Seeking the World’s Soul

Ah, Moscow: the never-ending grey­ness, the lousy weather, the win­ter depres­sion, the bad air… I doc­tored up this photo in honor of all that. (Sorry about the lack of posts recently, by the way; there’s a bad flu going around and I ended up sick in bed for 8 days straight.)

Any­way, this photo. I shot it two years ago as a stan­dard color image, in RAW for­mat of course, and then started play­ing with it. The light scat­ter­ing of snow and twi­light light­ing sug­gested some­thing odd and murky and vaguely fairy-tale like. The light­ing and my mood at the time made me think of liv­ing in an aquar­ium. I con­verted it to greyscale, applied dis­tor­tion sim­i­lar to a pin­hole cam­era, and then tinted it in cyans. After that, I applied a “paint­ing with light” tech­nique — you cre­ate a new layer in Pho­to­shop, set it to “soft light” and then paint whites and blacks on with a very soft brush at 8% opac­ity. It’s a nice way to dodge and burn an image sub­tly and reversibly.

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Found this at http://www.lokis-laughter.com/ (http://www NULL.lokis-laughter NULL.com/)

The River

One day, three men were hik­ing and unex­pect­edly came upon a large, rag­ing, vio­lent river.
They needed to get to the other side, but had no idea of how to do so.
The first man prayed to Woden, say­ing, “Please Woden, give me the strength to cross this river.”

Poof!
Woden gave him big arms and strong legs, and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours,
after almost drown­ing a cou­ple of times.

See­ing this, the sec­ond man prayed to Thor, say­ing, “Please Thunor, give me the strength.…. and the tools to cross this river.”

Poof!
Thunor gave him a row­boat and he was able to row across the river in about an hour,
after almost cap­siz­ing the boat a cou­ple of times.

The third man had seen how this worked out for the other two, so he prayed to Frige say­ing,
“Please Frige, give me the strength and the tools… and the intel­li­gence… to cross this river.”

And poof!
Frige turned him into a woman. She looked at the map, hiked upstream a cou­ple of hun­dred yards, then walked across the bridge.

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Hav­ing at least a basic pro­fi­ciency in some for­eign lan­guages is essen­tial to trav­el­ing well and under­stand­ing the places you visit or live in. Though tra­di­tion­ally taught in a class­room set­ting, the mod­ern trav­eler has some very inter­est­ing new resources for solo study of a for­eign lan­guage, includ­ing two new web sites demon­strat­ing some very inno­v­a­tive teach­ing meth­ods. … Read more

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I just got pulled as an editor’s pick on Blogged.com! This is pretty much the first site review I’ve got­ten so I’m very pleased.


(http://www NULL.blogged NULL.com/blogs/seeking-the-worlds-soul NULL.html)

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Min­nehaha Park, Min­neapo­lis, is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s a thin rib­bon of a park fol­low­ing Min­nehaha Creek down a nar­row river gorge. Paths run from the Falls until the creeks slows and broad­ens, and floods into the Mis­sis­sippi. In a deep spring flood, much of the park may be under water; in an August drought, the shore can gain 25 feet of beach, as this photo shows. … Read more

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Happy Women’s Day!

Awe­somest hol­i­day ever. Tony gave me a bot­tle of the incred­i­bly high qual­ity, $120-a-bottle absinthe we’ve been ogling for two years at Azbuka Vkusa, and I finally got out to a pub­lic banya (steam baths) with my excel­lent girl­friend Marina. Good but strange expe­ri­ence. Got beaten with oak twigs in what’s got to be a pagan-remnant-ritual/ mas­sage while in the sauna. Jumped in a tub of ice water after­ward. Drank lots of tea and ate very good choco­late. Want to write more but falling asleep at the keyboard…

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Small gallery of heav­ily reprocessed pho­tog­ra­phy, con­vey­ing extra styl­iza­tion, of images shot in Russia.

This pic­ture is of a group of aging Com­mu­nists gath­ered out­side Red Square who I hap­pened across while walk­ing to an exhibit at the Menage. They were almost entirely pensioners.

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