Merry Christmas from Me and the Pops!

Musica

I came across the modern equivalent of a dusty old shoebox full of tapes on the Internet last night. These are a few songs I wrote and recorded roughly 5 years ago when I first discovered Garageband. The quality is shoddy to say the least but it's kind of a fun visit to another time, and some of the harmonies I'm actually kind of proud of. Welcome to my attic. Dust off and take a listen:

Sinner *one of the first songs I ever wrote/recorded.

Whose Face Do You See *back when I lived in the East Village, my neighbor John Newell asked if I would sing a song he'd written lyrics for. Here's what I came up with.

What Is Left Is Love *I was clearly listening to a lot of Coldplay.

Falling *Written for a good friend who was entering tricky romantic waters.

Mama *I believe this was the second song I ever wrote.

Steve Martin, America, Art and the Box

Normally, I'd post this on my Tumblr because it's of a less personal nature but seeing as Tumblr is down for an indeterminate period of time, I'm sharing this here. It's an excellent write up that uses the bizarre 92nd St Y/Steve Martin episode to raise a far more important and pertinent point regarding the role of democracy in art. I'm all for democracy in politics, social order, etc. but where art is concerned, it seems to act in a reductionist manner, leaving us with nothing but the lowest common denominator and in place of democracy, we get mediocrity. Just saying....

Miami Spice

If Miami hasn't got it, they haven't invented it yet.
-Vincent 'Vinnie' DeMarco, Miami Vice
















Andres of Green Tea Films

My first trip to Miami proved to be an extraordinary and entirely unexpected pleasure. Over this past week, I met a remarkable crew of filmmakers, directed my first commercial, experienced my first Art Basel, ran into a boatload of old and new friends, saw a private LCD Soundsystem show, ate and drank, then danced, ate and drank some more. It hasn't been 24 hours since I got home and already I'm nostalgic. Thanks to Max, Violet, Green Tea Films and my Mondrian-poolside-work-bungalow for making this an awesome December so far.

The exceptional Maximillian Chow

LCD Soundsystem @ The Raleigh Hotel















Sean and Tash of Green Tea Films

Southern Exposure

One of the things I cherish about my apartment is the light that it gets in the early to late afternoon as the sun is going down. I shot this today at a moment when the light was bouncing off the floors and creating an isolated shaft of passing illumination. The light in the shot vaguely reminds me of the light in my father's work from the early 1980s, which brings a smile of joy and recognition to my face, even if I'm not showing it here. Tomorrow I leave to work in Miami for a few days, where I hope I will have time to capture a few photos full of warm southern light to share on my return. Until then....

A Maximalist Thanks to the Minimalist Chef

I'd like a Mark Bittman in my pocket at all times, but I'll save that request for Christmas. Right now, I'm giving thanks in advance for my very favorite holiday.

Did I mention that I love the Times layout for this?

The Marriage of Claudia and Peter

My friend Claudia married Peter, her boyfriend of ten years, at Peter's mother's home last night. It was a beautiful and warm ceremony, and of course I photographed (click photo to see more). Now we just have to wait for the birth of their undoubtably beautiful baby, due in April.

A Life On/Off Facebook

Let me state for the record that I absolutely love Facebook. I love using it to keep in touch with the many wonderful people I've met in life and I love the constant exposure to new and interesting content that's shared across my various networks of friends. What I don't love is the seductive yet ultimately meaningless cycle of consumption and instant gratification that Facebook engenders.

And so, my friends, I have de-activated my account. Not forever, but for now.

It's time for me to fill the well again and engage in the slow, private process of content creation rather than consumption. Once I have something to show for myself, I'll return with the hope that ravenous content consumers like me are still out there, standing by to enjoy (or not) the fruits of my labor. Until then, I will relegate my internet presence to the occasional post here and on Persons+Things.

It's November 2nd

Have you voted yet?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-right-world/

New Song : Forgive

It's been a long while since I wrote or recorded anything but I was talking about childhood with a friend yesterday and it led me to pull out my dusty keyboard and lay down this thumbnail sketch of a track on Garageband (sans mic, hence bad tinny recording).

Forgive from Alexis Stember on Vimeo.

Forgive yourself for not being everything you thought you had to be,
Forgive yourself for falling short,
You couldn't save him no matter how much you gave or thought he needed you,
You can't blame yourself anymore.

Forgive yourself for not being everything you thought you had to be,
Forgive yourself for falling short,
You can't make him or any other person your responsibility,
You're a big girl now, not the child from before.

On Relationships

Pool Party, Summer 2010

It would seem that much of what Rabbi Dov Heller, M.A. outlines below would be self-evident and yet many of us, myself included, would do well to remind ourselves of these basic guidelines for finding and creating a fulfilling relationship with long term potential. Keep in mind that this is written by a religious man so if you're an atheist or agnostic or anything else, take the God references with a grain of salt. They don't dilute the significance of the underlying message.

5 Golden Rules For Finding Your Life Partner

When it comes to making the decision about choosing a life partner, no one wants to make a mistake. Yet, with a divorce rate of close to 50 percent, it appears that many are making serious mistakes in their approach to finding Mr/Ms Right!

If you ask most couples who are engaged why they’re getting married, they’ll say: “We’re in love.” I believe this is the #1 mistake people make when they date.
Choosing a life partner should never be based on love (alone).

Though this may sound not politically correct, there’s a profound truth here. Love (alone) is not the basis for getting married. Rather, love is the result of a good marriage. When the other ingredients are right, then the love will come.

Let me say it again: You can’t build a lifetime relationship on love alone. You need a lot more.

Here are five questions you must ask yourself if you’re serious about finding and keeping a life partner.

QUESTION #1:
Do we share a common life purpose?
Why is this so important?

Let me put it this way: If you’re married for 20 or 30 years, that’s a long time to live with someone.

What do you plan to do with each other all that time? Travel, eat and jog together? You need to share something deeper and more meaningful. You need a common life purpose.

Two things can happen in a marriage. You can grow together, or you can grow apart. 50 percent of the people out there are growing apart.

To make a marriage work, you need to know what you want out of life – bottom line – and marry someone who wants the same thing.

QUESTION #2:
Do I feel safe expressing my feelings and thoughts with this person?

This question goes to the core of the quality of your relationship.

Feeling safe means you can communicate openly with this person. The basis of having good communication is trust! i.e. trust that I won’t get “punished” or hurt for expressing my honest thoughts and feelings.

A colleague of mine defines an abusive person as someone with whom you feel afraid to express your thoughts and feelings.

Be honest with yourself on this one. Make sure you feel emotionally safe with the person you plan to marry.

QUESTION #3:
Is he/she a mensch?

A mensch is someone who is a refined and sensitive person.

How can you test? Here are some suggestions
1. Do they work on personal growth on a regular basis?
2. Are they serious about improving themselves?

A teacher of mine defines a good person as “someone who is always striving to be good and do the right thing”.

“So, ask about your significant other: What do they do with their time? Is this person materialistic?”

Usually, a materialistic person is not someone whose top priority is character refinement.

There are essentially two types of people in the world:
1) People who are dedicated to personal growth and
2) People who are dedicated to seeking comfort.

Someone whose goal in life is to be comfortable will put personal comfort ahead of doing the right thing.

You need to know that before walking down the aisle.

QUESTION #4:
How does he/she treat other people?

The one most important thing that makes any relationship work is the ability to give. By giving, we mean the ability to give another person pleasure.

Ask: Is this someone who enjoys giving pleasure to others or are they wrapped up in themselves and self-absorbed?

To measure this, think about the following:

1. How do they treat people whom they do not have to be nice to, such as waiters, bus boys, taxi drivers, etc?

2. How do they treat parents and siblings? Do they have gratitude and appreciation?

3. Do they show respect? If they don’t have gratitude for the people who have given them everything, you cannot expect that they’ll have gratitude for you – who can’t do nearly as much for them!

4. Do they gossip and speak badly about others? Someone who gossips cannot be someone who loves others. You can be sure that someone who treats others poorly will eventually treat you poorly as well.

QUESTION #5:
Is there anything I’m hoping to change about this person after we’re married?

Too many people make the mistake of marrying someone with the intention of trying to “improve” them after they’re married.

As a colleague of mine puts it, “You can probably expect someone to change after marriage … for the worse!”

If you cannot fully accept this person the way they are now, then you are not ready to marry them.

In conclusion, dating doesn’t have to be difficult and treacherous. The key is to try leading a little more with your head and less with your heart.

It pays to be as objective as possible when you are dating, to be sure to ask questions that will help you get to the key issues.

Falling in love is a great feeling, but when you wake up with a ring on your finger, you don’t want to find yourself in trouble because you didn’t do your homework.

HOW WILL I KNOW IF I’VE MET THE PERSON I SHOULD MARRY?

The choice of a marriage partner should not be based on “I get a warm, wonderful feeling whenever we’re together and I want to have that warm wonderful feeling forever, so let’s go get married”.

Feelings, as we have discussed, have no logic on their own. They need to be acknowledged, of course, but they need considerable assistance from your brain.

Marriage means choosing the person you will spend the rest of your life with. This, as you may have guessed, is a very long time to spend with one person.

This person will live with you, eat meals with you, sleep with you and go on vacation with you. More important yet, this person will share your children.

You need to choose wisely. The decision should not be made based on feelings alone. You need to ask yourself some tough questions. The decisions have to be made on solid considerations.

Will this person be a good partner? Is she mature enough to put her own selfish desires aside to look out for what is best for the family?

Is he prepared to be a good provider? What is his track record? Is he responsible enough to get a good job and keep it?

Will this person be a good parent? Can you stand the thought of your children turning out exactly like this person?

They will, you know. Children spend a lot of time with their parents and consequently pick up many or most of their parents’ character traits.

You had better like your spouse’s traits a lot because you will be seeing them again in your children.

If something were to happen to you, would you completely trust this person, alone, with the task of raising and forming your children? This is not a pleasant thought, but it is an important consideration. Not everyone dies at a ripe old age with great grandchildren gathered around the bed.

Sometimes a parent dies and leaves young children in the care of the other parent. If you feel that you would need to be around to correct or lessen this person’s influence on your children, then you are considering the wrong person.

Does this person share your faith in God? God does not give us children so that we can mould them into the coolest, most popular people in school. Our job is to get them to heaven. To do that, we need to raise them believing in God. It is tough to do that if only one parent believes.

Saying “This is right and that is wrong, and I want you to ignore Mommy until you are thirty-five” does not work.

Small children ask about eight million questions in a single day. The answers to those questions go a long way toward forming the kind of adults they will become. Who will be answering those questions for your children?

Does this person you are marrying have sexual self-control? Single people sometimes have this idea that marriage is just some kind of lifelong sex festival and that as long as they have each other, they will never be tempted by other people. Wrong!

There are many times in every marriage when one partner or the other is sexually unavailable – illness, the last months of pregnancy, travel.

There are also times when spouses, just get on each others’ nerves. At times like this, other people can seem very appealing. That can be dangerous, because there are plenty of very attractive people out there who are willing to make themselves available to married men and women.

Do you want someone who has never said “no” to sex? If he is not good at saying “no” at eighteen, it won’t be different at forty. Do you want to worry about whether or not your spouse is being faithful?

These are very important questions, and if you are not comfortable with all of the answers, you should definitely not marry this person.

None if this is to say that feelings play no role at all in a marriage decision. You don’t have to, “Well, I suppose that you would make a good spouse and parent, so even though I don’t particularly like you I guess I’ll marry you”. You need to be happy and excited about the prospect of spending your life with someone. Your brain however must acknowledge that this person as a good choice.

Don’t listen to your heart alone nor your head alone…

Wait until your heart and head agree.

Chemical Exuberance

I have finally, finally gotten my hands back into some HC-110 and it feels remarkably good. This is the first roll of film that I've developed in over four months. Which is crazytown. More rolls to come....

Our Nation's Capital

Lincoln Memorial

Those who know me know that I like to travel. I don't particularly care where I go; I just like the way that travel shakes my seemingly familiar grasp on reality and gives me a fresh perspective on the things that so easily become commonplace or mundane.

My recent goal has been to escape the city, or at least explore one of its more unfamiliar alcoves, each weekend. I'm only two weeks in but so far so good and this past weekend, I finally made it to a city I've meant to visit for years: Washington, DC.

Washington Monument

One thing I figured out pretty quickly is that there's a lot to do in DC, and I only had a day and a half so I took it easy and indulged my feet in wandering aimlessly (and maplessly) for a few hours before my amazingly gracious hosts, Cameron and Joe, met me and gave me a serious taste of DC awesome.

Petty Cabbing It

We started with sunset drinks on the rooftop of the W Hotel, from where I got a rough lay of the land ("Oh, there's the White House! Right there in front of me! And the Washington Monument. And Ooo ooo! I can see the Pentagon over there!") and then we did what none of us had ever done: petty cabbed it down toward the Lincoln Memorial but on our driver's recommendation, stopped first at the Einstein monument where there happened to be a poetry reading (yes, there is an Einstein monument that apparently nobody but a group of English poets knows of. Score!).

Einstein Monument

From there, we walked down to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which I've observed plenty on TV but which really took my breath away in person as one of the most beautiful and tasteful memorials I've ever seen, and then on to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and finally, Joe's rooftop where we BBQed ourselves some dinner and ate with a view on the US Capitol building.

Kind of amazing....

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Other incredibleness that I discovered while in DC, thanks to Cam and Joe?

Marvin's for late night drinks.

Ben's Chili Bowl for even later and truly ridiculous chili smokes and chili cheese fries (just what you need at 3am).

And the entire Eastern Market section of town for Sunday afternoon perusing.

I'm liking you, Washington. Keep on keeping on.

Chiaroscuro

After an extended absence, it feels incredibly good to return to my camera again.

Go Do

There are certain songs that leave me really, really happy. This is one of them.

Fashion Week

Fashion week in NYC is really something else. Generally speaking, I hate both crowds and fashionistas but I have to credit Luke Wooden for making this year's fashion week a whole lot of fun. He was here from California to put on the LnA presentation (for which he also shot the very sexy wall projections) and after party at Milk Studios, all of which were a huge success. Kudos, signor ;)
Watch the video that Luke and Brian put together for Radar.

Video for Vimeo File v2 from The Milk Group on Vimeo.

American Gothic

American Gothic, Martha's Vineyard, 2009 — from the series American Stories Photo © Palmer Davis

I love this take on American Gothic, the original of which was painted near my hometown in Iowa.

(via Flak Photo)

So You Think You Can Dance?

This video needs no introduction. It's just pure awesome.

Permanency and Illusion

The past four months have been a remarkable period of new experiences and reflections for me and I woke this morning with a deep feeling of gratitude for all the things, both painful and pleasurable, that I've encountered in this brief stretch of time. Life is a bizarre sequence of random events that sometimes organize themselves into moments of clarity and when I heard this quote this morning, it resonated in a way that I felt worth sharing. Despite the new agey language and regardless of your larger beliefs, I think there is something to this line of thought that can be good and useful for everyone.

“When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of “becoming” as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don’t seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don’t demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don’t live up to your expectations.

Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms. You know that nothing real can be threatened."

-Eckhart Tolle

Everything That's Best I Wish You

I heard this song, which is actually called Not Supposed to Miss You, for the first time tonight. The musician Frally, who was married to Ben Folds for nine years, does a beautiful job of capturing the complicated emotions that go along with a long term relationship that reaches its conclusion. Not Supposed to Miss You is a fairly recent self-released digital recording off Frally's debut album, The Light.