Jared Moossy Interview

Copyright © Jared Moossy

Jared Moossy (b. 1980) is a Texan-born documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City in May of 2008. His interest in photography goes hand in hand with his interest in current events and social issues. His professional career has mostly been focused on the changing country of Afghanistan and the heightened tension of Mexico’s internal war on drugs.

Jared attended the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2008 and won the PDN Photo Annual and Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund in 2008. Jared has also won the PDN 30 in 2009. He has worked with and been published in Newsweek, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Stern, Conde Nast Traveler, Die Zeit and several others. Moossy is represented by Redux Pictures and is part of Razon, an international collective of visual storytellers pursuing stories independently.

Academy A: You have done extensive coverage on the changing landscape in Afghanistan, I’m curious about your thoughts on what it’s like to work there. Do you find that you can work easily with the people you encounter or is it always a stressful situation where you fear for your safety?

Jared Moossy: It has its moments. There are and will always be times where there is that stress, or nervousness for one’s safety. Afghanistan in general is a friendly country and overall the people are very friendly. It’s just outside influences or the bad apples that are ruining it for us. I would also say it’s never easy, there is always some barrier that you have to overcome and some boundary you have to cross.

Copyright © Jared Moossy

Academy A: I’m doing a project on Lee Miller at the moment and looking at your piece covering the conflict in Georgia really reminded me of her work. There’s a beauty and rawness to your images that shines through even in desperate situations. Where do you get your inspiration from and how did you develop your style?

JM: I think my style is still developing every time I pick up the camera, whether shooting in black and white or color, its always continuing to grow. I feel like since Georgia, a year ago, my style has grown significantly. I think it’s really important to look at all types of photography, not just journalism. Some of the work I’m most inspired and influenced by is simple, clean, and focused on art or an idea, not a cause and effect reaction.

Academy A: As a photojournalist who travels the world and observes many different cultures, what are your thoughts on citizen journalism? Are we witnessing a new wave of covering news through modern technology or is this a passing fad that will have people craving for more serious journalism?

JM: I think citizen journalism is great, and important, unfortunately it’s just detrimental to the idea of following journalism as a career. We are in a huge transitional period and it will be interesting to see where it evolves too. The Internet is really changing the way things work for a journalist and it is really changing the idea of whether photojournalism can continue to be a career path.

Copyright © Jared Moossy

Academy A: I noticed that you have begun experimenting with multimedia, I watched the video you did of your recent trip to Afghanistan on your agency website and found it to be an interesting extension of your still photography. Is this something you feel will be demanded of photojournalists in the future, in addition to any photo essays, clients will also want some kind of multimedia presentation?

JM: I think it’s important to change with the tide and I believe sooner or later that photojournalism will really turn into video journalism. People’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter, and video is a way to capture that falling attention span.

Academy A: I’m always excited to see someone young like yourself succeed and gain respect in a tough industry, where do you see yourself going in the future?

JM: That’s a tough question and I appreciate the compliment. As far as the future, I’m happy for the time I have now and I just hope and aspire to be able to go with the flow and adapt when need be, whether through video or other means. I just want to be piece of the puzzle that helps the world see the bigger picture. If that involves work at home or abroad…I just want to take pictures and I think that’s what its all about

Academy A: Finally, what advice do you have for the new generation of photojournalists that you wish someone had given to you?

JM: Be prepared for a changing institution and be prepared to change with it. We are at an uncertain time as far as journalism and an uncertain time in the shifting economy and world. Be open to that idea of change. Learn video and think about what will sell and keep you afloat.  If you want to do this kind of work then just shoot and don’t stop…You should be taking pictures everyday.

Copyright © Jared Moossy

[Via http://academya.wordpress.com]

Insights on designing for the web

Paul Boag writes about the current trend of poster-like web pages. As always, one must design for the medium, and a designer cannot treat a web page like a poster. Nevertheless, poster design has a few lessons for web design: “Stop designing websites, start designing posters.”

Mark Riggan takes the same approach, but from a different direction: “6 Things Video Games Can Teach Us About Web Usability.”

In this interview, Matthew Curry talks about running the website for Wiltshire Farm Foods, which sells food mostly to consumers over 80 years old, online. Targeting this audience means addressing the most extreme instances of users’ needs and disabilities. Yes, it’s possible—it’s all about usability: “Q&A: Matthew Curry on selling to older folks online.”

[Via http://pdilinks.wordpress.com]

Nanny interviews

This week we have started the process of recruiting a nanny to look after Munchkin when I go back to work in February. We’ll need someone 4 days a week live out who will be with him all day. Both my husband and I have interviewed many people through the course of our jobs but never for any position as important as this! I mean this person will be looking after the most important thing in our lives.
Would love to hear any tips from anyone who has experience of hiring a nanny or a childminder. What kind of questions give a good insight into the type of care they would give? Any warning signs to look out for?
Definitely appreciate any advice or comments!
Thanks in advance

[Via http://londonmum.wordpress.com]

New York's Transsexual Star Alannah Starr challenges gender boundaries

It’s Her Thing: How a beautiful woman with a little something extra got that way — and why “straight” men are lining up to meet her

by Amy Sohn

New York’s Allanah Starr.

Allanah Starr is a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual, which means she looks like a woman from head to toe except for one very prominent thing. Like many other transsexuals, she works as an escort, and she also has a burgeoning adult-film career (Shemale Strokers #3 was her most recent) and a website, shemaleexotica.com, that gets more than 3,000 hits a day. She lives alone in midtown, in a dimly lit minimalist apartment, and has a framed poster of Warhol’s Marilyn above her plush red couch. She is also unbelievably hot. Her boobs put mine to shame — 36DD — and she has a tiny sculpted nose and wide eyes, all a result of the 30 surgeries she’s had in the past six years.

She looks like a contemporary Raquel Welch — so hyperfeminine she makes me feel plain. As she tells me her story in her soft voice, wearing a snug Alexander McQueen jacket that highlights her cleavage, her legs curled up under her on the couch, I find myself thinking that maybe these days, the ideal woman doesn’t have to be a woman at all.

Allanah, who says she’s in her mid-twenties, was born in Cuba and grew up in Miami as a shy, effeminate boy, more interested in girls’ clothing than boys’. “I always saw myself as a girl in a way. I would play with my sister’s toys, but I had to stop playing with them when my father came home.”

She came out at 15, became involved in a gay-and-lesbian youth group, started taking drama, and got more confident, winning a school contest for her drag performance of Julie Brown’s “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” After high school, she attended a fashion college and began going to gay clubs at night. “I wasn’t going in drag,” she says, “but I was really androgynous — a lot of foundation that was the wrong color, mascara and lip gloss, my hair down to my shoulders. Most of the guys had no interest in me because I was so effeminate.”

Allanah Starr and Gia Darling who both Transsexuals at a night club.

But she was professionally driven and started dancing at clubs for money. “I was more interested in being shocking and bizarre than pretty,” Allanah says. When the club work started drying up, she got a job at tranny theme restaurant Lucky Cheng’s in Miami (in drag), where she met some transsexual waitresses. “I started thinking, When I get older, do I want to be a really effeminate old gay man, or do I want to be a girl and explore all these things that I always wanted to do?”

With help from a co-worker, she began taking hormones and getting electrolysis. She found a plastic surgeon and got a nose job, an ear pin, and breast implants. She assumed a female name, coming up with Allanah later, when she started doing porn.

Allanah Starr

Those first surgeries were funded by a friend, an older man she met at Lucky Cheng’s: “He was helping me out quite a bit. We didn’t have sex. He said he was impotent. Then Viagra came out and I stopped seeing him.” Eventually he disappeared and the restaurant closed down, so she turned to escorting. “I’d never had a regular job, and I just couldn’t see myself working somewhere for $10 an hour. It’s an expensive lifestyle,” she says.

She moved to New York four years ago to work for an agency, and now she works for herself. The men who like transsexuals are a diverse bunch, she says. Almost all are interested in the thing that makes Allanah so special. “A lot of them are submissive,” she says. Some guys are turned on by it, but “they can’t deal with touching it.”

“Are there a lot of guys like that?” I ask.

“Very few,” she says.

The most annoying thing about being a transsexual is that guys always want to dish with her about that annoying topic called What It All Means. “Of course they all think they’re gay. I avoid that conversation. I can’t deal with people who have issues.”

Part of the problem is, there’s no language yet to describe men who are drawn to trannies — or, as a friend of mine puts it, “transgressives.” My own guess is that they fall into four subcategories: closeted gay men who need the T & A so they don’t freak out about the ‘D‘; bisexual men who can get both needs met at the same time; porn-addicted men who need to keep crossing new boundaries to get aroused; and straight guys who nonetheless have a narcissistic attraction to the penis.

Graphic credit: Zohar Lazar.

Allanah’s sexuality is much more simple: She likes men and is okay with it. Though she’d like to be in a serious relationship, she doesn’t think it’s likely in the near future. For one thing, the guy would have to accept her work; for another, he’d have to accept his own attraction to her. For now she leads an independent lifestyle, doing movies to help with publicity and escorting to pay for her surgeries. “Surgery is kind of an obsession,” she says. “I’m totally addicted to altering my appearance, and I’m not really satisfied with anything. Transsexuals are very vain. Your whole life is your appearance.”

As for the surgical hole-y grail, she’s not sure. “There’s an assumption that a sex change is the final goal for everyone, and I don’t think it is,” she says. “If I do it, it’s going to be just for myself, not because I think it’s going to be a way of solving all the problems that I have now being pre-op.” And financially, as with any career, it helps to have a penis: In porn films, transsexuals start at about $1,000 to $1,500 per scene while women’s rates are about half that.

Still, sometimes she wishes she’d known more about her options earlier. “I think my life would have been different if I had started transitioning when I was younger and gotten a sex change. I could have had a regular career. And I probably would be able to find a serious relationship.” She pauses, and then we both grin, thinking the same thing. “I know,” she says. “I guess in New York, genetic women have a hard time finding relationships, too.”

This article first appeared in New York magazine. LINK

[Via http://tgirlnews.wordpress.com]

Timbaland Interview: Talks About New Album!

Timbaland talks about his new album ‘Shock Value 2′ and gives Miley Cyrus a BIG compliment- saying she’s right up there next to Justin Timberlake?? [we don't know about that]

Check the interview below

[Via http://gidilive.wordpress.com]

John Mayer Reveals Stories Behind 'Battle Studies'

I figured I’d post this because Battle studies is one of favorites to listen to right now.

John Mayer’s new album, the smart, sophisticated, and sweet ‘Battle Studies,’ has just been released. And no one is happier than Mayer himself. “I have no problem releasing it into the open and letting everybody have at it, poke the bear with sticks — and that’s the fun of it,” he told Popeater when we went to visit him at the Burbank, Calif., studio where he was rehearsing for an upcoming tour. Mayer, of course, is used to having every aspect of his life poked with a camera these days. He spoke with Popeater about why he can’t complain about that in song, how the whole music industry may one day be working for Taylor Swift and his epiphany moment with the new record.

His interview with Popeater.com is after the jump…

Congratulations on the album.

Thanks. I had my fun with those songs, so I’m happy to see them go out in the world and be consumed by others. The greatest times I have ever had making a record are driving home from the studio with the rough mix in the car. That’s my time with the record; it’s me getting to know the tunes. The more we rehearse these songs, the more I step into them as the performer, the less I want to hear them. When I get offstage, people go home and I’m still me, so I’ve had my fill of “Wow, look at what I can do” — probably for the rest of my life.

Isn’t that where other artists come in, though, having music to find and discover?

Totally, and I’m not sick of playing songs. I will have the time of my life playing these songs for people, watching them react and sharing them with them. But I’m not going to put it on in the car; I’ve never done that. I was in a restaurant about a week ago when ‘Vultures’ came on. I went, “Wow, I haven’t heard this song in, like, three years.”

So what’s on the travel pack right now, musically?

Pretty much my whole iTunes library, put it on shuffle; when you put 27 days of music on shuffle, it’s sort of fun. I’m trying to not take on any more pursuits than I already have taken on because I don’t have enough time in the day. When I go on tour, I think what I want to do is get in my room, set something up, some contraption, and work all night on some other thing. It just kills me every time. So I am going to put all my energy into playing, and unfortunately talking about playing, no more playing hotel-room ‘MacGyver,’ plugging things up and not going to bed. Recreational slumber is gonna be my new hobby. One of the worst feelings in the world is painful exhaustion; it’s a terrible, terrible feeling. So that’s what I’m gonna do: Get in my room, order room service, “That’s it, there’s nothing else to see here, please disperse.”

There’s a line I love in ‘Who Says’: “I don’t remember you looking any better/But then again, I don’t remember you.”

I know what the line means to me. I just think it’s sort of about laying it on a little thick with somebody when you first meet them, like meeting, greeting. That song is sort of the equivalent of the “back off and leave me alone” sort of song” without being a “back off and leave me alone” song, because when an artist does that I think they sort of show their hand a little too much. It becomes really defensive, and it’s not actually fun to listen to. There are two kinds of songs I don’t think have ever been successful, which is, “Why can’t you just leave me alone” in terms of the media and “Daddy, stop drinking.” Those two songs, I’ve never heard them work. Lindsay Lohan has a song, ‘Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father).’ They all have the lyric, “Put the bottle down.” [But] it is an organic ideal that comes up in somebody who says, “I’m going to use my music to take back the power and say, ‘This is not for you, this is me. I am mine, I belong to me.’” And I just don’t think those are particularly good songs when they happen because they’re so self-indulgent, but there was something about ‘Who Says’ where I said, “Wow, this is that song for me personally.” But it’s not so literal that people are basically waiting for me to be done yapping about how hard I have it so they can get on to the next song.

Watch John Mayer’s ‘Who Says’ Video

I think that works for a lot of the record; it’s very personal as well. When you, meaning most artists, pull out the acoustic guitar, does it become confessional?

I don’t have any interest in writing something that’s not something that I feel and it’s gonna be a knot in my stomach unless I say it. It’s just always been my M.O. to try and explain something. I can explain something into the ground. I don’t think I would ever pick up an acoustic guitar and go to write a record and not try to find the ideas that are so planted in my heart because they’re real. I’m interested in the songs where I can go, “Yes, I got to explain that.” ‘Half of My Heart’ is lyrically one of the most fluorescent songs I’ve ever written. It’s basically all about indecisions, but it’s really about compassion to that idea of somebody going, “I don’t know which way I want to go. Don’t think I can do this much longer.” But it’s not sinister. I like approaching ideas that would otherwise be off-putting to people in a way that you sing it and play it in a very sweet way and they go, “I know what you’re saying. It happens to me.”

What songs are you most looking forward to seeing how people respond to them?

‘War of My Life’ is gonna be really interesting because I feel like that one just fuses into people’s life; it’s almost like a horoscope that’s designed to make everybody go, “Oh, my God, that’s freaky ’cause that’s my life.” It’s written in a way that’s like the most vague horoscope of all time because everybody feels like they’re in the war of their life, one way or another. ‘I’m excited about ‘Perfectly Lonely’ ’cause it sounds just like the record. That’s what’s cool about this record: Most of these songs we play them, they sound exactly like the record. I think fans like to see the elements of the songs they listen to so much on a record come to life onstage and be able to see the parts working and how it all goes together. That’s originally how music was designed to be, the sum being greater than the parts.

I was gonna say aren’t the parts always greater now, but there are a few singer-songwriters who’ve had success: Colbie Caillat — Taylor Swift is like that, too.

Taylor’s great. I don’t portend to know her all that well, but from what I know you can tell she’s fantastic. She’s sweet and she’s the complete package. I think if Taylor’s manager came down with the swine flu, Taylor could manage quite well for herself. If Taylor’s stylist came down with the swine flu, Taylor would put her own clothes on and be great. If Taylor’s PR rep were to have swine flu, Taylor would step right in there and do her own PR. If the marketing guy at the label had swine flu, she would just start making Web banners to send to people to put on their Web site, she’d just start charging ad money. She’s one of those artists that has such a grip on everything that we’re all gonna be working for her one day.

What do you take from the final version of your record?

I had a beautiful moment listening to this record; I’ll never forget it, and that’s probably the last time I’ll put it in to listen to it. I was in the pool in Palm Springs[, Calif.]; just burned the CD off what I had downloaded from mastering, pulled myself a margarita, jumped into a heated pool, stayed in there all night listening to the record twice and I went, “Wow, OK, it’s up to snuff.” I just care about up to snuff. I’ll let everyone else figure out what their favorite song is or did it go more this direction. But I just want to keep the general pedigree up to a certain point. And then we begin, not very long from now, having new ideas people haven’t heard yet.
I thought you were gonna let those gestate while you sleep.

Yeah, but you know what? People haven’t found a way to break into my brain yet, so I enjoy the solace of having a thought that no one else can see or hear. So I will probably start doing that in the next couple of weeks, going, “Wow, what would be the next idea I want to write?” But I won’t write it.

via Popeater.com

[Via http://jay3091.wordpress.com]

Interview with a man who has cycled round the world

I asked my Uncle who has cycled round the world, a few questions about cycling.

Which country was the best for cycling in and why?

“Iran for hospitality – never felt so welcome in my life… and the dates from the city of Bam.

Italy for the food – Pomodoro tomotoes, Parmigiano-Reggiano and gnocchi.

Tibet for the scenery,

France for the roads.”

 

Which was the worst and why?

“Pakistan – nothing like having guns pointed at your head to encourage dislike of a country.

Albania – bad roads, scary people.

South China – fell off on an icy descent and smacked up my face.”

 

Do you like the law about compulsory helmets in New Zealand?

“Compulsory helmets… save lives.

Save one life and the law is worthwhile.  In the UK the helmet excludes any tax so they are cheaper.

New Zealand should do the same (exclude GST) or subsidise helmets.

A helmet has saved my life twice… once when I was run over by a 4×4 and the other in a head own crash with a car.

Got my vote!”

 

Do you think bike lanes make it safer for biking?

“Anything that raises awareness of bicycles with other road users is a good thing.

So yes. In Netherlands if anyone hits a cyclist they are at fault.  This law promotes awareness of cyclists… as does cycle lanes, so as long as they are on a safe part of the road and enforced like bus lanes (fines for motorcyclists and cars in the lane) this is a good thing.”

[Via http://cyclingcycling.wordpress.com]