matthearn.com

Update: I did not get to kiss John Mayer on the mouth. All is sadness. Doubly frustrating, is that because the Tweeter Center sucks, I couldn’t get any pictures. Argh.

Our tickets said something about “NO PROFESSIONAL CAMERAS,” which kinda concerned me, but I thought, well, Canon’s own website describes the Rebel XTi as a “consumer” camera (the 30D is prosumer; the 5D is professional; and the 1D Mark III is “Holy Crap This Is Way Too Expensive To Take Out Of The Box”), and if I just put on a relatively tame lens (no monstrous zooms with lens hoods), they can’t really complain.

Incorrect.

Apparently when they say “No Professional Cameras,” they mean no detachable lenses, so despite the fact that my camera entered the building with a 50mm prime lens that wouldn’t allow me to get a shot of John any closer than “ant” view, it was confiscated (and returned later, worry not). This wouldn’t have been so troubling if the tickets had specifically said “No cameras with detachable lenses,” which would have been perfectly clear. It also would have been less annoying if they weren’t allowing people to bring in $800 Sony zoom 8MP digitals that were capable of getting pictures of the bass player’s ridiculous Village-People-Cop hat.

Anyway, we got in, and I immediately bought myself a large boring American beer, only to walk an extra 50 feet and discover they had a stand selling all kinds of quality microbrews. So my frustrations mounted. Then we got seated while James Morrison played his set, and I got even more pissed off, because the sound system at the Tweeter Center is so crappy it sounded like James was singing through a special filter designed to remove all consonants from every word. I couldn’t understand a thing. Even now I have no idea if any of his songs are any good; it might as well have been all instrumentals. I’ve heard better sound systems in an elevator.

The same goes for Ben Folds, who from what I’m told is a phenomenal musician and performer; all I can say is he has some amusing gimmicks and his songs often have pretty melodies. I’ll give him a B- because he kept throwing his piano seat at the keys, and at one point during a song he broke a piano string on a low note, immediately stopped the song, removed the string from the soundboard, handed it to a fan, and then restarted the song exactly where he’d left off.

Luckily, during his set I was able to run off and pee, and also buy a quality beer named something like “Circus Boy” or “Circus Penis,” or something. It was FANDAMNTASTIC, and I got back to my seat to listen to Ben Folds play 2 more completely unintelligible songs and then wander off to put on his neck brace (I’m assuming, since his head is roughly the same size as the rest of his body).

Honestly, the best part of the concert (up until John walked onstage) was making fun of other people with Liz. A quick rundown of the amusing people we saw:

• Between 8 and 27,000 skinny little high school/early college-aged skanks who seriously needed to go dig a sandwich out of the trash or something before their bodies collapsed in on themselves.
• An ENORMOUSLY fat woman in a wheelchair, attended by her fat husband and 2 fat daughters, getting wheeled around while sucking on what appeared to be a quart-sized glass of rum-soaked pixie-stix-sugar. There must have been 3,000 calories in that “drink,” which sadly was probably maybe 1/5 of this woman’s daily regular intake.
• A couple thousand guys who were clearly there because their girlfriends liked John Mayer. These were the guys who were probably annoyed because they kept wanting to sit down and dorks like me wouldn’t stop standing up and screaming.

Yeah, I was screaming. John Mayer gives me happy feelings in my pants. DEAL WITH IT.

There’s not much to really say about John’s performance; he was ridiculously spectacular. It’s difficult to grasp how good a guitarist he is by just listening to his CDs; you kinda have to watch him play on TV, or live, particularly if he’s not constrained by late-night/early-morning network TV timetables. And the best part about it is that he can solo pretty extensively, but it never starts to feel like it’s gone on too long. For example: if you go to see Phish in concert, which I have, they will play maybe 8 songs, each of which is roughly 25 minutes long on average. Only one of these songs will have an identifiable melody. Usually after about 7 minutes into each song, Trey Anastasio would slow things down, and you’d realize they were launching into another 10 minute build-up leading to some kind of climax that left you feeling unsatisfied. John, on the other hand, played something like 25 songs, some of which were 5 minutes long, some of which were 10, but each extended solo was melodic and interesting and WENT SOMEWHERE. Going to a Phish concert feels like a 3 hour free-form jazz symposium at Camden County Community College; going to a John Mayer concert feels like going to a rock concert.

On the other hand, going to a Phish concert usually guarantees you a pretty boss contact high.

John didn’t quite play all my favorites, which I guess just means I’ll have to go see him again. However: not at the Tweeter Center, which has incurred my almight wrath for all times to come due to their immense suckitude.

Here’s a holla at ye. Let’s start off with: new pictures (just the first 5 are technically “new,” as in posted today). Yay! Yay.

As you are undoubtedly aware, I am what might be most kindly described as “husky,” or, as one of my childhood teachers actually put it, “sturdy.” I wasn’t always this way; in fact, at the time that the childhood teacher knew me, my BMI was probably 2. I was skinny as a rail until college. That’s when I discovered that, without parents around and few athletic opportunities available, I could cut all my classes and sit in my dorm room eating corn pops and taking advantage of The Internet, which was in its infancy (well, toddlerdom) at the time. I gained something like 35 pounds in 8 months, a feat which is normally only duplicated by the best sumo wrestlers.

Ever since, I’ve been in a see-saw battle against my enormous waistline; at the moment I appear to have reached some kind of sad equilibrium in which I get just enough exercise to compensate for my staggering food intake, because I just don’t have it in me to diet anymore. (I can’t even face the low-carb diet now, because the thought of running a mile (which cold sucks) and not getting to eat a donut and/or entire honey ham makes me want to cry.)

Enter the modern technology of holistic wellness, or philosophical weight loss, or hippie diets, or some such type fad. All I know is this guy says he can hypnotize me, via CD, into not stuffing my face with candy I steal from children whom I beat up for their candy. His name is Steven Gurgevich, PhD, and he has a website, so he’s TOTALLY LEGITIMATE. Also he has a name that sounds like a dry heave, which has the obvious effect of throwing anybody off their feed.

It consists of three CDs. The first CD sort of explains everything about the process, which is complex and involves “spirit” and “emotions,” neither of which I’m entirely sure I have, and warns against “hidden saboteurs.” (I like to envision small Englishmen chopping up my fat-burning liver with axes.) The second CD has some tracks with pep talks about breaking down barriers and learning self-control, and the third CD, which apparently is the most important, has the parts I’m supposed to listen to when I wake up, or before meals, or if I accidentally find myself tearing away at the flesh of a squirrel I find on the road because I’ve hypnotized myself so well I didn’t eat for four days.

So far I’ve just listened to the first CD, and here’s what I can tell you: man, it was boring. That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting, but because Dr. Gurgevich is a professional hypnotist, he says everything in a very calm, even tone, and after a while you fall asleep. I can also report that so far it doesn’t seem to be working, because I had to take a break in the first CD to go get Pepper Steak on Rice With Vegetables from the cafeteria. Anyway, I’ll listen to some more of the CDs and let you know if I, for example, spontaneously lose 70 pounds.

If this doesn’t work, I’m going to go with South Bronx Paradise.

omg no time to talk on vacation just go here look at new pictures ok thnx bai

Okay, I’m going to force myself to post, but only because I’m off the rest of the week and do not intend to put anything up, unless I find myself with a strong desire to drunk-write, which is always a possibility, or if I take a picture of something particularly compelling (particularly disgusting diapers, or maybe my wife drooling whilst a-napping) and need to get it on the internets for posterity. I’m also not taking any responsibility for anything that follows being funny, ’cause if you think I’m going to worry about making you laugh at 2:18pm before my day off, well, in the words of Sean Connery, your mother’s a whore.

Yesterday I got to skip most of my workday to catch a bus to Baltimore with the Chancel Choir of First & Central Presbyterian (so named because they were both First, and the most Centrally Located, which makes the other Presbyterian churches like totally SO jealous) to sing at the American Guild of Organists Region III Convention. This may sound very similar to getting to go to, say, the Nebraska State Ophthalmalogy Opthamogoly Eye Doctor Convention, except that Eye Doctors are better dressed and usually less, well, girthy.

The ride down was largely uneventful, unless you were the driver, in which case apparently EVERYTHING is an event; he alerted us that when passing over the Susquehanna River, you could look to the right and see the Conowingo damn, which I guess is useful tourist information, but he also pointed out a Weigh Station, The Place Where You Drop Off Family Members Who Are Going On Cruises, and some $350K Condos. By the end, people were just yelling “SHUT THE #*$& UP” every time they heard the mic click on.

We were to sing in the Baltimore Basilica, which is notable for being the first Catholic cathedral built in the United States. The cornerstone was laid in 1806, and construction complete in 1821. In 1937, the cathedral was raised to the rank of “Minor Basilica” by Pope Pius XI, but by the mid50s the powers-that-be had decided that the building suffered from a condition they described as “being surrounded by FAR too many crackheads” and they scurried the See off to the suburbs. Now the Basilica is a “co-cathedral,” which is kinda like being a cheerleading co-captain: half the respect, and twice the teenage drama.

But I joke. The building is actually BEAUTIFUL, and since it’s mostly space and stone walls, the reverb in there is unbelievable. Since I mostly sing in carpeted rooms that suck sound right out of the air, listening to plainsong chant and Russian hymns bounce off the walls for 3-4 seconds after we stopped singing was fascinating.

We rehearsed there, and then had some time to kill before dinner, so some us went a-wondering around Baltimore. The Basilica is just a few blocks from Peabody Conservatory, which you may recall I went to for a few years before realizing how annoying other vocal performance majors usually are, so I wandered over there to see if things had changed, which of course they had. I got loads of pictures of the mid-town area, the best of which I’ll get online at some point. We had dinner, consisting of sandwiches, chips, and other knick knacks, at a nearby Unitarian church, and then went back to get dressed for the service.

The service started with a 30 minute concert by Mary Beth Bennett, who is most notable because she looked REALLY REALLY familiar to me and I couldn’t figure out why, and then about an hour of singing and praying and all that good timey religious stuff. Then we piled on the bus, drank some beers, and headed home.

Oh, also, I went to the Phils game on Sunday; they won, and I got a million pictures, which I’ll post later. Other than that, the only thing that was notable was that I went with two Mets fans in full Mets regalia and didn’t get peed on by anyone! It was stellar.

I added some new pictures, as well as some new functionality over at the photography page:

• The “random” button works now, in case you just want something pretty to look at and don’t give a crap what it is.
• The “contact” button works as well, in case you want to yell at me for something.
• I added a “new” button that shows you the most recent 18 pictures I uploaded.
• There are 18 recent pictures.

Go ahead, check it out! It’s only partially self-indulgent and lame.

Remember when I said a while ago (yesterday) that I needed to replace my online photography gallery? And I was tired of testing out different freeware/GPL ones because invariably they didn’t do exactly what I wanted and did a ton of other things I didn’t need? And remember the part where you DOUBTED ME? Okay, just Josh. Still.

Well, after hours (minutes) of careful work (mostly watching TV), I have duly encoded my own jam. Right now it’s only got a few things in it, and worse, some of the menu options don’t work. You can click “random,” but instead of showing you a random photo, it, uh, won’t do anything. Same for contact, because while I figure I could just simplify things and put my email address in there, I know better than to give you people my email address. When the internet has my email address, the internet emails me pictures of taints and ads for Cialis. So, um, hells no. Also there’s no descriptions yet, just titles and EXIF information.

Anyway: Matt Hearn Photography. It’s definitely the most pretentious thing I’ve ever created, and I have created some pretty pretentious stuff in my day.

In case you’ve visited here over the last few weeks and, instead of seeing my beautiful, beautiful words, saw a message saying that my website had been suspended for overambitious CPU utilization, rest assured that the problem has been isolated and we are in the process of resolving it.

Well, not we, it’s just me. Because it’s my fault, you see. When I arranged for my site to be hosted by my current service, hostmonster.com, I paid for a nearly unlimited amount of bandwidth and disk space, and proceeded to upload scripts and databases and images and hilarious posts about hairstyles for head-fatties and everything was super happy: me, because my website was still online despite my previous hosting service deciding to close up shop; hostmonster, ’cause they gets the dollaz dollaz; and the internet, because let’s be frank, the loss of my website’s content would send shockwaves that might well destroy the economy of Nigeria or perhaps the entire Indian subcontinent. (Which just wouldn’t do. OBVIOUSLY.)

What I didn’t realize was that, while hostmonster certainly was happy to have my business and store all of my crap for me, apparently they don’t much care for me to actually SHOW it to people. Every time a person would look at my website (specifically the picture gallery, about which we’ll hear more directly) it required a computer in Utah to do some processing, or “thinking,” and respond to the user with pictures and words and all that good stuff. Well, supposedly my site, which receives all of maybe 25 hits a day, 5 of which are me checking for new comments (there never are any), and at least 8 of which are googlers trying to find pictures of Dave Chappelle’s Hott AZN Wife, was overloading the CPU of the computer in Utah and causing smoke to come out of its ears, if it has ears, which it probably does not, but who knows what Mormons might do to computers when they get them alone in the Tabernacle.

Long story short: the online gallery had to go, because while the pictures contained therein weren’t getting me anywhere close to my disk space/bandwidth limits, the processing power required to get them out of the database was angering the CPU gods. On the other hand, I was never terribly happy with that gallery software anyway; it seemed to do about 18,000 things, and I basically needed it to do one: display pictures in a pretty format, which it didn’t do very well. So I’m working on my OWN, much tamer, online gallery program, which will basically give you a list of albums to view with pictures located there up ins, in a pretty format that doesn’t distract from the image on the page. Totally boss! As soon as it is ready, I will be certain to alert the media. Until then: go to Charles’s site, since roughly 97% of my photography is centered on him anyway.

To cap off a week of not posting any funny stuff at all (for reals, it’s like I’ve turned into Thomas Pynchon, except that Thomas Pynchon probably never took a picture of his junk and put it on the interwebs), here are some shots I took whilst a-wandering aimlessly around The City Of New York with Teh J0sh. Enjoy ye them!

I know how you love that artsy shiznitzel.

Things with the high school show (“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Mar 15-17, 7pm, Brandywine High, come check it as it will be RAD) are ramping up rapidly, so we’re heck of busy with that. Still, a few things worth sharing:

Our friends Brian and Karen got married over the weekend; check out a few choice photographz here. Everybody was HOT.

I also put up some new pictures over at CharlesHearn.com. They are so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend checking them out.

I love cars. Also, I hate cars. Or rather, I love cars that work or can be easily diagnosed and fixed, and hate cars that defy all attempts to repair them. At the moment, my Bomb@ZZ whip, the venerable Izzy B, has but one functioning brake light. The one in the rear-view window. I guess that’s better than none, but try to tell that to the guys at the Motor Vehicle Inspection Lanes. I did. They weren’t terribly amused. I’m assuming all the carbon monoxide has destroyed their senses of humor.

Anyway, I went to Pep Boys to get new bulbs for the brake lights. But Pep Boys had none. So I went to ANOTHER Pep Boys, which had them. I installed them. No change. So I bought some new fuses and tried those. No change. So I kicked the car and threatened to bring wrath upon it. No change.

I gave up after that, but the long and short of it is that I have a car with fewer then the recommended number of brake lights and my registration expires in three weeks. CAN MATT GET THE CAR REPAIRED IN THREE WEEKS, GIVEN HIS BUSY SCHEDULE? STAY TUNED!

Oh, and go here and check out a bunch of crappy pictures I took of Ye Olde Newe Castlee last month.