michaelrhoades.net/v4

Winter has pushed autumn almost entirely out of the room, although it looks like there still may be an occasional nice day or two for a motorcycle ride or whatever one does outside when the cold isn’t yet so bad that it rips itself right into yr bones and the snow turns the roads into a dirty, wet bob-sled run... Been listening to a lot of Melvins, Big Business, and Dead Moon records in the past months, and saw the Ex play a couple of great shows w/ in the last two weeks... Am still living in NYC, though lately the dog and I have been spending a good deal of time in Chicago while redesigning this site... Working on getting a book published of the Chinatown work, and hopefully that should happen in France in the coming year... More news soon...

Version 4... has taken some time, a few back-to-square-ones mid-build, a frantic re-size or two in the last days, and now hopefully the site’s working well and the slideshow controls are visible for all (or most) screen resolutions... Always takes me some time to redo the website, b/c I only do it every few years, and consequently must relearn the little bits of the necessary apps each time... I think this new site looks a fair deal better than my previous ones, the only drawback is that it’s now flash-dependent, though that has made the whole process much easier and will make additions and later edits much less laborious... There’re only two new image galleries, China and Bangkok, though the Chinatown section had about one-third of the old photographs cut and about twice that many have been added so that there are now 69 images in that gallery... I’ve cut the Japan and India galleries entirely, and most other galleries lost a few or as many as two-thirds of their images to make for tighter edits... Here and there a few new images have been added throughout... Will be adding some video to the quicktime page next, and, of course, if you’ve the time, check back periodically for new photographs...

NB: The url has changed, and is now a bit less cryptic, www.michaelrhoades.net... though 33RaM.org will still remain valid since that's the address most of the search engines have...

Finally, more

in colombo sri lanka presently and the heavy rains are starting. over the last two weeks i've taken advantage of the down-time imposed on me by a few illnesses and an extreme allergic reaction to a meningitis vaccine, all of which i grudgingly became acquainted with in india, to finally update my website. new sections include photographs from haiti, and one from southern sri lanka, from an idp camp there. more to follow in the coming weeks.

and we crawl slowly on...

another site update, and it gets closer to something to be less embarrassed of. i'd been wondering these past few days what was worse, a site with no work more recent than the autumn of 2001, or posting some of my most recent photographs to a site held together by spit and by road tar (so to speak) . . . thanks to a 30-day trial version of GoLive, am now slowly washing away all of this unsightly spit and tar . . . new color corrections to follow in the next few days, along with a new, more polished version of the quicktime slideshow / movie of this chinatown work. finally for the near future, a super-8 film, converted to DV and re-edited a bit. honed. and slowed.


it is the beginning of autumn, and that is beautiful. pull out yr favorite records and remember being 15 (and sad and angry and confused but full of hope and inspired and you might as well be 30). go find records by nice strong arm and mission of burma and live skull and rites of spring . go buy the new record by the silver mt. zion (also here). . . watch aleksander sokurov's mother and son and russian ark and put on a scarf and jacket and enjoy the autumn while you can b/c soon enough winter comes stumbling through like a violent overweight drunk who misunderstands you more often than not and never wants to leave.

new site, of sorts...

http://www.33RaM.org

Sometimes, when we move to certain more expensive cities, and we're more broke than we've yet been and we're eating less and walking more and maybe we start smoking again---two or three times a day only, because we convince ourselves that it's calming and somehow our thinning bodies let this and a coffee stand in for breakfast---and our clothes seem to be getting bigger and who knows how but our waists go smaller than they've been since fifteen years old and, of course, common sense and oversized pants say we'll need some new clothes but, alas, back to that one same problem: we're broke. So we cobble together new outfits from roommates' hand-me-downs and our old v-necked sweaters and thank god for safety-pins and duct tape and it's barely clothing, much less fashion, but it functions and that's important. Change is death and taxes, change is unavoidable---we must work with it as best as we can.

33RaM.org has been updated. It is cobbled together. It is all safety-pins and duct tape and hand-rolled cigarettes for breakfast. The inches upon inches of adolescent growth have been hurriedly stapled to the ends of pre-pubescent legs, b/c time was running out, was moving on. (Time threatening brusquely, claim this height now or I keep it from you forever.) I invite you to look past the duct tape and the pins, and this is what I look like now. (33RaM.org)