X-CUP!
I was recently interviewed via email by a racy local art/design magazine called “X-CUP” (no, I don’t know what the name means). For some reason, they were interested in my High Speed Rail photography. It seems to me that I am involved in far more interesting things than HSR pictures, but that was what they were interested in. The topic was part of a series of interviews with foreign artists in Taiwan. I pointed out to them that, technically, I wasn’t actually a foreigner, but that didn’t seem to bother them. I think they found it quaint.
In any case, I was happy that among 16 individuals they only found me worthy of the much-coveted black background. Also, I managed to work in the Muddy Basin Ramblers as well as a reference to “The Age of Crap.” If you want to read the interview and my inane, random answers, you can download the .pdf of the interview here.
Actually, I’m glad I did the interview, because I am interested in getting to know more artists, even though I don’t think train photos are exactly the apex of my artistic abilities (or maybe they are. Lord what a depressing thought). The weekend after next I’ll be attending a film festival that will be showing Clay Soldiers. Hopefully other people will attend as well.
We had a four-day holiday last weekend, three and a half days I spent at home editing. It’s good weather for it, in any case: more-or-less constant rain. On Saturday I went up to a teahouse in the mountains above New Garden City where my friend Ray lives, along with Sandman and his relatives who are visiting from Scotland. We had a nice meal, took a lot of macro photographs of wet plants, and watched in horror as Sandman’s nephew took a nasty spill down the wet steps. Actually, I didn’t see it, but I did listen in horror to the thud as he hit the ground. He was ok, though. One of the benefits of being 17.
Mark has recently stirred a hornet’s nest by daring to express his preference for content quality over deliberately massaging a site’s code to garner the most hits. I can see where he’s coming from; obviously this site, which hasn’t really updated its design since 2001 and doesn’t have any of the traffic-gathering features that are de rigueur in these days of Google searches, is a testament to the low priority I place on getting millions of people to read my site. My trackbacks don’t work, I don’t know what pingbacks are, and I can’t even figure out how to get post titles to appear.
Still, I can see the benefit in getting a larger audience for your content, as long as such actions don’t supersede the content itself. For example, on flickr.com, submitting your photo to six million voting groups comes across as a bit desperate, but at least the content hasn’t been adversely affected by the effort, unlike, say, deliberately taking photos of nothing but scantily clad young women for photo hits. Of course, I respect most those who produce good content in an elegant fashion without feeling the need to compromise it in the name of making it popular. This, of course, is why I’ve made exactly $9.18 from my experiment with Google’s adsense over the past several years.
Ok, so the site needs a makeover. I’ll meet up with Mark sometime and we’ll see what we can do. I’m surprised the design has held up this long, actually.
I think you are too modest about your photography. Looking at your HSR photos alongside mine in the HSR group at flickr I can see that you take it to another level. Those images are quite special.
I just read the X-cup article too. Very interesting.
Comment by david on formosa — April 11, 2007 @ 3:35 am
I think your photos are very interesting.
Comment by Anonymous — April 12, 2007 @ 2:27 am