. Why do this, you ask? Well, he hated his job, but AOL couldn't fire him, because he was the one that created their entire look. He once even told a superior that he couldn't possibly make a deadline because he didn't live on the same space and time continuum that said boss did.

Neither one of these events got him fired.

I'm almost positive you will not be able to read the above, so if you've come this far in my post, you will have the luxury of enjoying its conceptual brilliance as well as its absurdity. You may also unfortunately notice the lack of a "Buy It Now" button, which I was sad to not see as well.

Heading: AOL JOB Graphic Art Designer Position America Online - (eBay item 110168540255 end time Sep-19-07 17:52:02 PDT)

Body: A prestigious Senior Designer JOB is yours now for pennies on the dollar and with no reserve. This is Big. This is up there with the Yahoos, the Googles, the Adobe Systems, and even those fancy start-ups in downtown San Francisco! Seriously. The upper **k plus bennies. I will even throw in all my personal belongings, and the 'cotchkeys' that I have collected over the years, basically everything within my pod walls that is not nailed down or chained. And with some "Sweet Sweetness" I could be coaxed into throwing in my Rossi 45R Burr Grinder, and my new Sacco Espresso Machine. And even set you up with some pretty cool co-workers, get you fit in nice.

I enjoyed my years in company, and just felt it was time to let her go out into the wild, perhaps someone out there will appreciate her as much as I did. I put a lot of time into this one and I hope it shows well.

'Strong to Very Strong' ability needed to maintain, achieve and keep this position and it does need quite a bit of attention. The usual Commercial Art needs like Illustration, Logo Development, Layout, Light animation and other stuff, you know, and of course the attention span for meetings, personal time management, project management and other things that are acrobatic for most artists.

Cheers,

Mediascapegoat

Ps. Just put the dot com after the name. Good Luck.

^ (just an aside, mediascapegoat.com is Dino's website which received a spike in in-flow during the two days it took AOL to realize the ad was up and to call eBay to take it down.)

From DC to Fredericksburg to Manassas, my final stop en route back to Pittsburgh was Leesburg, VA. It was a quick stop as I had only one objective for this small, colonial town:

Peanut Soup.

I'm going to cut to the chase and just say that it tasted like milk-thinned Peter Pan peanut butter. I only say Peter Pan, because it has an odder consistency and more sweetness than the other brands and that was exactly this flavor. Why I thought it would be any different, I'm not sure, but I can't say that it was one of my favorite culinary endeavors. Nonetheless, it was worth a shot.

Imagine being one of 900 Confederate men patiently waiting for over 10,000 Union troops to come over this hill at Manassas.

(Shot taken from the old Stone House which served as a field hospital during both Bull Run Battles in 1861, then 1862.)

Isn't it always about slick rhythm and smooth chops?

For more information on this photo, please contact the photographer.

(My photo opportunities courtesy of Buckley and the guys at Apple Music in Fredericksburg, VA.)

Ok, so leg 2 of "Adventure DC" was in Fredericksburg, VA. Marble-sized hail kinda put the shooting day to rest, but to keep within the bounds of productivity, we moved our business meeting a few hours up and relocated it from an office setting to the friendly neighborhood pub. It seems that my "business meetings" since I've come home from Asia have been a lot more fun than what I remember prior. The killer thing too is that I am just as productive during as I ever was before, but it's the decisions my brain makes post-meeting that sometimes fall into the, "Oi" category... nothing regrettable, just logic-less.

This shot is a product of a post-meeting, logic-less wandering through Fredericksburg and a stop at the local pharmacy. Not bad night photography for a small town and a photographer who had been enjoying Bell's Two-Hearted Ale for a majority of the evening.... a favorite of hers in the hoppy category, might I add.

My "artsy freak" (name lovingly given in a Blitzkrieg-esque IM assault from America's #1 heckler) take on the escalators at the Dupont Metro station.

I could have flipped this reflection, but I kinda like it upside down. You don't see too much of anything being turned on its head these days, and I'm sorry Mr. Lincoln, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't think you mind breaking conventions though, so I hope you are okay with it.

By the way, you look great on my brand new pennies - ya still got it, Abe... just don't shave the beard.

Not my favorite monument, but a nice contrast.

This is a little known fact, but these pretty little things were actually to blame for the chaos in the pacific theater in WWII.

Ok, ok, just kidding, but that would be... interes...well, stupid. The real story about the cherry blossoms is that we banked about 3,000 from a dude named Yukio Ozaki, mayor of Tokyo, in 1912. It was a gift to strengthen the growing friendship between Japan and the United States, but as everyone knows, ended up being a fairly futile gesture in the buddies department, twenty-some years later.

However, the US did send Flowering Dogwoods to Japan in 1915 as a reciprocal gift, but this is where I'm thinkin' we had some problems. Nowhere in my 10-minute research could I find the number of trees sent to Japan. Hm. Maybe we short-changed the Japanese and THAT's where they said, hey, this sucks, maybe this Hitler guy isn't so bad... he has a lovely garden... and as I write this, I'm really hoping none of my former history professors read this, especially you, Jenkins.

Anyway, today, more than 3,700 cherry trees are planted around the Tidal Basin, bringing countless visitors to DC for the two weeks in late March and early April for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival - all because the Japanese wanted to be pals.

Yeah, I'm lame (^), but deal with it. I was quite happy with this shot. It's not that the colors are great, or that the composition is great, but that the content is great. That beside the point though, how can one not be happy with drive-by shots?

Since I already admitted to liking shiny things and occasionally wearing pink, I might as well say, that I can be a sap too. Luke, I'm sorry to shatter your illusion, buuuut it's too much work to deny it and don't get me wrong, I'll still kick your butt if it's necessary.

Oh hey... whatcha got over there? A taco?

All right ya jagoff, I'll get my own damn taco.

So it's almost a shame that I post this photo above the below photo, but unfortunately, I've been, um, disinclined to post my work within the last two weeks. Not that I didn't like it, just that I didn't find the stories that interesting. Ok, that's a lie, but fuhgeddaboudit.

The good news is that I have new babies. A solid 85mm prime and a handy-dandy extension tube. For those not photo-oriented, an ET is an alternative to directly buying a lens that was designed for macro photography. All you do is twist it onto your camera body, grab a lens and away you go. Granted, not all lenses work with it, but that really doesn't matter.

I wasn't feeling incredibly inspired but I really, really wanted to play, soo I thought of things around the house that went with a comedic line or some sort of silly story. Now mind you, this was all macro photography, so I was kinda limited in what I could do. I came up with the following:

1. The brass goose my mom dropped on my head when I was little.
2. The coffee table that still has my little 6-year-old's teeth marks in it.
3. My collection of cool hotel keycards, however, vetoed because I could write a book from all the stories packed into those suckers.
4. Some beautifully crafted jewelry I picked up in an awesome Thai market for three bucks - which goes with a haggling story at its best, might I add.

and

5. The newest addition to my Enzo Angiolini shoe family. I don't own many shoes, but the ones I have I love quite dearly. These. Are ridiculous, but I love them: twenty bucks too!

But anyway, here's the story: Linda and I were wandering in DSW when this man, wife in tow, approached us for our opinions on his selection of a dress shoe. Linda immediately says, "Oh, I don't like them." He then looks at me, I look down at the shoe and say, "I don't really like them either, but I spent the last few months working for a fashion network and all the guys wore them."

Which would have been a perfectly acceptable answer, had I not been dressed like an idiot. These sequined, quaintly obnoxious ballet flats, some tight, worn bootleg jeans, a zip-up hoodie that Linda bought for my brother about seven minutes prior, which was about three sizes too big WITH the tags still on and was only on me because I was too stupid to bring a coat, and last but not least, a French braid that by this time of the day, was just shy of disaster.

Eek. Well, for whatever reason, the poor sap listened to us and ended up purchasing a much more mundane shoe. In case you were wondering, this guy had big feet and was trying to wear a lengthy square-toed shoe, which, is the equivalent on the absurd scale of girls above a size 7 wearing pointy-toed stilettos. And by the way, if someone can give me one good reason those shoes are flattering, I will go back into this post and write: "In my opinion" for every one of those statements...

If you're wondering the same about my shoes? Craftsmanship, ladies and gents, craftsmanship.

T-funk and I immediately got off to a great start:

"Hey, are you the girl that shot the Wailers last summer?"
"Yeah dude."

Chalk that one up to some music scene street cred.

Haha, but man, this guy is one of the most exciting bassists I have ever and probably will ever photograph. This dude rocks out so hard that I actually wished he would just slow down for 30 seconds and stay in the frickin' light... and I am NEVER one to discourage a good, solid rock-out. Not only am I pretty sure that his gold shoes walked every inch of stage left, I had to assist him, post-show, in locating his dread band, lost mid-crazy-headbang.


Really, there's so much to say about this guy from both an audio and a visual standpoint that I can't say anymore except: Yeah!!!

So I walked into Starbucks in Shadyside a few weeks ago with only my standard expectation of a decent cappuccino and a surprisingly good slice of blueberry coffee cake.

However, I was treated to the pleasure of meeting one of the most reassuring breaths of fresh personality I have encountered in awhile. Walking past the little preparation station, we were softly greeted by one of the employees, who flashed a smile of modest confidence from behind the espresso machine and went back to steaming some milk. As I unwrapped my scarf and took one last gander at the menu (uh, duh, my ritual and sometimes purgatorial "hm, maybe I want something else"), I was still quite enamored with the energy coming from the left corner. This chick had to be cool, perhaps some kind of artist ... and wait, what was she doing brewing espresso at Starbucks?

After Matt and I finished talking shop and got up to leave, we took a detour to the exit by paying our espresso-friend a visit.

Turns out that she is one hell of a talented girl, a musician whom Pittsburgh has certainly never raised before. Her name is Sonji and I think that she's got somethin' goin' on.

In lieu of focusing on my colloquial dangling of prepositions, check out Sonji's jams.

There is nothing better in an architectural photo than linear perfection. I think this photo is pretty close to my definition of that concept, though I can't take complete credit for the shot.

Switch to my History Channel narrator voice:

Constructed in stages from 1892 to 1914, the two main sections were designed by popular Chicago architecture firm D.H. Burnham and Co. Home to Chicago's legendary department store, Marshall Field's, the piece became known around the world for its size and for its delicate atria, including a thirteen-story sky-lit atrium in the northwestern corner (shown above) and five-story Tiffany & Co. mosaic atrium, comprised of 1.6 million pieces of favrile iridescent glass, on the southwestern corner.

Though Marshall Field's was bought out by Macy's and officially renamed "Macy's on State Street" in 2006, all of the original Marshall Field's plates on both the interior and exterior remain intact.

Annnd back to normal me:

I know it seems like it's just a giant Macy's, but anyone who appreciates early nineteenth century architecture really shouldn't miss this anomaly of a department store. Heck, I'm not really a shopper, but I had to explore every floor, though I think it was mainly to check out the different vantage points - orrr that's what I'll tell myself.

For the record, I bought nothing.

Going to Chicago without getting a deep-dish pizza is like going to Pittsburgh and not eating a Primanti Bros.' sandwich. Unbelievable, I know, but yes, it is as big of a deal.

This little ditty is a Giordano's pizza paired with a Goose Island draft.

No longer a Chicago virgin, I figured I'd pay commercial homage to Mr. Harry Caray.

Though, in the world of sports broadcasting, Myron could kick his butt any day, but I guess it's not really fair because Mr. Cope was blessed with the better sport.