… 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…

… 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…