How to Eat Oatmeal from textism. This guy can write.

I came back to the lab....Salon B only to find it locked and the dim hope of a dark sliver of carpet I saw though the crack in the door and the non-reponse to my knocking. I called the front desk from their own phone, reaching over the counter to talk to "frooont de-esk" and hear her say, "I'm right behind you" and hear it echoing in the phone like in "Brazil" where Archibald Tuttle comes through the door. She says the security guard will be down to meet me. "I'm workin over der an I can't get in. S'posed to be a guard or sumpin, right?"

So this minivan pulls up in the spot where they load your bags and sits there. Between me in the lobby and Solon B across the way. "He'll be down any time noo'ow." So I looks at him. Can't see inside but he does seem to be sittin there. I don't know who it is just then but I start to walk slowly out the door. I walk right up to the baroque French doors and kick one of them open with my stride when it gets 2 inches from my face. There's some goons vacuuming the red carpet. It's 2:27 am. It's freezing-desert-air-escaping-from-the-earth cold. I'm a lone Caucasian male, approximately 6'2, wearing what appears to be an orange dress shirt. I walk, almost sideways partway toward the minivan and I start to see some movement inside. It's a hand. It's beckoning me thither. The person inside is apparently the one here to help me but refuses to get out of the van.

I walk over and a big heap of a man scratches out his throat: "You da one dat call for security?" I says yeah, "I'm working in deerrr" Nice an easy like, so as not to arouse suspicion. "Well, lemme call number four!" he says and gets on the horn. Four answers and the guy looks at me like he's handin me my own turds because they had fallen in his lap. But what's he thinking? Hell, I know they's supposed to be in there 24 hours. The guy knew also, the "head of security" was leader of a rag-tag fugitive fleet. You could tell he was half-confident in his man -- his men don't abandon their posts but that don't mean they're not fuckin incompetents. He's half-ready to sell him down the river to appease the client before him.

It was so-an-so. Number 4. The skinny one. The guy who sits in this dark box all night. He was standing there with his back holding the door open for me to walk in side. "You friggin remember me! Do we need to dispense with the formalities." "Well, ghurumbalmuffamulata." "Ok, my badge is over here. By dem laptops."

So I'm back to my 'puter, I see one of the things don't have a dark screen and I say, "You can finish up whatever you were doin on it. That's cool." And as if (because) I'm rubbing his nose in something he didn't do as penance for something he did do, I make like I'm gonna forgive him this one little oversight, a boundary crossed but not broken. I kinda feel for the guy.

After all, I just wanted to get my smokes. This typin' is just covering up for the fact that I just wanted to get my smokes. I'm happy that the only person we really bothered was his fatass dickwad manager.

davep

Oh, can't sign off yet. I just got up 'cause I had to see what it was that's makin all those hypersonic screeching noises (we got a TV in here) - (but I thought the guy looked like an amature HAM radio enthusiast) so I go over and there's a big beautiful deer, a huge fuckin antler farm on the TV. Wow, this guy's watchin nature shows. But there's nobody talking. I strain my ear to hear the words of a benevolent narrator but nothing. Then, BLAM the buck falls. And the guard says, "Oh shit, she dropped him. She dropped him right there. That's one hell of a good goddamn big buck and she done dropped him". (He's a bow hunter of course... (One nice thing about someone telling you that they're a bow hunter is that you really don't have to say anything too that. They don't expect it. Really. Bow hunting is a little deviant no matter what side of the aqueduct you come from.) and he's giggling and sayin' "holeee sheeit" just like the hunters creepin up on the carcass.)

I think I'm gonna play "Clementine" by Elliot Smith over the room's PA system right now. And have that smoke.

Right now I'm narrowcasting from the Hidden Valley in the....wait, lemme get out my card-key...I'm narrowcasting from the Hidden Valley of the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort. I don't know how to pronounce 'pointe' but I think it means 'point' in some language.

Overlooking Sunrise Level 4 and the Pointe in Tyme Grille & Tavern. I'm going to survey my arrival. I just watched a guy hunting the giant lizards and snakes of the Southwest but I'm not hunting the giant lizards and snakes of the Southwest tonight. I'm the network server point man on the team setting up the GoMobile2001 wireless networking conference. The location is somewhere outside Phoenix Arizona.

I arrived via an airplane this afternoon with five of my coworkers. We are mobile networking conference professionals. We make mobile networking conferences. We design the mobile network that the attendees of the mobile networking conference will network mobilly upon. Tonight we ate pizza and drank soft drinks that were chilled by ice in a grey plastic tub.

I was the first to jack-in. The A/V point man, a redhead in a black suit, provided the stereo-mini-phono jack into the conference PA system. I began to play an MP3 of The Carter Family from my laptop.

We met our partners-in-conference: the team from IBM, assorted security men - our 'muscle', if you must use the term, and Doug from Symbol Systems. I was let into salon C of the Grande Ballroom and saw Doug shuffling wireless pc-card adapters and stacking them in long rows like punchcards in a hopper. Our job was to slide those cards into the PCMCIA slots of 275 IBM R30 laptops. My job was to make those laptops deliver the mail.

The air crackled from static built up by the short pile carpet. It singed with the slash of boxcutters. Marketing schwag spilled out by the boxful onto said carpets. And I tore into the biggest boxes, the servers, the beasts that we would ride to the finish of this six day epic.

By the end of the night, cut short by one time zone, we had 2 networks. I could print and browse the interent. I could smell a way through the challenge of automatically adding logins and mail profiles for all the attendees to the Active Directory. I thought to myself that tomorrow would be a good day indeed. I will then speak of the inhabitants of this place, of it's character and layout, and of my reasons for being here. If they weren't obvious enough.

The first project, as I see it, is to assemble one specimen from the various offerings of schwag and photograph them individually in the context of some representative local physical feature. I will commence gathering tomorrow. I would like to gather samples and empirical evidence in a pseudo social science study. May my vigorousness never falter.

DirectConnect is the shit if you have a fast internet connection and you want to fill up your new 80 gig hard drive. It's a P2P app that's kind of like Hotline but it hasn't been overrun by 14 year old assholes trying to get you to click on their stupid banners. The network is fairly pristine. It's tricky software to use. You have to connect to "hubs" and then you can search everybody who's connected to your hub. It's filled with porn movies, mp3's, pirated applications and games. To get onto the big hubs you have to share more than 20 gigs of stuff. (there are ways to fill your HD with crap of course, and DirectConnect is one of them!)

The thing I like most about it, other than the fact that people behave, is that it was written by a local kid named Jon Hess and he's got the same altruistic hacker mentality that made the internet what it is.

News from gamespot.com (yes, I read computer gaming websites) is that SNK, the company that made all those NeoGeo arcade games has just gone out of business. They were shitty look-alike games, yes, but it's still sad to see them go.

If you like old video games you should check out MAME the multiple arcade machine emulator. You can play the actual ROMs of your old favorites on your computer. From the FAQ:

MAME can currently emulate over 1500 classic arcade video games from the '70s and '80s.

The ROM images that MAME utilizes are "dumped" from arcade games' original circuit-board ROM chips. MAME becomes the "hardware" for the games, taking the place of their original CPUs and support chips. Therefore, these games are NOT simulations, but the actual, original games that appeared in arcades.

I'm proud of this one -- not in a patriotic sorta way -- just that it looks like one of those nifty "photojournalism" shots that people get paid a lot of money for. Maybe I'll get some money for it someday.

I didn't go see them this weekend but I want to salute Built to Spill right now. I'm eating toast with melty butter and listening to "Carry the Zero" now. It's my favorite BTS song and a damn fine justification for the existence of music, no matter how bad it can get. It's soooo beautiful, 'specially when he says, "count your blem-i-shes", it makes me shake my hair.

One bhang'd out Varanasi street dude.

I'm posting two more shots from Varanasi. Both taken the day after Holi.

One beat-to-hell Varanasi street dog.

Just got back from my 2AM liquor store (which, I'm proud to say, has stopped hosting Sureno "terrorize the clientele" parties for the better part of a year) and there was a woman, approximately four foot eight inches tall, of the Latino persuasion tossing her 40 of Old English up on the counter and sayin, "Aw, c'mon, I love you man, AND I love your sign. That's hella tight." The sign, taped to his new countertop read "New company policy: NO CRACK CHANGE!!!"

Things is lookin' up.

So, tonight I was making a web a photo gallery of some pictures of me and my girlfriend climbing Half Dome in Yosemite. They're definitely in the "vacation photos" category. I thought about putting a link to that page here on my blog and then I thought, "You can't put family photos up there. That's were your art goes."

See, I think I'm an artist. And I have a pretty stiff rule about separating out all those pictures that are just interesting to me and those that are interesting to other people. I mean strangers. That is a pretty good place to start if you're trying to figure out what art is if you ask me. So I said to myself, "Wait, what is your blog anyway? Just a place to throw up diary entries (here I go again) and the detritus of the CF slot on my digital camera?" NO. This isn't david_primmer.com -- [it's all about me...here's my favorite links!]. It may seem that way, and indeed, people may use it with the intent of getting more dave™ each day. But I think of it more like a visual documentary combined with an editorial column.

The two don't usually interact. They can, and it's nice when I essay about a photo or quicktime movie, or the visual stuff supports something I write, but I usually don't feel like writing something about a picture I took a year ago. I'm going to the effort of scanning it, that should be enough.

Ok, there you have the mission statement for the blog. Please send me your comments if you thought sucking packets off my server was gonna get you something else or if you thought you were looking at my family album. I'm curios to know.

Just as a side note, I'd like to get more fine art photography in the mix -- stuff with less narrative and overt subject matter. We'll see how that goes. One trick was to start shooting with toy cameras so I forget about things like focus and depth of field or being funny.

Primco.org. -- The king of all flavors. Roll and rolls and rolls of life savers.

Wednesday I was subjected to a laughably horrible piece of movie making called "The Last Castle. I'm writing this movie review because people must be stopped from going to see this movie. Ok, maybe if you shoot tons of heroin right before you sit down in front of this two hour and twenty minute joke of a not so funny joke of something that should be laughed out of town. Now, I hate to waste someone's $8.50, and I feel bad about snickering and laughing and groaning all the way through this one. The decent Americans all around me surely don't deserve their ball-licking patriotism soddened. That's why I'm going to try to reap some karma back from the universe and keep all of you intelligent, tasteful people away from "The Last Castle's" little corner of the multiplex.

Good morning. I promised this vid a long time ago but I did a hell of a lot of procrastinating in the mean time. Whew, that's hard work. Anyhow. Here's my dreamy BART ride.

West Oakland BART :42 seconds or download 1.8 megs

I spent all night trying to get my laptop LCD screen to look decent. That means the Adobe Gamma control panel for 7 hours. I'm shocked. Of course, this is nothing to write home about. I just feel like I need to say it: I'm all alone out here in tweakland. 7 hours.

Varanasi. I think this guy sells stuff to make paan. Or, he could be a regular candy store.

Varanasi. I don't know....in this context....I think it's hard to look macho.

This is a list of books that were allegedly written by one Kilgore Trout as compiled (with a plot synopsis for each) in the books Breakfast of Champions and Godbless You, Mr. Rosewater, which were definitely written by one Kurt Vonnegut. I place them here now because at one point, the wanton display of story ideas, dreamt up, attributed and then tossed away by Mr. Vonnegut was the primary reason I believed I would never be a writer. I may have had the ability to turn a phrase or two but without the ideas that apparently overflowed from a true writer's brain, I would never be more than an editor.

• This Means You
• Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto or This Year's Masterpiece
• The Dancing Fool
• Hail to the Chief
• How You Doin'?
• Now It Can Be Told
• The Pan-Galactic Straw Boss; Alternate titles: Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, Mouth Crazy
• Plague on Wheels
• The Smart Bunny
• The Son of Jimmy Valentine
• 2BR02B
• The First District Court of Thankyou
• Oh Say Can You Smell?
• The Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass
• Venus on the Half-shell

This information was culled from The Invisible Library, the link to which was culled from Textism.

After all this link copying and getting excited I can't remember why I started searching for this stuff. Oh, wait, I have browser history. Ok, I was looking for pictures of juniper tree sculptures in the Sunset district and I came across a painting of the Sunset and boom, I thought of Robert Bechtle. He's my favorite painter. I used to have about 30 postcards of his Alameda Gran Torino, in my house arranged so that no matter where your eyes landed while you were in my house, there would be a station wagon somewhere in your visual field. People used to come out of the bathroom after staring at it while they pissed and say, "Did you know that you have pictures of a station wagon all over your house?" Then immediately, they'd go, "Oh, I guess you do since you live here." I had that postcard before I had an apartment here in SF. I used to go to the art museum to spend the afternoon looking at it. I loved watching other people enjoy it. There are two great paintings in SFO near boarding gate 72 (United Airlines). Check those out when you're waiting for a flight.

I've compiled a bunch of links. Hey! It's my Robert Bechtle FAN PAGE!

OK Harris has a good page on photorealists and the painting Marin Avenue-Late Afternoon.

This is a sweet big one of '58 Rambler

'61 Pontiac, 1968-69, oil on canvas, 59 3/4 x 84 1/4 inches (151.8 x 214 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Karlsruhe University has two nice early ones: '60s Chevies, 1971

26 of his paintings all available through Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco using GridPix. Click anywhere within the image to zoom. The zoom function works up to a maximum of 16x the original image size. It's sooo rad. I love "Santa Barbara Patio" and "Albany Monte Carlo". Too bad there's no "Alameda Gran Tourino"

Oakland Museum exhibit last year. Can't believe I missed it.

Another story on the Oakland show with examples.

This one has Sunset Intersection, 1984. A gorgeous 3 panel streetscape.

You can actually buy these limited edition prints.

A portfolio at CSU Long Beach

Six paintings at artnet.com

WHEW!

I whipped out the chunk of paper in my front pocket tonight and it was my bus pass. It said OCT31 on it. Good till approx 6pm. October thirty first. I thought, isn't this date significant to me? It seemed like it should be but I couldn't remember. Then I looked at Marcie and said, "Today was the day I came to San Francisco. It's my tenth anniversary." Ten years ago today I went to the Nirvana Mudhoney show at the Paramount in Seattle and stayed up all night at Eben's house and walked with my backpack and guitar down to the bus stop in downtown Seattle to get on the Green Tortoise. I stood in line with a man in a light blue windbreaker (it was about 40 degrees outside) who would turn out to be my "buddy" for the trip. They use the buddy system. Turned out that the guy in the windbreaker was the first of many crazy people I would meet in the next ten years. Everybody on the bus pitied me because my buddy was fresh out of Western State Mental Hospital. Ten fuckin years. That's it. No need for estimating. Right on the money.