DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last Fall I took a picture of a Greek church in Ia, Santorini, lit up by the setting sun. It’s my favorite picture from that trip.

My original correction, shown above, is too orange. In reality, the church was lit by an orange-red sunset, but I think this version is not believable. My eyes would not have perceived that color; the human brain has, in effect, a realtime DSP doing advanced curve corrections on the input video stream. A human observer would have “seen” a white church, not an orange one.

Here’s the original image, as saved by the camera. Note that this is no more genuine or real than any corrected version; the camera is far worse at perceiving color than even a human with poor eyesight, e.g. me. But that’s where Photoshop comes in.

Last weekend I opened up the original image with the intent of making as large a print as I could. I began to tweak the colors, and experienced a disturbing deja vu — I’ve worked on this image too many times. I didn’t want to do it again.

I opened up a corrected version, saved for a calendar we made last December. The colors were great! The church walls appear white, with still enough red in the walls to suggest a sunset. The color of the dome was particularly appealing; that is the exact shade of blue I remember from Greece.

But this calendar image was too small for my current project; I had reduced its resolution prior to saving. This time, I needed the full frame. And I couldn’t imagine trying to rewrite whatever curves might have yielded this image. Knowing what I could achieve didn’t really help; it would probably take longer to reproduce this result than to make an all-new correction… but if the new one wasn’t as successful, I’d be able to see it immediately. Not good.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if I’d saved the correction curves last time?” As it turns out, I had. This was a lucky break, and a big relief; it saved me from doing something I’d done twice before.

A smarter way to work would be to save max-resolution images in .psd format, using Adjustment Layers for corrections. This makes it even easier to edit curves, because the loading and saving happen automatically. I’ll have to change my workflow.

Just yesterday I mentioned Roxanne’s, the awesome raw vegan restaurant in Larkspur, CA. They’ve just closed — the restaurant patrons are all eating next door, at Roxanne’s take-out window. Locals are happy to eat raw vegan food, but apparently not at white-linen-tablecloth prices.

Before Sunset is a sequel to a movie I never saw, nor even wanted to see.

In 1995, writer/director Richard Linklater, who’d previously done Dazed and Confused (“See it with a bud!”), co-wrote a story about a French grad student (Julie Delpy) meeting an American slacker (Ethan Hawke) on a train bound for France. The whole movie takes place in one night. It’s a talking movie, showing little but Hawke’s and Delpy’s characters getting to know one another, falling in love, facing the sad reality that they’d have only those few hours together. (That explains why I didn’t see it: no rock bands, no espionage, no seven-figure CGI budget. Who’d pay $8 to see a couple of people talking? )

Linklater rejoined his co-writer and cast to create a sequel. As in real life, characters Jesse and Celine are nine years older. Jesse has become a writer; his first successful book tells the story of one night spent on a train with a French grad student. In Paris to promote the book, he’s floored to have Delpy’s character appear at a book signing.

The characters have had nine years to think about what might have been. A few scenes of Before Sunrise are shown as flashbacks — Hawke and Delpy are nine years younger, charged with youth and hope and possibility… making the new scenes all the more poignant. Seeing the new lines in these characters’ faces drives home the loss of nine years. A lot of life has passed them by.

Before Sunset benefits from nine years’ experience. It’s about second chances, and Linklater appropriately raises the bar both for his characters and himself. Rather than 14 hours, this time Jessie and Celine have only 80 minutes; the movie takes place in real-time. It’s a film of an 80-minute conversation. And perhaps because I’m also nine years older, I sat captivated by it.

I recommend this movie. It’s not necessary to have seen Before Sunrise first… although you’ll probably want to see it later.

Jon Carroll tried a vegan restaurant (Café Gratitude), and was surprised to find that he likes it.

I confess to having had what Herbert Spencer would have called “contempt prior to investigation” about the word “vegan,” the concept of veganism and vegans themselves. Vegans, I figured, were people who were too snotty to be vegetarians.

He describes a particular, typically peculiar vegan restaurant, vents a few opinions on the matter, then finally gets to the texturized vegetable protein (aka “meat”) of the matter:

So then the food came. And here’s the truth, my beloved readers: I came to scoff and stayed to cheer… You know all those vegans who say, “No, really, it tastes good.” They actually have a point.

Certainly that’s true of Roxanne’s.

At the other end of the culinary spectrum comes news of “The Stonner,” a “1000 calorie, deep fried pork sausage kebab [that] has been dubbed the most dangerous fast food in Britain.” (“Stonner” is Scottish slang for erection. Had the Stonner been invented in the US, it would have been called a “tube steak.” Or, maybe, “McBoner.”) The inventor claims sales are, err, rising.

The inventor can be credited not only with the original idea of wrapping a pork sausage in a doner kebab, dipping the mess in batter and frying it. He also takes credit for naming it “the most dangerous supper in Scotland,” indicating that he knows more about marketing than he does about cooking.

(A tip of the toque to reader Chris Thompson, who reliably informs me of all new developments in the fried meat scene.)

When we visited Vancouver a few weeks ago, we stayed with a friend who lives one block off of Commercial Drive — a street that contains more culture in any three-block span than any three Midwestern states. I didn’t take any photos, so you’ll have to make do with a thousand words… these are the types of restaurants I jotted down on the back of a business card as we drove past:

Carribean/Jamaican, Greek, Greek & pizza, pita, Mexican, taverna, Italian, deli, Java Express, chocolates, cappucino, gelato, cakes, tandoori, sushi, Salvadoran/Mexican, vegetarian/vegan, donair, taco, bagel, vegetarian Indian, tapas, juice bar.

That’s not a complete index… I couldn’t write fast enough. Literally every storefront represented a different type of cuisine.

Our host called this strip “The Drive,” capitals evident, in a tone of reverence. Within 24 hours I felt the same. We ate Asian/fusion, gelato, Brazilian, and multi-ethnic vegan sandwiches within the span of five meals (and three blocks).

The Drive has its own website: thedrive.net. Although the design is dated, the site’s content provides a model for the way shopping-district websites ought to be: indexed via map (for spatial navigators) and category… with panoramic photos and still photos.

The Drive is anchored at the north end by Womyns Ware, a lesbian sex shop. It appeared as we drove by that the store’s outside walls feature larger-than-life-size murals of enormous naked women (sorry, womyn) dancing with arm-sized “dills.” I am not part of the store’s customer demographic, but I appreciated its very public existence: alternative-lifestyle stores suggest a high degree of local tolerance. Like San Francisco, Vancouver seems to have no closets. Commercial Drive felt a bit like Haight Street, with better food and fewer shoe shops.