… re-read my notes from yesterday… good notes… even though my morning process has been interrupted somewhat by the need to give medication to one of our dogs… today is the last day of that…

Letters from an American, November 02, 2022

… President Biden addressed the nation last night… he told the people, Democracy is on the ballot… yes it is… this morning’s HCR post is largely quotes from that speech… Biden urges voters to assess not the economy, not inflation, but whether the candidate they might vote for believes in Democracy… have they said they will abide by the vote, win or loose?… if not, if they are election deniers, then we need to turn our backs on them and vote for the person who will abide by the vote, by the will of the people… she quotes Joseph Nye Welch, who famously confronted Joseph McCarthy:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

… i am feeling hopeful about the election… early voting has been enormous… in my mind, that favors Democrats… but we will see… we have voted… i voted a straight Democratic ticket… there is no other choice in my mind… Republicans need to be turned back… i will be more discriminating when i feel Democracy is secure and the lunatic MAGA people are no longer an issue…

… the work of artist Crystal Liu, a strong Chinese landscape feeling… i like them…

… i have been photographing with my Nikon lately… i get better quality color images from it… i don’t particularly like the 2x3 frame of the 35MM format… i have been cropping them to 4x5 which is quite a crop… still, if you are thinking about that crop when you shoot, you include more on the sides than you than the picture you are taking warrants… so you can crop… at any rate… i have been making some landscape photos in the vertical and was tempted to leave them in the 2x3 format… i didn’t… i can’t stand that proportion these days…

Reclaiming Our Human Potential in the Age of Technological “Progress”

… Maria Popova writes about and quotes Dervla Murphy, an Irish woman who rode her bicycle from Ireland to Afghanistan… it was a feat for a woman to do such a thing in the times she did it… i am not sure it would be possible in today’s political and social climate… it wasn’t really safe back then… it’s less so now… the point of the quotes shared though is about how technology has succeeded in separating us from nature and deprived us of the full use of our powers…

The more I see of unmechanised places and people the more convinced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature. The mere fact that we think and talk as we do about Nature is symptomatic. For us to refer to Nature as a separate entity — something we admire or avoid or study or paint — shows how far we’ve removed ourselves from it.

… there was a time, when i was young, that i believed in the promise of technology and science… i still do to some degree… i suppose it’s the combination of science, technology and capitalism that is the problem, and one cannot have any of these things separately, it seems to me… i wish i could somehow envision a society without capitalist greed… Buddhist Economics is what i would aspire to… would it work?… what is so good about all this science and technology anyway?… longer lives?… better health?… for what?… at this critical moment in the world, much is being challenged and challenging… what will the next few years bring?…

How to Be Un-Dead: Anais Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

… embrace the wild and wonderful process of life… embrace it’s trials and tribulations… embrace the process and move through it without regret… do the best you can… accept the unfolding… be in the midst of it… whatever it is…

Bern and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre

… the article, written by Julia Curl, takes issue with the idea that the Becher’s were aloof, emotionally disconnected from the work… from the world… how else could they produce such clinically sterile work?… i am with JC… no artist is emotionally disconnected from their work… they make art because they feel… i can’t think of an exception to that statement unless we are talking about AI generated artwork… am i aloof because i make photographs without people?… some might think so, but i feel the photographs… at least the ones that are most important to me…