Why I Do This

On flickr I am a member of exactly seventy seven photography groups. Because my interests in photography are so vast I like to be updated on various kinds of photographic projects and discussions. About twelve of these groups are for photographers of the Blythe Doll. There's one called "Save Polaroid," a group only for pictures of green things, "Food Porn," graffiti, one for black and white Photos only,one called "The Jump Project" which is just pictures of people jumping. I really need to start on my jump photos, but I find that adults don't jump as readily as children and I think that's why it's taken me so long to get started.

What happens in a flickr photo group is that the moderator controls the flow of content that is added by members each day and creates rules for submission and discussion. You get to share your work and look at others, comment on work and receive feedback, advice or whatever you might be curious about. You also get a running update whenever someone in your group posts something new. It's a dream for me. I sometimes get so preoccupied with browsing someone's photo stream on flickr for hours. I may log on looking for one thing and get pulled in a totally random direction into a whole other world I had not intended to explore. Seeing other people's work and responding to their feedback is what inspires me to do more.

Recently I read a discussion thread on flickr in my "Arms Length Self Portrait Experience Group" under the subject heading "Why We Do this." A woman doing a self portrait project wanted to see if there was a pattern behind the reasoning for this particular type of photography. Sixty-one people responded with some really interesting answers. I replied with my answer first before I read them all. The following responses were my favorite.

Anonymous
I don't see myself in the mirror, I don't know who I am, so it's always a surprise when I take a picture and look at myself in a different context. I look at pictures of other people all day, every day, always analyzing, so when I see a picture of myself it constantly baffles me. I guess it's a little bit cruel to myself, but occasionally I like what I see and that's when it's fun.

Anonymous2
I think it's weird that people take photos of other people, but don't put as much value as taking photos of yourself. You're just as important as the people you're taking photos of. It doesn't matter if you like photos of yourself or not-- chances are, someone (kids, grandkids, relatives, friends) might wish they had more photos of you someday.

Anonymous3
I have always hated to have my picture taken, even more so now that I am older and have gained weight. I finally decided to take control of the situation and photograph myself. It was a therapeutic undertaking. If I was to title my portrait I would call it "essence"; as I see it as the essence of myself. It is who I see in the mirror, but not who I see in the photographs taken of me up until this point. This sounds terribly narcissistic, but it is actually a rediscovery of myself, after years of neglect.

Anonymous4
I like to see me from a different point of view. It is like when you hear a record of your voice and you say "hey, thats not me!!", but all other people recognize you.
Pictures remind me the world sees me in a different way than I do.

Anonymous5
Because none of my friends are able to capture me the way I want to be captured. If it sounds selfish, well... aren't we all?
And it's always fun to see how different your mirror-image compared to your camera-image can be!


Anonymous6
For me it is a way to express, catalog/contain, and reflect on some of the infinite faces/emotions/personas that float across the surface of my being continuously. it's like stopping time, or the process of living, and being able to hold on to something so complex and mysterious on a scrap of paper or a computer screen... somehow that helps me understand just what it is i am experiencing.

also, i have a rotten memory.

and, though i have figured little in my life out by this point, i feel the
most "in" my body and life that i have ever been. i feel beautiful and challenged, and i want to be able to look back on how i made it through all this difficult and wonderous life stuff, and be able to share it with those i love, and perhaps beyond them with the larger world, which is currently so entrenched in the struggle.

i want to be a light in the darkness, but first i have to find my own path and turn on all the lights!

(this was written b4 coffee and is full of the beginning of thoughts)

My response was:

I think self portraits are a scary, challenging and honest way to take a look at yourself, both aesthetically and emotionally. Personally I only really like pictures of myself taken by me because I know what I want to see or am trying to capture. Other times, things come up that I have no control over, that I didn't even know were there. I find these things fascinating sometimes. They can also be a lot of fun on occasion.

Laid out like tar

So I threw my back out just existing this week and I called out sick from work yesterday to try a series of different things to treat it. I went to get acupuncture in Chinatown, but surprisingly that didn't seem to change much. I wandered around Soho with my camera and took some pictures just to take my mind off the pain for a bit.

I idled into Babeland, (that's a sex toy shop for you prudes out there) for the first time. I was only aware of the one near Orchard Street and had never known this one existed. Apparently, they've been at this location for six years. It's a really nice, large space and the sales women were really nice. They were playing Le Tigre which was great and I just casually made my way down the aisle looking at shelves and shelves of scarily efficient self pleasure toys.

I saw the Hello Kitty vibrator live for the first time. I'd always heard about it. It's adorable of course and also comes in black as well as pink. The further down I got, the more graphic and impressive it was. While I was there about two or three couples wandered in as well. I never once felt self conscious or shy about it. I remember years ago when Tower Records was still open how weird it was that they had the Adult video section embedded with the rest of the DVDs. I would feel kind of awkward for the men who would be browsing those videos while the rest of us were glancing at them with judgment from the Comedy and Romance sections. I guess when it comes to sex in a pseudo puritanical, hypocritical and perverted society like ours, access has a lot to do with demand, atmosphere and intent.

When I got home I applied a self heating pad to my back and watched Lord of The Rings with Francis after doing some doll crafting in my room. Then I soaked in a tub of hot water and Epsom salt for an hour or so. After all this I just felt more tender and sensitive and could barely move without feeling the sharp pain in the center of my shoulder blades. I went to bed but couldn't sleep. I ended up propping myself against the wall on my bed and staring out the window at the men laying tarmac on my street. They stripped it the day before. They always start around eight or so and carry on through the night while people are trying to sleep but it really doesn't bother me much. When the tarmac truck rolled by, I could feel the whole building vibrate. I watched the men shoveling and smoothing out the surface, the steam rising from it. One of the workers was on his cell phone standing there on the tarmac and it made me think of how no one pays full attention to what they're doing anymore, including me. Technology has created so many different, petty things to distract ourselves from what's actually happening from what we're doing in the moment. Before cell phones, before technology, there was more of an opportunity to be present. The article I read in the Onion on the train ride home about the Nadir of Western Civilization being reached on Friday rings scarily true to me. The Onion may be a satire paper but it's based primarily on some really fucked up realities that we all can relate to.

Sitting there last night trying not to move or aggravate the sharp pain in my back. looking at the illuminated yellow light coming from the beastly tarmac vehicle was kind of peaceful. I haven't taken much time to be still and present for a long time myself. Maybe that's why this happened it me. But I still want it to go away.

Bob on Broadway and Natural Hair Care Tips

A really nice young lady spray painting a Bob Dylan stencil onto a t-shirt for me on Broadway in Soho yesterday. She works for www.oldschoolnyc.com

Not only did she make this cool t-shirt for me for twenty bucks. We also chatted about our natural hair care regimens and she recommended four online links for me to visit which she jotted down on the back of her business card.

-longhaircareforum.com
-newlynatural.com
-curlynikki.com
-naturallycurly.com

So the Israelites take over of Prince Street didn't completely ruin my day. : )

R.I.P. Patrick Swayze

Testing mobile blogger.

More Brian Eno

I was so knocked out by that reference to the Wired interview in Ritchin's book that I found the entire article on line. It's pretty amazing. The following jumped out and grabbed me and said "Hi, don't I know you?" : )

Africa is everything that something like classical music isn't. Classical - perhaps I should say "orchestral" - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. And the fact that orchestras play the same thing over and over bothers me. Classical music is music without Africa. It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. Orchestral music represents everything I don't want from the Renaissance: extremely slow feedback loops.

If you're a composer writing that kind of music, you don't get to hear what your work sounds like for several years. Thus, the orchestral composer is open to all the problems and conceits of the architect, liable to be trapped in a form that is inherently nonimprovisational, nonempirical. I shouldn't be so absurdly doctrinaire, but I have to say that I wouldn't give a rat's ass if I never heard another piece of such music. It provides almost nothing useful for me.

But what is tremendously exciting to me is the collision of vernacular Western music with African music. So much that I love about music comes from that collision. African music underlies practically everything I do - even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you "unlocked" the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn't tie them all to the same clock. That kind of free float - these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them - is a characteristic of West African drumming patterns. I want to go into the future to see this sensibility I find in African culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that Africa's in at the moment. I don't know how they're going to get freed from that, but I desperately want to see this next stage when African culture begins once again to strongly impact ours.

"Gossip is Philosophy"
-Wired Magazine

After Photography in the morning

Woke up this morning thinking about how I will be framing my presentation for a Faculty Conversation Series I'm doing at my job this November on my photography. Once this happens I can't sleep anymore because too many ideas start streaming in. I got up and found my Ben Long book, "Complete Digital Photography" and "After Photography" by Fred Ritchin.

I have been reading "After Photography" on and off since last fall. It is part photography critique, part revelation, and an incredibly important voice that helps me to understand the far reaching hand of the digital age passed our reality, passed our death? Ritchin, in one of the last chapters I read this morning entitled "Of Synthetics and Cyborgs," refers to an interview with Brian Eno, musician and multimedia artist, with Wired Magazine.

If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do?

I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things.

Why do you want to do that? You have you.

Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces.

I guess the only thing weirder than hearing your own music being broadcast on the radios of strangers is hearing music that you might have written being broadcast!

Yes, music that I might have written but didn't!

Will you still like the idea of these surrogate Brian Enos when they start generating your best work?

Sure! Naturally, it's a modifiable box, you know. Say you like Brahms and Brian Eno. You could get the two of them to collaborate on something, see what happens if you allow them to hybridize. The possibilities for this are fabulous.

What's left for us to do then?

Cheat. And lie.

Stuff like this makes my mouth hang open. Let your passes on loved ones live on in your heart. Brian Eno will live on literally through you. Creepy and amazing. I haven't even put my pants on yet.

Gadget Eternity

Oh, I mean Samsung Eternity. Francis was sweet enough to buy me a new phone today. He just upgraded to a Verizon LG touch screen himself (at my suggestion) last week. So in classic Fran and Zen corniness, we now both own two phones in clear plastic cases that look way too much alike. And I don't even do cases. I just got one to be on the safe side. UGH! I think most cell phones are just too bulky anyway without a case to go along with it. I loved my svelte little silver Sony Ericson phone but using the number keypad to text was driving me mad, I mean like violently mad. And I mean isn't that a sick reason to buy a new phone, especially since I don't even text that much!

But yes, I am paying an extra 20 bucks or so for this wondrous privilege in addition to the option of twittering, updating my Facebook status and receiving email from wherever the hell I am. I just wanted the least ugly phone possible and the cheapest plan I could get. So hurrah? I will now be broker than ever.

But on the bright side, now I can pretend to flip through my calendar and memo or something important during staff meetings when really I'm just decorating my Superpoke Pet Habitat.
LMAO!!!

Next gadget: Flip Mino Camcorder



Thanks Amanda, now I'm fuckin hooked.

Postal

My empty mailbox was so empty this evening. Not even an advertisement for a gym I already belong to. Not even mail for the previous tenant who’s been gone for three years. Not even a flyer from Dominoes. Nothing. Not like my mailbox has never been empty before. But tonight it looks almost like it’s been washed and wiped out. I would have gone back down to take a picture, but today was too tiring. My own anger has wiped me out. Maybe I was projecting on the mailbox.