The Twilight Report

What was 2004? It was a year of stolen and disputed elections in Georgia and the Ukraine, the rise and fall of Howard Dean and John Kerry, the first private space flight and the end of the "X-Prize," disaster in Darfur, prisoner abuse in Iraq, expansion of the European Union, the death of Ronald Regan and a month of flags at half mast, the return of Greek Olympics and a very smug presidential victory. In less political but tragic terms, the worst natural disaster in my memory has occurred in Asia as Tsunami death tolls top 135,000 according to CNN.com.

For me, the year started out as a bleak one in the coldest New York winter I have ever experienced. My mother came to visit me for her birthday. We stayed in Manhattan and it was bitterly cold.

Lowel and Johanna

I took a lighting class at Dutchess which was a blast. Some of my friends from Black and White II were taking the class and I met some other cool people. It was so much fun working with those people, including the teacher, Lowel Handler.

( Read more... )

In Short, 2004 was A Great Year and I have high hopes that 2005 will be even better.

I've been meaning to get back to a story I wrote about some time ago about nin (nine inch nails) some time ago. For those of you who care to read what I wrote earlier here it is: [ short entry about me trying to sell one of my old nin acquisitions on eBay ]. If you don't want to read that, don't worry, it essentially says that I was troubled by the behavior of the bidders to my auctions, apparently nin fans, but in the end I decided to give one particular bidder (a Canadian, so I suspect he talks funny) the benefit of the doubt.

Denmark: My Prison (in focus)

So in the end somebody finally won this auction for four nine inch nails CDs and I send off an invoice, waited a few days, sent a reminder notice, waited a few days, sent an extremely polite eBay message asking the buyer to pay up, or at least contact me, waited a few more days and finally filed a non paying bidder complaint with e-mail, waited a few more days and still heard nothing. I sent an offer to the next highest bidder (our Canadian bidder) and posted negative feedback for the non paying person. The first time ever, I really didn't want to do it, but I felt like I had run out of alternatives. I was planning on re-listing the item the next Wednesday, which was only a couple of days away, since I hadn't heard back from my Canadian bidder about the second chance offer.

The next day I got a message from the winner of the auction apologizing and saying that she had sent payment via PayPal. I checked my account and sure enough I had received my dough. This left me a little uneasy, because I had a second chance offer out there to my Canadian bidder and only one set of discs. I wasn't sure that it would end well if he decided to take the offer, and I wasn't sure if I could cancel it. It all worked out ok though, because I was able to cancel the offer and sent this stern message to the winner (and now paying) bidder:

I really wish you had contacted me sooner.  It said quite clearly
in the listing that payment needed to be received within ten days.  I
was about to relist the item.  Anyway, since you have sent me the money,
I will be posting you your CDs first thing tomorrow.  Thank you for
taking care of this.

...and the next day I posted the CDs. Mind you, all of this was during the most stressful part of my Color1 class: preparing for my final portfolio, so I was already ripping the hair out of my scalp because of work and school.

Denmark: My Prison (out of focus)

I started writing this story out at one point, but the whole thing seemed rather angry, and I wasn't in the mood to sound angry, because I don't think I was particularly. Then I forgot about it, but I was looking at someone's profile on-line yesterday. Boredom had set in I think, and usually I hate it when people have music playing on their web pages, like this one did, but I stopped for a minute to listen to it.

Sound a bit like a bad nine inch nails rip off... I thought to myself I wonder who it is. I found the place in the page where the music was playing. In this case it was actually a music video. I pulled the temporal navigation slider back to the beginning of the video to see if it would tell me who the band was. Nothing there. Then I tugged the widget back to the other end of the song to see if that would offer any clue. There was nothing there too, but in this case it was spelled out for me:



For those of you who don't know, don't remember, or more likely don't care, Trent Reznor's label is Nothing Records. Ahhh... I thinks to myself so this isn't a bad nine inch nails rip off, it's just a bad nine inch nails song. There would have been a time when I could not have accepted the thought. I would not have been able to utter a sentence which included the term bad nine inch nails song. Fortunately, my tastes in music have become less dogmatic, and maybe even more refined. I still listen to nine inch nails on occasion. I think my favorite song has got to be Reptile - I would still like to write a demo to that music - but my devotion is obviously not unquestioned, as evidenced by the fact that I was even selling off part of my collection. And oh yeah... the fact that I listen to Trent on the order of once every few months instead of several times a day as I did back in 1995 (which as some of you already know was the 1985 of the 90s...)

Denmark: My Prison (interference patterns)

A friend of mine a while back essentially told me that my taste in music was, how shall I put it? Well let's just say that my taste in music is apparently "gullible." My initial reaction to this was amusement, because, it is such a silly "Ha-Ha" thing to say. After all how can my taste... my preference... be gullible? You can be gullible enough to believe that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or that this gentleman here owns and can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. You can't be fooled into liking trance or rap or country or any other form of music, either you like it or you don't. Even when I described my taste as being dogmatic, I do not think I would be so insulting as to call my taste in music gullible. Which is how I sort of take this narrow minded kind of statement now: insulting.

Even if you are more "expert" in a subject than someone else it's quite obviously unfair to apply your standards to someone else's taste and expect them to take it as a friendly act. I see nothing wrong with being critical of a piece of art, for example, if you are a movie critic and are not critical enough of Titanic to write a poor review then you are clearly not doing your job (that is just my opinion... Man).

I visited a friend recently in an apartment which she had just moved into, so when I discovered that she had hung up on her wall one of my black and white prints, I was honored. Ahh... was actually my first thought of the prints I gave you, you chose to hang the most cliché. Instead of saying that thought, I simply said that I was honored. Now, admittedly it is easy to say something nice in place of something insensitive in this sort of situation, but pretty much in any situation if you are creative you can say something nice when socializing with your friends, and when you can't maybe you ought not say anything.

I suppose that means I shouldn't have said the last three paragraphs. Pretend you didn't read them.