external monologue

the fog of alton park

yesterday on one of my numerous forays into alton park to get to H&RBlock i noticed this railroad scene off on a side street. i pulled off and spent a few minutes photographing it, feeling a bit anxious the whole time due to my "white guy with a camera driving a german car" persona.

one of the things i love about chattanooga, in terms of photography, is the abundance of railroads. yes, i know that railroads tend to be pretty cliche photographic subjects, but there's a reason for that and the fact that they've been photographed so much forces you to be more creative with your images. granted, this isn't the most interesting of images, but like i said, there wasn't a whole lot of standing around time.

...

i don't really want to talk about it, but i'll just say that my taxes are done and the check is in the mail, so to speak. no wait, not so to speak, literally, its en route to uncle sam, all $928 of it.

saw the cooler last night, and i can't really say that i recommend it. i'm actually surprised that its managed to stay up around 65 on metacritic; i'd probably give it closer to a 50. something that i remembered right after we sat down was that originally it was supposed to get an NC-17 rating, but had been edited down to R before final release. what this means is that it has a couple, what i considered, completely gratuitous sex and violence scenes. in the end this captures the entire feel of the film to me. it appears to have been made by a couple young film school students armed with a handful of cliche themes and a strong desire to shock viewers into a reaction. at the same time there's not nearly enough character development to elicit any emotional involvment. 2 thumbs down.