This was a pleasant documentary following the legendary Bill Cunningham. It gave a few details about his history and his personal life, but it mostly just showed Bill being Bill. What struck me about this movie was all of the dichotomies.

Bill Cunningham is the godfather of the street fashion photography. But it was clear in this movie that he’s still a man of the people. He’s still on the street every day. He does other things too, but his primary thing is taking pictures of clothes. He’s the ultimate recorder of the people, working for one of the biggest institutions. Meanwhile so many of the people he inspired started on free blogs taking pictures of the street and moved to a little fancy pictures of celebs and models, and writing books and only taking pictures of fancy people. Bill is the people’s street fashion photographer, even with the clout of the New York Times. Which stands in contrast to all of the street fashion photographers on the web, which use the people’s platform (i.e. internet) to be sort of elitist.

[Rambling, I had a point somewhere in there, but it fell apart pretty quickly.]

Go read it. Seriously. Go read it now.

I’ll do it a huge injustice and say it was about a lot of things, but a lot about priorities. He talks about his father and his daughter and how these things play into his process right now. I think the piece is yeoman’s work.

At the risk of being on the wrong side of the piece and its message, there was one bit that really struck a chord for me:

In fact, a depressing amount of the time–really up until this week–I would do my job until I hadn’t the slightest idea what time it was or what bullshit I was typing or what my crank was ever meant to be attached to in the first place.

But, even when my shitty little crank was not attached to anything, I did keep cranking. Because, Dads do their job. It’s what they do.

They crank. They crank and crank and crank and crank.

The emphasis is added. That’s me. Not me as in “I emphasized that bit,” but me as in my mindset. See, I can hate a lot of things about whatever I do, but all it has to be is a means of providing for my family. And not even so much my immediate family (although that is the most direct need), but my family in a larger sense. I don’t mean my extended family, rather, I think about it generationally.

I’m a second generation American. And while I’m not a raging success, by almost any account, I made good on my parents’ wishes when they came to this country: a better life. By those measures, I’ve (and my sister) have taken our family to that next step. So what I do in my life is all about providing. Providing my family now a life. But also providing my family generationally another wrung on the ladder to climb up.

So I crank.

And I think that’s the job. I’m not presently a father, but I relate to that bit of writing my Merlin Mann, at least that part about Dads doing their job. I relate to the rest of it and am inspired by it, but more than anything else, I recognize that I just crank. And while it can feel soul-crushing at times, I do it with a purpose that lets me keep at it, almost in the face of logic.

This is a poorly conceived post, but I’m putting it up anyway. I hope I can keep revisiting and revising it to make it something worthwhile, but I just needed something out there because Merlin Mann’s piece really spoke to me on a few levels.

Go read it now. Seriously.

“The Beatles were trying to be the Everly Brothers, and they couldn’t quite pull it off. Elvis really wanted to sound like Dean Martin. But, you know, by failing …” He stops and starts again. “You have an image in your head of this iconic person. For me, it might have been Johnny Carson, where you grow up with him, and you think, ‘Well, that’s who I need to be’ — to realize that feeling I had when I was 8, sitting in my parents’ house and watching him. And then things happen, and you think, ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t — that fell apart.’ But it’s the failure to be that person or to completely follow through on what he did that leads you to something that’s much better.”
- Conan O’Brien (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/10/conan-2-0/)

So hopefully what I thought, that’s no longer, leads to something different and better.

This also ties into something else I’ve been thinking about lately. What’s valuable to me? Granted, until very recently, I was thinking about this in more superficial terms, such as “is watching tv that valuable to me? Are there other things I want to do that I’m sacrificing for television?” Not everything I want to do or actually do can be valuable to me. So I think it’s time for some reflection on choices.

This is rambling and I’m not going to edit it. Just had some thoughts and wanted to get back to blogging. Perhaps this post would be better if I was better at typing on my iPad. Maybe.

After the last week of work, which isn’t over yet, needed it.

Daily Drink pictures. Probably won’t cross post all of them, but since this was the first.

This was a very entertaining movie. Cute even. The story of love and loss by a fifth grader (or something like that). I got this movie via recommendations from friends, and it was great. Don’t get me wrong, a bit on the cheeseball side, but you don’t really notice because you’re caught up in the movie. I don’t know if I cared about the characters in a traditional sense, but I definitely wanted to know what was going to happen to them.

I thought the acting was pretty good. The children actors I thought did a great job carrying the movie. I thought Bradley Whitmore did a great job as the dad, less so about Cynthia Nixon as the mom. Truthfully, they played an important subplot, but if it was removed from the movie, I don’t think it would’ve made the movie any worse. For all intents and purposes, parents in this movie could’ve been the “Wah-wah-wah-wah” Peanuts adults and it would’ve worked solely in the kids’ world.

I think this makes a great date movie. Works for the ladies, and while there aren’t any explosions, guns, car chases, I think guys could more relate to the main character in this movie, 11 years old or not, than most male characters in standard “chick flick”/rom-com fare.

So I don’t understand this movie. It’s based on a book right? I’m not even going to bother looking it up and Amazon linking it (BTW, buy from Amazon via me folks. Put some shekels in my pocket, haha.).

So you have a movie that plays up every kind of negative female stereotype, that actively has a character succeed by following rules that play again said stereotypes, only to “discover” stereotypes are the better life? Though what could’ve I expected, the movie really does play to the stereotypical rom-com formula for most all of the relationships in the movie.

I’m sure everyone can, on some level, relate to one character or another or multiple characters in the movie, but it seemed to be a pretty mediocre effort. I thought the acting was passable. I mean how hard is it to play kind of crazy? (By everyone, not just the women.) Also, I didn’t think the talking heads/”When Harry Met Sally” [DVD] interview bits were at all useful, entertaining, necessary.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets.

Link to my profile in case you don’t want to read it below.

Cognitive Content

Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content

1. Oral fixation
2. Constructive behaviors
3. Temporal References
4. Abstract thought
5. Order
6. Affection
7. Moral imperative
8. Aggression
9. Visual sensations
10. Hard sensations
11. Sexual fixation
12. Restraint

This movie was filmed by the same guy who did “State of Mind” [DVD]. Both documentaries on North Korea. “State of Mind” was about the Mass Games. I thought it was a really interesting view on North Korea. This movie is about U.S. soldiers, one in particular, who defected to North Korea and have lived there as part of that society since.

I have to say, I was extremely bored throughout this movie. The subject matter was interesting enough. And I’d certainly read a book about it, but in movie form, I just felt it was lacking any real compelling points. A lot of interesting, but nothing to grab you and pull you in. Which is a shame.

It’s not a bad watch. It’s an interesting glimpse into that part of the world. I’d say watch “State of Mind” over this.