my worst chanukkah

A memory. A holiday dinner. A Jewish thing on the edge of the country with a family I can’t seem to like. I am here with the eldest son, my employer, a shallow, suburban creature who, when he speaks in glowing colours about his ex-girlfriend, repeats how she stayed a size zero, because she knew he likes girls small. He is certain that everyone loves him, that he can read anyone. “Just part of being a businessman,” he says. He makes me increasingly uncomfortable. The more I learn about the relationship, the more it sounds toxic and mutually abusive. She left him right before they were to be married, cheated then fled, leaving behind the only life she’d ever known. Even though I am new to this group, still tentative, and her actions seem extreme, it never occurs to me to think she made the wrong decision. I know, rather, at the edge of my own understanding, deep and dark, that I should follow her. Distance myself from these people and this place.

The younger brother works for a large American multinational. Clever, he works on their kernel team, a job for life, specialized in a way that feels nearly impossible for a human to endure. On the surface, he seems fine, but he, too, is unkind to his partner, a woman who seems to love him very deeply. I don’t know her well, but it seems she might do well to step away, much like the aforementioned ex-girlfriend. They fight often behind closed doors, voices rising. He doesn’t know how to connect, so he tries tricks from the dog training manual. Coldness, harshness, attempts at alpha supremacy.

The dinner is awkward, with coils of tension wrapped tight like springs, ready to suddenly unwind and blind someone. I learn that the brothers may have inherited their uncomfortable emotional outbursts from their parents, who humble-brag about volunteer hours spent working to “save” battered women, but then damn my mother for being one when I bring up my childhood while thanking them for their hard work. “How dare she keep children in that situation! I’m so sorry for you, she must be a horrible person.” I am shocked and say so. I am told that they will accept my apology for being a rude guest, as it must not be my fault, given that I was raised by such a contemptible mother. I do not apologize. The subject is changed.

The only person there I feel I can speak to is his grandmother, as her prejudices are expected and I know how to deflect them. She is an antique, however, and detached from her era. Her conversation meanders, jumping from year to year, as her focus wavers. I’ve never met anyone quite like her, but his grandmother still feels like she’s been standardized, traits pulled from a pamphlet about age and fading bodies. “The slightly racist old lady: Option III”. Her make-up is a billboard advertising her deteriorating motor skills, eye-liner applied as if with a crayon, lipstick approaching an event horizon, and her wig, a klaxon blaring, crooked and slightly terrifying. I wonder what she was like before, as she seems nice, as if what I was looking at wasn’t representative, but sunlight filtered through too many years.

During dessert, when an aunt and uncle started singing and I start bringing dishes into the kitchen, someone decides to tease me for being “such a good little woman”. It is made very clear that the man who brought me told his family that he was bringing his girlfriend to dinner. Shock again, but this time I stay quiet, lacking a script. There is a chance that I will be fired if I contradict this.

My own relatives don’t keep close, but nor do they pretend to. There are no public facades, flawless or otherwise, no pretense to an external whole. Perhaps I am missing out, not having a family structure, but this, I think, surely must be worse.

I want to leave so badly, be anywhere else. Shrinking into myself, I look around the table, quiet and concerned. No one else seems to think the bickering is abnormal or the shouting downstairs is out of place. They are acclimated to their fractured, strange reflections of familial bonds, unhealthy though they are, and blind to their own internal misfires. How do they manage to be so stubbornly insular in such an interconnected world? I do not ask. It does not seem the place.

Later, as I am driven home, I am admonished for upsetting his parents.

Muscles & Glitter

ChrystaleneI just updated Lensflower.com with a new post: Muscles & Glitter. My friend Chrystalene started hitting the gym this year and part of her program asks that participants take Before and After pictures, preferably by a professional photographer, in order, I suspect, to encourage participants to take it more seriously.

There’s a lot of social pressure for women to stay weak, myths about bulking up and being less feminine, as if having strong muscles cancels out beauty, rather than enhances it. She and I are more modern and believe, quite strongly, that type of thinking is rubbish. So, rather than take the usual sort of fitness photos, where the focus of the portraits are hard, oiled muscles, back-lit and knife edged, she wanted something fiercer, more feminine. Nevermind smiling, sweaty looking jogging shots or virtue signalling like mad with work-out clothes (yet without a hair out of place), it was going to be full of glitter and pizzazz.Chrystalene side plank

So here she is, glamourous and gorgeous, flexing her muscles for feminism.

And, as most of the time lately when I take a picture, I’m pleased with the result. I haven’t been creating much lately, so it’s reassuring when I like what I do.

Also, this shoot may have produced my new favourite review, “It’s a rare photographer who will get half naked just to make you feel comfortable being half naked.”

Saw a great slide recently, “Privilege: The human version of “works on my machine”.”


Learning by Sarawut Intarob on 500px.com
Learning, by Sarawut Intarob

The American elections continue, with reactionaries on the left and right, worse on the right. Everyone has fallen on the right, except for Trump, who runs on a campaign of divisiveness and scapegoating. The educated, the ones with options, don’t seem to understand why he’s still around, still a force. The language he uses in “debates” consistently register at the fourth grade level, the “solutions” he offers are the equivalent of trying to fix a broken garburator by hitting it with a hammer. How can this man, who seems like a parody of himself, like a satirical rendition of a concept too awful to look straight in the face, be relevant? But that seems the crux of it; options. It’s easy, when you have them, to be blind to the desperation of those who don’t.

You can convince yourself anything is fine if you don’t think you have any other options.

And America’s narrative of money and power? It’s fading, and failing, and sad. Even the tech bubble seems to be slowly deflating. Meanwhile, headlines are painting a larger, bleaker picture. “World’s carbon dioxide concentration teetering on the point of no return; future in which global concentration of CO2 is permanently above 400 parts per million looms.

Yet this is the same world in which Google’s AI is writing post-modern poetry, there is less crime than ever known, and extraordinary art is being created everywhere people go. The world which provided the above photo, which I find tirelessly inspiring. It displays a glimpse of the world I want, a mix of contrasts, varied and rich in experience, with education and tools for all and everyone, no matter their circumstances. Education, tools, and options.

So, wild ones, when you try to talk with those who hold opposing viewpoints, especially those who accept the scapegoat as truth, maybe point them over here: It’s Okay To Be Gray, by GlitchedPuppet and Siderea’s three part explanation and take-down of what’s going on with Trump’s campaign, which I consider essential and file unequivocally under REQUIRED READING – The Two Moral Modes: Part One, The Two Moral Modes: Part Two, The Two Moral Modes: Part Three.

affirmations (“for your trials and tribulations”) -::- I am looking forward to it with some relief.

The Life of Death from Marsha Onderstijn.

More travel approaches. Nevada. California. Festivals of thought and music. The desert. The rich. The coast. More of the rich, though a slightly different kind. Lights. Action. Arduino. An experience in a large dark room underground, the entry the same as the cost of a plane ticket.

Tomorrow I’m going on an in-depth, insiders tour of the TRIUMF Accelerator Laboratory, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science, to learn how to use the world’s largest cyclotron.

Later, by a week, I’ll be at Future Forward, a Burning Man spin-off for the one percent run by Robot Heart. A double-date just outside one the most artificial city in North America. Google’s Eric Schmidt is the keynote speaker. Darren Aronofsky will be wandering around with a camera. I will recognize no one, both a weakness and a strength.

I write this while streaming Coachella live, a private concert projected onto a wall, Underworld and M83 and LCD Soundsystem, five feet tall and eight and a half feet wide. I write this while the man on screen singing is the same man who held the door for me at Michael’s funeral. How small, the world.

Later in May, I’m going to San Francisco for my birthday again, bracketed by Maker Faire. (I have never been.) There are secret plans afoot and a place to stay for ten days. The secret society is gone, but there will still be a party. I will still find my way.

Joining the world of missing persons and she was.

The Darker Sooner
by Catherine Wing

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

-::-

Work pulls me onto trains, lately. Seat upon seat, row upon row, the windows looking out onto the same dark green trees and slate gray ocean that I’ve grown to associate with my own failure to find colour and light. These trips, short and small as they are, would have been special, would have been seen as stepping stones, but there has been little, since Michael died, that inspires, that cradles me or helps me feel alive. I am thankful that the places I’ve been going have community; cleverness and kindness meshed together, a basket to land within that protects me from hitting the ground.

I made a new friend through work, one of my on-going contracts as a copy-editor for a group of Information Security professionals. He lives far away and we don’t talk often, but when we do, we have the sort of personal, political, and philosophical discussions that I always imagined friends must converse about deep into the night, sitting on hypothetical porches with bottles of wine or in imaginary living rooms flickering with candlelight, post dinner-party or house-party. Maybe there’s a cat, the furniture is well loved, and discoveries are being made, bridges are being raised, and beliefs and opinions are being forged, tested, and reforged.

I use “hypothetical” and “imaginary” because I don’t know how to find myself in such cozy situations, (though I crave them more than most things). Like many things, I only know they’re real because I’ve been told about them and seen them at a distance or through the lens of media. That said, I still like it when I find its echo on-line and it’s been good to have again, as it’s something I’ve been missing for a number of years, since defeat took me and my capacity to reach out diminished (as is easily mapped by the decline of this journal).

He has me reading books I would have skimmed over, summaries of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. They haven’t pulled at me yet, there’s been no internal tug of recognition, but I appreciate the gentle push into new directions. I haven’t had the focus for entire books lately, so I spend my reading time on-line now, following the news instead, like the Panama Paper leaks or the horror show that’s passing for the Republican primaries. Topics: Science, privacy, human rights, politics.

I miss art and design, but I’ve misplaced those impulses too. They’re somewhere in my history, but not my present, along with my languishing photography backlog, my lost animation reels, finding new music and singing along, dancing, movement, creation. Agency, desire, grace. The spark.

pass the popcorn

Hominid from Brian Andrews.

Hominid is an animated teaser based on the Hominid series of photo composites by Brian Andrews, described as “photo composites made from human and veterinary images”.

-::-


A weekly movie night has sprung up in the homeless-yet-have-a-place dichotomy I’ve been inhabiting. Challenging films, insistent and smart, things I haven’t seen before, but have dearly wanted to. An exquisite corpse of connections from week to week.

It started with Fassbinder’s Macbeth, a faithful and brutal retelling of Shakespeare drenched in colour, shouting, and death, then moved to Far Side of the Moon, written, directed, produced, designed, and starring Robert LePage. Based on his visually striking theater production of the same name, he plays two Quebecois brothers awash in tides of their mother’s recent death, set in the context of the USSR-United States Space Race of the 1960s.

The loss of a parent, the small kingdom of the stage, brothers, strife. Small threads, alike in dignity.

LePage is known in Canada as a national treasure, the intellectual French-Canadian prince of visual delights. The transitions in his films are especially beautiful, as the round door of a coin laundry becomes the port of a space capsule or the green screen background of a weather channel becomes the wall of someone’s apartment. They are playful and unexpected, much like the films of Michel Gondry, the French-Parisian master of surprise and whimsy, who directed the next choice, Mood Indigo.

Based on a book written in 1947 and set in a blur between an imaginative retro-future of when the book was written and the modern day, it concerns a joyful couple who meet, fall in love, and marry, but the wife, played by Audrey Tatou, falls ill with a flower in her lung. What was bright, grows dark.

Next, pivoting on the love story, the toxic flower, the here and now, we showed Upstream Color, written, directed, produced, edited, composed, designed, cast by and starring Shane Carruth, the man responsible for Primer, which details the path of a man and a woman who fall in love after being poisoned by a parasite from a specific flower. From darkness, comes light.

It ends with an unconventional family, isolated in the country, like the subjects of Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos we’re showing this week.

artpost: Monochromatic (the precious unconscious). Did each get a name when finally born?

Excerpted photos from 1931-1955, Doll Factories

via Mashable, via Retronaut.


Jan. 28, 1949. A worker trims the eyelashes on a pair of doll’s eyes.


Dec. 15, 1951. Freshly cast doll legs dry at a factory in England.


c. 1950


1947. Freshly cast doll heads wait to dry.

artpost: flight, the way they move together


Ascension, by Jacob Sutton, featuring ballet dancers Hannah O’Neill and Germain Louvet

This September marks the launch of the Paris National Opera’s Third Stage. While the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille are, of course, world renowned sites of cultural and architectural interest, this particular ‘scène’ is not a stage in the physical sense, but exists in the rather less tangible online realm.

Launching from the Opera’s website, which has recently been treated to a slick overhaul, the digital platform will feature a mix of mediums including the work of film makers, choreographers, visual artists, directors and writers. Third Stage will also allow ballet and opera aficionados from all over the world to delve into an exceptional set of archives, created in partnership with the INA (French National Audiovisual Institute).

One of the original films currently being featured on the site, and exclusively on Telegraph Luxury, is Jacob Sutton’s Ascension, which showcases the spectacular architecture of the Opera Bastille and the Palais Garnier, as well as the breath-taking skills of ballet dancers Hannah O’Neill and Germain Louvet. A contrast of behind-the-scenes and front of house, the film flits back and forth between shots of the dancers below stage at the Opera Bastille, dressed in black to match their sombre, industrial surroundings, and in the glittering golden foyer clothed in softer pastel shades and bathed in light.”

Posted from an intercity train in Britain

A Life Of Break-Ups
by Ioana Cristina Casapu

I have gotten used to saying goodbye
But to travel light
Can be heavier than it seems
You always sell your stuff
Free your stuff
Give away that pair of shoes
Pass over this set of plates
And voila,
Your life fits again in only three boxes.
I have gotten used to saying farewell
I will see you again
Someday
Kiss all the bridges and gates for me
Forget me not;
Gotten used to keeping my mind alert
My baggage easy
And my memories inside my iPhone
To telling myself
The eye has to travel
So that my stories can unravel
But sometimes distance kills the best of intentions
Sometimes the home you find
Is different than the home you dreamt of
I like airports when it’s sunny
They remind me of summer
Serendipity
A life looked from afar
The promise that the Earth is round
And the hope that distance
Is only jet lag
Before coming back.

Selenium is sick


TV On The Radio – Trouble

“All of this borrowed time, it’s running out. It’s the ending of the show.”

Selenium, our beautiful one-eyed pirate ferret who had the dreadful kind of exciting year, has just been diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma. This is, unfortunately, a death sentence. There is no cure or reasonable treatment. We are uncertain how much longer she has, the prognosis for aggressive lymphoma in young ferrets is dire, but as it is rare, there is less information on it. It might be that she will not survive until January, though David has been giving her the very best possible care and inventing new recipes for soft food that have been successfully coaxing her into eating, or she might survive it until spring. We just don’t know. But please, if you have a moment, if you can reach out to David and offer any kind of help or support, it would be dearly appreciated. There is only so much I can do from England.