View Whore

I joined a Flickr group a while back purely because I like their concept. Each day they pick a random group to "invade". They all join it for a day, bomb it with photos relating to that group, and then fuck off again. It's random, it's creative, it's inspiring, it's completely juvenile and it's totally me.

Yesterday's group was an easy one. My Photo Is Crap But I'm A View Whore. It's a great little dig aimed at those people who submit photos to heaps of groups because they get off on the number of times people have viewed their photos.

So I did a shot taking the piss out of these people. In particular one woman out of the local group of photographers who I think is a self-centred egotistical twit. She's the butt of many household jokes about photographic technique and talent or lack thereof. She's also the reason I don't go out to local photography group meetings. I can't stand her in virtual reality so I think I'll be tempted to punch her in real life.

The list I created was with her in mind, and the shot based around those trying to be her, but not quite making it.



Yet... I am a view whore too.

This is my single most viewed photo to date. It pisses all over everything else I've uploaded for the amount of times people have clicked on it. And I'm addicted. I keep checking back to see how many more people have looked at this picture. Even by posting it here I am tricking myself into thinking it's more popular.

Go ahead... Click on it... You know you want to...

Showers and Lecturers

Yet another expedition into pissing off my University Composition lecturer. Each semester we got a list of ideas to select from and write a couple of pieces to conform to, or rather, "be inspired by".

We spent a while looking at pieces for instrument and "pre-recorded tape". To me this is an outdated idea. Something used in the early seventies by composers trying to be different to the norm and introduce an element of the booming world of popular music into their compositions. I argued that it's a dying or even dead form. My picture of a modern equivalent would be a live at-computer mixing event to go with a set instrumental performance. Or, at least, fuck the tape idea off and go to CD. Even that's getting too old now.

This is my way of saying fuck you, lady to the lecturer. For my "instrument and pre-recorded tape" piece I recorded two fantastically boring minutes of me having a shower. I overlaid it with various water sounds from my sink and produced the whole thing on CD, titled Don't Forget to Wash Your Armpits. The problem was that I had far too much fun doing the recording and put no thought whatsoever into the composition. My argument there was that it was meant to be inconsequential anyway.

Here we go:
Don't Forget to Wash Your Armpits for Piano and CD.
Piano performed by the crappy midi on my computer at the time, because I never got the piece performed in reality.

Bass Music from the Archives of Vic

Back to the exciting days of Composition studies once again. This is one I really should do over again, and multitrack it by myself. It's called Big Bottom in an obvious hommage to Spinal Tap, but also in an yet another attempt to piss off my composition lecturer with my assumed frivolity.

At the time I had to submit any sort of recording of one of my peices, so three of us got together in a room with a mic and pressed play. The balance between the basses terrible. One of the players was my girlfriend at the time, who I knew (even before I started to go out with her) was an overbearing player prone to making mistakes and not caring, and not having an iota how to listen and perform in a group dynamic. But she was a captive bass player who could read music. There weren't that many in town.

It's noisy, it's poor quality, but at least a recording exists, and that's what you're getting.