Sunday. I did play some guitar last night. Not enough, but enough for a long Saturday out shooting and then working on the photographs in Photoshop. This led to watching a chapter of that historical Korean (political infighting and intrigue in the palace) soap last night, so I got to sleep late, got up this morning later, got to breakfast and back under a cloudy overcast sky by nine. Such is life in Oakland.

I haven't finished putting together what worked out to be two sections of Moving Planet photographs for artandlife, but I'm close and suspect I'll post the link right here before the day is done. I'm still quite ambivalent about them, but my questions need time and distance to simmer and come to some kind of conclusion. Just the little internal conversations that go on in shooting these things, the questions and barriers encountered are specific to each photographer, I suspect, and I've got the usual number clogging up my brain.

Anyway, the Folsom Street Fair later in San Francisco. Naked men doing nasty things to other naked men. There's a certain pulling back on my part from going and shooting. Naked women doing nasty things to naked women doesn't elicit quite the same reaction, but I suspect this somewhat uptight aspect in me is a barrier that I need to work on. To get my head around. We'll go, we'll shoot, we'll do what's required, but we'll come back, if memory serves, wondering what in the hell I was doing there in the first place. Acting cool all through, of course, but still, well out of my depth and understanding.

Running around the Castro naked is evidently a current rage - in that it's been getting press recently - and I suspect we'll see some over the top running around naked on Folsom Street today. OK. I guess I don't care as long as this leather stuff results in photographs I can run. There was one participant in the Moving Planet parade that was carrying this particular flag, but the one I eventually used was taken from the back after he'd passed me by. Able to make the point without putting his dick in the mix. Better be a damned good picture before I'm posting that.

Our photographer has his little hang-ups?

Our photographer should learn to keep his mouth shut. This is similar, I suspect, to the free speech movement of the sixties when I was in college and defending the right to use the usual words in public, a student reaction to growing up in the repressive fifties. Instead of words fifty years later, we're doing images, running around naked in public as opposed to saying fuck up on a lectern out in the square. It's been a long road since Lady Chatterley, maybe there's an even longer road to ahead.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has been debating a law that requires, if you're running around naked in the streets, to use a towel of something similar to sit on when you're in a public place like a restaurant. They're worried about spreading cooties. Not banning the nudity itself, but setting some evidently needed boundaries and their discussion has reached the press. How could it not reach the press? The national press. The international press. One does what one can to keep the tourists coming I guess. So many angles, so many aspects, all from showing a little skin, even here. Ultimately nothing is new in this universe.

Later. It's overcast and I wondered if there were a chance for some rain, but I did get the act together, get on the bus, get on the train and walk to Folsom Street. For an overcast, but probably not going to rain afternoon, it was packed. Yes, there were a couple of dozen men sprinkled around in the crowd naked, but they were nothing compared to some of the costumes: the leathers, masks, whips, pierced nipples and such. Now, swinging dicks do not a photograph make, but acting out in wild assed (Who are these people! My god, what are they doing!) costumes is a totally different matter. So far, so good.

Then, walking, shooting for maybe half an hour, what had started slowly as the dry mouth and symptoms of an ocular migraine began to gather steam. Interesting to be caught in currents of weirdly dressed and undressed people while experiencing one of these things, I can only give thanks it didn't develop in to a full blown occurrence. So, with not nearly enough pictures in hand (but enough, in looking at them, to squeak out an artandlife section) I left, walking against the stream of people arriving. Boy were there a lot of people arriving, many of whom were dressed for the part, many of whom didn't seem to be kidding. I wonder how many of these folks spend their weeks working quietly as a mouse in an office building?

Anyway, home now somewhat battered, a long day out shooting for so little production, but a weekend buttoned up and done. It will take some time to recover, I suspect, another slow day or two ahead, but such is life and there's always guitar practice.

One thing. The server at my ISP was hacked. When I went into artandlife this morning the main page didn't appear, just a list of links to the various pages displayed along the left side of the screen without any formatting. I hit the F5 key to refresh, thinking it hadn't loaded correctly, but no, still the same spare unformatted column of links down the left of the screen, so I clicked on one and a “you've been hacked” graphic popped, compliments of some outfit calling themselves TigerM@te done in various colors.

So I checked and found a file in the server root directory of my account and opened a support ticket. Deleting the file caused the page to work properly, but in then going through the various subdirectories I found and deleted another twenty or so similarly named files, added by these people to not just my account, but to every other commercial account on that server.

The response from the ISP was they had their entire IT staff working on it, they'd indeed been hacked and were in the process of fixing the problem. I'm wondering what more may be coming. No chance from what I've seen of damage to people coming in from the outside to browse at least. Some thanks for small favors.

Still, if this is all that's going to happen they've probably done us a good turn in pointing out the system's security fault. From what I know of viruses from the old days at the company they can be a whole lot nastier and destructive. Cross our collective fingers and thumbs.