SCOTT GORDON BLEICHER PHO(BLOG)GRAPHY

Merry belated.

I’ve been soundtracking my end-of-the-decade tree trimming and chestnut roasting to the delightfully tipsy interpretations of holiday standards by the master craftsman, Bob Dylan.

Christmas In The Heart marks album number 47 for Dylan, and the first Christmas album of his nearly six-decade career which has seen a late renaissance of sorts since 1997’s Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind up to last April’s Together Through Life.

And fear not, voice coaches, Christmas In The Heart features more of Dylan’s old-man-punched-in-the-throat-with-barbed-wire, tonsils-pulled-with-needle-nose-pliers, a-pack-and-a-half-a-day gargle and croon, albeit this time backed by saccharin-sweet harmonies, layers of syrupy nostalgia, and a quickly filled quota of jingling bells.

If you don’t flat out enjoy the album, you can at the very least debate with your fellow egg noggers the depth of Dylan’s objectivity during the recording process, as Christmas In The Heart continually teeters on the brink of ’so bad it’s good’ on a number of tracks that seem the result of an ill-fitting Santa suit, a half-drunk bottle of bourbon, and a late-night-on-Canal-Street karaoke machine.

It’s not until the rollicking barroom brawl/moonshine ho down of late-in-the-album track Must Be Santa that you get the idea that Dylan is in full control here, masterfully implying a measure of sly self-awareness and self-deprecating humor, as he toes it incredibly close to the line of Kmart portrait studio Santa Claus with a crying toddler up until the epiphany of this wool-pulled punch line.

As Stephen M. Deusner perfectly put it in his review of the album for Paste Magazine: “Musically, it’s wonderfully bad; conceptually, it’s just wonderful.”

This is one lump of coal that I wouldn’t mind finding at the bottom of my stocking.

Below is a shot from a weekend shoot with Yuki Mark Lim- former fashion stylist, current bedroom linen designer, private New York City realtor, entrepreneur, owner of a Jack Russell Terrier named Walter, and all around cool guy.

Yuki is the owner of Apt 168, a short-term boutique apartment rental agency. His website, apt168.com, is in the middle of a pretty significant aesthetic overhaul, and his contact-page-portrait will look something like the one below when the new site launches early next year.

I wasn’t sure if I had a place for his portrait in my portfolio, but I liked it enough to show it, and figured that I’d show it here.

Q. What could possibly make for a better Christmas gift than a copy of Tokyo Juxtaposed?

A. Fruitcake.

Oh. Right.
…

Tokyo Juxtaposed, my self-published ‘zine chock full of aesthetic and cultural photographic juxtapositions from my early summer jaunt to the land of the rising sun, is still available for purchase over at MagCloud.

And it’s on sale!

While a copy of Tokyo Juxtaposed certainly makes for a great Christmas gift, it DOES NOT make for a great stocking stuffer. (Please, gently place the magazine into the stocking, preferably with a cardboard backing in a plastic sleeve, taking care not to bend its edges or crease its pages.)

And if you live somewhere in the six boroughs (I’m looking at you, New Jersey), I could meet you (along the L) and sign your copy for you, that way it would, you know, have my signature on it.

Or maybe you’d buy one if I told you that the other THIRTY ONE pages that you CANNOT preview at MagCloud were filled with hentai.

But they’re not, so, tough luck.

Pervert.

I’ve been having a good time over the past month shooting, editing, and uploading snapshots from my iPhone with an app called Best Camera. After experimenting with photo apps on the iPhone, pro photographer Chase Jarvis designed Best Camera to be, well, the best camera app available.

And I have to say, he nearly got it perfect. (sliders on the app’s filters and a photog directory on the site please!)

What is probably the coolest feature of Best Camera is not it’s ability to snap and edit a pic with over a dozen photo filters like Contrast, Vignette, and Frame, not the app’s ability to automatically upload and share your pic on social networking juggernauts Facebook and Twitter, but the perpetually updating online gallery of images shot by other Best Camera photographers around the world.

At thebestcamera.com you can see a live feed of images as they are uploaded, can vote on your favorite images, and can filter images by the best of the hour, day, and month. And each Best Camera photographer gets their own gallery page which, over time, I can see building into a nice little visual diary for myself.

If you happen to not be following me on Twitter (why not?!) and are not a friend of mine on Facebook, then you can follow this link to my Best Camera portfolio. Check back often because I plan on shooting and uploading with Best Camera frequently.

Granted, the pictures in question are merely two-megapixel snapshots, most of them poorly exposed and overly noisy, but there is something honest about the imperfection of the image, the impressionistic factor, the immediacy of the moment and the ability to share it instantaneously.

Also, I like to take pictures of my food before I eat it.