15 Albums in 15 Minutes

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Metallica – Metallica

Appetite for Destruction – Guns’n'Roses

It was the style at the time.

The Levellers – Levellin’ the Land

Reminds me of festivals, campfires and endless summers in deepest, darkest Somerset.

Portishead – Dummy

1st year at university. Ubiquitous but brilliant. Nothing like it has been produced since.

Manu Chao – Clandestino

Other than Santana’s collaboration album, Supernatural. This was our year in Seville’s soundtrack.

Black Box Recorder – England Made Me

Love the guitar, tunes and especially the lyrics of all these. Brutal it is, but I love how it simultaneously celebrates and rubbishes its subject matter. Sarah Nixey’s got a fine voice on her too.

Shakira – Pies Descalzos

I get all kinds of crap for liking Shakira. But face it, she’s a thousand times better than Kylie. And her gig in Guadalajara three years was one of the best I’ve been to. There. Argument settled.

The Smiths – Best of Vol. 2

The first Smiths album I bought (1992). And it’s an excellent primer…

The Velvet Underground- Velvet Underground & Nico

Paranoia, sado-masochism and violas never sounded so good.

REM – Automatic for the People

Choose any track off this one, any of em. Gold.

The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry

Still my favourite Cure album. I’m all about the minimalist production.

Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy

Jamaica? Nah, she went by herself.

Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour of Bewilderbeast

Best album of the noughties for my money.

Molotov – ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas?

Spanglish soundtrack to Guadalajara 1998.

Underworld – Dubnobasswithmyheadman

Translating this Oaxacan knicknack would require too much explanation of the ins and outs of Mexican wrestling, but I loves it. “Work hard, play hard” would be near it but doesn’t capture even a fraction of the colour…

Anyroad, just a note to say that any minute now the internets are getting cut off to this here house and we’re moving to NYC, then on Friday, Guadalajara for 6 weeks or so, then L.A. for a week, then back to NY, NY… shall be something of an adventure. My new zip code resolution (to coin a phrase, nay, a tradition) is to update this blog a bit more often. So let’s see how that goes. If you don’t already subscribe by RSS, and would like to be emailed whenever new ramblings find their way to this site, please sign up for email updates here:

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Maine’s been grand. I’m going to miss the folks and the ample, accessible, countryside and coast. We’ll be back… A bientot, folks.

It took a while, but I just got sent a copy of the book where some of my photos are being used. Chuffed is what I am.

Takes me back to the last time I used one of these machines 5 years ago… Wish they were transparent so you could see what’s going on inside.

Look it: 25 random images from my photoblog slideshow

Mind you:

It doesn’t work in Chrome or Safari (and probably others…), some images will break (cos they’re too big to be resized), some are pixelated (cos they were too small), some aren’t cropped well (cos they’re square or portrait), and the idea is you have a fairly large monitor to see them properly in the first place.

Techyish stuff

Not sure if this is of interest to anyone at all but I thought I’d post it anyway… I’m coming up to the 300th photo on my photoblog (and just hit 13,500 on Flickr…) I’d have more on there but it takes 10 minutes or so for each new post and I’ve been wondering for a while if there’s a way to do it with the tim-thumb.php script rather than using WordPress’ in-built resizing tool and custom fields. Anyway, that’s an issue for another day which, using what I learnt today, should be fairly simple.

So I wanted it to slide from one post to the next rather than load a whole new page. I’ve made inroads today.

It uses:

• jQuery + jFlow for the slider: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jFlow
• A new variable for the WP Loop I’d not heard of before: ‘orderby=rand‘
• substr – a php command that lops a given number of characters off a string (such as the URL of the photo), then concatenates the tim-thumb resizing bit on the end.


<div id="slides">
<?php $category = wp_get_object_terms($main_query->post->ID, 'category');
$recent = new WP_Query("showposts=25&orderby=rand"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<div>
&lt;a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"> <img src="http://agaveweb.com/photos/wp-content/themes/blackcanvas_10/timthumb.php?src=<?php
$string = get_post_meta($post->ID, "photo", true);
$newstring = substr($string, 0, -12).'.jpg';
echo $newstring; ?>&h=750&w=950&zc=1" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />
<p class="slider">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

And that is what passes for excitement during the week in Brunswick, Maine.

The above’s a short video of the charming little animated ‘green white man’ on all the pedestrian crossings in Oaxaca. I like how he encourages you to run, not walk, the closer it gets to the stop again. I also wonder if there’s a backwards setting in there somewhere…

As you know, no news on this blog means there’s lots of news occurring, but no time to write about it. In brief, we made several gourmet home-made pizzas last night with a couple of lovely folks from Bowdoin. Today’s Wolfe’s Neck with dearest Atticus, picking up Blackcurrant & Apple juice, Twiglets and as many Creme Eggs as I can stomach, from the UK Essentials shop in Freeport. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, tis a Flickr meet in Brunswick of all places… so maybe some more Mainecentric photos will follow soon. And that is the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of current events round our way.

Elias does it again

Guadalajara’s rising multimedia star, Elias Garcia-Ortiz has once again rendered one of my photos in beautiful watercolour. Above is Mitla’s Spanish church built with and on top of the remains of the conquered Zapotec structures.

Mitla, Oaxaca, México

It’s not the first time my photos have got an EGO2005 makeover More here

Tapetes Zapotecas

Part of the guided tour on Day 2 took us to a little cooperative centre close to Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca to see how Zapotec rugs/mats/carpets are made using methods that haven’t changed over the centuries. I still remember doing something similar when I was about 7 in Kingston school. I made an acorn placemat. Actually that should be Acorn, because I was into BBC computers at the time… There used to be a weaver in our village too using not dissimilar methods.

The Oaxacan valley’s climate isn’t ideally suited to rearing sheep so the wool is brought in from Los Altos, the first step is carding it to get all the wool fibres going in the right direction.

We card

After a few minutes of carding the resulting rolag is spun into wool using a hand-turned spinning machine. It rotates a spindle which twists the wool and winds it onto the bobbin.

Rigging up the belt to the spinning machine

Next up is the dying process. Cheaper rugs use synthetic dyes, but here they’re still using a range of natural dyes using local ingredients. There’s a whole range of colours. Cochineal is used for the reds (the word comes from the Spanish ‘cochinilla’, woodlouse or more literally ‘little piggy’). Cochineal is harvested from the ‘leaves’ of a local cactus. The female insect is first removed from its husk (I’m making up terminology here…) then ground up with a metate (volcanic pestle and mortar type thing) and activated with lime juice to produce a deep crimson.

Bowl of unground cochineal

Metate. Not to be confused with Petate

Blues come from cobalt from the coast. It’s bought in crystal form and is again activated with lime juice. Here’s the guide mixing it on his hand:

Indigo blue in action

Yellow is from Cempasuchil (Marigolds)

Dried cempasuchil

and several varieties of moss are used for green colours:

Verdes

Once the dye’s mixed up to the colour they want, the wool steeps in it for 24 hours or so. Though they didn’t mention it, some kind of mordant is probably used to fix the colours at the end of the process.

When they have enough wools with the colours needed for the rug, it’s time for the loom.

Weft and warp

I still can’t work out how they get the complex patterns into the rugs and I was off taking pictures when they talked about the finer points of the process. It involves pedalling to swap the weft and warp and passing a shuttle between shifts is about all I know. Wikipedia on weaving will fill you in better than I ever could so I’ll just give you a few photos of the bits and pieces used in this part of the process instead:

Shuttle

The finer points...

Tying up loose ends

The resulting rugs are gorgeous with rich natural colours and using traditional geometric designs that can also be found decorating the Zapotec ruins down the road at Mitla. They’ll set you back a few hundred dollars but considering the huge amount of work that goes into each of them are a veritable bargain.

Mitla

Next up… the difference between Mezcal and Tequila and how to make it

Tip your head back as you scroll down for full effect...

If everything goes according to plan the next photos you see in this blog should be of mole, chapulines, mayan ruins and mezcal.