by the man-in-plastic – j. kiely jr., photographer, pilot, diver and sometimes nerd
Driving home tonight past the landmark Bubbling Brook ice cream stand I saw smoke ( or something ) coming from behind the building. Not sure what it was, but I let the WFD know about it anyway. Might be nothing, just did look strange and caught my eye.
Woke up to snow and it’s blowing pretty good right now. First things first, a bit of shoveling before prepping to head out.
So I decided to do some ‘old school’ ripping of VHS tapes into digital using the EyeTV as posted earlier.
I’m watching a college road trip video to Disney from 1993.
Feels strange to watch this right now. Some parts are funny though…
For some unknown reason I’m sitting at the computer ripping a few old VHS tapes into MPEG format using EyeTV. This is taking some real time, so I got to thinking….
Drove over to Patriot Place in Foxborough a bit earlier this evening. The snow cover on the roads was pretty mixed. It was obvious that plows had been around, but the pavement was by no means black. With flurries still falling I was interested to see what the crowd was like at this new “lifestyle center” outside mall.
After a quick stop at the ATM to deposit a check I walked around for a few minutes. This is an outdoor mall, it’s pretty cold out if it’s snowing. At one point I waited for five women toting Victoria Secret bags to cross in front of me. There was only one relatively safe place to walk and they filled it for a moment. Moving over to the crowded Bass Pro Shop I discovered something amazing. It’s a huge store, no doubt, but they have opened a restaurant inside the store. The menu looked to be standard pub fare, but as I looked into the place I could see the typical stack of booze bottles behind the bar. Amazing.
When did it be come normal practice to hand out liquor licenses to outdoor stores? Jeepers, Bass Pro only seems to have 10,000 different styles of fishing rods and 100,000 different lures. Love the big aquarium in there, however, that whole forest scene in the middle of the place is cool.
That said, Patriot Place is rife with places to get a drink. Now late December with snow falling might not be the perfect time to do this but I propose a Patriot Place Pub Crawl when the time is right. Start at CBS Scene, and head South. There’s at least 7 different places that serve – including Bass Pro – and a free shuttle that takes you from one end of the complex to the other.
Could be fun.
Way more fun that editing video clips from the past!
(update found image on a street in NYC in October – adds something to the mood of the electorate at the time I wrote this post – j.)
I am really loving this campaign season now.
Palin is political kindling, it’s amazing to watch, looking forward to her speech tonight, Wednesday.
For me, however, the upcoming debates will make or break the whole deal.
In the meantime some links to visit. Keep y’all smilin’
Real fun….
http://www.peteyandpetunia.com/VoteHere/VoteHere.htm
Even funnier…
http://www.youtube.com/user/SaraBenincasa
More than slightly biased…
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/3671/the-reform-candidate#comment-1994895
So she said and I heard her well enough with the second utterance. Given why I was there and what I was doing it was as good a way as any to get my attention. Still, for some reason I wanted to tell her my name. I resisted and took a snapshot of her and her classmates from a bygone decade in a fun embrace.
It’s their reunion. 30 years by my count.
So it goes.
(For the most part this ‘blog of mine has been a testing ground for a number of things. I like the fact that I can push snapshots from my iPhone to Flickr and then push them directly here. That’s pretty cool. There are many ways to do this and if good old Twitter can stay up for more than a couple of hours I have a mind to play with a couple of Twitter-centric solutions to this. I’ve barely started to ‘blog and now I’m drifting towards micro-blogging. I guess it’s all a big experiment)
Today – it’s a bit of reflective writing.
If you didn’t know my name you would naturally see me as a photographer Saturday afternoon. Draped in a pair of Nikon D200 SLRs with impressive glass attached to each, I certainly cut the cloth of a photographer and that would be the case. I realized for the umpteenth time that what I do often is seen by the rest of the planet as who I am and some days it is the same thing. This weekend it also dawned on me that it was the first time in about 14 years that I was not running around as a community news photographer documenting the right of passage that is high school graduations. I actually enjoyed many of those graduations. I did. It is the pace of the modern newspapers deadlines and staffing foibles that changed the equation for me. For decades the community news photographer was asked to be in multiple places at once. Part of the game. In the last few years the equation became even more unbalanced. I truly no longer miss it.
I have much to write about my musings in the area of “the photographer” and life as it goes. More to the point it is something I think about and have thought about for many years. Some of it has to do with the act of being there and being a witness to something no matter how large or trivial but not really taking part in it. While books have been written about the role of the observer in any given situation and how that changes the very situation itself, but I’ve never come across much from the position of the observer.
The feeling of being on the other side of life’s glass partition. Separated by the lens, yes, by your actions as a photographer, yes, from the rest of life’s tribe. I’m not sure I’ve quite figured out how to describe it. It may be a particular case of my own making. A distance I have honed to allow myself to be there without the mental entanglements. Not quite sure exactly.
Somethings more to ‘blog about.
Happy Monday!
