in my tree

I made a before-and-after picture of my beard. Behold!

Hat tip to Ashlie, who makes the prettiest diptychs and triptychs in the land.

New meme: Here’s a totally random way to make your new random band’s new random album cover. Post one! Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

But don’t worry, I’m not going to list 25 things about myself.

Everyone’s BFF Rhett Miller played a show the other night at the tiny, fabulous Sons of Hermann Hall. Thankfully, the sleet and cold kept all but a few dozen fans away — the fewer people at a concert, the better the odds no one will be so annoying so as to be a distraction.

There were a few well-equipped photogs there, one of whom was the Dallas Observer’s Patrick Michels. He made a slideshow, which you should look at, but first check out the very best picture of all:

What a good-looking dude!

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Also, there were about two dozen amateur photogs at the show — roughly two-thirds of the audience took a moment to whip out the iPhone or what-have-you and take a shot. Or ten. Or way more than ten. That always bugs me, but this time I had just read a pretty interesting article at Slate that touched on the phenomenon:

There is something vaguely embarrassing—even narcissistic—about our new era of mass photography. Because we’re always carrying cameras, we’re moved to document every moment of our lives—sometimes to the exclusion of actually experiencing that moment. Take a look at this picture of Barack and Michelle Obama at one of the inaugural balls. Everyone in the audience has a hand up with a cell phone pointed at the stage, but nobody is actually looking at what’s going on. The scene is puzzling: If the guy next to you is taking a picture—one that you can be reasonably sure will end up on a photo-sharing site somewhere—why do you need one, too? But we do this often these days. Win Butler, the lead singer of the band Arcade Fire, once told Terry Gross that he and his band mates have stopped going out into the crowd to perform because nobody pays attention to them—everyone’s got their cell phones and cameras in front of their faces.

Which of course, brings us back to The Kinks. But I was a little off before. I wanted to know why we look for ourselves in pictures, and the lyric is, obviously, “people take pictures of each other.” In both cases the reasoning is the same, sure — to prove that that moment happened, that you were there, that you existed. I just had the wrong verb last time.

All this existing we’re trying to verify, though, what’s it worth if we’re focused more on documenting our lives than actually living them? I mean, we’ve already ruined every future Arcade Fire show, and for a world where THIS counts as reality?

A few weeks back, The New York Times illustrated how it envisioned some of 2008’s more fanciful patents. One of them in particular caught my eye:

That’s right — a “tortoise bathing facility.” Seriously. It’s the perfect gift for those of you who’ve maybe forgotten to send something to your BFFs Bling and Scooter!