You might start seeing this picture of me around the Internet. San Diegans, I beseech thee: become a member of Voice of San Diego. It’s a great way to meet other kind, thoughtful, interesting San Diegans who make things happen. It’s also cheap. Also, they’re cool.

About to be defeated by a fried chicken benedict as Chris looks on.

Five years ago, Dusdin and I collaborated on a project I called the “Decimal Week.” I wanted to celebrate finishing grad school with a series of 10 consecutive days of songs and photographs on Dustin’s and my blog, 1.618 (RIP).

The idea behind 1.618 was that mp3 bloggers talked too much and that the mp3 blogosphere created too much pressure to discover new bands or surface really esoteric songs. The Internet was at once making music easier and less enjoyable to find. Dusdin and I just wanted to share songs that we liked with the world and tried as hard as possible to select songs with as little thought as possible. I don’t think either of us could ever say why we picked the images we did, but we liked having images accompany the songs.

We named the blog 1.618—after the golden ratio—because I had developed a numerology habit from listening to too much Boards of Canada. I like the idea of a number being so precise and beautiful and irrational and infinite. I think it makes a nice metaphor for art, or for the appreciation of art. No one knows why people like the things they do. It also made a nice metaphor for the blog, as we posted one random song after another, just like the stream of digits in an irrational number.

Sometimes patterns appear to emerge in irrational numbers, and I thought it would be fun to let the Decimal Week look like a pattern was beginning to emerge in the blog. We never talked about what we were doing on the blog and we didn’t allow comments, so I don’t know if anyone noticed or cared.

Dusdin was starting to experiment with studio lighting, so he came over with a backdrop and a bunch of gels and we spent at least an hour taking pictures of me dancing around in my apartment. I had an image in my head of how I wanted it all to turn out. I was horrified to load the photos onto my computer when we were done and realize that the image I had in my head was directly informed by Apple’s silhouetted iPod ads. We’d spent an evening making really awkward iPod ad ripoffs.

I corrected our course by laying the photos over one another in Photoshop and applying different fills and gradients to create the final images. I liked how it turned out. I still do.

Five years later, I’m still happy with the mix, and I miss having Dusdin nearby (which is not to say that I want to do another project like this). The songs still excite me and they remind me of a wonderful time when my life started to take focus, and when I first started dating my Shannon who’s now pregnant with our first daughter. It was a very good Decimal Week. We don’t do 1.618 anymore, but life continues to be completely and fully irrational and beautiful and I know to be very suspicious if a pattern ever appears to emerge.

Here are the final images and links to their accompanying songs:

Junior Boys – “In The Morning” (original post)

New Order – “Dreams Never End” (original post)

Broken Social Scene – “7/4 (Shoreline)” (original post)

Lilys – “Black Carpet Magic” (original post)

The Fall – “The Classical” (original post)

New Order – “Temptation” (original post)

Vitalic – “La Rock 01″ (original post)

Wolf Parade – “Grounds for Divorce” (original post)

M83 – “Run Into Flowers (Abstrackt Keal Agram Remix)” (original post)

Polmo Polpo – “Riva” (original post)

Sedona was fun.

Everyone (including Tumblr) is wearing purple today as part of Spirit Day, a day to show love and support for bullied gay youth. It’s also Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Wednesday, which can naturally become Gratuitous Purple Picture of Yourself Wednesday.

Gay kids: please don’t kill yourself. PLEASE!

by Dusdin