I’ve been wanting to write something about the completely devastating tragedy at Virginia Tech this week, but I honesly can’t figure out which train of thought to put into what sentence. It’s so completely senseless, random and sad. It’s not one of those events that we, as Americans, are separated from, like for instance a suicide bombing in a crowded city market. A bomb went off in Iraq this week and killed over 200 people. Those types of events happen almost daily in Iraq but we, at least I, have a hard time relating to the tragedy of them because they are so not our culture, so not what we’ve ever experienced and so not our way of life. They are equally tragic and devastating, but for some reason, I connect to the Virginia Tech events more. I hear about suicide bombings on the radio as I drive to work and I say… again, what else is new. But the Virginia Tech shootings… it stopped me in my tracks. I felt this overwhelming sympathy and sadness and loss. Maybe because I’m a college graduate and I went to a private military school and when I look at the pictures online and on the news I see myself and my friends in the faces of these young college kids. It’s just too close to home. I can’t begin to fathom what they must have gone through, sitting in those classrooms with their friends and then suddenly, chaotically, just systematically executed one by one without anyplace to escape to and without any action to take.
I’ve followed the coverage, mostly online. I’m somewhat of a news junkie and I found myself glued to the coverage this week. I realized, however, that my fascination was not so much with the details of the story as with how much more personal the news was and how it was being spread and communicated - websites, camera phones, Myspace and Facelink profiles, blogs, instant messages, text messages, emails. CNN couldn’t report things nearly as fast as the people who were there in it, live, online. There has been a lot written online about the use of these technology tools and how it changed the coverage of this event, but it is truely amazing… and heart wrenching. There are student blogs that were covering the event minute by minute with text, pictures and video. We have used the term Web 2.0 for a couple years now but I think we are now in the midst of News 2.0. Mainstream news agencies are racing to the scene and racing online, not to necessarily get the scoop on the story, but rather to get to the amature videographer or blogger who got the scoop on the story. The killer, with his video testimonial submitted to NBC, knew this best of all. It’s an amazing evolution of technology.
Well, all news and technology aside… I’m just so taken aback and saddened by this whole thing. My thoughts and prayers go out to the entire VT community and the friends and families of the victims.
One of the photos that caught my eye online was this one below. It was a coffee cup from au bon pain. It’s difficult to read but I think it says:
“If it had not been for this coffee cup I would have been in Norris 211. I can’t thank God enough for sparing my life, but I also will never understand why yours had to be [taken]” - it’s difficult to read the last word.
Ok, I promise this is the last cowboy costume picture. I ran across this one from a different photographer that was covering our little Brokeback party. I think this one is the best. The “Sheriff” on the left is my roommate Dylan and our friend Richard is in the middle.
We had our Donkey Punch Brokeback Mountain show at Rich’s last night. It went awesome and we had a pretty good turnout. I think it was definitely one of my favorite nights so far, at least for dressing up. I took a few photos with my camera and a few friends also took some pictures of me, which I posted below. I’m the host/MC of the night on the microphone so I try to make sure I represent the theme. Last night I definitely think my costume came together well… especially my damn hot cow-hide cowboy boots that I bought lol. I think I make a pretty decent cowboy but you can be the judge below 
That’s my BB gun
Here another pic I shot in the mirror.
The one is a little foggy because the flash bounced off the nightclub fog that gets put on the dance floor.
Here’s a shot I took of my boots… a little blurry but you get the basic idea.
I posted a few more pictures of the stage setup after the jump link below.
Continue to the rest of this post »
So for about the past year, I’ve had an alter-ego that I never really mentioned much here on my blog. My roommates and I put on and promote several shows at a local nightclub here in San Diego. During the summer, we put on the crazy and hugely popular Foam Parties, but on the second Saturday of every month we also do a show called Donkey Punch (don’t ask). We do it just for fun and it has actually turned into a really fun event to put on. Each month we have a different theme and we have a stage set and dancers etc. Last month our theme was a Toga party and this month (tomorrow) it’s called Brokeback… after the movie Brokeback Mountain, and everyone will wear cowboy hats and boots etc.
It takes our crew almost the entire day to put the set together before the show on a Saturday night. It’s very theatrical and much different then anything else you usually find out in a nightclub. During our last setup, my roommate Dylan put his camera on a tripod and set it to snap a photo every 2 minutes during the whole day (similar to the pool time-lapse series from my earlier post). He then stitched the images together to create this video clip below. It’s really cool to see how the stage comes together right up until the club opens. You can get an idea of what goes into creating the set.
If you wanna check out our full lineup of events and/or subscribe to our email list, you can go to our promotions website at www.spincyclerinse.com. The Spin Cycle Rinse is the original name of our Foam parties and we also use it as the name of our promotion comany for our other parties.
Last Saturday night was the Rufskin spring swimwear fashion show at Rich’s nightclub in San Diego. I did the photography of the behind the scenes and the show for Rufskin. It was a lot of fun and really nice to be behind the camera again. It’s been awhile since I really did any cool photography projects. I posted the pictures to my Flickr.com account.
Click the images below to view the slideshow for the fashion show and behind the scenes pre-show.
Images are copyright protected. If reposting for personal use, please provide photo credit to me - Joe McDonald at jpatrickm.com - Thanks!
