MOMENTS – The new bi-monthly photography e-zine from SEA/collectiv is out and you can download it here.

Its a PDF and weighs in at about 4MB (20 pages), not too too big – and it is chock full of some pretty nice and quite diverse photography… including a modest and mysterious contribution from the Dude and his little monster Nikon camera pimped-out with a 20mm lens. Think wide-angle and big-picture.

OK, you need more of a tease than that? Say no more, nudge-nudge, wink-wink… here are a few of the photos from my series called Mysterious Little Houses in the Alley that didn’t make it into the magazine. Gotta pay a bigger bribe to the editor for the next edition (Just kidding of course, just kidding… insider Cambodian courruption humor).

I really like my small contribution, which right there is something rather unusual. Most of the time I see all the faults and very little of the good points in my own work. Call me hyper-critical if you like, but that’s just the way it is, generally. But this time I really like the series I put together right in my own backyard.

Just little houses in the alley behind my apartment here in Phnom Penh. No people, just lots of evidence of people. And lots of nice colors and textures and a certian kind of straightforward honesty, but also a bit of mystery.

Like I said, please do let me know your thoughts if you have the time. Thanks!

Ande now, back by popular demand… some fresh-from-the-steamy-hot-streets-of-Phnom-Penh Street Photography.

And my renewed commitemnt to post new photos every week from my semi-big town here in SE Asia.

 From Monday (just two days ago… osrry for the dealy, but I shot so many photos it took a few days to get ‘em processed and sorted)…

Phnom Penh street food vendor.

A kid, his sister on the bike and big brothers trying to ignore all of the above as they concentrate on their Cambodian chess battle.

A very nice kid who ought to be in school, but instead is scavenging garbage with the rest of his family.

Another nice young kid spending her days with her charcoal vendor family.

I’d like to add that these kids are not abused (Better to say that I see no indication at all of any abuse whatsoever) and are cherished by their families, but economic realities being what they are here in The Kingdom, it is very common to see small children doing hard and entirely honest work.

Groovin’ on the Chinese soap operas…

Tah-dahh!

The end.

If you have the time and interest you can check it out here.

Here's the teaser photo:

Young boy sniffing glue on the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia

That happens a lot and its often how I work. I shoot and shoot and only later, sometimes much later, do I finally discover what the real story is. Well that's life and I'm not complaining. Actually the esential point of this particular story did not reveal itself to me until I sat down and wrote the sucker.

It takes a long time to write. This story is about 1,000 words long and it took me hours and hours. Hard work, not as much fun as taking and processing photos, but quite satisfying once you finaly get the job done. I did git-er-done and there you have it.

And in other news… please stop by Sharkys on Thursday night when The Hellhounds once again take the stage to howl and wail the BLUES.

Should be a real good time with some new songs and some old ones that we repainted and lubed-up at our Sunday afternoon practice session.

So, yes… that means that stevegoodman.com, my professional photography website is not only back up-and-running, it has been refined, reconfigured, rethunk and redone and for the first time I can honestly say that I am very happy with it. Wow.

It took a lot of time, hard work and determination to git-er-done, but it was totally worth it and I learned a lot of good stuff long the way, so the whole miserably goofed-up thing turned out to be entirely positive and valuable. What could be better than that?

In a somewhat related vein, I recently ran across the followng graphic again (I had seen it before and it sprang to mind during a recent conversation with a friend of mine), so I poked aorund on Google and found it to share with my friend (and with you too).

It is at once sad and hilarious and it certainly rings true with anyone who has ever been involved in projects involving lots of different people.

It brilliantly illustrates the many pitfalls of human organizations in dealing with complex problems that are almost always made exponentially worse and more muddled by the vagaries and challenges of human communication.

Let's take a look shall we?

Pretty funny stuff and most people agree that it cleverly captures an all-too-real phenomenon that anyone who has ever worked for a large company or for the government, especially the military, can relate to and validate with their own anecdotal examples.

But that's not why I am brining it up. The interesting and downright pathetic thing is that the gist of the sort of mangled and mismanaged project in the illustration is something that I actually (singlehandedly) did to myself!

It is astonishing and instructive, not to mention being embarassing and profoundly disturbing. Despite all that, I'm managing to take it all in stride and learn from the experience, so just don't you worry about a thing.

Elabloration and commentary is forthcoming and will be published here soon. Unless I can't find the used tire I still need to really finish the job!

^The Hellhounds*, Phnom Penh's devilishly inimitable  BLUES  band, will be "Haunting the House of Sharky" again this Thursday evening (and every Thursday in January).

January 21, 2010 – at 9pm.

You are most cordially invited.

Please come as you are, but don't expect to leave unscathed. 

No cover charge… and all the BLUES you can stand.

*Good guys who made a bad deal (with you-know-who) and as a consequence

play the BLUES, Twisted Country, Odball Hillbilly and confounded Cajun music

in a decidedly dirty, nasty, twisted, vile and pleasantly repugnant way…

as if their very souls depended on it.

Honest to God… you'll have one hell of a good time!

^The Hellhounds, the Phnom Penh based BLUES band that I play guitar with, has a new blog and its pretty cool in a fun and goofy kind of way. I'll tell you this much, I spent a hell of a lot more time building the blog this past week than I did playing guitar or taking and working on making great photographs and that kind of sucks. Long story I won't share with you about things that have been distracting me and troubles that I needed to take my mind off of by throwing myself headlong into building a stupid website.

However, it did do the trick as far as taking my mind off other more important things, and now it is finished and I can stand back and enjoy the fruits of my labor as well as the fact that the project is done and came in under budget and far above expectations. How often does that happen?

That's a generally good policy to stick with and I thinik it bodes well for the future, both near-term and long-term. What about the mid-term?

There is no mid-term… that's a complete fabrication that people continue to delude themselves with. There is only now and later. anything halfway between the two is just a spot in time that will quickly pass from present to past.
 
So I'm going to turn that around thisweek (the short-term) and spend more time playing guitar, shooting and processing photos and less time pushing pixels around and beating pesky and belligerant html and PHP into submission.

Next item please…

You know, you just have to compartmentalize to deal with it all intelligently. If you don't sort of wall yourself off from certain looming imperatives then its almost impossible to deal with the other pesky bits of this business of life. Its just like piles of papers on your desk… if you wait long enough a bunch of them will become irrelevant and can be tossed satisfyingly into the rubbish bin.

What remains still has to be dealt wth, but at least al ot of the other annoying and distracting items vying for your limited attention have by now gone stale or otherwise lost their red-hot glow of urgency and irritation.

I just always find that it helps alot to be "in-the-moment",as they say, rather than straddling seven moments at once.

So first I did the blog for The Hellhounds and now I'm in the middle of doing my new mythicaldude blog… and some other stuff too.

Always in-transit…

http://www.mythicaldude.typepad.com.

In the next few days I'll stop posting there and only post here: at the new home for the mythicaldude blog.

What happened was… well,  I was sitting around thinking (but not too much) and then I talked it over with the guys (above) and we all pretty much agreed that it would be better to use WordPress and to host all of my sites in one place, so that's what I'm doing.

The upshot is that pretty soon we'll be moving…

Whoosh!

Well, not too soon, I mean I'm not going to finish this migration tonight, so there will be a certain amount of reasonably anticipated standing around with our, uh, our… hands in our pockets waiting for someithing to happen. Or whatever.

Which brings us to today's pithy quote..;

 Confidence: that feeling you experience just before you understand the problem.
 –Author Unknown
 

Welcome to the all NEW Mythicaldude Blog

Formerly at

http://mythicladude.typepad.com

NOW

located at

http://mythicaldude.net

Have fun!

Why a new blog?

The management team at Mythical Enterprises felt that the old blog was looking and feeling a bit dated and that a back-end upgrade along with a top-to bottom re-branding was in order for the new year.

Its a long story. Basically it’ll be easier, cheaper, more flexible.

Oh, not such a long story after all if you omit all the details!

Perhaps I ought to apologize for that last post. It was fun to write, I won't lie to you, but it looks (in retrospect) kind of juvenile and silly. I suppose I get that way from time to time.

My Mom read it and gave me a bit of a hard time… that is to say that it caused her to worry about me. I explained that it was just my sense of humor and that there was no cause for alarm. Mothers are like that, yeah they are. Love you Mom!

The guys at Sharky's liked it. Nobody on Facebook commented, which I interpret to be an inexplicably bad omen, but so what… I'm not superstitious

At any rate I think I want to be a bit more mature, focused and intentional this year, so let's just chalk that last post up to being the last post of last year (a day late and 10,000 riel short) and we'll consider this one to be the first post of the new year and an auspicious harbringer of things to come. Coolio indeedy!

So I've updated and launched my newly redesigned, simpler, more elegant and functional photoblog at www.mythicaldude.net and I hope you'll go check it out. Simple concept: a photo a day… and this time I really mean it.

I've also, yet again, redone my Steve Goodman Photography website at www.stevegoodman.com and while it still needs work (who doesn't?)

I think it has some compelling new features, charming content and a certain glistening shine. Actually it smells like a new car and, as you know, that's a pretty damned good smell.

Of course it'll wear off soon enough and the pile of trash in the backseat will start to become unbearable, but let's not go there now sister…

That might be all I have to say for the moment… just got home from a fun and sweaty Sharky Bar gig and once again the band sounded pretty damned good if I do say so myself.

Shakry's has the best stage and sound system in Phnom Penh, it even has seriously humongous(sp?) stage monitors, so playing there is always a pleasure. In addition to the monitors they have a some huge-ish guitar and bass guitar amps and a snazzy durm kit which Scoddy was all over tonight making things sound extra zesty.

I never really notice drums too much when I listen to most bands, except for when they are really sounding catchy and special, as was the case this evening. Nice and impossible-not-to-notice pithy little accents in all the right places made things sound extra gutsy and in general it felt like the whole improbable Hellhounds machine had been lubed, calibrated and polished to a nice snazzy shine. Pretty cool.

Don't tell anyone that our plates are expired, the brakes are squeaky and the steering is a more than bit dodgy.

 It feels like I need to find a photo for this post so please hang on just a minute… OK here's one now:

Yes. It is a brick wall somewhere in the alley behind my apartment in Phnom Penh and it symbolizes, in a starkly literal fashion, the brick wall I ran into at the end of last year. Ouch. Fascinating perhaps, but not pretty by any stretch of the imagination.

These things happen and life is full of false starts, slow boats, dead-ends, abrupt cancellations and lots of minor cuts and bruises (even serious contusions from time to time). Its OK. You run into one of these and – unless your are really out-of-it – you'll know that you were going to fast for your own good and heading in the wrong direction (even if it seemed like a good idea at the time).

Hey man, just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and head on over the sunny side of the street! And quit moaning… one must take things in stride.

So now it occurs to me that I need one more juxtapositional image to symbolize the high hopes, determined ambition and spiritually uplifting feeling that a new year ought to be greeted with… uh, hang on again for just a second…

Heh-heh-heh… Yes! A big thumbs-up for this one. Again nothing subtle going on here (we cater to a wide and shortly-attention-spanned multi-culti-demographic audience here at MythicalDude-Amalgamated-Industries-InterCorp-LTD, Inc.^TM). Things are both operating normally (which is to say somewhat dysfunctionally) and also changing at the same time. This much is abundantly clear, but what the future holds is anybody's guess. As for me I can only say this… Despite the odds I'm still hoping for the best and I think I'll know it when I see it. And that's all she wrote.

Please stay tuned (As mentioned in that garishly lurid last post (below with the test pattern at the end)… and that's where the tuk-tuk soaring by comes in to play in this photo (a photograph with text in it!) … to really make the picture memorable and add a healthy dose of funk and a not-very-shy dash of indisputably local flavor to the whole ball-of-wax – even though we're all living like The Jetsons here now in 2010, there still aren't any seatbelts (for reasons unknown)… so we're all going have to just deal with it, come what may.

I like this first blog photo of the new year a lot… and I really know what I'm talking about when it comes to stuff like that, so take my word for it.

It's jam-packed with big fat juicy meaning. Obviously it has its own conceited metaphor… today is the well-lit portion of the photo and tomorrow is represented by the blackness of the doorway. And to reinforce that interpretational notion is the solidly unambiguous statement – written in text – that things are being improved and that we can expect something good!

You really can't get much more straightforward than that in the realm of photographical metaphors.

There's somebody in there (which means that there is a there there)… and they're doing something in the backgound (or so they say) while they remain open for business  and operating normally (as though!), or so they say right up fron in BIG BOLD LETTERS. There behind the door, there in the inscrutable darkness of the future just beyond today that nobody can see. Something is happening.

• Something BIG and BOLD.

Where will it all lead? What's going to happen next? Will we be stopping for a pee-break and a snack?

Who the hell knows? Not me, that's for sure and a half.

Hey, its all good and it only seems counter-intuitive until you get used to it. (a tip-o-the-hat to the zenbozo)

So get used to it and for crying out loud there sport, let's all try to get along even if things get a little sloppy here and there. Remember: one man gathers what another man spills… Don't let the fucking bastards wear you down (the BEST advice my Dad ever gave me).

So get with the program dude, stop being such a poopy-head and don't forget to always remember to keep the FUN in dysfunctional.

I smell bad and I'm going to take a shower. like I said before, it was a sweaty night.

Sorry Mom, but I need to try and be honest. In the real world (or so we've been told here in the world of mirth and myth), a good acid-test to predict if something you want to say might be a certain kind of funny… is to ask yourself this… "would my Mom grimace dissapprovingly if she heard me say this?"

Hah! I smell bad and I'm going to take a shower. After that its going to be a good year. That's my status.

Word. Peace and out.

PS: I think we're actually off to a splendid start, but everything is still a little bit weird and distorted.