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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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I’ve made my peace with my current camera. Even though I leave it on automatic way too much, and even though it’s a bit to big and serious looking, I’ve become comfortable with hauling it out and just shooting with it, as well as using the kit lens. Here’s another shot of Monroe the Great Dance from Chicago.

Record Club tonight , and that always sends me spinning through my collection and the sources of online music. Now I’m thinking about little I know about Jellybean Benitez. Earlier I remembered that I’d forgotten Debby Harry’s “French Kissin’ in the USA”, but I couldn’t bear to put it on and listen to it, because what if I didn’t love it as much as I used to?

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An image that’s part of a project from 1987. I’ve had my new scanner for almost ten months, but I’ve neglected to test out the negative scanner until today. I unearthed the negs as part of the next phase of cleaning (stop sorting things into piles and go through those piles and evaluate stuff). I turned up a bunch of my original photographs for pieces from all the phases of my work over the past twenty or so years.

On one hand, thank god I hold on to everything. On the other, my god, I hold on to everything! I’m trying to devise a plan for turning a bunch of this stuff into new pieces that I can distribute and disperse.

For now I’m thrilled to find out that my scanner does such a good job so simply and quickly.

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I’m lucky that I have many seconds, because all day today people have poked their heads in my office and asked if I had a couple. I myself am an office drop-by-er, being happier to walk over and ask someone something than to call or email.

There’s a lot more photos taken and posted to photobucket than ever make it onto the blog here. I suppose that at some point I should set up some sort of flickr account so that people could take a look through the backlog.

Today is the day that we started having “In God We Trust” on our currency (in 1864)

And today is Immanuel Kant’s and Betty Page’s birthday.

Mammon, Mind and Body all rolled into one.

That was my backlog of trivia.

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Had somewhat grandiose hopes of cutting my book collection by about a third to donate to ICP’s benefit book sale. That isn’t happening, but at least I’m getting six boxes of them out of my house. And boy am I ever reminded of how many books I have on hand to read.

Messing around with a new lens for the camera – it seems a little soft to me, but at least it’s lighter to carry around. And I’ve been meeting some commitments, which feels good.

I am indeed happy to have gotten my taxes filed a couple of weeks ago, working alongside Thor. We have an annual “file together” coaching session, which always helps me emotionally. The net effect of my filing is that my tax dept should be whittled down considerably, meaning that I should be clear of it by the end of this year. Here’s the lesson: Always file your taxes, kids! At least 50% of my obligation has been penalties and interest for years that I didn’t file.

So maybe this is all spring cleaning in action. The books were just picked up (three cheers for folks who show up when they say they will, even if I’m not always one of them), so I think I’m going to take myself out to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s Art Fest for a little treat.

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Lehigh’s back home. And taking her rightful place on the bed. Yesterday I was awoken by three friends and a birthday cake of astonishing artistry, now I have to contemplate the prospect of eating most of a layer cake. Must invite more company over!

As much as Lehigh wants to help, it’s a chocolate cake, so she’ll just have to cheer me on from the side lines. Had a reasonable walk today and learned a bit about my DSLR. There’s good and bad news, but one thing that struck is the way that once you shoot with something enough, you internalize the possibilities of the equipment. These days I know what my regular cameras (including the iPhone) will do with the shooting conditions I find myself in. I haven’t gone through that experience with the Nikon yet, especially with the different lenses. But I’ll get there.

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My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.

Low ceilings, patterned carpet.

These twenty sentence things are not repackaged tweets; rather they are all new original content generated out of a crushing sense of inertia.

I’m a content provider?

The above photo was taken while I waited for people to get out of the way of another photo I wanted to take: a heavily bolted steel pillar in the middle of a Queens train station.

I had noticed the pillar’s knobby texture in contrast to the tiled surface of the passageway behind it and like so many other of my pictures I didn’t want something in it that would distract from showing that contrast.

Thus, I was in the position of wishing that the torrent of other people moving through the hallway on their evening commute would vanish, so that the purity of my aesthetic vision might be transmitted uncompromised.

I suppose I was feeling like Ayn Rand.

The moment of absence didn’t happen, at least not during the ten minutes or so I was waiting and snapping off pictures so as to ward off the notion that I was loitering, so I packed up my camera and moved on to my evening appointment.

In my pictures New York is mostly an unpopulated city.

It’s as if I appreciate their traces more than their presences: better a scrawl on a wall than the person sitting next to me on the subway.

There’s some exception if the person is cute, and my friends and family show up in front of my camera as well.

It’s a bad habit, to be wishing people away.

Pictures and recognition have been much on my mind lately.

Think of the world before 1800, and ask what percentage of the population had ever had a likeness made of their individual physiognomy.

Following on from that, how many ever had the slightest expectation of that happening to them?

And what is those percentages today?

In much of the world, I suspect that it has become hard to make it all the way through your life without having your picture taken, either by family or by someone else.

Is turning the camera away a recognition of the everyone’s compromised privacy?

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Mom just swung by the office, and while I know she’ll want to kill me for posting this view of her, I have to post this, my favorite of the pictures I just shot. But here’s the thing: I’m shocked at the difference in quality between the camera I just lost, and this the backup one. The ability to handle interior light conditions is vastly different. Now given, this current camera is about four or five years old. It’s just that I can really see the difference in lens quality between it and the Lumix.

I might have to start toting around my DSLR. I’m turning into one of those photographers I always used to crack wise about.

Over on The Onion’s AV Club, I see that Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson is giving a rare interview. I may have said this before here, but I don’t really care for that strip, which provokes passionate devotion among many of my friends. Some of it is beautifully drawn, but I just never thought that the writing was much more than a few stock situations reshuffled, and I was pretty much repulsed by Calvin, who struck me as a thug in training, unredeemed by his flights of fantasy. It’s Krazy Kat, where you’re mostly being asked to root for Ignatz. But then I always hated Dennis the Menace, too. Maybe I see Calvin as exemplary of the boys that used to frighten and make me nervous as a kid: boys who delighted in smashing stuff and running around. I suppose we are meant to see him as creative, and rebellious, but I just don’t get it.

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If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.

I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.

I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.

A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?

And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:

Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!

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