How Deep Is The Ocean?
The online portfolio & blog of Eric Ogburn

From Califone’s Artist Page on Thrill Jockey Records:

Roots and Crowns. “Uniting where you come from – your roots — with what you strive to be or what you reinvent yourself to become — crowns,” explains Califone’s Tim Rutili. “At the bottom of these songs are the memories and images you sift through in the process.”

“Before we started to work on the new the record, I was listening to ‘Orchids’ by Psychic TV on repeat,” says Rutili. “This song made me want to start writing songs again.” Califone offers a sparse and beautiful cover of “Orchids” on Roots & Crowns. The line from the song, ‘In the morning after the night/ I fall in love with the light,’ became a theme for the new album.

Heron King Blues was very much the dark end of the band’s last cycle; in many ways this new album is a kind of dawn after the darkness. The songs and sounds all feel fresh.

Imagery of rebirth comes up often on Roots & Crowns. On “3 Legged Animals,” Rutili sings, “3 legged animals shut their sweet eyes/ lick your scars and grow wings,” and later, “leave your memories, we’re almost new.” He explains, “that song started out as a song called ‘Dreamless’ for the end credits of The Lost. The last scene in the film is a total bloodbath; after that it seemed like the film could use a little sweetness, a bit of salvation for these dark, misfit characters after a period of intense violence. We re-recorded it with Califone and took a more detailed approach, both lyrically and instrumentally. Where the first version felt more about balancing the mood of the film, the one from the album feels more about hope and joy, rebirth, survival and self-acceptance.”

Watch the video for “Spider’s House”

This is just disturbing. As if actually submerging yourself in ocean water isn’t dangerous enough, now you have to worry about sea creatures jumping into your boat and stabbing you in the chest.

From abcnews.com
Fla. Boater Stabbed in Chest by Stingray

LIGHTHOUSE POINT, Fla. Oct 19, 2006 (AP)— An 81-year-old boater was in critical condition Thursday after a stingray flopped onto his boat and stung him, leaving a foot-long barb in his chest, authorities said.

“It was a freak accident,” said Lighthouse Point acting fire Chief David Donzella. “It’s very odd that the thing jumped out of the water and stung him. We still can’t believe it.”

Fatal stingray attacks like the one that killed “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin last month are rare, marine experts say.

OK, I keep hearing that stingrays stabbing humans in the chest is a rare occurence, which may or may not be true. Stingray stabbings often go unreported due to the pain and death caused by having a foot-long barb sticking out of your chest. If these stingray attacks are as rare as experts tell us, then there can only be one explanation that explains the recent elderly-harming and celebrity-slaying attacks: stingrays are terrorists.

We’ve polluted their water, overcrowded their beaches, and devastated their food chain. Meanwhile, stingray-kind are helpless against the combined might of humankind. So what choice do they have? Terrorist tactics and guerilla warfare. If we don’t give in to their demands, they will continue jumping into our boats and harming old men, while killing our Australian celebrity snake-wranglers.

But if there is one thing we’ve all learned from our president, is that you don’t give in to terrorists. There are plenty of freedom-loving fish in the sea that have no gripes against us, and refuse to stick barbs in our chests. We have to continue our way of life in the face of this adversity. So don’t cancel your scuba lesson, or refuse to charter that deep-sea fishing vessel this weekend for fear of getting a foot-long stingray barb in your chest. If you do that, the terrorists will have already won.

From the Fine Arts Showcase website bio: Gustaf Kjellvander/The fine arts showcase

Gustaf Kjellvander with a past in bands as Sideshow Bob and Songs of soil has a new album coming out under the name of The fine arts showcase.

The new album is being called Radiola and will be released February 2006 in Sweden; it’s been recorded at Mission Hall Studio by Mathias Oldèn from the band Logh.

His latest release was called “Gustaf Kjellvander Proudly Presents The Fine Arts Showcase and the Electric Pavilion” and was released in May 2004 on Startracks.

Gustaf has mentioned that his albums are a bit like mix-tapes representing his multi-sided influences. The new album is more varied than his earlier records but maintaining his well-known writing and song style.

Having grown up outside Seattle after being born in Sweden he’s well familiar with the English language and uses it fluidly. After 10 years in the states his family returned to Sweden, where Gustaf as a mean of coping with boredom and alienation started writing music. One of his first gigs were at his school when he was 12 years old. And so the story goes.

He’s currently residing in London, travelling to Sweden for gigs and promotion.

As some of you may know, but most don’t because I have no readers (I can admit it), the site has been down as I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the redesign. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it was necessary to hammer out all of the bugs.

Before I list all of the changes to the site, I’d like to tell you why I redesigned it in the first place. First, if this is not your first time here, you may notice that the site looks very similar to its previous version. That’s intentional. I’ve always like the original design. What I did not like was that it lacked the fluidity that it represented, in both layout and in implementaion. The new design is much easier for me to update, which should hopefully help me to update the content more often. But more importantly, the new design takes advantage of fluid layout.

NOTE: The site is not fluid for Internet Explorer users. Why? Because Microsoft’s ancient browser doesn’t support the same web standards other browsers support. The new Internet Explorer 7, due out any day now, fixes many problems, and will give you the same experience as the rest of us. If you must continue using Internet Explorer, make sure to update IE7 when it launches (you can actually download the beta version now). Otherwise, I highly highly highly recommend Firefox. You’ll thank me later. Moving on…

Give it a test. Make your browser smaller or larger. Neat, huh? What’s best is that all of the high res photos will scale with the size of the browser. This benefits those with lower resolution monitors, since the site will work just fine for you, and the pictures will be plenty big. But those of you with higher resolution monitors can really have fun, as the site will grow to fit your screen.

The other problem I’ve tried to correct has its roots in the site’s birth. The original site launched while I was evacuated from New Orleans during Katrina. What was supposed to be a window into my personality, which is far from being very serious, turned a little too staid. So I’ve added a few items that I hope will help express what I’m about.

Another thing I’ve changed is the distance between this site and pixelfork.com, my freelance web design business. Pixelfork had its birth after my return to New Orleans, and I rarely mentioned it here, thinking it best to keep the two separated. But I think since they live on the same laptop, they can at least recognize each other on the web.

Lastly, I have (hopefully) simplified the site’s navigation, and made the Photograph’s page more pleasant to use. If you have any problems or notice any issues with the new design drop me a line, or leave a comment.