_posted in art | dayedayerocks | film | interactive narratives | music | news | photography | the temple | web | 15 November 2005

well, on a bed of california stars is back, since ive been told several times i need to start it back up and i am tired of sending out emails, so here it goes...

two week vacations are freakin' long! i feel like i was in georgia for a whole month. re:birth, my first exhibit, was a blast! pictures are up… hoping to add more once i can track them down.

finally finished reading, on photography by susan sontag, while sitting in airports on saturday (as in the whole day saturday). previous to sontag's passing in 2004, i had only read one of her writings, notes on "camp," which i found to be very entertaining.

there are tons of passages from on photography that do it for me, but i think these are the most interesting...

_first quote

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841 was the calotype: from kalos, beautiful.) Nobody exclaims, "Isn't that ugly! I must take a photograph of it." Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: "I found that ugly thing. . . beautiful."

if any photographer made the ugly beautiful, it was diane arbus.

_second quote

A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude. The photographs of Mathew Brady and his colleagues took on the horrors of the battlefields did not make people any less keen to go on with the Civil War. The photographs of ill-clad, skeletal prisoners held at Andersonville inflamed Northern public opinion-against the South. (The effect of the Andersonville photographs must have been partly due to the very novelty, at the time, of seeing photographs.) ... Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they cnn reinforce one -- and can help build a nascent one.

regardless of one's views on the war in iraq, final salute is a very touching piece, and most definitely an "unsuspected zone of misery." there is a great deal of "appropriate context of feelings and attitude" on both sides of the debate on iraq.

_another quote

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 -- a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her opens open, screaming with pain--probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.

(nick) ut cong huynh's image of a "a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her opens open, screaming with pain." Winner of the World Press Photo, 1972. a portion of the "hundred hours of televised barbarities."

_in other news

the uc system's investment committee voted to divest from sudan! the recommendation goes to the board of regents in january for an up or down vote.

well it's started... i have no idea where this damn thing is suppose to go or exactly what it's suppose to be... but hey... who doesn’t want lay their “heavy head tonight on a bed of california stars”

_soundcheck: cat power, the covers record