Hamish Reid / Pandemonia.com: An Introduction

Pandemonia?

Pandemonia.com is my home domain, an umbrella for a variety of web pages reflecting my interests in photography, imaging, music, writing, and flying. It's a personal attempt to present a not-always-coherent view of the things that catch my interest.

Pandemonia currently consists of the following starting points:

My home page, consisting of the pandemonia.com opening page, my bio, and a copyright notice. Nothing terribly interesting, unless you're interested in who I am, or want to know the conditions under which you can use my images with my blessing.

The Pandemonia image and photo site, an attempt to to publicly thread together some of the images, obsessions, thoughts, and experiences I've collected over a decade or so of photography. Pandemonia's images are organised in a web of obsessions and themes; genres; and narratives or essays.

California Driving -- A Survival Guide. A somewhat scabrous and cynical look at what it takes to survive the experience of driving in California. Mostly aimed at tourists, travellers, and immigrants. It even earned me an interview with the BBC a few years ago; it still gets me a lot of email, about half of it thanking me fulsomely, the other half asking how I could dare say such stupid things about my beloved California.

Handsome Poets. Fab Bay Area pop band. Yes, I'm HSP's guitarist / bass player / web person / photographer, etc. (this web site is horribly out of date, but yes, we're still a band...).

My Flying pages. In 1999 I surprised a bunch of people by learning to fly. If you've ever wondered what it takes to learn to fly (at least in Northern California), or what it's like, take a look at these pages.

My more formal gallery / portfolio pages at HamishReid.com -- basically just the images, without the explanations and accompanying chatter... (if you want the chatter, visit Photolalia).

The Handsome Poets and California Driving sites aren't strictly in the Pandemonia domain, but since they're both either my site (Caldrive) or done by me (and intimately part of my life) (i.e. Handsome Poets), they're here as well.

Note: with the notable exception of my Snap! snapshot server, my web pages are usually free of Java, Javascript, frames, and such gubbins. Not because I dislike them (web sites I've designed for other people have all the good stuff in 'em), but because I like keeping things simple and relatively quick to download, browse, and take in. It's a personal philosophy, I guess. It might change in the future when bandwidth really does become cheap....

Pandemonia?

Why the name? Well, long ago I used to lurk around in the London Underground looking for the little everyday surrealisms that thrive in an environment like that (torn posters, bizarre architectural turns, rat colonies, Yanks in tartan pants -- the standard sort of things that interest simple minds like mine). For several months, nearly everywhere I went -- Highgate, Camden, Tooting Bec, Angel, West Acton, Wood Green, etc. -- there'd be these tiny little stickers in out-of-the-way places (behind a seat back, or along the bottom edge of a wall, or 8 feet up a wall, etc.) with tiny cryptic notes in careful handwriting; each one started with the word "Pandemonia". They never made much sense (I think we know the reason for that...), but I liked the name, and I admired the ambition. And the word "Pandemonia", always on every sticker, stuck in my brain forever.

And besides, by the time I got it together to apply for a new domain, all the good names were gone.

(And there's also a pandemonia.net now, a quite separate collection of arts and crafts hosted by Joe Cooper Rolfe in Louisiana. It was real pleasure to discover that there's actually a physical place -- Joe's family plantation -- called "Pandemonia"...).

A History

Pandemonia has been in existence as a web site continuously, in one form or another, since at least early 1995 (probably earlier -- I've lost track). Visitors to my previous (and still somewhat visible) home page (http://www.dnai.com/~hamish) will find things here rather familiar.... It just grows and grows.

Who Are You?

If you want to know a bit about me, take a look at my bio. In summary, I'm just another Berkeley-based Anglo-Australian photographer, musician, and nerd.

Getting In Touch

I welcome feedback, but since the amount of spam has lately gotten out of hand, I may miss your email, especially if it's sent from Hotmail or Yahoo (all mail that comes from -- or seems to come from -- either domain (and a few others, like hongkong.net) is always automatically junked by my server before I even get to see it existed. This cuts maybe 50% of my spam immediately. If you use Hotmail or Yahoo, you could always get a real ISP...). In any case, visit the Feedback page to get in touch, which will help bypass this filtering.

	My home page, consisting of the pandemonia.com opening page, my bio, and a copyright notice. Nothing terribly interesting, unless you're interested in who I am, or want to know the conditions under which you can use my images with my blessing.
	The Pandemonia image and photo site, an attempt to to publicly thread together some of the images, obsessions, thoughts, and experiences I've collected over a decade or so of photography. Pandemonia's images are organised in a web of obsessions and themes; genres; and narratives or essays.
	California Driving -- A Survival Guide. A somewhat scabrous and cynical look at what it takes to survive the experience of driving in California. Mostly aimed at tourists, travellers, and immigrants. It even earned me an interview with the BBC a few years ago; it still gets me a lot of email, about half of it thanking me fulsomely, the other half asking how I could dare say such stupid things about my beloved California.
	Handsome Poets. Fab Bay Area pop band. Yes, I'm HSP's guitarist / bass player / web person / photographer, etc. (this web site is horribly out of date, but yes, we're still a band...).
	My Flying pages. In 1999 I surprised a bunch of people by learning to fly. If you've ever wondered what it takes to learn to fly (at least in Northern California), or what it's like, take a look at these pages.
	My more formal gallery / portfolio pages at HamishReid.com -- basically just the images, without the explanations and accompanying chatter... (if you want the chatter, visit Photolalia).