For those of you that are unfamiliar with the service, last.fm is a pretty cool site. Not only does it create a profile that displays the top artists in your iTunes, as well as the top tracks, but it also gives you a lot of information about various songs if you search for them. I used it in looking for albums to get more information about them.

Okay so I haven't posted in a really long while, or often enough, so this'll be a slightly longer one.

I was talking to Damien a couple of weeks back and we started talking about photography (which makes sense, since Damien is in a photo class, we both take digital design together, and we got onto the topic of art and thus, photography) and he has a really interesting take on photo. It's not a tremendously unique one, but it is one that is pretty different from my own, so I find it an entertaining one to reflect upon.

For Damien, photography has to be really thought out and planned; every photograph must be absolutely deliberate and composed, much like a drawing. Photography is very much about intent and the finished product should reflect that to some extent. This makes it sound like he poses everyone very carefully, which I know is not the case, but in looking at Damien's photos I know that isn't what he means. Basically, his philosophy seems to be that people cannot simply point and shoot cameras. That's not how photography works. In order to make photos into art there must be some very definite thought behind it.

Speaking of art. Last spring I did a "senior project" at my high school, which consisted of me creating portraits of six of my friends, and one of them was this one (LOOK LEFT!) of my friend Alex, who was the guitarist in the school blues band (which I was in, but as a vocalist). Drawing him was super frustrating because this kid has just about the worst ADHD I've ever seen; I asked him to stay still for five minutes and he couldn't do it. So I asked him to lie down and sleep and stay still that way, and he was still twitching and fidgeting. I eventually gave up and took some pictures of him as reference images, and then played with powdered graphite and ebony pencil, and the final product is what you see to the left. Now, my high school's yearbook does this thing where parents can purchase a congratulatory page for their kids and put pictures and a cutesy message on it and all that jazz (not unique, I'm sure), and so I got an email from his parents today asking if they could use this image on the page that they are purchasing. Woo! Basically that made my super rainy day.

And on top of all of that, right now "Stairway to Heaven" came up on random, and I had been discussing it with a friend of mine yesterday. Gripe about how cliché or dumb you think this song is (DOUG) but it remains one of my favorite songs in the history of ever. A lot of intensely powerful memories are tied into this song. The song started to come to a close and I was anticipating hearing "a long long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile..." (even after almost three years) and so I had to put on Don McLean's American Pie. If you're Doug or Josh, yeah I know I'm a big dork, but it was my first instinct, and I kinda had to because it's been a while.

Anymahoo, that's about it for me. Enjoy your days.