Note to non-LJ-readers:
I use filters. Kind of a lot. That means, if we're even remotely close, that you're probably missing some significant portion of my posts if you're not logging in and reading them on livejournal. Therefore, you must sign up for LJ to secure a name so I can add you to my filters, and until LJ supports secure RSS, you have to sign in once in while to catch up on protected posts.

I used to have an opt-in Research Filter where I let off academic steam about things I find particularly exciting. I got too busy to write up quality posts to it, and I moved it to iterativedeepening.com in theory but I haven't really updated it there either. Feel free to RSS it there, and it's also syndicated: id_blog. I will probably take it up again one day.

Most of my internet activity these days is photographic, primarily in the manual photography album. RSS there as well. Should I syndicate that? Comment if you want it.

And finally, I syndicate my twitters: httf_twitter

I've had a backlog of 4 rolls of film for a while. It's nice to be behind on processing because then I don't start jonesing for new photos. I've been getting a lot more purposeful with my photography lately. I plan a few rolls in advance, and while I'm certainly still taking impromptu snapshots, I have an agenda for most rolls. I'm about to invest in a few rolls of very bizarre film, so that should be fun to play with.

I've never really thought of myself as an artist, and still don't particularly, but photography is definitely the creative outlet that keeps me sane right now. It's how I organize and process my emotions. I have a few projects in the works that are going to take a few months, and chipping away at them is very satisfying. I've been hoarding away some of my best photos to use in multiple exposure prints, but I still need to shoot the photos that will complement them. I'm also getting really into positives, which is unexpected. I have a bunch of darkroom experiments I want to do with positives, but I'm also wanting large positives for other projects. I'm probably going to revisit the golgi stain neurons as well, if any of you remember that. Anyway, boring stuff for you all I'm sure, but it's keeping me happy.

This is a routine photo dispatch, nothing particularly of note. More black and white and more weird colors. Also, I'm going to be printing photos for christmas presents, which should be interesting. I'll just be a little print-making factory for a few days in the next month.

Here's some recent black and white:

   
     

Those last two are ghetto macro shots where I turned my lens around and held it against the camera. It was fun. I really want a real macro lens though. And a wide angle lens, and a medium format camera, and an IR filter...

The roll I mentioned last time that was cross-processed and pushed came out really insane. Very vibrant colors, very red. At first I panicked about the red again, but I got used to it.

   
   

One of my latest rolls that I'm excited about was a roll of 64 ISO Tungsten slide film, which I got cross-processed in C-41. It came out exceedingly pink. Or rather, the negatives came out exceedingly turquoise. I actually could not filter out enough red light with a standard color enlarger filter, so Audrey showed me how to use blank red film as a filter on top of the standard built in filters.

littleweirdgrrl from Roll 23: Fuji T64, cross-processed - More



yosh on Roll 23

In general, cross processing slide film in C-41 makes the photos come out a little grainy, higher contrast, and with washed out colors that have the hue a bit skewed (different hue depending on the film). This was definitely the case with the roll I had cross processed from Toorcamp, which came out mild and a little bluish. That was Fuji Provia slide film.

Anonymous condom bomber at Toorcamp, from roll 12


I don't really go for the whole lomography craze, but I do like messing with my color palate. The entry where I decided I like pushing color kind of marks the beginning of this interest. I'm currently shooting a roll of slide film that I'll be getting cross-processed AND pushed. It's 100, so the grain shouldn't be too bad, but the contrast might be kind of insane. What I'm hoping to do actually is counteract some of the color desaturation. We'll see.

Also, rubin110 and Joachim have both taken some great photos of me lately, so I thought I'd post a few of those as well. Joachim's is cross-processed, and it's actually the same film that I'm currently working on. And Rubin's had a roll of the same film as well.

Joachim's:


Rubin's:


And on the same day as the above photo, Rubin and I shot a roll of Kodak Flexicolor. It was ISO 8, which is ridiculous, so this involved a lot of long exposures and chasing the sun. And flexicolor is technically supposed to produce negatives--it's designed to be used to duplicate slide film in negative form. So technically this isn't cross-processed, it's just film that was never intended to be shot in normal daylight. Anyway, it came out craaazy blue. Definitely some of my favorite photos of me.

"Nineteenth century novels were all-important to her. It wasn't a question of her liking them; they were a neurological necessity, like sleep... [They] allowed her to organize social sense experience." -The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker

When I look through photos that I've taken, I think, "Gee I should do things more. With people. So that I can take more photographs."

First few rolls of film from India are up. I have another roll of black and white which I developed myself and which I'm still working on printing. I'll post scans of some prints eventually. In general, I'm very happy with how they came out. Also mixed in are some more local photos that snuck onto those rolls.

Roll 15 - Fuji Superia 400 on the K1000:

I was very pleased with the color on this roll--Superia is quite solid. The first half is photos from Toorcamp, and my favorite of those was this gorgeously backlit photo of Billy. I've been playing with backlighting a lot more lately. I initially shied away from it because it's kind of a bitch to meter, but hey that's why you bracket with a few variations on the exposure. And when I went to Toorcamp I was backlighting a lot because I was obsessed with lens flare. But I also really like the low color saturation and the high contrast highlights you get in the foreground, like on the side of his arm.



This roll I actually shot halfway and rewound, and then reloaded a month later on my way to India. So there's a shot of Paris in there, and then a bunch of Bangalore. Unfortunately it looks like my gallery puts them in a weird order when you access them via the tag, but you can probably tell which ones are from India. Here's one of my favorites of the India photos. It's a random series of overlapping exposures done on the K1000. The "live" theme is a happy accident.



Roll 19 - Fuji Sensia 100 on the K1000, pushed two stops:

The next roll of film in India is slide film that I had pushed two stops. Normally this would be horribly grainy, but with the small grain of 100 ISO it was not bad at all. And the color is gorgeously saturated. I recall liking the color saturation on roll 11 which was 200, pushed one stop, but the grain on that was too much. I'm going to continue playing with this because really my love for oversaturated colors knows no bounds (and probably needs to find them). Anyway, following is a shot from that roll. In the ruins in Hampi, there were a lot of very low and very high light situations where ordinarily I might not have gotten good color. In this shot, it's low light, but the color is still really juicy.



Roll 20 - Kodak Elite Chrome 100 shot on the K1000:

I also shot a roll of slide film in India that's not pushed, and the color is very faded. This was film I actually bought in India, so that may well be the cause, but I also think that without pushing it, the color in slide film just doesn't excite me. However, I did shoot some backlit shots of my family which looked great with the under-saturated color. This one of my aunt Sue makes me really happy. She's very beautiful to me. And that photo has the quality of family photos from the 80s, which makes me very nostalgic.

I've recently reorganized the film album in my gallery. I was posting an album for every roll, but that started to seem like an arbitrary delineation, so now I tag the roll number. But this means that I no longer get the album header to ramble about how the roll turned out. So I'm posting some of those ramblings here, by way of archivation, and will post them here in the future. I've also included my favorite photo from each roll, under the cuts. It was a nice retrospective for me.

I have two color rolls from India getting developed right now, that I'm very excited about. And I have one black and white roll that I'll be developing myself, which should be very interesting indeed. It has a ton of multiple exposures, most of which I purposefully didn't align, and it's mostly photos of the kids mobbing me. I'll be in the darkroom this week with tristan_crane to develop it, and with littleweirdgrrl to do some prints.

Roll 11 - Pushed color

( Turned out rather grainy, but nicely saturated colors. )

Roll 8 - Light leaks and pushing

( Light leaks are bizarre and unpredictable. )

Roll 5 - High school film

( A roll of film I found in my closet, from back when I was a yearbook photographer. Shot in June 2009. )

Today I went with Janani to MG road, a shopping district in Bangalore, to try to find sandals (which I did) and to get some souvenirs for a couple people back home (which I also did). But the event of note was that somewhere inside of Dubai plaza, I lost her. I have my G1, but I haven't unlocked it, so it's useless. I did all of the usual reasonable stuff. I looked in nearby shops, I waited out front of the plaza.

I haven't actually spent much time alone in India, and getting stared at constantly is fairly uncomfortable for me. But the blue in my hair has faded considerably, and there were other white people in the area, and many non-Indians, so it wasn't too bad from that angle. After what was probably about an hour, I used someone's cell phone and called her and found out that she'd given up on looking for me and taken a rickshaw home.

The unpleasant part of the affair mostly ended there. Once freed from places-I-recently-saw-Janani, I wandered around the neighborhood looking for a cafe that ioerror recommended (which had moved, unfortunately) and got myself a beverage before catching a rick home. Sitting around that mini-mall was sort of thought-provoking though. I remember at one point looking around at the Indian and East-Asian young women in trashy westerner clothing and thinking that it looked like San Jose. And that it was a little revolting. And that I am totally conservative. With my knee-highs, and my lace up heels, my cloth handerkerchiefs and my hair back in a bun, turning up my nose at the girls in shorts and flip flops. It's funny. And this normally isn't apparent in most of Bangalore, because everyone here is conservative. But amongst people who basically subscribe to American culture, it was immediately obvious. I think this is a big part of why I'm enjoying Bangalore.

Granted, I'm clearly not socially conservative. I just think people should dress nicely all the time and only expose themselves under appropriate circumstances. (prim face)

Anyway. I love it here. The auto-rick driver wanted to rip me off, and I had the "Meter?" "80 rupees" "No, meter!" "Meter plus twenty rupees" "No! Just meter! Why?" argument with him, which extended somewhat into the actual ride, but it wasn't actually unpleasant. Neither of us would budge, but after a while we were both just laughing. "Why? Just because I'm white? I had a rough afternoon shopping, and you want to charge me an extra 20 rupees!" And then I convinced him that he needed to take me to a bank and wait for me to use the ATM. Going to an ATM can take 10 or 15 minutes here, and the meter doesn't really run when you're stopped, so I kind of got the last laugh on that one. But I paid him 28 rupees extra in the end, rounding the fare up to 100, which makes for a grand total bill of US $2.10.

Haggling is a little tiring, but when I'm in a good mood it's almost fun. It helps that people are just really nice here. I picked up my kurtas from the tailor, who was re-altering them, and they wouldn't charge me, which just killed me. I left them a shirt to make, and I hope it goes well, because I enjoy giving them my business. Honest people here are actually weird about receiving tips. "Hey, you forgot some money at your table!" Normally my rule with the auto-rickshaws is that I always pay extra if the driver doesn't try to rip me off, and the ones that demand extra, or won't run the meter, I just won't ride with them. But this guy today was amusing. Somehow people here can rip you off in a friendly nothing-personal manner.

Speaking of which, with the kids, I can already tell who's going to be the scammers. This kid in the center, for instance. Totally hilarious, dramatic kid. But utterly merciless and pushy. He wanted to be in every photo. He and a few of the other particularly snotty boys would put their hands in front of the camera when I was trying to shoot photos of the girls, or anyone else. Obviously, I pretty quickly started ignoring him and trying to keep him out of the way, and only focusing on him to warn him when he pushed other kids or was particularly rude. And whenever I actually turned my attention on him directly he would just turn it on, like magic, like he hadn't already been in 5 photos and sabotaged 3. "Auntie please, one photo? Only one ohoto, ok? Just me, ok?" And he would make that "no really, I'm being quite reasonable" face. It was hard to not laugh.

I'm still trying to get my shit together here. I didn't bring very much clothing, but luckily we have a washing machine, so I've been getting by. I've managed to get one pair of Indian churidhar pants, but haven't found another pair that fits that I like, and I have recently acquired several kurtas (the shirt/dress tops that go over churidhar, see photo) but had to have three of them altered, because I am shaped wrong for this country. Two of them I had to have re-altered because they did it wrong the first time. And even then, those outfits require that I get another pair of sandals (as opposed to the lace up heels I've been wearing every day) and I am apparently too much of a delicate flower for sandals. They hurt! I don't have any calluses...

I bought fabric today to have some more shirts and skirts made. I'm excited, but really nervous about finding a tailor that won't fuck it up, since it's a little harder to explain how to make a western item of clothing without handing them a sample. But in general, the notion of having all of your clothing custom made is exceedingly appealing. If this works out, I'm reaaaally going to come back to India with an Agenda next time.

I also took a gamble and got a roll of film developed here. I'm glad that I did because I think that now I've finally sorted out how to do double exposures on the K1000. Unfortunately, I figured this out by noticing the one thing I failed to do on all of the otherwise perfect double exposures on that roll. And on the roll of hp5 I just shot at Gunjur. Oh well. It was really disruptive, shooting that roll of film. I don't know if I've got it in me to try again. The kids just go completely wild when I'm out there with a camera. I feel bad--we're really not supposed to We'll see. I'm out of black and white film for now anyway, until I find some place I can buy more. And color double exposures are less my style. I'll do some, perhaps.

Anyway, I uploaded some more good digital shots. A bunch of them were taken by the kids, when I gave them my digital camera to distract them. Whenever I had my Pentax out, they pretty much just mobbed me. It's honestly kind of amazing. It doesn't stop.

I'm staying up late to write this, but I've been meaning to write for days. It's almost 11pm. Way past my bedtime. I have been going to bed by 10 and getting up before 7 every day here.

It's really beautiful here. The people are really nice, even if most of them try to rip us off all of the time. It's almost like a game. And sometimes we win. Sometimes we can trick them into treating us like human beings by seeming like human beings. And then people are really warm. I had lunch today in a single filthy room, sitting on a bench opposite an old beggar man. We nodded at each other. I paid extra for my lunch because they didn't rip me off. This was at the little place next door to the government school in Bangalore. And these kids are so fucking adorable... don't get me started.

It's also aesthetically beautiful though. There are these cars that look like 60s Volvos, called Ambassadors. They were an Indian motor company that's now out of business, but these gorgeous cars are still around and still in use, especially by the state and as cabs. It's mind-blowing to me that the government here has gorgeous vintage cars from the 60s.

And the people all dress very conservatively. I'm actually very conservative aesthetically, in many ways, so this pleases me. I spent the 45 minute rickshaw ride to the school yesterday counting different kinds of mens clothing. And then trying different methods for mentally collecting the data because I can never let a meta opportunity slip by. Anyway, I feel pretty confident in saying that 95% of adult men here in Bangalore wear button down shirts. And they're not overly modern looking. Solid, conservative colors, or striped in a vaguely 60's or 70's style. Rarely loud. And slacks. And sandals. Higher class men wear oxford shoes. And women mostly wear ethnic clothing. Kurtas or saris. Brightly colored. It's not that they dress more thoughtfully here, its just that the standard, the thoughtless default outfit, is better. There are no women in gym suits. No men in baggy jeans. It's lovely. I, in my knee-high socks, knee-length skirts, lace up heels, and shirts that button all the way to my collarbone, I am scandalous. Even besides the blue hair.

There are contradictions everywhere. Bizarre juxtapositions. The photo in this entry is cows grazing on the lawn in front of a gated apartment building. We're staying in a complex of fairly nice apartments. Gated community with guards, sporting courts, playground and pool. And two buildings away, down the street, is a family in a shack in an empty dirt lot. They have a dog. The rickshaw drivers who wait outside our complex throw rocks at the dog when they get bored.

The research/design work we're doing takes up most of my time. Tonight we had a conference call with one of our advisors at CMU, and he's one of the Education people (as opposed to the HCI people or the computer science people) so we talked a lot about how to really hammer home the impact of our product on student engagement and learning. It's hard--education research--there are no answers really. And with this situation... we just have so much that we're up against. We're working with legacy applications, and they're poorly designed and difficult to use. The kids have so little experience with computers. A lot of our design is being altered because these kids just don't know how to use a mouse, much less use a mouse with a new collaborative paradigm. Anyway, here's a screenshot from one of the math games. Perhaps you get the idea.



Really, I'm grateful that I have work to do here because I think that without feeling like I had somewhere to channel my energy in such a way that it benefits the community, the poverty here would be overwhelming. I feel this way even in SF. I require a social justice outlet to live with myself in this world.

Other highlights of day 2 include my first Indian mosquito bite (about 2" away from the one I got in SF!) and more delicious food. But the main thing of course, is the kids.

My second day doing user testing, we went to a really rural school. I will try to get some better photos of the schools later, but right now any serious photography is out of the question, because the kids are too excitable. I already feel a little bad about disrupting the school's routine so much. The only real consolation on that is that the product we're working on will eventually be theirs, for free, and I think it will really make a difference. Many of the kids we work with have hardly used a mouse at all--only watched and occasionally taken a turn. In case I haven't given you the spiel, our software facilitates the use of multiple mice on one computer for collaboratively playing educational games.

Last night I was too tired to post, but yesterday I took a video of the kids. As you can see, they get really excited about foreigners, and in particular about my blue hair. We only work with 2 or 3 kids in the computer lab, and when the rest of them aren't in class, crowds of kids creep up to stare at us. The photo above (more here) is of Janani standing at the computer lab door and fending off the brave kids who will sneak all the way there to stare. And then when I try to talk to them they just grin and stare and say "hi auntie, what's your name?" (their English is limited) so this video is mostly them being really excited about interacting with me and the video camera.

This was an "Is it recording? oh hey, it's recording," sort of situation. I took a photo of the kids on my digital camera and showed it to them and they thought it was really exciting, so I wanted to show them video. So this has the viewfinder turned towards whoever's being recorded, and as such, the framing all sucks.

I'll be posting some cheap-o digital snapshots along the way, and I'll be shooting film which will come along later. I uploaded the first photos tonight.

Paris was nice. I was exhausted. ioerror and whittles had both given me contacts in Paris, but in the end I didn't meet up with anyone, and didn't take anyone's restaurant recommendations, and just ate near the hostel. It was nice to be really alone. Anyway, I was up bright and early the next morning, and took a few photos. Here is the canal next to the hostel:



And the flight to Bangalore was a bit rough. There were personal TVs at least, and I had two seats to myself, so I could curl up and sleep. They ran out of vegetarian meals though. I ate meat 3 times in 2 days. Fucking French. It was really nauseating. When I got to Bangalore though, the first thing I did was get cash and go buy daal and paratha. Holy sweet jesus it was delicious. I'm still kind of on a food-high, post-Paris. I really ate very badly there, mainly in that I had loads of trouble finding decent vegetarian food, and frankly I just can't stomach meat very often.

Our apartment here is very nice. We have toilets and a shower and even a working clothes washer, IN the apartment. Granted, the shower doesn't drain so the bathroom always has somewhere between a puddle and a full quarter inch of water covering the floor. Whatever. I've used showers in the Bay Area that did that.

I actually was wide awake at 7am today, and I went to the school with Kurtis and Janani. The kids are mind-blowingly adorable. Tiny, gorgeous, well-mannered, but utterly coy. Today I stuck to research but soon I'm going to have to get out there with an SLR and indulge in some serious portraiture. Debriefings were especially torturous. The kids don't speak English, so Kurtis and I are left out while Janani interviews the kids with our driver/translator Kumar. But we still watch because we can sort of follow it, and the kids throw us shy glances and occasionally smile at me and stare at my hair. And I just want to photograph the hell out of them. They're so damned cute. The user testing stuff is actually just hands-down great. It's really clear that this will be a useful tool for them once we ship it, and I think the kids really enjoy participating.

Kurtis and Janani seem to survive on about a meal and a half a day, which is of course just abhorrent to me. So, while they waited at the school, Kumar took me across the street to a little one room kitchen/restaurant thing. I don't really think I can describe these properly if you haven't seen one. It was of course advertised as a hotel. Presumably they have a room to let somewhere. I let Kumar order food for me, and listened enthusiastically to his extensive explanation of a balanced vegetarian diet, and various varieties of Indian food. We also talked about Indian food in San Francisco, and shared a gripefest about global warming that was really reminiscent of back home. I told him about the Mission, and about how we eat there and what it's like. It was a really excellent lunch, which he insisted on buying for me even though I tried to talk him out of it--it was a bizarre role reversal from the taxi driver ripping me off yesterday at the airport. Anyway, I think I've made a friend. Nothing like bonding over food. Kumar has promised to show me where I can get the best paratha in Bangalore.

And towards the end of our meal, a boy ran in and called Kumar out. Kumar was totally calm and told me he'd be right back, and when I looked out the door, there was a swarm of kids rocking his rickshaw back and forth. I nearly died laughing. It turns out they were trying to get out a snake that they saw in it. They succeeded and killed it. They took the whole thing really seriously. The boy who came to warn Kumar got really excited when I got out my camera and ran with me across the street to take a photo over the fence. Here's the photo:



And now I'm going to sleep. It's 9pm. I'm exhausted.

Just got through security at Paris CDG. They xrayed my film. I generally have no problem (if waiting around for an extra 15 minutes is no problem) getting a hand inspection instead, but here they were insistent that x-ray machines don't harm film, and that there was no other way through. They also told me that if I checked my bag it wouldn't be xrayed, but of course when I talked to the people at bag check they said that the xray for checked luggage is actually much stronger.

I mostly held it together through the first 10 minutes or arguing and bringing superiors and security guards and whatnot, but once I realized there was no way out, I pretty much lost it. I sobbed uncontrollably through the remainder of the security procedure. And now I'm sitting at my gate still crying.

I don't know, maybe it will be ok. It's all 400 film. But what if I wanted to push process it? Would it still be ok? What if I want to blow it up? Have I just lost some infinitesimal percentage of exposure to The Man?

This feels even more violating than those machines at SF that look through your clothes. Fuck all of this.

I'm getting on the damned plane to Bangalore now.

Color is Kodak Max 400 on a Canon AV-1. B/W is Ilford 200 on a Pentax ZX-M and the grainy ones at the end are Kodak 400 CN on a Canon AE-1, shot at 800 and pushed. Full album on my server.

More here: http://www.thatwhichisneither.com/hurtstotouchfire/gallery2/v/learningManual/roll6/

It's just the linework, but it looks pretty great. Go fetaltoaster!

I've pretty much abandoned my research filter in favor of a public blog, and I'll be leaving the filter for angsting about academics, or posting about geekery that can't be spoken about too publicly.

So the public blog is at iterativedeepening.com (.org right now actually--what do you guys think about that? I'm considering .net as well) and I've syndicated it: id_blog and today I blogged about TMS which is a crazy awesome science technique that does not involve lobotomy. There's a few archival posts from ye olde research filter up there as well. I may not stick with Iterative Deepening, for reasons previously discussed, but it's cool for now.

Today I presented my first published paper at AERA. I was half mad with nervousness last night, but it mostly melted off today. And I gotta say--I was pretty outstanding. The audience was clearly engaged, they asked really insightful, curious questions. And I did the entire presentation extemporaneously (as in, I didn't pre-write anything I said), without stumbling, and delivered it well.

Even better, that damned paper is done with. You can read the full paper online, but I really only recommend skimming it.

Additionally, today I talked for an hour and a half with Scott Makeig who is a research scientist at the Institute for Neural Computation at UCSD. He was recommended by my thesis adviser, and it turns out, we hit it off spectacularly. I really like his approach to EEG research. He basically invented ICA for EEG, and he's currently building an integrated lab that will process high-res EEG at the same time as high-res motion data and muscular data--basically the full picture, not just a bunch of brain data and really low-res behavioral observation. It's stupidly awesome. I want to put musicians in it and have minute data on their every action. And Makeig did his PhD in music biophysiology so he's totally excited about my research ideas. And the icing on the cake: he's also interested in mathematical cognition, and we talked a bunch about neuroscience angles there too.

Oh wait no. That's not the icing. The icing was that he offered to try to set me up with post-bac funding there for a year. Which would be totally rad. Not a serious consideration at this point because I still need to graduate and I'd rather stay in SF, but I'm very excited about keeping in contact with him.

Anyway, flight home is boarding. Life is good.

He's lucky I haven't mastered standing up yet.



Alternate caption: "All your laps are belong to us."

I'm in that warm fuzzy honeymoon phase with Twitter, and thus don't have much to post. Rather than cloud the livejournals with my 140 character thoughts, I've syndicated them: httf_twitter. Just in case you want to hear every dirty one liner from my lab manual.

Eventually I will return to you, o faithful livejournals. Probably.

So, I want you all to wake me up with the audio file of your choice. Who's in?

Think of it like a collaborative alarm clock. Record yourself talking to me, record your cat, sample some music, whatever. Make a few. Send me files in a reasonable format and I will use them as my alarm.

I've been using a clock/alarm app on my G1 that will play any audio file as the alarm. And of course I have a voice recorder, so the past few weeks I've been waking up to myself explaining why I should get out of bed. It seems definitely better than beeping. The best way to get me files is gmail (hurtstotouchfire). The G1 is pretty forgiving but if it's a voice recording or a weird file format, send a tester file as well just in case because obviously I can't listen to it until it wakes me up. I hope I don't have to tell you to change the filename so it's not giving away the content. The idea here is to get the social element as well as the novelty of an unexpected alarm.

And while obviously if you were kind you would aim to help cushion the blow of waking up, I really can't fault you if you're devious.

I'll post audio and commentary on the best ones in a few weeks.

Backgound: Amanda Palmer is this fantastic singer/songwriter who has a pretty black sense of humor and writes very emotional songs. One track on her new album is called "Oasis" and it's about a girl who gets raped while drunk at a party and has an abortion. The song is very upbeat, and the girl's perspective is indifferent--she's more concerned about her favorite band Oasis. Aside from being a great song, I enjoyed the social commentary. Apparently the UK promoters declined to air it on the radio because it was "making light of rape, religion and abortion". This has sparked a lot of dialog amongst her supporters about how perhaps if you can't laugh at it, then it's really taken over.

Amanda pointed out that if the song had been appropriately "sad" people wouldn't have had any problem with it--it's the tongue in cheek complexity that freaks people out. So the following video is her "sad version" of Oasis. The sound is terrible unfortunately but I still lost my shit laughing at it:



Here's the original video for comparison: