Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Ingmar Bergman

Watching the shiney lacquered jitterbug pixels Ingmar Bergman interviewed by Dick Cavett watching "Wild Strawberries" close up discussing the whiskey loving actor Victor on the Island. "You see your pants?"

His light use of English, Cavett sputters questions - "did you learn anything from totally protecting the actors? a special emotion?" - by cutting it off, we did not try it, not created out of pressure, it just came.

We are back with BiBi Anderson. The sense of the artist, just a sense.

After the Seventh Seal Ingmar ended his chess game with Death and guess who won? Bill and Ted played Death and won at Battleship, Clue, Electric Football and Twister.

Perhaps there was silence in heaven.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Cool Mashup of your online subscriptions and feeds

It's a cool tool kids, but like the webintelligentsia are saying it is a terrible name: 'profilactic.com'. Hopefully someone will buy them or fund them to get a new name. Who knows one day it could be the standard by which all others are judged as is said -

http://www.profilactic.com/index.jsp

Before and After House Renovation in Shoreline, Washington

Before
Before, Renovation, Shoreline, Seattle, Washington

After
After, renovation of Shoreline, Washington house

This home improvement renovation just cheered up and modernized this house! We hadn’t had a chance to hang the art properly yet when the 'After' photos were taken, but I think you see the difference in how the lighting warmed, cheered and brightened up the place. Also we re-positioned the sofa and chairs, giving an improved flow into and around the living room. The vintage blue Queen Anne inspired library chairs the homeowner already had purchased and now put to use!

They hung the larger more colorful art in new locations, which is now the first thing you see coming in the front door (on the right out of this photo). It is so welcoming everyone wants to be in this room now, instead of instantly wandering into the media TV room.

The dedicated husband and wife team striped the popcorn ceiling with a pancake spatula and a water sprayer, covering the floor with the plastic you see in the "Before" photo at the top. They wore masks, and carefully mopped up anything which was not caught by the plastic. Once finished the new pot lights and ocular lights were hung by our electrician.

I had the couple purchase matching custom-made, simple oak book shelves for storage (see the "After" picture to the left and right of the fireplace). We kept them short, not going to the ceiling so they would not appear looming over you while seated. We faux painted the white fireplace to look like a pale and aged red brick in under 1 hour.

We also painted the interior of the house a light coral color - changing the color, warming it up made a huge difference. The homeowner was truly afraid of making a mistake color and nearly all surfaces were white, white and more white - painted or otherwise. Calling the color 'coral' instead of 'pink' helped a lot to sell the idea of something other than white.

The torchiere relocated to the media room leaving more space here in the main room where it was needed; the yellow sofa, and large TV set we moved to the completed media room.

The lady of the house told me that no one ever wanted to sit in that cold living room. Now people sit and talk comfortably and you can see everything.

In other major changes we added a dining room, the hot water heater was once in the center of the house, we dropped it into the basement, replacing it with an automatic heat on demand style water heater. This expanded their useful space quite a bit. Since they had no basement the space for the heater had to be dug out and a small concrete floor and utility stairs poured. Diging out the hard packed soil was more difficult than first imagined – but with friends and family, it went fast.

They engaged in a large number of improvements, including adding a new roof. The lights need to be focused in that quick shot I took. We are looking for a suitable living room table, and continually try to pare things down. It’s clean and more than livable now, it is a pleasure.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

What Annie Leibovitz learned from John Lennon

Leibovitz:
"What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone. You're not there in the room talking to someone about something else while you're really trying to take their picture. You know, talking about the weather or the Knicks game because you're trying to pretend you're not really taking pictures. I always think that's funny. We're not really taking pictures here! This will make you relax! Lennon was very straightforward and helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well."
http://www.powells.com/authors/leibovitz.html
Annie Leibovitz Puts Down Camera, Talks
Dave Weich, http://www.Powells.com