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Next Stop: Cleveland

Yesterday I watched four guys load all of my possessions into an unfortunately large truck (too much stuff!) to put it into storage for a month. Why storage? Because tomorrow I’m leaving for a very big adventure: the All That Glitters – The East Coast and some Southern States Too Tour

Tomorrow morning I will leave Chicago, leaving along with it my Chicago residency, to drive to Cleveland where I will photograph Bella Sin for All That Glitters. This begins a four week road trip during which I will photograph at least 20 burlesque performers in their homes and ask them one question: What does burlesque mean to you? All of this is in support of my goal to create a coffee table book and documentary video about what burlesque means to 100 performers across the United States.

This trip has been a long time coming and has taken a lot of planning, some of which will still be occuring on the road. Stay tuned to my Twitter feed and my Blog for ongoing updates.

The entire trip will cover at least 5,500 miles – over 90 hours of driving – and will take me through 23 different states.

And you know what? I’m looking forward to it.

Dear Chicago

I love you. I hate you. I’m leaving you.

I love you for helping me grow into the person I am today. For presenting to me opportunities and challenges that broke, shaped and rebuilt me in ways I never could have imagined.

I hate you for the painful memories with which I am leaving. For the friendships and relationships gone wrong and the reconciliatory conversations left unspoken. Conversely, I love you for the people I have met, the friends I have made, and the relationships that I will cherish for years to come.

I love you for the education I received here, both in the formal classroom and the classroom of life’s hard knocks. For the professional endeavors I was able to pursue and the personal and financial successes they afforded. You helped me free my mind, simultaneously revealing how much there is to learn in life and overwhelming me with the possibilities.

I hate you for your bitter cold winters that consume my soul like a cloud from Mordor, silently creeping into my conscience unannounced and unwelcome.

I love you for showing me that money isn’t everything and that it is possible to engage in the pursuit of happiness without engaging in the pursuit of wealth. You also showed me that money sure does help in the pursuit of happiness, especially when it comes to paying the rent.

I hate you for being so far away from anything else nice to look at on a weekend. I can drive for two hours in any direction and still be in a flat cornfield…or under water.

I love you for your public transportation, even though I didn’t use it as much as I thought I would. But then again, when you charge me nearly five dollars for a round trip when I can usually put my positive parking karma to good use and park for free within a block of my destination, I’d rather drive.

However, I hate you for your Big Brother traffic lights. It didn’t matter that I came to a full and complete stop before I turned right on red…you still took my money.

I love you for your lakeshore path and for the hours I spent biking along the waterfront. And I love you for your irony, calling those dirty, sandy patches by the water “beaches.”

So yes, Chicago, I both love you and hate you for many different reasons – more than I can write here, but enough to keep you in mind for many years to come.

But it has come to this. I am leaving you. You have been home to me longer than any other place in my time on this earth. I am “from Chicago” although I was not born here, nor was I raised here.

But since I subscribe to the mantra that “home is where my stuff is,” later this month all of my stuff will be loaded onto a truck and placed in storage, thus rendering me homeless for the month of May. In June, my stuff will all be delivered to my new home in Los Angeles where new adventures and opportunities await, and with them the requisite heartbreak and life lessons.

It’s been good, it’s been fun, but it’s time to go.

Love,

bcj.

Sometimes Progress Feels Like Standing Still

Some days, no matter how much I accomplish, it still feels like there is more to do than I can ever get done. That explains most of this week. This feeling was not helped by multiple technical difficulties in the office that took my attention away from my priorities for the week. But the good news is that the distractions appear to be resolved and I am now able to refocus on the priorities.

Scheduling for my “All That Glitters: East Coast and some Southern States, Too” tour is going well. I have four sessions confirmed in Cleveland, New York City and Philadelphia, and I have eight conversations in progress in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte and New Orleans. I’m also working today on contacting performers in the remaining cities on my list.

The road trip begins in 21 days!

Buffalo, NY has been oddly unresponsive, so if you know of anyone in Buffalo that is involved in burlesque and would like to be a part of this project, please have them contact me soon.

In the midst of all the of above, I have been packing my home and studio for the move out to Los Angeles. This involves getting multiple price quotes from moving companies, always a fun process.

The plan is to have all of my non-traveling items loaded onto a truck and moved to storage for May while I go on the road. The end of the road trip will leave me in Los Angeles where I will be looking for a new place to live. Once that loose end is tied up, the moving truck arrives and new adventures on the West Coast begin.

Circus Doggy

Here is an outtake from my All That Glitters session with Mimi Le Yu in St. Louis, MO, with her whipped-cream-loving dog, Betsy.

Viva La Mueerrrrrrrrte!

All That Glitters: The East Coast (and some Southern States, too) Tour

I’m very excited to announce my plans to visit each of the following cities to photograph burlesque performers for All That Glitters! I am actively seeking participants, so if you or anyone you know is a burlesque performer in these cities, it’s time to get in touch.

30 sessions, 25 days, 14 cities, 11 states. It’s gonna be fun!

I’ll be keeping an updated itinerary on the project web site here.

And then I’m moving to California. No, really! I’ll photograph performers on the West Coast after the move.

Clownin’ Around

Satori Circus

An Artist’s Toolbox

Audra Kubat

Gallery2 with JW Player

I use Gallery to post and organize photos and media on this site. Gallery can also display flash videos, but I was never happy with the flash player that is installed by default with the Gallery software.

Instead, I wanted to use the very popular JW Player and searched far and wide on the Internet for instructions on how to replace the default player. Despite the power of Google, it took some time, but I finally found a solution through Krunk4Ever!’s blog, for which I am immensely grateful.

However, with the latest releases of the Gallery software, those instructions no longer worked for me. Again, a long search ensued, but to no avail.

Though I am not a programmer, I know enough to break stuff often, and fix stuff sometimes. After a lot of breaking, I finally fixed it!

So here now I share with you the changes I made to my Gallery flash module in order to use JW Player to display flash videos. I should point out that these changes are in addition to the changes applied by Krunk4Ever!

All of the changes outlined here were made in the FlashVideoRenderer.class file found in modules/flashvideo/classes within the Gallery folder.

Before:
array(‘href’ => ‘modules/flashvideo/lib/G2flv.swf’),
array(‘forceFullUrl’ => true));
$flashVars = ‘flvUrl=’ . urlencode($src) . ‘&Width=’ . $width . ‘&Height=’ . $height

After:
array(‘href’ => ‘modules/flashvideo/lib/player-viral.swf’),
array(‘forceFullUrl’ => true));
$flashVars = ‘type=video&file=’ . urlencode($src) . ‘&Width=’ . $width . ‘&Height=’ . $height

Before:
array(‘forceFullUrl’ => true, ‘forceSessionId’ => true, ‘htmlEntities’ => false));
$flashVars .= ‘&thumbUrl=’ . urlencode($thumbUrl);

After:
array(‘forceFullUrl’ => true, ‘forceSessionId’ => true, ‘htmlEntities’ => false));
$flashVars .= ‘&image=’ . urlencode($thumbUrl);

Before:
</script>
<div id=”flashvideo” style=”align:left;width:496px;height:250px”>
<div id=”soContent” style=”width: 100%%; height: 100%%”>%s</div>
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>

After:
</script>
<div id=”soContent” style=”width: 100%%; height: 100%%”>%s</div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>

Before:
var so = new SWFObject(“%s”, “%s”, “100%%”, “100%%”, “9.0.28.0″, “ffffff”);

After:
var so = new SWFObject(“%s”, “%s”, “%s”, “%s”, “9.0.28.0″, “ffffff”);

In this last change I added 20 pixels to the default height of the player so that the player navigation wouldn’t cover the video.

Before:
$SWFObjectUrl, $jsWarning, $playerUrl,
!empty($params['id']) ? $params['id'] : ‘movie’, $flashVars, $expressInstallUrl);

After:
$SWFObjectUrl, $jsWarning, $playerUrl,
!empty($params['id']) ? $params['id'] : ‘movie’, $width, $height+20, $flashVars, $expressInstallUrl);

So that’s what I did and it seems to be working. I hope that helps someone else out there to accomplish the same goal.

Grand Rapids, Michigan

In October I visited Grand Rapids for a weekend during which I met a handful of the fantastic folks from Super Happy Funtime Burlesque. I haven’t been able to catch their show in person yet, but from what I’ve seen in vidoes and heard on the street, their show is not one to miss. The weekend I was in town happened to also be the closing weekend of Art Prize, an open art contest.

GiGi Animalicious & Mr. Happy Pants

The first night in town I met up with Mr. Happy Pants, GiGi Animalicious and Velveeta the Cheetah for some tasty eats and then headed to Original Cin’s place for a shoot with her and her son Mike. She also introduced me to her pet snakes and her hilarious chinchilla. If you’ve never seen a chinchilla bathe itself in volcanic ash, then you are really missing out.

The second day was a full one as I worked with GiGi Animaliscious, Vivacious Miss Audacious (who was suffering from a sinus infection and had to put up with me for a little while – oh, and we had to kick out her boyfriend’s band so we could finish the video interview. Sorry guys!), the lovely Rita Ambrosia Schuvitinitcsz & Velvet Dan, and producers/performers Mr. Happy Pants & La La Vulvaria. The latter shoot was momentarily interrupted by a homeless knocking on the window shouting, “Don’t be makin’ it sexual!” Don’t worry, Mr. Homeless Man, it was all on the up and up.

Balloon Monster

In amongst that busy day I had the opportunity to consume some delicious Spanish tapas and peruse some of the art work around town with GiGi Animaliscious as my tour guide. As with all art there was some good and some…well…different. I especially liked the giant jellyfish made of hundreds of balloons as well as the portraits screen printed on salt.

Sunday, my last day in Grand Rapids, started with a lazy morning during which Original Cin’s fiance whipped up a yummy egg & bagel sandwich, a tasty surprise. That afternoon I had the pleasure of working with Velveeta the Cheetah in her beautiful and bright loft space. She happened to be holding a rummage sale in her space at the same time, but we managed to get our work done before the crowds swarmed in.

The return drive was a beautiful sunny day, quite the opposite of the rainy weather that accompanied me on the trip to Grand Rapids. Michigan is known for its beautiful fall foliage and I got to experience a bit of that view on the ride home.