… almost bedtime, a little All In with Chris Hayes… Joe Biden driving an electric pickup truck… selling his infrastructure plan… kitchen cleaned up and ready to go… will make the morning go smoothly… a satisfying day…

Poaching the skate in red wine vinegar, water, thyme salt and bay leaf… i thought i would post the final product but forgot… it was good…

… pleasant morning, spring green colors are amazing…

… sun shining on my back, warm, delicious…

… Fishkill Creek near the closed bridge, landscaping woman is working, nearby, a pair of geese and goslings, unperturbed by landscaping woman, i try to make this point to her, she needs to remove her earbuds first, when she understands what i am saying, she tells me she got quite close to make a video, she has an accent, Spanish?, Italian?… i wish her good day and move on to a bench down the path…

… as i write, a chipmunk appears looking for food… is it eating the maple seeds?…

… simplify, i have switched to the iPhone resident camera… it is more versatile… this sets off thinking about simplifying the write photograph and post workflow… time to reduce my efforts to that which sparks joy…

… i text H and ask if she wants to have breakfast at BBC… “yes!, dogs too?”… “dogs too”, i reply… normal is returning to our lives…

Cave paintings created around 40,000 years ago on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, among the world’s oldest cave art, are being destroyed by the climate crisis. A new study conducted by researchers at the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit of Griffith University in Australia describes the damage of rock art panels in recent decades due to climate-induced haloclasty, or salt crystallization.¹

Hand prints in the Pettakere Cave at Maros-Pangkep, Indonesia (image via Wikipedia Commons)

… i wonder how many cycles of ecological disaster the planet has been through?… i am not at all religious, but i was given exposure to Christianity as a child… responsible parents did that… i liked the story of Noah’s Arc… i combine it with the (Buddhist?) concept of cyclical worlds to render a cyclical series of floods, sort of a Groundhog Day, but spanning hundreds of thousands of years with each epoch offering a full flourishing of the planet and humanity that is summarily wiped off it’s face and started over again by an increasingly frustrated God… lets see if they get it right this time… it is sad to see that record of the current epoch is being erased by the effects of climate change…

… i try to avoid most mentions of 45, i refuse mostly to say his name, he remains a clear danger to democracy… i am glad to [read ](https://hyperallergic.com/646642/biden-scraps-plan-for-national-garden-of-american-heroes/ “Biden Scraps Trump’s Bizarre Plan for a “National Garden of American Heroes”, via Hyperallergic”) that Biden/Harris admin is scraping the heroes garden…

_In a small but important step toward restoring sanity in America, President Joe Biden has officially scrapped Donald Trump’s plan to build a “National Garden of American Heroes.” The outdoor sculpture park would have honored a perplexingly eclectic mix of nearly 250 figures — from athletes and pop culture icons to the conservative former Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia and, ironically, Hannah Arendt, known for her writings on the dangers of totalitarianism.¹

… i have seen this work a number of times on my Feedly feed… it is an exceptional series documenting a Chinese American family living in a tiny apartment on Ludlow Street… five people in 350 SF… i can’t imagine, the chaos, the constant being on top of one another, how do they do it?… we are told the marriage does not survive, hard to know if it’s the quarters or just a relationship that follows the course of half of all marriages in the US… i match that statistic, being on my second marriage… i wonder too, how do the children view growing up like this?… we can find some of their views at the virtual exhibit…

The Lams of Ludlow Street, Thomas Holton

… i had an internal debate about sharing this photographic work, it isn’t what I normally glom onto… i make natural light flower blossom photos, but mostly turn them to black and white… also, i like a little intellectual content to photo projects, this seems more straightforward appreciation of beauty in nature, still, there is something about the softness of these images, they almost seem computer generated, is that a good thin?, i don’t know…

Xuebing Du, via Colossal

… i find her instagram account, that she is a her was not apparent until i got there… she has 28.5k followers and is only following 733, enviable fellowship stats if you are into that sort of thing… i try not to be but don’t always succeed…

… Fiona woke me up at 2 AM, needing to go downstairs, drinking water, out briefly, then back to bed… i slept in to 4:30 am, a bit later than i like, a bit later than usual…

… weight down two days in a row, step count up… hoping to keep the trend going…

… no Heather Cox Richardson post this morning, yet, it will probably come later with an apology for forgetting to hit the send button or an explanation regarding power failure or…

… Republicans doubling down on voter fraud claims and law changes, banner headlines on the news last night something to the effect of “Fears Grow that GOP Will Steal the Election in 2022”… US democracy is profoundly threatened, the leaders of one side having decided they don’t care for it anymore… they have convinced their constituency that they are rescuing it, not destroying it… it is imperative that the “For The People Act,” be passed and signed into law, it is needed to head off the destruction of democracy, filibuster be damned…

… the birds living in the eves of our roof over my studio window have begun the day’s round of feeding the family, they arrive to a great deal of clamoring from their babies… we will wait until they fledge to seal the opening…

… i am always tired at the end of the day, making final words difficult to write in a meaningful way… right now Rachel Madow on the debauchery the secret service gets up to… and the incompetence…

… to do this week… begin new organization scheme on Flickr… edit backlog of photos; clean up dining room; order more smart lightbulbs; measure bp…

… isn’t there something more interesting to write/think?…

… sitting on a bench, listening to the water flow by…

… earlier, as i walked down the road, a cricket, a whiff of summer, i felt lazy…

… from Taschen…

… hmmm… expensive, desirable…

… a post on Sylvia Plath in Brain Pickings resurfaces a thought that viewing the youthful suicides of Plath and Francesca Woodman in parallel might be fruitful, informed by Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the fundamental philosophical question being whether to continue to live or not… most of us, me included, ferociously hold onto life and fear death… some do not, for whatever reasons…

… this portrait photograph by Guilherme da Silva astonishes me, such a unique individual, captured really well…

… The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus, Hendrick Goltzius (1588)…

… Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas…

… Sontag is making the point that photographs differ from paintings in that they are not, in most cases, renderings of what a we imagine a horror to be, they are the horror itself once removed…

But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.¹

… Goya, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), eighty-three etchings depicting the brutality of Napoleon’s army when invading Spain in 1808 to put down the Spanish rebellion in 1808…

… why must there be brutality for the defeated?, to be thoroughly humiliated?, why do human beings work this way?…

… Sontag makes a point of the non-judgmental captioning of documentary photographs vs. the captions of Goya’s etchings which are very judgmental…

… a painting (sculpture, music score, etc.) is the creation of the artist and its first standard of relevance is the truth of its attribution… a (documentary) photograph’s first standard of reference is the truth of its contents… though authorship can become important when a photograph becomes collectible…

War was and still is the most irresistible—and picturesque—news. (Along with that invaluable substitute for war, international sports.²

… that sporting contests are wars for peacetime is an extremely interesting point, and explains the way news presentation makes war seem little more than sporting contest, at least in the beginning… i remember the broadcast of Operation Desert Storm… the same applies to political contests, with contests for presidency presented in a similar sporting event format… i have spoken of this before…

… The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Roger Fenton… a famous photograph that i have seen in a book somewhere, maybe Sontag’s book, On Photography…

… it appears that many iconic photographs of conflict were staged…

We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and of death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, “off guard.” No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.³

Only starting with the Vietnam War is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were setups.⁴

… Phan Thi Kim Phuc…

After snapping the photograph, Ut took Kim Phúc and the other injured children to Barsky Hospital in Saigon, where it was determined that her burns were so severe that she probably would not survive. After a 14-month hospital stay and 17 surgical procedures including skin transplantations, she was able to return home. A number of the early operations were performed by Finnish plastic surgeon Aarne Rintala. It was only after treatment at a renowned special clinic in Ludwigshafen, West Germany, in 1982, that Kim Phúc was able to properly move again.⁵

… up at 03:50 AM… HCR thinks the Republican Party is hitting an inflection point where it will collapse under its own scandalous weight… it is, though, crucial that the For The People Act gets passed…

… mechanics of the morning running smoothly… clean kitchen, coffee set up ready to go, dogs down with me, let out, treats distributed, cat fed… may the rest of the week run as smoothly…

… tax day today…

… tired… wondering about tomorrow… what will i get done?, what will i do?, will it mean anything?…

… paying attention to the finer details, in this case, flavor development in my cooking…

… this will make 5 or 6 quarts when finished…

… two joggers pass me by…

… at the beginning of the pandemic this caused great fear and alarm…

… in the middle of the pandemic, when i masked whenever out of the home, i feared less…

… at the present moment, fully vaccinated, there is no fear at all…

… a beautiful morning…

… perfect temperature, slight coolness on bare skin, but not chilly, body gently throwing off heat rather than heat sucked away…

… really feel like i might have found a blogging platform to love… at first, the difficult access to other bloggers, the absence of any indication of eyes on your post unless someone is moved to comment… the silence deafening… then… this is nice, no worries about followers, grabbing attention, you do it for yourself, it is freeing… just write, make pictures, post…

Inner Journey is a raw and introspective portrayal of Harris’ experience as an autistic, non-binary, transgender artist, tracing their struggles with mental illness, self-love and gender identity¹

… on the one hand, i am sympathetic, empathetic, struggle at the fringes of acceptable societal behavior sucks… on the other hand, i grow weary of self-centered trauma art projects bringing home the bacon… it is important attention, but is it the attention of a society that loves train wrecks, or a society ready to change?… contrast with the trauma Laia Abril chronicles in her ongoing project A History of Misogyny… is the photography good?… its hard to tell, the story dominates… i hope Marvel Harris finds peace in their life and that LGBTQ+ people find ever increasing acceptance in the world…

… Dr. Marcus Bunyan reviews this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago…

… i saw a review of the show a while back, made me wish i could afford to get to Chicago…

This is a harrowing exhibition. In reality, in the 21st century, it shouldn’t be, for the problems that it investigates – the psychological, physical, and emotional realities people encounter in the years leading up to, during, and after fertility; the lack of open acknowledgement of pleasure, the lack of access to abortion, trauma, and the loss of fertility – should not longer exist. Women’s bodies are not vehicles for reproduction as see through a patriarchal, capitalist lens.¹

_“I’m trying to visualise a history of misogyny so we don’t forget what’s in the past and don’t get too comfortable in the present; so we take a look at things that sometimes we don’t want to – in a visual way that doesn’t make you just turn the page but makes you engage somehow and think a little bit.”²

… Israel and the Palestinians, war, the article notes the death of Palestinian children and women in particular… human beings… will they ever learn not to kill each other?… the news media was targeted in one of Israel’s air strikes… this is a forever conflict, the world is a forever disturbing place, i doubt i will live to see the end of it… it makes me sad…

… it’s Sunday morning, i peruse my Feedly feed and come across a review of The Score, by the Fugees on Pitchfork… i am not a fan of hip-hop, culturally it is miles from my life experience, but it gets a 9.3 (of 10) rating, so i decide to read the review… after a bit i decide to cue up the album and listen to it… i like it…

… this sentence from the article reverberates with my own life experience…

For Wyclef, the endeavor was a 24/7 lifestyle. He had moved into a bedroom upstairs after being kicked out of his home in Newark by his religious father for creating sinful music.¹

… i have a lifetime of experience with disapproving patriarchy…

… as i am listening, these words, “too many MC’s and not enough mics,” which sums up the attention driven culture we live in perfectly…

… the album is clear, beautiful in places, i understand it, at least partially, which i often don’t in this genre of music… so many references to history i experienced through tv news…

… my first day of microblogging and post as you go was successful… my words and pictures go to a platform where i have no followers and it is hard to know if anyone looks at them, but, the workflow is efficient and i like having a separate notes on attention stream…

… i had it in mind to sleep in this morning, but my dogs had other ideas… Chas whimpered every time i turned in bed and Fiona decided to clean my feet, all while cool wisps of air puffed through the bedroom window and washed across my legs… i managed to stay in bed until 4:30 AM, later than usual…

… dogs are creatures of habit, once you do something for them at a particular time of day they immediately assume it will happen again the next day and when it does, it is locked in as an expectation for every day… in this case, i get up, let them out, give them a treat… it is, as you might expect, the treat part that locks in the routine…

… a martini and two glasses of wine conspire against last thoughts, but i am waiting for H to feed the dogs before we watch a bit of tv and go to bed… a productive day, new blog set up, posts made, garden tended to, good dinner (salad nicoise)…