Scenes From Today’s Walk

The route…

… the scenes…

Walking

Sitting in Long Dock Park

… quiet summer morning… thinking about places to publish what i write… this morning the idea of writing longer, more considered posts, weekly, publish to Medium?, Ghost?, how to get it out… what to get out…

… trying to find words for the sound of cicadas… rasping is what i have come up with… it’s not right as rasping is an unpleasant and grating sound, which cicada noise is not…

… i have stopped to listen to the water rifle by in Fishkill Creek, Madame Brett Park…

The Antidote to internet Cat Porn?

These images were created with a machine-learning technology called Style-GAN. It’s an AI algorithm that can learn how to sketch almost anything, including human faces, by studying hundreds of thousands of existing images. And as we know, there’s no shortage of cat pictures on the internet.1

thiscatdoesnotexist.com

… you be the judge…

  1. Hakim Bishara: https://hyperallergic.com/664401/this-is-not-a-cat-style-gan-ai-algorithm/ ↩︎

Film

  • The World to Come: this looks good, and perhaps a little steamy…
    • “Sometimes stories choose you”: Director Mona Fastvold opens up to Martha Alexander about shooting her latest film The World to Come, which tells the tragic story of two farmers wives who fall in love in 1850s upstate New York1

… that it takes place in upstate New York (actually filmed in Romanian mountains?) makes it more of interest to me, that being the state i live in, also that it is a lesbian love story, produced by a woman, directed by a woman… apparently there was a lot of toddler chasing and breast feeding on the set during filming… what enterprise looks like in the hands of women…

  1. Martha Alexander: https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/13468/mona-fastvold-director-interview-the-world-to-come-film-movie-review ↩︎

New (to me) Music

… among my somewhat daily routines is to look through Pitchfork reviews of newly released music… i will pay attention to anything with a rating of 8 or higher, sometimes to things with a 7.5 or higher if it is a genre of music i am fond of… i have music nerd friends who say this is a terrible way to find new music… all i know is that i have often enough found new-to-me music that i really like… so i continue to the practice… here is some new music added to my to be listened to list…

  • Mega Bog: Life, and Another… this review got my attention because of the high rating the music is given, that it is experimental, referencing folk, jazz and chamber pop, but also because i learned about Green Porno, a series of films wherein Isabella Rossellini costumes herself as a variety of animal creatures and demonstrates their sex lives… trust me, watch the trailer, it’s hysterical…
  • Yves Tumor: The Asymptotical World EP…
    • The music of Yves Tumor moves like something molting. At first, it cleaves to genre, taking recognizable shape—a loping bass line, a steady backbeat. And then the shape dulls. It starts to appear as a copy of itself, not a rock song but an imitation rendered from paling memory. And then the form splits, and from the split comes something glistening and new, in the same arrangement as the old, dulled thing but rawer and more perceptibly alive.1

  1. Sasha Geffen: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-tumor-the-asymptotical-world-ep/ ↩︎

The Haiku of Issa

… reading and thinking about these poems as a daily practice has done a great deal to center me… they are guiding lanterns, illuminating what is truly important, not the glorious deeds of men and women, not conquering heroes and explorers, not rich men shooting themselves into space… but the fly that mimics the actions of a person praying over their rosary beads or brushing the flies away from the father’s face one last time… what is important is humility in the face of a cosmos in which we are a minuscule factor and will always be a minuscule factor…

… on with today’s six haiku…

  • the snail going through it’s daily routines with little fuss…
    • despite all the petty concerns of people, the snail just is…
    • nature just is…
    • people need to learn to just be…
  • flies imitating people with prayer beads…
    • even flies pray?…
    • but it is imitation, not the real thing…
    • is what people do with prayer beads important if the flies imitate them?…
  • something about fluids, if they were sweet, being the poet’s dew, his dew…
    • my immediate impression is of a homosexual relationship… though Issa did sleep with women, prostitutes… was he perhaps bi-sexual?… or is there another interpretation…
  • something about the sight of the ocean invoking the mother he never knew, every time…
    • his mother died when he was young and the ocean makes him long for her?…
    • the ocean is the mother he always wished he had…
  • about a summer night where even the stars are whispering…
    • is this anything more than the evocation of a still summer’s evening?…
    • all the cosmos is hushed…
    • being one with the stars…
  • about brushing the flies off his father’s face for the last time…
    • melancholy, old age, death…
    • my father is dying, if i weren’t so angry with him i might be melancholic…

First Thougths

… a good day yesterday…

… some research and thinking about web presence, nothing conclusive… assemblage of some ideas… the main decision being whether to have a news letter only, or a second blog site where more carefully composed writing happens…

… a good walk, photographs made and edited, there were some good ones…

… a nice dinner

  • mothership tomato salad
    • we will be making this salad numerous times in the coming weeks as the summer tomatoes are ripe in our garden and at the farmer’s market
  • lacinato kale and ricotta salata salad
    • this is a longtime favorite that features raw kale
  • pan fried crispy skin salmon
    • first time i have ever managed to crisp the skin and have it not stick to the cast iron skillet…
      • salmon in the pan before heating up
      • lots of canola oil
      • medium heat
      • finish in oven under the broiler…

… it was a perfect summer dinner that met my dietary goals, low animal fat, low carb…

… the news from Heather Cox Richardson is of the more distressing kind this morning… 45 is consolidating power, continuing to divide the nation, trying to undermine the bi-partisan infrastructure bill… HCR wrote:

One of the hallmarks of a personality like that of former president Donald Trump is that he cannot stop escalating. It’s not that he won’t stop; it’s that he can’t stop. And he will escalate until someone finally draws a line and holds it.

… 45 needs to be god… he won’t stop trying to be god until someone draws that line and there are consequences for stepping over it… this is what bothers me so much… the inability of our governing system to hold him accountable… we have completely failed on that score and with every passing day that we continue our failure, the closer we come to a dictatorship… this is what keeps me awake at night…

Scenes From a Walk

Some pictures from this morning’s walk…

Walking

… warm and humid today… will be hot later and again tomorrow…

… sitting on Roundhouse property by the falls…

… thinking about my web presence, wondering about a three branch approach…

  • notes on attention paid
    • micro.blog quasi stream of consciousness
  • on attention paid
    • ghost hosted monthly formal post and newsletter
  • StudioMBK
    • portfolio site

… thinking about the complexity of our lives in the next few months…

… thinking we should postpone Fiona neutering… lots of moving parts in our lives and the vet practice we have been using is in transition, moving offices, new owner, staff upheval, we need veterinary practice to settle down…

… i’ve decided to map my walks going forward and include as part of walking posts…

… thoughts about a Patreon account linked to my news letter…

… shooting in manual mode with the Nikon… it is slowing me down… pictures are more carefully considered…

… a pause to rest my back… Ron’s Icecream…

First Thoughts

… a better night’s sleep again… without AC…

… Cardinal singing loudly outside my window… standing in for the Robin which has been absent lately?…

… i need to step up my daily reading time… i have a growing pile of books on subjects i am interested in to wade through, both ebooks and analog form books…

… C says J has been doing worse the last few days… she is not sure J fully understands what hospice care means, that maybe his cognitive decline is preventing him from taking it fully on board… i think it might be denial… i am wondering what i will find when i go down to see them at the end of August…

… eras in both our families seem to be coming to an end and new ones begun… the nieces and nephews are all starting their new lives and creating their own eras, while our parents are reaching the end of theirs…

… i continue to think about why i produce art, how i produce it, and how i will make it available to the world if at all… can something be done purely for its own sake?… i continue to be disenchanted by the art market system, which generally has artists at the bottom of the profit pyramid, and works to coop challenges to the system into itself, or suppress those challenges… the capitalist/market system sucks the soul out of just about everything it touches…

… news that our vet has been bought by a corporate entity, PetMed, or PetMD, or something like that… we don’t like that our vet is going corporate… already our primary doctor has left… must everything become corporatized?… we also wonder if they will ever go back to in-person care, as opposed to curbside drop off… we fear that we will never see a doctor in person again…

The Results Are In!

… blood panel results are in… less pasta, less sausage… will life be worth living?… on to skin and colon inspection… am i the only one who deferred routine doctor visits during the pandemic?… probably not…

Walking

… after tending to the chickens…

… it’s a walk on the Madame Brett trail… a blustery day, almost feels like the beginning of Fall which is a month and a half away…

… some scenes along the way…

… a white butterfly flits across the path in front of me… actually, probably a cabbage moth… this morning i read that butterflies are symbols of renewal and rebirth in Japanese culture and also viewed as the souls of the departed… they are generally a benign or good sign…

… as i write this i wonder about living in a way that makes the world symbolic and sacred… can this be done without devolving into superstition and suspicion?…

… some more scenes…

… that’s all for now…

The Haiku of Issa

… less progress on actual unraveling of meaning in these haiku today, but, several books on the subject, one of which i have ordered for my library… one thing that i knew, but which is confirmed in my exploration today, no single translation can transmit all the meaning possibilities packed into a great haiku… numerous translations are required…

  • on turning fifty: from this day on, it’s all profit…
    • was fifty the life expectancy when Issa was alive?, that would seem to be the implication…
  • a butterfly flitting, a child crawling, repeat…
    • another one of those ordinary moments
    • but also, butterflies are symbols of rebirth and transformation and are thought to be the souls of the departed… so the image of child and butterfly is one of a conversation between a new being and an old soul…
  • on sea slugs not seaming Japanese…
  • writing poems to please the rich is not art…
    • i can relate to this… art is too much driven by wealth now as it was then…
  • envy of the child being scolded, end of the year…
    • to be a child again?, from the vantage point of old age?…
  • cuckoo singing, nothing special to do, even for the burweed…

First Thoughts

… a successful day yesterday… visited M and P in rehab, had barbecue at C and A’s and did the seven hours driving without much strain… yay me!…

… i didn’t take any family pictures and i am disappointed by that… we were in too much of a rush on the way out…

… it was good to be among people socializing…

… C and A already with a nursery set up in the house… won’t be long before we have a what?, grand nephew or niece?…

… H very happy with the day yesterday… she did little to help prepare, required some prodding to go, was in a really grumpy mood the day before, but yea!, was really glad we went!…

… today is cool and rainy…

… i managed to sleep in, a full eight hours sleep…

… a dream about being hung for some crime that wasn’t a crime and certain i would be reprieved at the last minute, so not too worried…

… rooster screaming in the distance… this is the one H has been telling me about but i don’t usually hear… sounds like the rooster from hell…

Fiona Sleeping

Erwin Olaf

“Palm Springs”, American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex I, 2018 © Erwin Olaf

… another wonderful artist written up by Miss Rosen…

_ “I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks._1

… Olaf works in a similar vein as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson…

… in addition to the tableau photographs in this article, the full article on Blind Magazine includes some wonderful portrait tableaus…

  1. Erwin Olaf, Miss Rosen: http://www.missrosen.com/erwin-olaf-strange-beaurt/ ↩︎

Judy Chicago

… feminist artist trail blazer…

… a really interesting artist and article about her written by Miss Rosen, another of my favorite reviewers of photographic art and art in general…

I never thought I would live this long,” says Chicago, who is now 82. “Understanding mortality at such an early age gave me an impetus to work. One of the reasons I produced so much work is that I never knew how much time I would have. The other reason is that every time I lost everything – like when The Dinner Party became the piece that nobody wanted to show, or when Congress debated it, or when I had to start all over again – I didn’t know what to do so I went back to my studio and made making art my reward.”1

… this quote inspires me… make the work, something will come of it… it’s the making of the work that is the important act… making it for its own sake, wherever the creative imperative leads you… i suppose this is what i want to do… make the work i am compelled to make, and let the rest take care of itself or not… this blog is part of that… my daily photo walks is part of that… this act of living and recording it is part of that…

… I will keep forging ahead…

  1. Judy Chicago, as quoted by Miss Rosen: https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/53616/1/judy-chicago-art-world-patriarchy-interview-the-flowering-book-memoir ↩︎

There is a Strange Silence

… this morning… usually there is a robin singing loudly outside my window, then by now, some other birds may have joined, sometimes a cardinal or two… there is nothing but the faint high pitched noises the insects make, and, very faintly, a robin in the distance… what is going on?… i suppose this might be the time for a new micro poem?… this one was written yesterday when a robin was singing loudly outside my window…

Before dawn, a robin sings by itself— watch out worms!

Haiku of Issa

  • sin is not possible without talent, on a winter day…
    • if talent is lacking then being lazy on a winter day isn’t a sin?…
  • four or five pennies for the poor, evening rain…
    • the scene set, it is melancholy…
  • a cuckoo singing to the poet and the mountain, the poet and then the mountain…
    • like an echo?…
    • summer harbinger, summer poem…
    • mourning, melancholy, longing… these are the things the bird symbolizes, though, not being Japanese, i don’t naturally pick up on these implied feelings…
  • holes in the wall whistle flute like on an autumn evening…
    • imperfect human-verse…
    • there is a without and within to this poem… without, winter is coming… holes in the wall need fixing… but for now… a pleasant song…
  • a fat priest with one foot out the door on the last prayer…
    • even priests can be half assed…
  • skinny mosquitoes, skinny fleas, skinny children, stupid world…
    • why is the world stupid and not wondrous?…
    • who would think up such a world?…
    • mosquitoes, fleas and children, all in the same world… imagine that…

First Thoughts

… dinner with S and S last night, conversation about writing, posting, making money off writing and posting, or not…

… i talked about not wanting to be on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter anymore… about constructing a new social media environment… it was hard for me to articulate what i wanted to do… i know that what i have been doing isn’t working for me… i think i want it to be newsletter centered… maybe i should start researching the the best way to mount and distribute a newsletter…

… i do some preliminary poking around on Newsletter production and don’t find much that interests me or that i don’t already know about…

… a lot of driving and visiting today… will be pretty exhausted by the end of it… family, priceless… that is… worth the effort…

… we will go see H’s mom in rehab… we will visit our nice, C, and have a barbecue, then we will return home… projected departure time, 7 AM… projected return time, 7 PM… we will bring the dogs…

Lacuna/Intertwine

… this is my kind of photo project, devoid of people, made on walks around the hood… ok, it’s a collaborative project and i don’t do that… but the rest is all there…

… inspire of not being collaborative myself, i do appreciate the work method, which is to make analog pictures of the hood and then send them to another photographer who is doing the same to be printed overlaid… nice pandemic project… worth a look…

… about not shooting people… this comes from a shyness about asking people if i can photograph them and a reluctance to photograph them surreptitiously… and, for the most part, i am interested in the symbolic potential of ordinary objects and scenes devoid of people, though the evidence of civilization is almost always there…

… and, by the way, phase mag is one of my favorite photo mags for it’s emphasis away from photo journalism/documentary and towards conceptual work…

Talking About the Weather

… i am reading an article on the changeabiltiy of the whether and the lessons it has to teach… the article is in Lion’s Roar, a new feed on “Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time” i have added to my set of feeds… i come across this passage…

Buddhists, as Matthieu Ricard says in his luminous new book, Happiness, excerpted in this issue, believe that suffering and unhappiness are quite different things: suffering is the state, the reality, we are all given, but unhappiness is just the way we choose (or do not choose) to respond to it. Those rendered suddenly paraplegic often call themselves happy, after a year or so of adjustment, as frequently as those who win the lottery end up in despair.1

… i am struck by the contrast of who is as likely to be happy as who is not… that it is more possible to adjust to sudden and relatively extreme misfortune as to sudden and relatively extreme good fortune…

… i don’t know if the contrast is an accurate one… there are plenty of stories about how winning the lottery ruins lives, but i am not aware of many about happy adjustment to becoming paraplegic… i suppose i believe it, but would like some data on the point…

… i tend to believe it because humans seem remarkably capable of adjusting to circumstances as they are when those circumstances become more restrictive (though they rarely like loosing ground in the world)… we are ok with boundaries as long as we know what they are… and perhaps the problems involved with sudden wealth are because, suddenly, there are no boundaries… what defined and oriented life before is no longer useful and there has not been time to develop new boundaries and orientations that help with coping…

… as for the main topic of the article, that our inner moods are transitory, like the weather, and they color things one way and another… true enough, but i feel the author is reaching for something that he doesn’t quite get to… “our inner weather seems impossible to foretell,” he claims… though in my experience, when i go to bed, i generally have an inkling about how i will feel when i wake up unless there are disturbances along the way (dogs are good at that sometimes!)…

… day to day inner good weather can be cultivated… certainly, unexpected things happen along the way that alter inner weather, but cultivating a mind that can adjust to changes in circumstances is important life work… we might have goals we are moving towards, and habits and rituals that support our movement forward and our general happiness (or not), but they are worthless if they can’t accommodate sudden shifts in circumstances…

  1. Pico Iyer: https://www.lionsroar.com/whatever-way-the-wind-blows/ ↩︎

The Haiku of Issa

In today’s episode…

  • a woman sings the rice planting song in the shade of a thicket…
    • the rice planting song is a very important folk song in Japan and rice growing in general extremely important…
    • what i note about this poem is a woman is being rendered with affection… as representative of tradition?…
    • rice planting occurs late spring, early summer, but there is no indication that rice planting is going on, only that the song is being sung…
  • pampas grass trembles helplessly…
    • this paints an image in my mind for sure… but what is the meaning behind this anthropomorphic rendering of vibratory grass?…
  • an old dog leading the way to the graves…
    • is the dog a dog, or do the Japanese have a similar way of referring to older men as old dogs?… is it an elderly man leading the way?…
    • is this a literal or metaphorical visit to the cemetery…
    • would this be a winter poem with its reference to old age and death?…
  • the daughter lifts a melon to her cheek in a dream…
    • melons are taken quite seriously in contemporary Japan, carefully nurtured plant by plant and with musk melons fetching as much as $27,000 each…
    • i don’t know if this is a recent development…
    • is this a summer poem?…
    • it feels like a flemish painting to me…
  • a mouse lapping at the Sumida River in the spring rains…
    • this seems like a treacherous enterprise for a small mouse to be lapping at a river swollen by spring rains… perhaps the poem is symbolic of the naivety of the young?…
    • the Sumida River is also the subject of a famous Noh play, Sumida-gawa, about a crazy old woman who comes to find her son only to find he died on the banks of the river… the play was first produced in Osaka in 1784 when Issa would have been 21 years old… the play takes place in the spring…
  • the weight of being born a man on an autumn evening…
    • my question is, is man a gender reference or a humankind reference… in Western culture it would be read as a humankind reference, and thus, the weight of being human is knowing we will die…
    • if more specifically a gender reference, then i am less sure about meaning… the responsibilities that older males acquire during their lifetimes?… the weight of that?…

The Earliest Bird

… for years i have wondered about a bird that sings quite loudly starting very early in the morning, well before sunrise… it seems to be the first bird to start singing and sometimes i swear it sings all night long… i decided to duckduckgo earliest bird to sing… the answer, a robin!… i went to iBird and listened to the dawn song of the Robin… yup, that’s my bird… there is a reason why a robin is often depicted as the bird that gets the worm… i compose a micro poem on the spot…

A robin singing by itself— watch out worms!

First Thougths

… i have not had any alcohol at night for the past week…

… with no alcohol consumption, am i getting a sense of what my sleep patterns are without it?… for the past three nights i have gotten out of bed 5 1/2 to 6 hours after i have gone to bed… is that the sleep i really need these days?…

… i go to have blood drawn today, finally… no reason to believe there is anything wrong, hopefully the blood panel will confirm that…

… i read an article about deleting your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram accounts… i bookmarked it… i’ve never spent much time on Twitter or Linked in, so deleting those accounts would not be such a big deal… Facebook and Instagram would be another story… for now, i have removed the apps from my phone and i haven’t checked either for days…

… i’ve also begun to unplug from daily TV news consumption… this is harder to do because H often has it on all day… yesterday i think i watched almost none… i preferred being in my studio, outside in the garden, in the kitchen making supper, or in another room reading news and articles on photography and art… i believe i am feeling happier…

… i am also beginning to rethink how i pursue my art and making it available for people to see… i will be working on developing a consistent monthly email… i will be working on building my email list… i will be working on sending portfolio publications to those i know in charge of galleries… one reason i may want to keep my toe in the water on social media is to be able to get the word out when there is a show or a new publication…