“The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.
- Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Wow… what the heck were we doing to our bodies on the Atkin’s Diet?

If you are not using RSS, you’ve probably already noticed that I’ve reskinned my blog. I’m just letting you know that it’s not just the blog that’s gotten a fresh new layer of paint - my entire site has gotten a bit of a freshening up. I’ve actually been going live with one section at a time, and the client area isn’t quite done yet, so please excuse the growing pains there.

However, my portfolio section has been updated. Here’s a screen-capture of my new splash page (make sure to refresh your cache so the new page loads if you have recently loaded the site).

The American conceit has taught me that everything worth learning was discovered or invented in America by Western Civilization (white folks mainly, be them European or American). I am slowly unlearning that. I somehow always forget that many European avant-garde artists over the centuries drew heavily on the influence of Asian art. It’s very strange to me that so few, if any, of those influences ever get their own space in the art history books.

I am not Korean, and I don’t understand more than maybe two phrases in the entire song, but it’s a beautiful visual concept paired with a pretty song.

I just can’t share these pictures without getting into some philosophy regarding cameras and film. I caught a conversation in a small breakfast place while in Carmel where some guy was making a comment about how a 35mm Leica is a “real” camera. This struck me as a bit ridiculous, and a bit ironic since I had both my dSLR and medium format cameras on me at the time. Can you really say that digital photographs are inferior to 35mm? I was tempted to sarcastically quip that 35mm is clearly inferior to 120/220 just to make a point (Jeannie stopped me from making a scene).

Nothing in photography is ever replaced and the new technology is never any less real than the older stuff. While I am sad that Polaroid will no longer be producing its famous instant film, it only serves as a reminder of how unique that Polaroid experience is. Nothing can replace that. 8×10, 4×5, 120/220, 35mm - they are all still and they all have their fanatics. I’ve even seen some contemporary work by people using pinhole cameras that they built themselves. There are so many obvious innovations and subtle nuances in the different equipment available to making photographs. It’s these mechanics of all the formats that produce different kinds of pictures by virtue of the limitations.

Art is created in confines of structure, not in its absence.

These are some of the pictures from my first successfully developed roll of 120 film (and a picture of my Hasselblad, taken, ironically, with my dSLR).

Before the invention of chemical fertilizer, farms had to rely on the nutrients in their soil and the sun for the well being of their crops. This natural limit in resources was the basis on which optimum yield in crops could be determined. If too much was planted, the crops would be under-nourished and result in lower yield.

After WWII, the country had a large surplus of ammonium nitrate, which was used in the manufacturing of weapons and explosives for the war. The military factories were given large government subsidies to be converted to chemical fertilizer factories, which in effect, raised the potential yield for any given plot of land. However, this also equates to a shift of farming crops from earth-dependency to being petroleum-dependent.

(I don’t have as much information on pesticides, except that they are derived from poison gases developed for war use.)

“When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it - or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn… Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy to every calorie of energy invested.”

- Michael Pollan, The Onmivore’s Dilemma

I never realized that the food I eat is a result of government investment in military technologies… or that we’re consuming more energy to make food more “efficiently” than we did in a more natural state. It’s a little bit awkward to know. I have to remind myself that knowledge is empowerment, and not torment.