So... so what?

The artful consideration of the universe, the recording and arranging of ones findings in order to confront a formal issue, is enough. But beyond that, there is so much more. Just as science tackles the Big Questions by way of smaller questions, so does art. A simple quest to see what happens when this color and that are placed next to each other, or when this particular formal constriction is placed upon a way of looking at the world, can lead to such profundity. So what? The only real response I can think of is ‘What else is there?’ If not this, then what? What would the world be, were there not minds attempting to make sense of it? What would my world be if I were not trying to make sense of it? So what? So what? Why not? So it isn’t for you, perhaps. But it does not negate the artist’s experience of having created it, nor does it eliminate the things you perhaps gained in perceiving it. Things that may or may not be readily apparent, but things that are nonetheless present.

think

so very delicate, so fragile, this white light we all are given. so easy to obscure it, to deny it, so easily snuffed out. how much harder it is, to let it show through. how much more difficult, to burn ourselves upon it, to be consumed in its rapturous brilliance. and how hard to make it shine once more, once it is dimmed and hidden away. so many moths beating their heavy wings in desperate pleading to regain admittance to that glow, so many men staring into the sun to find that which is so long lost.

temporal nature of being

i have passed too much of my life before a screen. too much of my life before a screen from which nothing but emptiness can be taken. i am changing this. i am only using the screen for somethingness, now.

airport

there are small birds living in the airport. flitting about the airy ceiling and living on scraps from the food court.

softly

six light brown feathers with dark brown banding were stuck, in a dried smear of rust colored blood, to the cold glass of the front window as i arrived home this morning. i blew on them gently and they floated away on my fogged breath and my chest felt warm in spite of the frigid air.

confuse

his voice is in a tonal range so low that you can barely register it, and he speaks quickly and you race to keep up and resort to reading his lips at times. his eyes gleam when he is excited and he carves small arcs in the air with his fingertips as he speaks, and you follow his fingers instead of his lips and lose track of his words for a moment but somehow they have lost importance because everything he wishes to say is hidden in those small movements. he speaks without speaking, even as words tumble forth, and your body responds without the consent of your brain which is still embroiled deep in the verbal and won't be catching up for some time.

inevitable

let me tell you a secret, he says, those hard blue eyes dancing black in yellow streetlights and cold. let me tell you a secret. his all-too-familiar lips part over all-too-familiar teeth and his all-too-familiar tongue darts in and out quickly to calm his winter chap.
let me tell you a secret, he says, stepping closer, and his heat radiates from his dense form in the frozen stillness and the longing to be caught up in those arms and caressed by those hands is a forcible thing, a sick snaking sneaking creature climbing up your throat and squeezing the air from your lungs. let me tell you a secret, and he barks a short laugh and his breath grazes your cheek and you smile uncertain and unwilling to let him in again but incapable of preventing it.
let me tell you a secret, he says, and he leans in to whisper in your ear and you flinch but he doesn't notice. his lips brush your earlobe as he murmurs something you cannot decipher because your heart beats so loudly, echoing in your chest, that it drowns out anything else. what, you say, i didn't hear you, you were too quiet. and he barks out a laugh once more and throws his head toward the sky, at where the moon would be if it weren't hiding behind thick clouds and snow, looking for all the world like a coyote, and perhaps he is, and without looking down he barks yet again and bays 'i love you' to the clouds and then he looks at you and grins, feral in the darkness, and runs his hands through his hair.

temporary

i will create a new version of the january sky, when it comes.

it will not care that i am hiding beneath it.

sharing minds

i don't share with you the times when i am frantic beating against walls and wailing curses and tearing my hair. perhaps i should i don't know. i keep those things as private as i can i don't know why i don't like to show that i don't have control of the things in my mind. i sob and scream and gnash my teeth and bloody my fingers biting the nails. i don't know how to share that with you, i don't know how to share with you my lack of grace i don't know what good it would do, to show you that we have some sort of camaraderie. i am not ashamed of my frenetic moods i just don't know how to share them with you without feeling i have done some disservice to myself and anyhow they end so quickly and when i am in them i don't think to share them because they are all that is real. perhaps someday you will be with me when i lose myself to the frenzy and you will calm and quiet me and you will understand or perhaps i will hide away like i always do or perhaps i don't know.
i should perhaps just let go and lose control but there is always something in the way.

spare thoughts

SIJ is just over six feet tall, has dirty blond hair, scruffy side burns, a scraggly mustache and the beginnings of a goatee that will never become anything more than the beginnings. he has a patch of white in his hair that changes shape gradually throughout the year- somewhat larger in the summer and somewhat smaller in the winter. he has strange protruding bones above his shoulder blades that feel like the remnants of wings. his face is broad and open and dotted with freckles and his chin is strong and his cheekbones high. his eyes are the color of glacier hearts.
i know the contours of him better than i know myself.
i hope that someday i know DEK with the same thoroughness.

disjointed and somewhat uninteresting

i like to watch my dog sleep. once she has found a comfortable position, she closes her eyes and sticks out her tongue and shuts off completely for an hour or two. frequently, her left front paw twitches and she snores softly. i can make any amount of noise, i can call her name and whistle and kiss at her- no reaction. her smooth, shiny black coat invites stroking when she is so calm and still, and often i lay my head on her side and sleep myself.
in other parts of my brain, it is sweater weather again. colorado's sweater season comes on in fits and false starts, so it is possible that it will not be sweater weather for long. but for now, it's chilly when i take the dog out in the morning, and it stays that way for most of the day.
i have had a great many sweaters in my life, but two of my best loved sweaters have gone to two of my most loved people. to sij, a green one surplus from the german army, with german flag details on the shoulders. to dek, a dark blue one surplus from the navy. neither ever fit me that well, and neither was that flattering on me, but i loved both dearly because i have a fondness for surplus military gear and also because i have a fondness for dressing somewhat like a boy.

thing provider

i was dubbed 'thing-provider' years ago because i insist on giving gifts to sij of all sorts. whenever i go somewhere, i find something for him. very rarely is it a useful something, but it is frequently a something that has caught my fancy in the best way. if i find it in a junk shop it is likely that i have carried it delicately about the store and put it down and picked it up and turned it every direction examining it, and sometimes even put it back and then come again for it the next day. if i find it elsewhere, on a beach or in a wood, i have caressed it gently and carried it carefully back to my car or my room and looked at it half awake in the early morning and touched it to my tongue or rubbed it against my cheek.
i love the things i give and think perhaps that passing them on is the only way to spread any of that love. i don't know. perhaps i am fooling myself.

the one on the left

the sky overhead in bands of electric blue and softly scalloped pink glowing clouds, the mountains black with hidden sun. darkness comes swiftly and blue loses the electric, clouds shudder to gray. violet overtakes and then blackness and the shimmering prickling light of stars in a no-moon night. skies pretend to be limitless but are only infinite. magic is pretended well when moons are missing and the coyotes howl at their reflections in the rivers because there is no bowl in the sky.
touching the edges of the earth, where the dead do not dare walk for fear of having to live.

fiendish

for the five of you that read this... i'm working on a second blog, primarily for my own amusement. it is here and it has not much in it yet. but it will.

handle with care

i enjoy examining hands. my own, of course, are most frequently subjected to scrutiny; but those of others are fair game as well. my left hand is more interesting than my right, at the moment. it is graced with, beyond its usual collection of scars and freckles, the following: the digits 4322, a band-aid on the first finger (covering a paper cut - well, a mat board cut), a small oval stain of black ink just below the first knuckle of the first finger on the palm side, a small stain of blue ink at the base of the middle finger on the palm side, a small round bruise at the base of the thumb on the back side, a nearly microscopic scab in the first knuckle of the first finger on the back side, an almost-healed burn at the base of the small finger on the back side, a short vertical incision in the first knuckle of the ring finger on the back side, and a small cut that travels lengthwise down the middle of the ring finger.
my hands have never been delicate. they are tools, and ones that i use constantly. i don't believe in keeping my hands clean. my hands know things that even my brain is not privy to. they can work on their own.
i can tell you about the hands of my favorite people, in great detail. how they feel, how they look, what they know. I's hands are large, broad and square. his fingertips are smooth but his palms are rough and calloused. he has a scar on his left ring finger that feels like it was made from some other person's skin. D's hands are long and thin, his fingers are smooth and feel delicate; their strength is surprising, and astounding. they dance, quickly and elegantly, about whatever task he sets them to, dexterous and agile.
someone told me once that the eyes may be the window to the soul, but hands are the mirror of the heart. perhaps this is true. perhaps this is why i look.

backwoods voodoo

there is no magic in wild places. nothing supernatural or sorcerous. there is only honesty. but it is honesty so strong, so forceful, as to be mistaken for enchantment. it beguiles some and terrifies others; and a few it drives to utter madness. this kind of honesty is difficult to find in the civilized world, where mere survival is not enough. hiding becomes second nature, deception becomes rote, in the pursuit of civility. certainly creatures hide, but only in pursuit of survival. in nature all things are laid bare, beauty and ugliness, fear and love. in the wilds, where furred creatures far outnumber hairless apes, there is nowhere to hide.
art, i think, or the best of it at least, tries to reach at that honesty we are missing- tries to tap in to the root of things, the place where all things are apparent.
to be bewitched by nature; to believe that it holds some magic, some power, that we do not also hold; is to be sorely mistaken. search deeply and you will find it, if you want to.

place memory

memory is a curious thing. the twists and turns of free-association taken by the active mind are at once entirely illogical and perfectly rational. thinking of, of all things, Mahayana Buddhism leads me to a certain stretch of highway in western Oregon, on the way to Newport. fog leads me to a stretch of Kansas road at three in the morning, my lights barely cutting through the crowding mist. and the poem This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams sends me to the dirt road through the desert that runs to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
an eerie place, the great salt lake. we walked in the heat under cloudless rain-coloured skies to the place where white crusted black rock curves out into rusting water. the silence was heavy as the heat and our footsteps were gunshots; a lonesome raven cried out and overhead flocks of pelicans, antediluvian and massive, shuddered noisily on their way from nowhere and to it.
in and above and through all of these things, he is present. the smell of his sweat and the feel of his skin. he is only the second person whose scent i can recall without some external prompt. he escapes the loop of associations, he is his own entity.

xacto knives are not ergonomic

the first finger on my right hand is swollen to twice its normal girth and i cannot bend it easily. the first knuckle is red and taut and warm to the touch. on the palm side of the finger, all of the blue veins are clearly visible.
i am not even halfway through cutting matboard.
on nights like this, i don't know what it is that is preventing me from going to some commercial production house and shooting and editing commercials. even now, with my hands stiff and my arms weary and my fingers filled with miniscule cuts that i know will hurt later, the thought of editing commercials turns my stomach. it is enough to give me pause, to make me realize that i have to find some other way. my standards aren't for sale, even when i desperately wish they would be.

frost on leaf litter

the spring has an excess of color and the summer an excess of heat, the fall is indecisive and trips over its feet. winter i can rely on. winter decorates the ground each morning in extravagant diamonds shining in thin sunlight, winter blanches the color out of everything until there is naught but essence left. winter makes the hidden visible- breath and branch and earth- and blankets the seen in snow and wool. winter comes, sometimes smiling and sometimes baring teeth. but winter comes faithfully. when all the perishable green is gone from the world the everlasting green takes on new and radiating splendor, its dull darkness assuming the forsaken role of 'colorful'.
the mice move indoors and the spiders curl their legs and sleep and the dogs glare baleful at the open door.

like so much glass

the human body is fragile and so easily broken. and so very easily broken.

heatsink

this is an idea. possibly a scattered one. deal with it.

bolex set on 't', single frames. dark room. heatsource rather than lightsource used to expose the film. a single frame at a time, however long it takes to outline something using the heatsource.
the result should be an animated, glowing, wavering outline. should be.

test on 35mm with a similar ISO first? testing 24 frames would be better than testing 5,040.

idea source: the modern photography room in the MOMA- heat-photographs on color infrared, using heated blowers to create images of people.

end of idea.

infiltrating spaniards

i was reminded recently of Apocalypto, a film i hesitate to give the respect of proper capitalization and italicization. it's not just that it's terrible (which it is) or that Mel Gibson made it that bothers me. it's a whole slew of things. historical inaccuracies, physical impossibilities, poorly used technology, bad puppeteering.
the thing that bothers me most, though, is the ending. in which the arrival of the Spanish is implied as salvation for the 'good' mayan. here comes Jesus, Mary, and the Conquistadors, just to save the day...

philosophically mute

i said that the other difference between film and video wasn't important, but it is. so i'm going to obsess on it for a while. don't mind me.
film projection involves a fancy-pants contraption that shines pure white light through translucent film- either black and white or colored- that is made up of a base layer and an emulsion layer. the emulsion layer is made up of, among other things, silver particles. when the pure white light shines through the film, it projects silhouettes onto a screen (or a wall, or the side of a van... whatever you happen to place in front of it). a dance of light and dark.
digital projection involves a different fancy-pants contraption that shines colored light that has been digitally manipulated to combine itself into various images.
the difference between these two is this: in digital projection, there is no darkness. the blacks are colored light, rather than shadow. shadows are not shadowed.
this will probably be expounded upon in the future.
it's important.
i swear.

seeing not seen

when you watch projected film- the real stuff, the physical thing- you spend half of your time in complete darkness. as the film runs through the projection apparatus, the light shining through the frames is alternately obscured and revealed by a spinning shutter. it's difficult to explain, much easier to just show you, but believe me- you are spending half of your time in darkness.
projected video, because of scan lines and such, never leaves you in the same sort of darkness.
this, i think, is one of the two fundamental differences between film and video. the other is not important right now.
just know that you spend half of your time in darkness, whenever you go to the theater.

goldfish die easily

last week i bought six goldfish for an image. goldfish, in mason jars, lit from beneath. shot in black and white, stuttered so that the fish jerk unnaturally about their little glass homes.
one of the fish was dead by the next morning. another died the following day. and two more died the day after.
so now i am short four fish. it's a good thing that they only cost twelve cents.
more importantly, i keep watching the world slide by and wondering where i belong. the drapes are pulled tight because the light hurts my eyes and i fear i am going blind.
there is pattern to everything in life, but it is all interconnected... i don't know that i am able to isolate anything specific. there is a pattern to the way that the colours swell and burst at sunrise, and then fade away and fold in upon themselves at sunset. a pattern to the growth of the grass and to the movement of the clouds. most people are simply unaware of it, or choose not to notice that they are part of the pattern. 

many years ago, when i was quite small, a woodpecker drilled a hole in the outside wall of my bedroom. the woodpecker quickly abandoned the hole, and it was taken over by starlings. by all rights, i ought not like starlings. they are a non-native species, they crowd out the native species, they are dirty, they are loud. but i adore them. their proud iridescent black plumage, their haughty gaze, the way that they teach their young to pick out the best of the apples rotting on the ground beneath the apple tree. for as long as i can remember, they have lived in my wall. tucked between the intact drywall and the outerwall, nested in among the insulation. every year they raise a family, sometimes two. many generations have passed through that nesting hole, i am sure. they have returned to the same spot so many times that i think, should they not be in my wall, i would not be able to sleep at all. they have always had a somewhat raucous cry, not quite that of a crow, but still not a pleasant sound. however, i know that they, like many birds, can learn to imitate many other sounds. i have heard of starlings imitating car alarms and children laughing and dogs barking. but my starlings never had, until i heard one last week. imitating the ring of my cell phone.

sickness

my throat feels as though i swallowed nails this morning. which i didn't, if you were wondering. I tells me that i sound like tom waits when i am sick like this. i can't decide if that is a good or a bad thing.
everyone in my family is traditionally sick for at least one of the three major holidays in the last quarter of the year. last year i was sick for both thanksgiving and christmas. it would appear that this year i get halloween, unless this clears up in the next two days- which is highly unlikely. this feels like the kind of sick that, before i had a tonsillectomy, would have left me miserable and bedridden for a week at the very least.
i wonder who gets to be sick on thanksgiving this year?

fear and friendliness

i don't care to go into the details of my social anxiety. it's not as though it will change at the drop of a hat, and i am not about to work on that when i have much more interesting things to do. however, in spite of any apprehension i suffer, i still find (or used to, prior to my change in relationship status) that i get myself into trouble of a certain kind far more often than i probably ought. which can make parties doubly awkward. not only do i dislike the very idea of being at a party; what with the large group of people and the noise and the drunkenness and the idiocy; i find that i am often confronted with multiple people with whom i spent very brief, though frequently enjoyable (and often extremely inebriated), quality time.
of course, last night was no exception. and my social skills, as usual, are a bit rusty. so i spent most of the evening sitting quietly watching my ex-boyfriend, my high school friends, three one night stands, and a number of random make-outs get ridiculously drunk. quite amusing.
being the only non-drinker at a party is always a bit absurd. watching people lose control of themselves in increments, listening to speech slur and profanity increase exponentially with each drink down the hatch. i can't do it often, but it is entertaining every so often. it's better than drinking, and being the one losing control. and, hey, drunk people are friendly.