I've moved!

Hello people,

I've finally started a new blog and kept up with it, entitled Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time. Like the title suggests, I am un-threatened by a good time, and therefore try to have as many good times as possible! This blog primarily focuses on the ridiculous events I see and participate in, along with photos from my travels, concert and event photography, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

You can also check out the parent site for more of my photography.

Photo fantastic

I've been pulling up some of my old photos and giving them a bit of an enhancement. I'm working on getting my website back up and running, and I'm adding more content than just my concert photography. I've got a new layout and I'll be registering a new domain name soon. I'm excited for everyone to see it. I think you can even comment on photos too which will be nice. I've learned some new Photoshop techniques and I've been putting them to good use on my photos since I never really had time to touch them up in the first place.

I figured I'd show you one of my favorite photos that I took in Japan. You can't even tell that it's in Japan, really. There are some patterns on the walls of buildings where you can automatically tell it's Japan, but this isn't one of them. I just love the contrasting patterns and how the red is faded. I even rocked the cloning stamp to get rid of some unsightly object that was in the original (and no I won't mention where it was!)

Idiotarod 2009

This past Saturday I took part in the 6th annual Idiotarod race in New York City. For those of you unfamiliar with the race, think of the Iditarod that's run in Alaska, though instead of dogs you have people and instead of a sled you have a shopping cart! Everyone meets in one spot and then race to the first checkpoint, where you can wait for 20 minutes, or compete in mini challenges that will allow you to leave earlier. Then you receive the address of the next checkpoint which you run to and compete in more shenanigans.

This was my second time participating and it's a pretty brutal race. On top of the sabotages from other racers (that are legal and encouraged) such as the possibility of a fake checkpoint, lots of food and condiments being thrown, and even bowling balls being dropped in your cart to make it heavier, the whole race is 5 miles long! For someone who is as professionally lazy as I am, this is the most daunting part. However, I overcame this feat with only a sore knee afterwards, along with getting pegged in the face with a handful of flour and someone lining our shopping cart handle with ketchup.

Teams are also strongly encouraged (if not required) to come up with a team theme and dress up, the most ridiculous and over the top the better! I had the brilliant idea (if I do say so myself) of having our theme be The Price Is Right, with our official team name being The Price Is Wrong, Bitch! The best part being (aside from our sweet t-shirts with Bob Barker's floating head on them) the spinning wheel in our cart! Check out a video below:



I was pretty proud of my mobile creation, and also felt like a badass for a day since I was also the one who stole the cart. Here are some photos of other carts & teams I really enjoyed (in no order):


Fake Work Police Department


Bullfighting team


My friend Leila's team - the Oregon Trail of DEATH!


Another friend's team - Wayne's World (I was Garth for Halloween this year, btw ;)


Batman and Robbins


My whole team at the first checkpoint

And you can see a ton more great photos here and here!

Now it's time to start brainstorming and training for next year's race!

- Alix!

New Years Resolution?

Crap, obviously it's been a while since I've updated. I'm going to try and use this more often, since I like to expand on my little Twitter/Facebook headline thoughts sometimes. So what have I been up to? Well I graduated college and moved back to Brooklyn, New York. Greenpoint, to be exact. My roommates and I started a collective blog that we hope to update every now and then. There's four of us and we're all into similar yet different things, so I hope the blog will be awesome. You can check it out at http://vandettes.blogspot.com!

I've had a lot of time to mess around, since I am currently a Freelance Career Coordination Manager and working out of home ;) I was bummed out for a while, but I've gotten over it for the most part and am still living life somewhat like a college student - as cheaply as possible! I've been working on my website and have a new layout ready, I just am working on fixing up some of my older photos to post so I can get some healthy content on there. I'm excited to finally have it finished since my site has been in need of a makeover for a long time. And I've been having a good time seeing friends and meeting new ones back in Brooklyn. Good times abound!

So that's basically all you've missed in the past couple of months. I hope the rest of my updates are more frequent and more interesting from now on ;)

- Alix!

Art Art Art

So I really just wanted to post to give myself a reminder of an exhibit I need to check out before mid-November. But since I really should be doing homework I decided to expand upon this post to include a few more photos of art and other things I've seen that I would recommend.

Well the exhibit that I really want to check out is 'Fade' where a ton of red LED lights are put on the wall to accentuate the architecture.



See more photos and info on where to see this (in Boston) here!


I also came across about half of what's left of the original Abraham Obama piece done by Ron English by the SoWa galleries:


(click the photo for a bigger view... they're 13 feet tall!)

Check out Ron's site, he's done some good stuff such as a painting of my favorite Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor and a "spoof" on one of Takeshi Murakami's sculptures.


And across from where the Abraham Obama posters are is a bunch of galleries which are free to check out. One of them over the summer was hosting a bunch of paintings by Christopher Hauck which remind me of some of the wittier street art I've seen. This painting that was in the gallery actually made me LOL:





And for a dumb yet still funny picture that I didn't take and don't know where it came from, here's a Post No Bills sign:

Waiting for fall

I love autumn. I love it when the leaves turn colors and you can just walk down quiet streets and crunch over them in the coolest and cleanest of air. Times when curling up in your room with dim lighting and a good book with a cup of coffee or tea is a great way to spend a night. The flavors of pumpkins and apples and spices swirling out of shops. Deep and smoky colors are in the trees and on the people.

Fall makes me want to live a life with scarves and mugs and sinking couches and moving photography with vignetting and afternoons and deep oranges and yellows and pumpkins and cider and boots and sweaters and walks and hugs and warmth.






I'm feeling very nostalgic for Japan. I was really taken with these photos by this guy on Flickr, and they're really beautiful and making me wish I took more photos while I was in Japan of every day people and life. I yearn to go back.

In the blizzard of '77

Whoops, it's been two and a half months since I've updated. My b, like I mentioned before, I forgot I have this thing. And with no readers as of yet, who am I writing for? Myself, I guess.

So update on me quickly, that trip to Spain/Europe isn't happening. Long story short, the tickets my aunt had booked for herself were non-transferable, therefore even changing the first name on the tickets was a no-go. Lame, but it's cool. Instead I'm leaving for LA next Thursday, then going up to San Francisco, and from there helping my friend Keri move (aka drive) to Chicago. I'm pretty excited, since I was only in LA once three years ago, was in SF for a day but only went to the movies, and should have been in Chicago for a day but my flight was oversold and I had to wait in the airport for 9 hours! So this time I'll get to spend quality time in each city, and lucky for me I have some good friends in each city I'll get to see as well. So yay for that. I'll try to give some updates while I'm away.

I went to the library the other day and took out a pretty good stack of CDs. There's a lot of music I have been meaning to check out for the longest time, so I finally made a list of what I could think of and went searching at the library. Here's what I came home with:

Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger
Iggy Pop - Lust For Life
James Brown - Live at the Apollo
Detroit Cobras - Baby
The Jam - The Jam Collection
BT - Emotional Technology
My Bloody Valentine - Isn't Anything
Out Hud - Let Us Never Speak Of It Again
Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death
Ramones - Ramones Mania
Jesse Malin - The Fine Art of Self Destruction
Nada Surf - Let Go

I'm pretty excited to listen to all of these. I have songs here and there of all these artists, but not full albums. I'm listening to Nada Surf's Let Go right now. I knew "Blizzard of '77" from when I was at CMJ two years ago, talking with a friend (who happens to be in one of my favorite bands) that I've noticed often sings lyrics to songs when something is said that's similar. It was a cold night in New York and I was comparing the weather to Boston where I go to school, mentioning my first winter there and how we had a blizzard, and that a couple cars got plowed under all of the snow we had. "In the blizzard of '77, the cars were just lumps on the snow snow" he sang, the opening lines to the album.

At work if I have nothing to listen to, I sometimes peruse muxtape.com, and "Inside of Love" happened to be on this one particular playlist. "Is that Nada Surf?" one of the guys I work with yelled from across the room. I wrote the name of the song down so I wouldn't forget it. I'm halfway through the album right now, and I don't know why it took me so long to get this CD. Even with my friend's recommendation two years ago, I just never got around to it. It's too bad, I think it's going to become a favorite.

I hope I'll be this excited about the rest of the albums I brought home.