Photograph by Eikoh Hose

… Guts and Ghosts: The Radical Legacy of Japanese Photographer Eikoh Hose…

… there are so many Japanese photographers I love… Eikoh Hosoe is another one… this book from MACK is on my list if i get a windfall…

Robe verte, 1967, by Domenico Gnoli

… love this painting… it reminds me of photographs i might make… not sure it has anything particularly important to say about the world other than, perhaps, “god is in the details¹”… what beautiful details they are… Gnoli created between 1949 and 1969 and was an illustrator and set designer… yes, the work above smacks of illustration, but i find it soothing and perhaps significance for its observation of cultural accoutrements… it is pleasing to look at work…

… on display at the Fondazione Prada…

… i free associate to “the devil is in the details,” and then to, “The Devil Wears Prada,” a 2006 romantic comedy/drama starring Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Adrian Grenier…

… had to switch keyboards… the wireless keyboard, which i spilled coffee on quite a while ago, was starting to get gummy… the cold weather causing the keys to gum up and stick because of the sugar-coffee-water spilled on it… was working fine over the summer… the colder weather seems to bring back the gummy…

… dinner with E&B last night… very nice time… talked about many things… they, at the end, pressing their concerns about rent control being considered and likely to pass at city council… they seemed to be saying that property owners and business owners in Beacon have been unable to stop this or even have a debate… i gleaned that they wanted a debate on the issues but it isn’t clear how we get there… the Republican Party is absent from the table in Beacon… business interests are absent from the table too?… they are perhaps thinking educating H will educate the many people H is in touch with…

… truth is, nobody wants the burden to fall on themselves alone… they suggest minimum wage adjustments to help people with limited means rather than promoting large business interests in Beacon… wouldn’t this make it harder for businesses to make their nut?…

… lots of Democratic hand wringing happening at the national level after the elections… HCR points out that the handwringing is overreaction… it was a mixed bag, a mixture of wins and losses for the Dems… even the Yungkin victory in Virginia may have a silver lining… it was achieved while holding 45 at arms length… could this be the start of Republicans moving a little towards the center?… if so, it would be a good thing…

… HCR meter focused on the growing authoritarianism on the right… the critical race theory boogie man is being used to bludgeon educators and rile up parents (suburban, mostly white voters)… she points out that authoritarian movements across the board attack the educator class as part of their playbook…

… Eric Oliver appears in DW’s life… it is interesting how matter of fact DW is about his gayness… he describes in great detail time spent with EO, makes it very clear that he loves him, but has yet to say anything much about a sexual relationship…

… a remarkable passage of existential angst…

_ Again I felt nothing but all the sadness and parting and dying and diseases in the world. All the accidents and hate in the long, long everlasting going-on-ness of it all. I thought that I and Eric and all people living were nothing but the reflection of all the thousand million people who have gone before, and I thought that in a long time, almost no time at all, we would all be gone again and swept away._¹

… it’s all EO all the time now… total infatuation… EO seems to be bisexual… DW describes the attraction between him and a woman friend, and how they go off together alone to do he knows exactly what… apparently EO thought the girl was “passionate”… sexuality is implied often but not talked about overtly… discretion seems to be the dominating force… finally, there is a kiss, one, to comfort… he so doesn’t make a point of the homosexuality… it just is and this is probably as it should be…

… i did a search on Eric Oliver who’s noted accomplishment seems confined to being Denton Welch’s companion and executor of his estate…

… Republican Glen Yungkin won the Virginia governor race… Yungkin is widely viewed as a Trumpian Republican and many will view it as a warning sign that the far right is poised for gains in the Midterms and could win back the presidency in 2024… it is, of course, too early to know what it really means… a Republican win is consistent with history in Virginia where a gubernatorial candidate of the opposing party to the President of the United States is the common choice of voters… why this should be is not clear to me, but it is the history of the situation… it will be interesting to see what the turnout numbers are… that will be more indicative of whether there is energy on the Democratic side or not…

… the thought that is bugging me more has to do with the mess that the infrastructure negotiations have been in Washington… a theory that has currency with Authoritarian regimes around the world is that Authoritarianism is able to respond more quickly and effectively and consistently (when they want to) to changing events around the world and the fast pace of technological development… the Biden/Harris administration is trying to challenge that perception but the difficulty Democrats are having passing a broadly popular with the public infrastructure bill seems troubling in this regard… at least one commentator, Democrat Mark Warner from Virginia, suggested that failure to have passed an infrastructure bill of any kind hurt the chances of Terry McAuliffe in the race… given historical trends in Virginia mentioned above, maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not… but the broader theme of whether Democracies are too cumbersome for the present world environment is a legitimate question and the jury is out on that…

… this mornings post from Heather Cox Richardson suggests that last night’s election results across the nation were a mixed bag with no clear indication of future national winning strategies for either party… in fact, it seems that voters voted in line with the degree to which their state is conservative or liberal than anything else…

… i had a productive day yesterday… worked right up to 6 PM… i made my first “In This Year” post in which i photograph an inscribed date i find on my walks (usually on a building, but sometimes scrawled in random patches of concrete) and then look up what happened in that year… i find it is an interesting exercise in grounding oneself during times that seem tumultuous… a somewhat reassuring find is that tumultuous years are common in history and that things often work themselves out without bringing down the present order… though not always… one will also find a record of eras that come to an end… what is always the case is that life goes on, sometimes in a better way for the general population, sometimes in a worse way… Steven Pinker author of Better Angels of our Nature¹, argues that the overall trend is for the better and that Enlightenment Humanism is the foundation of that better trend… i loved the book, especially it’s grounding in Enlightenment Humanism philosophy… it is completely in line with my own philosophical stance in the world… however, those principles are under severe attack and one can imagine everything “going to hell in a hand basket” as that enlightenment order crumbles… hello new dark ages?… or is something else afoot?…

… it seems odd that Joe Biden, in some ways a relic of the past, is the standard bearer for Enlightenment and Humanist principles… a true believer in the “Better Angels of our Nature”… a last gasp?… the optics at present don’t seem good…

… i am feeling like Ken Wilber’s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality would be an important book to read right now… an important concept that i want to review is that every next level of being subsumes and incorporates into itself the preceding levels of being and is dependent on those levels of being that came before it, yet none of the levels of being that came before it are dependent on it… that is… split out of this next level of being, preceding levels function perfectly well on their own… the thought that i have in reviewing current technological trends is that a way is being prepared for the appearance of a next higher level of being… a level of being composed of all that is now and a more comprehensive intelligence brought on by advances in data processing…

The North Light of Block Island, RI. Photograph by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh

… i have been taking note of dates in the landscape, mostly on buildings, but sometimes carved into concrete or other hard surfaces…

… when i encounter one, i like to look up the year in Wikipedia… it provides a list of the events of that year… here i stand in 2021 in front of a building finished in 1867… momentous things have happened in the United States this year… many of them are certain to make a similar list in another 145 years… will the list tell the story of the beginning of the end of democracy in the United States?…

… as the finishing touches were being put on the light house, these events were unfolding around the world¹:

• January 01: The Covington-Cincinnati Suspension Bridge, renamed the John A. Roebling Bridge in 1983 is opened.
• January 08: African-American men are given the right to vote in the District of Columbia.
• February 03: The Late Tokugawa shogunate comes to an end when Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu abdicates and Prince Mutsuhito becomes Emperor Meiji of Japan.
• February 15: The first performance of Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube is given by the Vienna Men’s Choral Association.
• February 19: The Qing Dynasty defeats the Nien rebels in Hubei China at the Battle of Inlon River.
• March 01: Nebraska is admitted as the 37th State of the United States.
• March 30: Alaska is purchased from Alexander II of Russia for $7.2 million. This becomes known as Seward’s Folly.
• May 01: The first political May Day march in Chicago.
• May 07: Alfred Nobel patents dynamite in the UK.
• May 29: The Austro-Hungarian Compromise is born through Act 12, establishing the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
• June 19: Emperor Maximillian of Mexico is executed by a firing squad.
• July 01: The Constitution of the North German Confederation comes into effect. It establishes a confederation of states under the leadership of Prussia and Otto von Bismarck.
• September 14: The first volume of Das Kapital (Karl Marx) is published.
• October 21: The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed by southern Great Plains Indian leaders. It requires Native American Plains tribes to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma.
• November 02: The first issue of Harper’s Bazaar is published.
• December 18: Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States at a theater in New York City.

… the Earth pirouettes around the sun in a universe of unimaginable size, while the affairs of men unfold on it’s surface…

… i am reading The Journals of Denton Welch… transcribing a particularly interesting passage into my notes… i look and see that it is 5:30 AM, time to wake H so that we can gather ourselves and go to vote…

… as i am reading, i feel i am reading in the dark… the lamp over the desk is pointed up to the ceiling so there is only reflected light… i turn the lamp around to point down at the desk… now i can see…

… voted… low turnout in this off, off year cycle…

… walking…

… a patriotic mural on the side of the DMV building… something worries me about this… there is no signature from the artist¹²…

… i pass L walking their dog and on their way to vote… we discuss briefly the Republican shenanigans…

… as i walk i consider that the next step in my photo/blogging project will be weekly summaries with Saturday and Sunday devoted to that task…

… i see a sign about the Hudson River Greenway Trail… i look it up and find maps of the entire length…

… i seem to have tumbled down a tech rabbit hole… Ulysses wasn’t syncing properly… so i started the process of moving folders to iCloud syncing as opposed to the external dropbox syncing i had been doing… trying to locate the issue… now it is syncing through dropbox properly, but i have an extended syncing operation going on the iPhone that i have to let finish before backing out of it?… dropbox seems to be preserving things like favorites better… i should learn to be patient when there is a synching problem… it usually sorts itself out…

… while i have been waiting for Ulysses to get synced, i have been collecting entries together around subject material gathered by tag searches… this is so cool!… so easy to pull related material together due to tagging discipline!… will make it easy to find my way to subjects, topics, whatever, should i want to write something more planned and considered…

… what an interesting entry:

_ I seem to have spent a great deal of my childhood in prison — other people’s prisons. The Black Tulip prison, the French Revolution prisons, the Spanish Inquisition prisons. And the horror of those prisons was so real to me that I often look back and vaguely remember straw, the filthy food, the oozing walls and the toads on the floor, as if I were really once in that situation. Whenever I hear about prisons, I seem to imagine that I have experience confinement myself._

… would one engage so strongly in prison fantasy if one were not feeling in a prison themselves?… i wonder what DW’s prison was… certainly it was his physical infirmity in adulthood, but this memory takes place in childhood before the accident that ruined his health… would it be closeted homosexuality?… that would be the major suspect, but without knowing more about his life, i don’t know if there were other prisons to be endured…

… DW describing a visit to a wealthy woman to deliver a painting of her pug… DW seems to be comfortably bourgeois… i think to myself that a painting of a pug could not be breaking any new ground in art… is it pandering to the wealthy for sustenance?… the journals so far leave me with the impression that while DW was open to experiences, and rendered them in often considerable detail in his journals, that there isn’t anything particularly extraordinary about him other than his penchant for prose writing… i will have to read one of his fictional works before i arrive at a firm opinion… in any case, my efforts are no more groundbreaking or notable… not even as notable, because i’ve had little success at being noticed in general… he is going places and doing things that i can only imagine the equivalent of in my time on earth… my movement through this time and space is more mundane… yet i write about it and publish what i write… am i any less arrogant?…

… HCR meter, democracy is on the ropes… pointing to the spreading and increasingly blatant disinformation campaign in progress by the far Right… this morning’s stars are Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson… Rubio apparently gave a speech that would have been unimaginable just a year or two ago… a speech that indicates he is banking on victory for authoritarianism and wants to be on the right side of it when we get there… another essay in Mother Jones names Fox News and Tucker Carlson in particular, as fascist propagandists… this has got to be beaten back… my belief is that Democrats in congress could make it easier by eliminating the filibuster, at least on two issues… voting rights and the debt ceiling… i too believe that democracy is on the ropes and that we have precious little time to save it…

… a disrupted day yesterday… plumbing problems escalated significantly when sewage began backing into the toilet in the basement and then overflowing… the stench… the mess… the frantic calls to the plumber… the $200 check handed to the plumber for fifteen minutes spent clearing the house trap which had become clogged… the flow of the entire day disrupted… it is remarkable how much i depend on my expected ordered flow of things happening…

… the backing up of the house trap seems an interesting metaphor for what is happening to the plumbing of Democracy…

… i did manage to make some quick revisions on J’s website and their LinkedIn page… their LinkedIn page is a bit of a mess… will have to help them with that…

… at the top of David Corn’s article, this image of Tucker Carlson…

Tucker Carlson at Politicon in Los Angeles on October 20, 2018 Christian Monterrosa/AP

… TC turns my stomach… i remember him on CNN’s Crossfire back in the day… he was an obnoxious twit back then… he’s morphed into something monstrous-to-me now… doesn’t he look monstrous in the photograph?… the point of the choice of image…

… i am toying with getting active in supporting democrats in next year’s election run up… i don’t have much money to give, but i have some time, which i’d really rather not expend that way, but i believe we are reaching a tipping point and need to be on deck in defense of Democracy…

… i was surveying the organization of my journal in Ulysses yesterday… i have this wonderful warm feeling of it being almost there as a cohesive product that could solidly support… something… but what something?… well organized thoughts and notes are the foundation of something bigger, if you want them to be… what is the bigger thing i am moving towards?… the coupling of journaling, thinking, and posting on a blog… something that develops the broad story of a particular human being at a particular stretch of moments in time grappling with the cosmos as it impinges on them… as i write this i am aware that when one has a project like this, puts large amounts of time and energy into it, one starts to desire an audience… one is supposed to desire an audience… the question sits in the shadows, what is my target audience?… my answer has been… i don’t care about my target audience… i want to craft something that is profoundly satisfying to me… this is what i seem to be on the path of now… it feels good… it needs tightening up and refining… it seems to be firing on nearly all cylinders, to use a gas engine phrase that is becoming quaint… can i push it to peak performance soon?…

… a sterling review of my niece’s new restaurant!

… i have signed up to receive emails from Jörg Colberg, one of the photobook reviewers i follow… recently he sent an email talking about The Archive of Public Protest… its a photo site dedicated to the sharing of photographs of the protests in Poland…

The Archive brings together visual traces of social activism, grassroots initiatives opposing not just political decisions but also breaches of democratic norms and human rights. It is a collection of images that constitute a warning against rising right wing populism and discrimination in the broadest sense of the term: xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and also the climate crisis. In establishing the Archive, its creators wish to prolong the life of their images, which are connected with specific events, and whose existence ends with their publication in the press. The APP gathers together photographs in a single, easily accessible collection, which will remain accessible to researchers, artists, and activists. Additionally, use of the Archive’s resources will be open to all users who express a desire to communicate the values with which its creators identify.¹

… it’s worth checking out here…

… from, Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson…

Today the Washington Post published a long report about the events before, during, and after January 6, compiled by a team of more than 25 reporters and additional staff who reviewed video and court transcripts, followed social media posts, and interviewed more than 230 people. The report lays the blame for January 6 on Trump and warns that we are in a fight for the survival of democracy.¹

… and…

The Washington Post suggests that they made that calculation in the immediate aftermath of January 6 because Trump continued to command his base and they worried about being primaried from the right if they didn’t support Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And so they acquitted him in his second impeachment trial and supported the “audits” of state election results that had already been proved secure.

But that leaves a circle to be squared.

Winning a primary by staking out turf as a Trump supporter would mean losing in the general election… unless state legislatures fixed elections so that Republicans would win, no matter who the Republican candidate happened to be.²

… the next three years are “all hands on deck”…

… sign up for her newsletter here…

… first day of November… the toboggan run down the hill to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year has begun…

… yesterday i was feeling a little frustrated that i am not making any progress on my photography work… i have no projects in progress, or so i was thinking, other than cleaning up my archive, processing photographs i haven’t processed, etc… i keep thinking i should be trying to make a book… i should be submitting to calls for entry… i should be planning what my next solo show will be… i should be doing what the world of fine art photography expects me to do… i have been telling myself that the new year will be a year in which i actively return to doing all of these things…

… at the same time, i have been questioning my participation in what Jörg Colberg and others call “photoland”… something doesn’t feel right about it… as Colberg points out, it is a self-contained and incestuous land… photographers, gallerists and the wealthy having a limited conversation of limited value and importance… and that conversation has a limited set of formats in which it can be conducted… and the economics of it is a false economics… a photograph is infinitely reproducible… and yet, artists and gallerists rely on artificially limiting the product to make it valuable and then sell that exclusivity to the well-enough off-to-afford-it… it’s an elitist system… something’s not right…

… for some time i have been frustrated by the artificial limitations of format that photoland places on photographic artists… for a long time i have been working on a project that has been through a number of iterations of title, but in the end is the same project… going for daily walks and photographing what catches my attention… whatever it is… i write about what i see and experience too…

… this project demands a daily display of photographs that are “of the moment”… it needs an extended format of ongoing presentation…

… it finally struck me yesterday that I have been working!… daily… for a long time… and this is what i have been working on… this is the project!…

… the current iteration of the project is this blog, Notes On Attention Paid (NOAP)

… i must continue to refine it… articulate what i am doing… come up with an artists statement… come up with a way to connect it to photoland without allowing photoland to artificially constrain it…

… this will be the work of the new year…

Walking…

… a warm morning with, as M put it, interesting clouds… i would add interesting light too…

… now that there is update capability between Ulysses and M.b, i am daring to post as i go… i started this morning with a picture post when i am only half way through my walk…

… signs that there may not be a farmer’s market this AM… transitioning indoors?… they usually break for a week when they do that… no signs of vendors at either the DMV parking lot or the VFW…

… sitting by the falls, the “dull roar” masking all other sounds…

… very interesting email from Jorg Colberg…

Farmer’s Market…

… stripped bass for dinner, Chas eagerly waiting for fish skin dog treats… radicchio, carots, fennel, broccoli… D and K… S and S… Chas and Fiona’s #1 fan… kids in costumes… rainbow storm trooper, ladybug, Godzilla, Jack Skellington… fish lady dressed as an octopus…

Later in the day…

… preparing the pot roast for the oven… classic old horror movies on the television… waiting to see if there will be trick-or-treaters… and now, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu… what a great movie!…

… i decided to read all the posts i made last week… it takes a while… i write every day and post most of it… i make photographs every day and post many of those too…

… my overall impression is that i am very pleased with it… it reads well and is interesting, at least to me… does it matter if it’s of interest to anyone else?…

… the main topics were my walks, The Journals of Denton Welch, the need for voting rights legislation, forgetting my chicken tending duties, the Carnot Cycle and how it might apply to the “mechanics” of social media… there is something really interesting about that last thought… something that needs pursuing…

… i am sitting here contemplating the use of Obsidian as the primary journaling and note taking app, cutting and pasting over to Ulysses when i want to publish something… the reason to do this is to make use of Obsidian’s ability to interconnect things and display a map of those connections… this in turn will make it easier to see relationships in the stream and develop them into… what?… more full blown and refined writing about the relationship nodes… a journaling process meant to surface connections and relationships that are easy to follow… i do this in Ulysses through tagging… the question becomes, is it worth the extra steps to cut and paste into Ulysses for publication to Micro.blog… and, is this part of a shift away from the journal to blog direct posting and towards more considered and complete articles or posts?… what would be the value of this?… fewer posts?… more interest?… and there it is, a shift being contemplated partly because i want to see the structure of my meandering and partly because i want to arrive at content production that will be more interesting to others…

… and then i discover how hard it is to insert a link to a web page… it can be done with proper syntax but it is not an intuitive or easy process…

… i really want to find a use for Obsidian, but it just seems unnecessary complication for the thinking, reading and writing that i do and the way that i do it…

… sticking with Ulysses for everything for now…

… halloween… we are ready for the trick or treaters, except we never get very many… we bought good chocolate so we would be willing to eat what is left over… a stash that could last the year depending on how many come to our door tonight…

… no HCR meter this morning… she decided to take the night off… in her place i read a couple of articles in The Bulwark… the first is about standing up to bullies… Fox News and FN personality, Tucker Carlson are the bullies… Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger are viewed as standing up to the bullies… is it doing any good?… the good that needs doing is to ween the too-many-people swallowing Carlson’s bullshit off of the bullshit… really, at some point, the whole concept of opinion news built around personalities needs to be reigned in… news needs to go back to being news with standards of truth and fairness… personality opinion needs to be kept off the news so that it is not mistaken for news… i am sure this is free speech problematic, but there has to be away to reign in the flow of bad information and incendiary personalities…

… [the second](https://www.thebulwark.com/when-jesus-came-to-q/ “Lecaque, Thomas, When ‘Jesus” Came to Q, The Bulwark, October 29, 2021") was about a crazy Qanon conspiracy speech given by the actor who played Christ in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ… a film widely viewed as anti-Semitic as is MG… the degree of crazy in this country, at this moment, is astounding… i am very worried we are on the path to authoritarianism underpinned by this crazy… if it comes to pass, there will be chaos and abundant lives lost…

… a frustrating day yesterday… after having spent the entire day before cleaning the house and making dinner for K and D, i looked forward to Saturday being a me day where i got things done i wanted to do… it didn’t turn out that way… H wants to get a second wire crate so we could leave the dogs in crates and attend, last night, a birthday party… then there is setting it up… then there is laundering the dog beds… when i get down to the laundry room there is lots of water on the floor… drain pipes from the kitchen have sprung a leak… should i fix it myself?, or should i call the plumber… i decide to call the plumber because, the plumbing is a mess and needs to be done properly… shouldn’t cost that much and we will then be good to go into the distant future… but, because the plumbing is a problem we can’t do dishes and thus can’t cook, which means we have to order in for the weekend and the pot roast i bought on Friday needs to go into the freezer until we can cook a more elaborate meal…

… it’s almost November… most of the trees still have leaves and many haven’t begun to change color…

… feeling tired today… i’d like a day off… maybe hang out on the sofa and watch old movies… probably won’t, but that is the thought i am having…

… collecting photographs of dates on buildings and looking up what happened in that year… Wikipedia turns out to be a good source for the what happened…

… a woman jogs by…

Broomberg & Chanarin, Shirley 1, from the series How to Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, 2012

… hmmm… the above photograph was the lead in to [this article](https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13666/the-camera-is-not-innocent-a-history-of-the-white-gaze-in-photography?utm_source=Link&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=RSSFeed&utm_term=the-camera-is-not-innocent-a-history-of-the-white-gaze-in-photography “Miller, Daniel-Yaw, “The Camera Is Not Innocent”: A History of the White Gaze in Photography, AnOther Magazine”) about a new book, The Image of Whiteness… the title and lead in image are a bit of misdirection… intentional, maybe clever, but misdirection none-the-less… the book is broadly about how photography and photographers support white hegemony through image making… as the article describes it, it has little to do with the other type of gaze, the (mostly white) male gaze… and yet, we have a lead in image that is reminiscent of pinup girl images of the 40’s and 50’s… i think the subject is interesting… though i am personally more interested in the subject of women in photography (the more conscious reason for pursuing the article further)… in front of the camera, behind the camera, as curators, as critics… and… in general, i admit to being suckered in every time by an image of an attractive-to-me young woman… as i have said, many times, almost all of us are hardwired to have a sexual response to the encounter of possible sexual partners… whether we are enlightened human beings or not depends on how gracefully we can move beyond that first primal instinct to a fuller appreciation of all the dimensions of the human being in front of us…

… maybe this happened months ago and i failed to notice, but i am so excited to see that i can now update already published posts to my blog!… this is major for me… any other Ulysses users notice this gem of an update to the Ulysses-Micro.blog workflow?…