Middlebury College economist Caitlin Knowles Myers projects that overturning Roe might reduce the annual number of abortions by about 14 percent. “A post-Roe United States isn’t one in which abortion isn’t legal at all,” Myers told The New York Times. “It’s one in which there’s tremendous inequality in abortion access.”¹

… having just been thinking about atrocities and the atrocious, i encounter this article and wonder, why are these “atrocities” so important to stop, and others not?… the same Christians so adamant about abortion are pro Israel in spite of its atrocious treatment of Palestinians… the same Christians many decades ago lynched black men and women(?)… there is something unique about the unborn child?… i suspect it is a useful political issue for rallying the faithful as well as a means of oppression of women, especially women of color…

… pro choice advocates are resigning themselves to further restriction of abortion after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case out of Mississippi…

… we are not logical animals… we are primal and political animals… the ability to reason only means we can work out a defense for atrocities and the atrocious…

… Sontag sums up the chapter by reminding us the presentation of history is selective… we have reached a moment in which a large number of our citizens are ready to look at the horrors of slavery and its aftermath, but what about the many other atrocities committed in our name by our government?…

A museum devoted to the history of America’s wars that included the vicious war the United States fought against guerrillas in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 (expertly excoriated by Mark Twain), and that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded—now more than ever—as a most unpatriotic endeavor.¹

… Sontag talks about the “usefulness” of images of atrocities exhibited long after the atrocious can be punished for being atrocious… the example is a set of photographs of lynchings in the south, taken as souvenirs… why show them in the year 2000 when they were made 1890-1930?… what are we supposed to do with the information, with the consciousness they raise?…

The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of these pictures makes us spectators, too.¹

… will black and brown people be treated better now because we see these images now?, will we recognize just what brutes we are?, i am guessing that most who saw the exhibit or the book, Without Sanctuary, think of themselves as brutes, yet…

It was further argued that submitting to the ordeal should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of “barbarians” but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.)²

… this is what gives me pause at our present moment in history, brutes are on the move, and they are us…

… Sontag talking about the limited ability of a photograph to tell a story, to deliver understanding… they can shock, they can be pivotal moments for public opinion, but they don’t say much about the moments leading up to the moment in question… they define, but don’t explain… words, she tells us, explain…

… several thought streams in my brain…

… yesterday i ordered a b-day gift for J… part of me didn’t want to… such a weird dynamic…

… this AM a post or two by S about their life which is happier these days with G in it… lightning has struck them twice… i hope we get to meet G…

… it struck me that i like posting to Micro.blog, even though so few people get to see it… much of the same content could be posted to FB, but i don’t like posting there… i don’t like having adds and aesthetics forced on me… i don’t like that they harvest data, i don’t like much of it… so, i prefer obscurity with control… that seems to be the choice these days, obscurity with control, community on corporate terms…

… the loud bird just started cranking up… i don’t know what sort of bird it is… i imagine it large and bold, but it could easily be tiny… all i know of it is its very loud sing-song voice…

… wondering if we will have any of the 17 year cicada cohort around here… so far, no signs of it… i will be disappointed if we don’t… i remember the last major cohort, there was more of it to the north…

… i have been looking for ways to use rhubarb as a savory ingredient… i am not big on deserts because i am on the edge of pre-diabetes and because i can think of many ways i would rather consume the excess calories (hello cheese course!)… last night i made a rhubarb and spinach salad which called for poaching the quince and reducing the poaching liquid to make a dressing for the salad… the dressing was delicious, the rhubarb mushy… tonight i did a salad that called for pickling the rhubarb and using the pickle juice as part of the dressing… i much preferred the pickled rhubarb which softened a little but largely retained shape and crunch while gaining sweet-tart flavorings… it was combined with lovage (in lieu of celery) and fennel… i think celery would have been a little better… lovage is a strong flavor which overwhelmed the fennel… however, i think rhubarb and lovage would be lovely by themselves…

… Pocket Road trail today… the climb is relatively easy, two stops to let my heart slow down, my health app tells me i have climbed the equivalent of 33 flights of stairs…

… the trees are well leafed out and it is dark at some points along the trail… the sounds of water as it flows over, around, under rocks… this stream of water comes from the reservoir up above… i am sitting about half way up, at the point where the trail crosses the stream, my stopping point most of the time… this is what is in front of me…

… i feel the happiness of a body that has exercised itself to the point of endorphin rush, satisfied that i can do it with relative ease… happy to be in the woods with only the sounds of the stream, birds, insects… so calming…

… turning attention to my own work, i am in the process of reorganizing my creative productive stream, this new blog is part of that effort, i have decided to separate what i write about from what i photograph so that one site is about my photography and the other site is about everything else… the image above is one image from attention paid in May… check out more here… more added to the end of the month… here is another…

… and…

… and…

… and…

… and…

_“The personal is political” was the slogan of second wave feminism. In this deftly interwoven exhibit, curator Karen Haas features photographers working 1965-1985 from Canada to Latin America in a demonstration of how women’s personal lives were inextricably linked to cultural and political inequalities. The provocations and inspirations of the Civil and Equal Rights movements share many qualities with our current #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements. “Personal and Political” sheds light on a vibrant historical narrative, offering a perspective that brings our own times into sharper focus.¹

… this article reviews an exhibit at The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, featuring women photographers active during the years 1965-1985… i would definitely go see the exhibition if i were in Boston, even if women in photography weren’t my personal rabbit hole… some great images in the show, here are a couple…

“Patti Smith, New Orleans” Annie Leibovitz (American, born in 1949) 1978. Photograph, chromogenic print Gift of Jan Colombi and Jay Reeg Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Bathroom Surveillance, or Vanity Eye” Martha Rosler (American, born in 1943) 1966–1972. Photograph, inkjet print (photomontage)

Museum purchase with funds donated by Scott Offen Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

… the game i most loved to play, even if not the game i was most competitively successful at (that would be soccer, which i was able to play competitively through college)… this article talks about Common Practice: Basketball & Contemporary Art

Firemen put out blaze while youths play basketball by Paul Hosefros for The New York Times, 1975

_“Basketball is a universal language, much like art is. There are other sports that are likely more popular, but none are as influential as basketball from a cultural standpoint,” says artist and filmmaker John Dennis. “It transcends barriers in music, fashion, art, and pop culture, and also draws attention to pressing issues in the social and political arena.”¹

… the birds nesting in the eves of our house became active some time ago, at the first hint of daylight… right now, the garbage truck is banging, whirring and whining down the street…

Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.¹

… my entire life has been spent in a land that has been largely free of war… i am white, male, middle class, in my 60’s… relative peace and calm has been a luxury throughout my life… military conscription ended when i was old enough, there has been no war since that demanded such conscription… because i am white, the violence of the justice system does not impact me… it is impossible for me to truly comprehend the privilege i have been graced with…

That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.²

… people should not detach themselves from their feelings about misfortune and tragedy, theirs or others… the universe is indifferent to it, but people are not always… the closer to home, the more certain it is they won’t be… where is one to find meaning in a universe that churns on, constructing, deconstructing, building up, grinding down… is the best stance one of detachment?… if it is, then what of the human capacity to feel, love, empathize… there is a great emphasis being placed on empathy these days, it is a hopeful stance, one that suggests that we can all just get along… and yet, the evidence is solid in the direction of no, we can’t…

… Sontag talks about photographs taken among the ruins of the trade towers… what is beauty?… does it exist in devastation and death?… the discussion is about the confused powers of photography, the power to document, the power to make most anything beautiful, the position of witness to the truths of the cosmos, sublime and detestable both…

… as example of raising misfortune to artistic aesthetic heights, which crosses over from documentation to exploitation, Sontag offers Sebastião Salgado, who photographs wild animals on the brink of extinction, humans engaged in barely endurable labor that pays a pittance, or roaming the world restively looking for a place to live out their lives with decent prospects for the privilege i have… she notes that his pictures are exhibited in high end galleries and purchased by people with far more means than i have… they are noble savage sorts of photographs… the savage is beautiful so long as they remain the savage… she note also that the people he photographs never have a name… or at least, he hasn’t troubled himself with finding out what it is and identifying them…

_ PHOTOGRAPHS OBJECTIFY: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality._³

… photographic fact of life… Sontag talks of the current trend to show the shockingly ugly, to provoke emotion, action, or simply catapult the creator into notoriety… this latter is the operating motive of so much these days, to be noticed at all one has to shock… a shock doctrine… as i write this i know i have heard it before and look it up, the title of a book by Naomi Klein where she describes it as the deliberate exploitation of national calamity to put through dubious policies while the people are distracted… hmmm…

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.⁴

… an extremely important point…

… Sontag discusses the significance to a people of collecting their history and enshrining it in an institutional setting so they can remember the tragic past and celebrate survival in the present… Sontag asks why there is no museum of the sufferings of African Americans (at the time of writing, there are now a number that are in planning or opened as of the writing of this Atlantic article in 2016)…

… this quote is highlighted 273 times in my Kindle edition book…

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.¹

… Sontag concludes the chapter discussing the racist nature of photographs of the dead and dying in African and Asian countries… a collective fascination with the less fortunate as a means to confirm the good fortune of not living in one of “those” countries… human beings are very good at othering… one questions the adaptive advantage, isn’t there something wrong with nature’s programming here?… is getting one’s genes into the next generation so important?… at this point i confront the reality that, as far as i know, i have not projected my genes into the next generation, a fact that at times leaves me feeling a failure…

… still waking up… taking seconds to connect the thought of doing to actually doing it…

… began to rearrange my photography website… not sure i like what i did but will keep going until it makes sense…

… dogs restless, got me up early… Fiona smelled something outside in the back yard i think… i finally got out of bed at 3:30…

… looking at the weather, there is very little rain in the forecast… my next thought is how expensive watering the garden is…

… Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the Republican refusal to get behind a bi-partisan commission to figure out what happened on January 6, 2021… the thinking is that some of them will have to testify to things they would rather not testify to…

… the noose is closing in on 45… the NYS AG announced that the investigation is now into criminal wrong doing, suggesting that there are some smoking guns…

… how often will we be incredulous over Republican rejection of Democracy?… Democracy is not in their best interest so long as they remain the party of aggrieved white men and women… question is, do Democrats have the balls to do what is needed to stop them?…

… i take the road through Memorial Park… it is Wednesday, food bank day… there are so many cars in line…

… sadness again drifts through me… even in an improving economy, so many need food… i am surprised by the two Lexus cars i see in line, and that so many of the cars are in good to practically new condition… i don’t expect poverty to arrive in a Lexus, i expect poverty to arrive in cars that are ready for the junk yard… i am not sure what to think…

… in the park, a person is asleep on the ground, back turned towards me, a dog rests its chin on their hip… a wave of sad comes over me… homeless?, transient?… the dog looks well cared for… i hope there is a house that welcomes them somewhere…

… a squirrel chases another squirrel, territorial squabbles?…

… sitting by the falls at Roundhouse… a favorite spot… feeling good…

… i got to bed at 9 last night… the dogs let me sleep until 4…

… man and woman near by, couple?… she is pregnant… they are looking at the falls, chatting, drinking coffee… are they staying in the hotel?…

… the air temperature is perfect again, blissful…

… C is the first person to take note of my FB post about my new blog, did they visit?… there is no way to know unless they comment, i suspect they will have a quick look…

… i have been writing a journal and publishing much of it for a couple of years now… i read and write and write about what i read daily, and it adds up to quite a bit each day… i have been publishing the days work in one post, complete with the photographs i make, etc… as i say, it adds up to a lot, some of it almost pointless fluff, some of it quite serious and contemplative… almost nobody reads it as far as i can tell, and truthfully, i haven’t promoted it much… i always expected it would be too time consuming and not of enough interest for anyone to read regularly…

… i think that may be changing, at least the time consuming part… whether the change means it will be more compelling, i don’t know, probably not, but at least it is being delivered in more bite sized containers…

… it has changed because i started to write using the wonderful writing app, Ulysses and because recently Ulysses developed the ability to publish directly to the Micro.blog platform… i had never heard of the platform, but investigate, set up an account, and recently took “notesonattentionpaid” as my domain name… as the name suggests, it’s a collection of thoughts about what has caught my attention… each thought or thoughts set is a stand alone post, so a prospective reader can settle on the post that seems most interesting and read that… as i said, less daunting… interesting to you?, maybe…

… this from an article about it never being too late to change course and pursue something you are passionate about…

Celebrity chef Julia Child worked in advertising before writing her first cookbook at the age of 50. World-renowned designer Vera Wang was a figure skater and journalist before entering the fashion industry at 40. Housekeeper Anna Mary Robertson Moses, aka Grandma Moses, began her painting career at 78; her work now sells for millions. And the list goes on.¹

… the article catches my attention because it describes a 22 year old Vonnegut as a prisoner of the Germans in Dresden when it was fire bombed… the book is about Dresden… i did not know that…

… have i read this book?, there is a movie, right?, Art Garfunkle?… google informs me that there is a movie, i haven’t seen it, AG wan’t in it… yes, now i remember, that was Catch 22… the book is apparently about the allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, 130,000 peopled dead, target of no strategic importance, except to break the back of the will of the German people… strange to have this come to the front in the same morning Susan Sontag helps me remember and fill in the gaps of the Vietnam and Desert Storm wars… also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia… H was lamenting the death of one of the breeders of Chas, ‘the universe is cruel” she said, i pointed out that the universe is indifferent, it is people who are cruel… we believe they can choose not to be cruel and shake our heads over and over again when they don’t… is there free will?… prevailing science seems to think not, so maybe even people are not cruel, they cary out the indifference of the universe…

… the article on Literary Hub is a reprint of “a 1969 review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Iconic Anti-War Novel”… Vietnam war era, an oblivious time in my life, the draft ended as i turned 18… i still got a draft card, number 27 or something like that, i would have gone, or J said once, been shipped to Canada…

… i read the review, it mentions Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, as being unstuck in time and abducted by aliens… ahh, i did read it, a long time ago… the aliens and unstuck time welded to my consciousness, the rest i have no memory of…

… the bird feeding has begun, the sounds of scrapping in and out of the metal fascia, the hungry chirping of the fledgelings… not as raucous as yesterday, maybe not going full bore yet?…

… this image immediately catches my attention…

Greentea Peng, Photography by Stefy Pocket

… good hook image, red, woman… sex… i am also a little intrigued by the hook line “Your the Musical Jesus!”… what does it mean, i ask to myself, to be a musical Jesus?… image and headline compel me to find out…

… a conversation between two music personalities i haven’t hear of, the genre seems to be rap, hip-hop, he is older, established, she is younger, up and coming, this is her first album, written and produced during the pandemic, her pandemic project (don’t we all have one in one way or the other?)… the album being discussed is Peng’s Man Made, i look for it on Spotify, not there, some single are, i will listen later… i find the Jesus reference, seems to be something about being a carpenter, craftsman?…

_To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do, and pictures taken by photographers out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.¹

… this very first sentence arrests me… the truth of it… the kind of picture we can be so certain isn’t staged, images from Vietnam, napalm child, man being shot in the head, among the most noted, notorious?… i read on and the man shot in the head photo was staged in a fashion, execution carried out as theater for the press corps… this moment in time, reverberating down through the ages by photograph… there is a Woody Allen movie in which the image features as wall decoration in the dining room of a luxury apartment… the idea that someone would live with such an image all day every day means that we can become indifferent over time… was that the message?…

… “More upsetting” Sontag goes on to write, is a collection of photographs made by the Khmer Rouge of people condemned to die moments before they are executed… the condemned had committed the crimes of being “intellectuals” or “counter-revolutionaries”… i think about the precarious situation our country finds itself in where one wrong turn, one failure to stand up to the creep of authoritarianism could bring similar atrocities within our borders…

… because of the power of still and moving images, since the Vietnam war, such imagery has been tightly managed by the military with the news media as a kind of accomplice…

American television viewers weren’t allowed to see footage acquired by NBC (which the network then declined to run) of what that superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi conscripts who, having fled Kuwait City at the end of the war, on February 27, were carpet bombed with explosives, napalm, radioactive DU (depleted uranium) rounds, and cluster bombs as they headed north, in convoys and on foot, on the road to Basra, Iraq—a slaughter notoriously described by one American officer as a “turkey shoot.”²

… how is it i was not aware of this?… was it reported at all?… and how is it we are using radioactive rounds (we needed a use for depleted uranium?)… i do remember the slick presentation of the Gulf War, operation Shock and Awe, Desert Storm… neatly packaged for presentation on the evening news… go team!, may our victories be ever more glorious… there is a Star Trek episode in which war has been sanitized of bloody consequence, attacks are computer simulated and the computers determine who reports to the vaporization machines to take their place among the dead… no muss, no fuss, no rebellious population to stop the fighting…

… Sontag notes that the lens which creates the record is the same as the lens that surveils and targets… the actions of doing each belong in the same category of aggression… it seems to me that the increasing resistance people have to being photographed in public is a reaction to this aggression… it is also interesting that the new capture format, smart phones, is much less aggressive in appearance and, consequently, more successful in its aggression… additionally, this is what has changed, with cameras in everyone’s hands, government censorship of photographs and videos is much more difficult, there is abundant footage these days of the killing of black men by police…

… about media self censorship…

This novel insistence on good taste in a culture saturated with commercial incentives to lower standards of taste may be puzzling. But it makes sense if understood as obscuring a host of concerns and anxieties about public order and public morale that cannot be named, as well as pointing to the inability otherwise to formulate or defend traditional conventions of how to mourn. What can be shown, what should not be shown—few issues arouse more public clamor.³

…to be continued…

230.8 lbs

… downward weight trend stopped… not surprising given precipitous drop over past couple of days… water weight, ebb and flow of water in the body, like the tides?…

… two Heather Cox Richardson’s this morning… both about the same thing… the struggle over voting writes and the need for the Democrats to pass legislation that strengthens them… it is the choice between oligarchy/authoritarianism and democracy for all the people… how it can be a choice we are fighting over is tragic, but it is firmly rooted in the white male patriarchy that has been since the beginning… the patriarchy lives or dies in the next few years… the stakes are high…

… so pleasant to have cleaned the kitchen the night before and have everything set for morning routines… the amount of alcohol i drink is the determining factor… i can do a cocktail or two before dinner, or a glass of wine or two with dinner, but not both…

… the birds are singing madly outside… it reminds me of a time when i worked dayshift on a Ford assembly line in Mahwah, NJ… when the birds started singing, it was time to go to work… men’s work… the plant is no longer there…