naylandblake.net

As you can see below this post is tagged with the phrase “daily photo”. Which means that it’s part of my practice of taking pictures every day. What is not readily apparent is that while there is at least one pictuer a day, because of the format restrictions I’ve come up with for this blog there is also usually one post per day, with only one picture in that post. So at the most, one picture gets published per day. But for each that gets used, there is at least one other that gets taken and processed and uploaded to my photobucket account. There’s quite a few of them over there that haven’t been posted yet, and I don’t quite know what to do with them.

For example, this was taken the same day as the above image. Why did I think that the first one would make more sense as the lead off? I couldn’t tell you. For the most part the relationships between what I’m writing about and the images I’m posting are oblique, but I know that when the time comes to figure out a post there’s always one picture that seems to make the most sense. And sometimes that picture choice eliminates the topics for the post altogether.

For example, today I’m tempted to write about the odd habit that I’ve noticed in certain women to continually pat and smooth their hair. I see them do it on the subway often, women who’s hair has been coiffed into swooping bangs and straight sides: they form their hand into a kind of mitt, thumbs opposed to all of their other fingers which are held rigidly parallel; then they grasp the hair and slide it between the the thumb and fingers. I suppose the grip is to keep the nails from snagging the hair, and the hair has been straightened in some way, so the smoothing is to keep it all straight and aligned. There is something that reads as so considered and technical and yet unconscious in the gesture that it marks for me the extent to which these women feel observed and displayed, how the regime of appearance has become so utterly internalized. The other night I watched the “Housewives of NJ” and a couple of the women there did it frequently, more so when they were agitated. Many times a preen can be a mark of power, a subtle amping up of allure: think of Mae West adjusting her furs or rolling her shoulders. But this gesture just seems trapped to me. Trapped in a constant state of disrepair.

Now have I taken any pictures lately that I could place alongside that? I think not.

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Summer trips and how much I need them: I’ll be teaching briefly in Chicago, and hitting a few other events over the next couple of months.

Lehigh’s new ideas about scheduling: evidently it’s silly for me to sleep one minute past 6am, and so she needs to be on the bed at that time jumping on me and flogging me with her braided pull toy. This new policy has been in place for the past week, and I’m a little disturbed by it.

Scarcity: I’m almost at the point where I’m having to wait for my magazines to pile up so that I can bundle them for recycling. I’m already past that with newspapers: I wanted to crumple some newsprint to cushion some thing I was packing, and couldn’t find any in the apartment.

What to do about Facebook: I should just cut the cord, since all FB does for me is provide a convenient way of announcing events. Otherwise it’s a pain – I’ve been trying to import the feed for my blog into it as notes, but that process seems to happen only episodically. It seems like a group of posts will show up and then there’s a ten day delay before the next group shows up. Really I’d just like everyone to access it on my main website.

WordPress plugins and how I love them: speaking of www.naylandblake.net , I’ve been tinkering with it a bit and added on some functionality that allows me to integrate my Twitter account with it. Now my trivialities and weak jokes will nestle alongside my profundities and whingeing. Now I’m thinking of ways to get my tumblr to show up on there too.

Bourbon: It can make everything better and then make you feel sad and worn out too.

Daily life: there seems to be a scarcity of anecdotes in my daily life of the kind that provide fodder for funny blog posts. Clearly I need to be around more picturesque types of people and regard them with more judgment. Or I need to fall down more, so I can look on the funny side of that.

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You could go to the store.

Or you could clean and look for the part you need.

And that would unearth all the other barbs of incompleteness.

Don’t worry – I’m good.

You can make a computer that will beat a human at a game of chess.

But no computer can come up with the idea of chess, or decide it feels like playing it.

Think I’ll go out in the sun again – but maybe no shop.

That’s Dominic at a gallery.

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It’s one of those meeting days at work, where we’re going from one long meeting to the next. In between I have the attention span of a gnat. At least my desk is getting closer to being cleaned off and the file system on my computer is more in order. Every few minutes I pic something off the desk and file it or toss it away. And then I click on one of the tabs on my browser and waste more time. Then I cone back to this page and type another sentence. Like that last one.

All of this feels far from working in the studio. And while I’ve been making small steps in that direction, there’s a lot of distance yet to travel.

After a glowing weekend, the chill has come over the weather here: a bit rainy and about twenty degrees cooler.

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