All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure. Everyone knows that what slows down highway traffic going past a horrendous car crash is not only curiosity. It is also, for many, the wish to see something gruesome. Calling such wishes “morbid” suggests a rare aberration, but the attraction to such sights is not rare, and is a perennial source of inner torment.¹

… all of it, but especially that violations of an attractive body are pornographic, that is, sexual, we respond sexually… why?… we feel guilty over this, i have…

… Georges Bataille, a great theorist of the erotic… kept a photograph taken in China or a man being dismembered and flayed on his desk… he found it both ecstatic and intolerable…²

… Sontag points out the religious nature of a fascination with suffering and its elevation to the ecstatic… one endures what one endures for a higher ideal…

… Sontag notes the growing indifference, the growing entertainment value of violence in mass culture…

… we can be brought images of suffering from far away, but it is easy to turn away from them, not do what we are being asked to do, because we are warm and safe and, at the end of the day, we are mostly impotent to help, what part of our resources we are willing to devote to assuaging cruelty, our consciences, is limited for most of us…

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.(Ibid)

… and…

To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.³

… i woke up to the sound of dripping… i woke up earlier to the sound of animals fighting, not sure what animals, high screeching sounds, cats?, raccoons?, some kind of raptors?, it seemed vicious, and then was gone… when i woke up the second time, to get up, cats fighting, different than the screeching last night… fighting, it seems inevitable in the animal world as one creature encounters another creature threatening its existence… is that what is going on now in this country, two sets of creatures fighting for existence?, for power?… the screeching from one side is especially loud… does that mean those creatures are especially worried about their continued existence?…

… the loud bird is singing, Fiona on the bed, i hear her breathing… the quiet hours of the morning…

… i ordered the new iPhone 12 Pro Max, for the camera improvements… photography moving towards iPhone much of the time, iPhone only eventually?… one big advantage, no dust in the lens, on the center, save time on cleaning images, save images that can’t be cleaned… i ordered a keyboard for it… hoping to facilitate writing while on BI, when at cafe’s…

… struggling to get reception, finally, when there are least bars, it comes… notable, a baby snapping turtle, Fiona finds a deer well before i see it, scented it i think… a bird chattering… the sound of the creek flowing by…

… an art show at the Carriage Trade Gallery in NYC, curated in partnership with Rectangle, Brussels… the exhibition displays the critique of colonization by 12 artists… setting aside for the moment what John Berger told us about the capacity of the establishment to absorb critique and present it without doing damage to itself (art galleries are capitalist entities for the most part)… or can we?… how effective is the critique?… does it change anything?… or is it a PR campaign of its own, designed to suggest that Eurocentric capitalist culture is sensitive to its ill effects on the planet and its peoples?…

There is a common misconception that countries in the Global South are “developing,” when in reality, many of them are still recovering from centuries of imperial dominance.¹

… [an article](https://hyperallergic.com/645965/the-very-real-motherhood-penalty-in-the-art-world/ “The Very Real “MOtherhood Penalty” in the Art World”) on how women are penalized in their professional careers for having children… the art world is no different, given its male domination… and here is an interesting quote:

The cultural industry contributes a greater share to the United States gross domestic product than agriculture, transportation, or construction, proving that creative work is **work.¹

… a review of the films she has directed… i have seen one of them, Wendy and Lucy, slow, nuanced, poignant, sad… i am thinking it might be time for a film festival in lieu of our series binge watching… i watched Wendy and Lucy at the beginning of the pandemic because Michelle Williams was in it and i adore Michelle Williams, she is a courageous actor, a very good actor… she is in several of Kelly Reichardt’s films…

… a series of photographs on train hopping/homeless culture… it’s not pretty, each photograph assigned a number, no person is identified, almost all the photographs are people, the photographer travels with them, photographs them… hopping trains sounds romantic, looks anything but… a young woman, lying down, legs spread, menstrual blood showing on white panties, she has pulled a skirt up to give the photographer this view… she holds a paperback book, 3 By Flannery O’Connor, this suggests she is intelligent… the same young woman appears in several photographs… this is one of them…

1027, Photography by Mike Brodie, Taken from the series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

… the title, Mike Brodie’s Pictures of the Fascinating, Fleeting Train Rider Subculture, seems misleading… there is a lot of squaller, many people in the series we feel sorry for…

… the usual early morning bird singing loudly… cat wailing downstairs… coffee made… dogs let out then treated… slept through the night, feel groggy… contemplating what needs doing before leaving for BI… looking forward to it, always do… will look forward to going home, always do…

… the cursor blinks a questioning blink at me, what’s next?… i would like to compose a beautiful poem, i tell the blinking line… but then i type and the words flowing out are not beautiful, just regular as H would say when complimented on their beautiful self…

… what will make today successful?, catch up on my photography, make a good number of photographs, there have not been many over the past four or five days… interruptions, outside of routine visits to sister-in-laws and cousins… contact with family, hugs, wonderful, tiring drives…

… i track shipment of the new SPF 50 pants i bought, still in a kind of limbo, left the warehouse, not really on its way… i went with free shipping which saves money but leads to impatience… old fashioned anticipation…

… an article in Hyperallergic introduces me to a feminist film streaming service, Another Screen, which in turn introduces me to a feminist website, Another Gaze, which finally takes me to an article on Cinema Scope, In Search of the Female Gaze, like a series of Russian dolls… a lot to explore… more later…

… [an interesting article](https://hyperallergic.com/647998/what-the-nefertiti-hack-tells-us-about-digital-colonialism/ “Sarah E. Bond: What the “Nefertiti Hack” Tells Us About Digital Colonialism, Hyuperallergic”) on a famous bust of Nefertiti exported by German archaeologists at the turn of the last century… European and American museums house a large amount of antiquities from Africa and other continents, many exported from their countries of origin illegally or under marginally legal circumstances… Europe held the power cards at the time…

A black and white photo of the bust of Nefertiti from a postcard available from the Staatliches Museum, Berlin, Germany (1956) reveals how and why color photography would have been key in the inspection of the Amarna finds in 1912 (image by Brück & Sohn via Wikimaedia Commons).

… the article discusses the impact of colonialism on even the present day digital copies of antiquities with interesting anecdotes on things like the refusal of European institutions to train natives as archaeologists…

Whether in the Antebellum South or in 19th century Egypt, White control over the literacy of marginalized persons has always been a tactic for control. Egyptology did not begin to be decolonized and to encourage the training of native Egyptians within the Antiquities Service until the 1920s. French oversight within the Antiquities Service in Egypt did not end until 1952, after almost a century of colonial control. Mostafa Amer, its first Egyptian director, was appointed in 1953.¹

… Letters from an American, May 24.2021

… we learn about Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, and the shocking abduction of Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega (his girlfriend) by forcing the commercial airliner they were on down when it crossed Belarus airspace… Europe and the US are protesting in strong terms, but the question is whether anything meaningful can be done… can the journalist and his girlfriend be saved?…

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, an authoritative scholar of authoritarianism, notes that autocrats are watching to see how the West reacts, since they, too, would like to be able to control their dissident communities in exile, showing them: “You are not safe. You are never safe. Not even if you live in a democracy; not even if you have political asylum; not even if you are sitting on a commercial plane, thousands of feet above the ground.”¹

… of course!… Art Bites!…

… and then i look up one of the recipes and there is nothing in it that connects to art history… hmmm… and then i look up another recipe and it does contain history, like this recipe for chickpea flatbread with olives… this citrus and avocado salad recipe had no history attached to it, but i wonder about the combination of rhubarb and avocado?, hmmm…

Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.¹

… a new motion picture is set to the story of Gary Webb, who ran afoul of the CIA with an expose on the connection between drugs in African American communities and the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, supported by the American Government as opposition to the Sandinista government in the 1980’s

Amos Bronson Alcott via Wikipedia

Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.¹

… and yet, most of us struggle to get these simple things right… making it more complicated than it really is… or are we led by a social and economic construct that really doesn’t want us to realize how simple a matter human life is?… if we did, and we were content with it, wouldn’t we buy less?… the bet of consumptive society is that we won’t…

… this photograph of Tina turner and Azzedine Alaia in 1989…

Azzedine Alaïa & Tina Turner, Paris, 1989. © Peter Lindbergh (courtesy Peter Lindbergh Foundation, Paris)

… wow!…

… J’s birthday… chicken dying, glad i am not the one to deal with it this week, will probably be gone by next weekend… wrote a check that catches us up on medical insurance payments, have not liked the feeling of having to wait, decided that even if i use personal money to do it, it was a nagging thought every month i wanted off my mind… need to start down path of scheduling colonoscopy, i am overdue… getting caught up on medical care post pandemic… we drive over to L’s for brunch today… a cooler day than when we went to J’s… lots of intrusions in my daily routines… want to get back to them…

… nice article in Lenscratch on this Guggenheim Fellow photographer… many amazing images, this is one of my favorites…

©Carl Corey, 8922 • Sault St. Marie, Michigan

… many more in the article…

… an article by Art Blart about the Tate Modern exhibition of her work… i don’t know if the exhibit is still up, but if it were and if i were in London, i would go see it…

There are so many words that you can say about an artist and their work. So many unnecessary words. All you have to do is look at the work. Does it speak to you? does it make you feel, does it empower you?

For me, artists either have it or they don’t… and in this case, visual activist Zanele Muholi possesses it by the bucketful. Panache, flair, downright unclassified fabulousness, call it what you want. They just have it.¹

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972). Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007. From the series Being (2006 – ongoing).

… i strike the metal bowl,

… the end of spiritual observance,

… now, what’s not important?

… i read of Kyoto and cuckoo’s cries; roads not travelled and autumn evenings; whitebait with black eyes in nets; felled trees and moonlight; autumn moons and chestnut worms; snowy mornings and dried salmon; crows and bare branches; outhouses, moonflowers and torchlight; crane’s legs shortening in spring rain; how spring implies autumn; weathered bones and wind-pierced bodies; misty rains that obscure Mt. Fuji…

… this is what Basho has to tell me in twelve poems… he makes much of little things, brief crystalline moments… i think back to the irritation of messy food falling in my lap, repeatedly, a little thing, a brief moment, a moment i was alive and present… should i be grateful?…

… it’s Sunday,

… i make the metal bowl sing,

… and read haiku in lieu of prayers.

… long, hot day yesterday… drove down to middle NJ to see J, have lunch… she seems to have landed in a nice place, gated community, mostly white from the few people we saw, though they said their upstairs neighbor is black… it was hot because the AC wasn’t working anywhere on our journey, not the car, not in J’s house… i fixed the AC in J’s house, will have to take the car in to have it’s AC fixed, how much will that cost?…

… after such a long hot day, i was cranky… dinner was a very messy sandwich from Redline Diner which dripped profusely into my lap to my great irritation… then the salsa fell off the chip into my lap on its way to my mouth… pissed off, i tossed the rest of my dinner… H believes i was mad at them for what was ordered, not true, just really pissed that messy food was winding up in my lap even though i was leaning over the table… this is the content of ones life, the inconsequential bits of content that are most of what we experience?…

… thinking about S, thinking my feelings might be jealousy… it would explain my disquiet about them…

… i brought Fiona with me this morning… it limits the picture making but it’s nice to have her along…

… a long article on famous artist pairs who did or did not marry, but maintained long creative careers wherein it sometimes became difficult to parse out who influenced who and what they might have been without one another (the patriarchy has too often assumed that any vigor and brilliance in the woman’s work can be attributed to the man they are with)…

I want to believe that the institution has changed, that there are ways this elaborate ceremony is not as conventionally damning as some make it out to be. If anything, today we are less enamored by the idea that any partnership is for life — even if I have entered it believing this with my heart and soul. Divorce is no longer so scandalous. Love is possible at any decade. Financial security and education point to women marrying later, and to lower birthrates. Yet it still feels like we are struggling, as a culture, to put the female artist on the same pedestal as her male equal, as so many women writers and artists, Paul among them, have pointed out in their lives and in their work.¹

… and this from Toni Morrison via the article…

_I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do. That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. Before that, all the men I knew did know better, they really did. My father and teachers were smart people who knew better. Then I came across a smart person who was very important to me who didn’t know better.²

… interesting article on the problem with naming women artists, who’s histories are all too often tied up with men more famous then they during their lifetimes… and then there are the ways that the patriarchy patronizes women when it names them…

In 2017, French novelist Marie Darrieussecq’s succinct biography of early 20th-century German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, was published in English. In it, Darrieussecq calls her subject Paula, while the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was her friend, is called Rilke. When asked about this disparity in The Paris Review, Darrieussecq was blunt, “It’s the truth about men and women. It still is. It’s hard to have a name when you’re a woman.”¹