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mixed tapes are weird.

i'm always trying to create a strong sense of narrative, through a combination of feeling, lyrics, and song title. but feeling is the dominant factor.

so i always start with… like, a lot of pieces of music. this last mixed tape started with over 200 pieces of music. it's a process of reduction. so you have this massive jigsaw puzzle, but not all the pieces fit together. or maybe it's more like a choose your own adventure book. if you choose one song to follow another, it immediately disqualifies a certain number of other possibilities.

sometimes you really want to use a particular song because you feel it embodies the theme of the whole piece. but then the mix is almost done and it won't fit anywhere. you try to shoehorn it in to bad effect. if you are wise, you kill your baby. that's what my best friend calls it. you have to sacrifice it for the betterment of the entire piece. and hopefully the theme comes through without it.

so i had to kill my baby. i was close to finishing and i rushed the finish. i know... i did that the last time too. it's because these mixed tapes can be incredibly cathartic.

sometimes you have to make the wrong decision and believe it's finished, in order to realize you've made the wrong choice. sometimes that's the only way.

Started shooting interiors for Craig Stanghetta's website/portfolio. It's a lot more difficult than I imagined, and that's saying something because I imagined that it was going to be difficult.

So I armed myself with a Julius Shulman book and started studying. There are technical considerations, but the most challenging part of it has to do with the photographer's obligation to the designer. The photographer is not there to make a work of art out of his or her photographs. This is not about the photographer... it's about the designer. The moral obligation is to represent their work as honestly and as best as possible.

But here's the weird part... Julius Shulman's photographs are works of art in their own right. But he had to first abandon the desire to make an "artistic" image before he could arrive at this.

Weird, right?

So this is the second time I've shot in Meat&Bread and I will be shooting a third time. And probably a fourth.

As a footnote, these shelves and the counter are made from the subfloors of the building. Meat&Bread is located in one of the oldest buildings in Vancouver, and as the suite next door was doing a renovation, this wood was about to end up in a landfill. There is no way you could ever know from looking at it that this wood came from the building's original construction materials. But unconsciously, you do. It harmonically ties into the design of the space in the most holistic way.

We finally got a cryo-vac machine for cooking sous-vide at the Pourhouse.

Stand sold separately.

This is a quote from Terrence Malick's latest film, The Tree of Life. For those of you not familiar with Terrence Malick, he directed two critically acclaimed films in the seventies before he stepped away from filmmaking completely. He did not make another picture for exactly twenty years.

I have a particular fondness for his first film Badlands, though people seem to connect most with his second feature, Days of Heaven. That movie is gorgeously shot. Yet I have not been nearly as captivated by his most recent films... Until now. The Tree of Life is incredibly restrained and nuanced. It's in what is not said, that it says the most. Film is about showing, not telling.

Of course the irony in my last statement is that this quote is spoken in the film... yet not much else is.

It's nearly a masterpiece in cinematography. It restored my belief that a film made in Hollywood can be beautiful and poetic. And it speaks to the one thing that matters most in life, in a world where we struggle to find meaning and happiness.

Not sure why or what.