It’s Been A Week
It’s been a week where I’ve been head-down blinders-on productive. Productive, but ungrounded, and sort of spinning around, agitated, stretched thin (I printed and submitted to an art show; I got a new camera and some lighting gear and a new tiny printer, and have been figuring out how to store it; I ordered some polaroid sheets that barely exist online (after typing in their name again, they probably do not do what I want them to do—a big disappointment and a project shattered); I began a slow large process of ‘rebranding,’ or just branding at all at first. I booked a few shoots and have had work on top of that—work where I spoke up in the church’s book club and the office administrator, later, asked me where I got my degree, which is somehow a suggestion, in my mind, that I should go to grad school, while the intern wants to send me to A/V training probably because I am too apathetic. All of these are good, but once, I did not quite see my life like this).
If there has been a focus to this week, it has been technology. Technology like a checklist. On what camera I’m using, on how to store it best with all my other gear (how many Pelican cases do I need! Kathy says, while we print, “I LOVE PELICAN CASES!”), on whether polaroid film can ever be infrared (including a long search into thermal-infrared cameras, how they’re used, why they’re used, and a few examples from Zone of Interest and ORA, but not, in fact, Call Me By Your Name), and briefly, getting me out of this mess entirely, the relationship between a technology and representation (an inescapable problem—c.f. “Physical and Material” in The World of Art: The Photograph as Contemporary Art). All this time, in this thinking hole of tedium (a certain circle of hell), like a technical list. The world has been going on around me.
So a few observations. (The only way to get out of that hell of tedium is to observe; there is no prescription out).
I drove home from a Hana Stretton concert last night, after sunset. She performed in the trees, while the sun descended behind her. The clouds held color. She rubbed her hands to keep them warm, while whispering into the microphone, playing acoustic guitar. Her music sounds like a quiet hum. She announced that this was her dream concert. To be among the trees reminded her of home. And at her dream concert, her only goal is to make people feel restful, like napping under the trees. If you find yourself laying down on the floor, closing your eyes…
Of course I thought of my week for a moment. Just a moment. And then I looked at the ground, unfocused my eyes, or just stared while the leaves on the ground in front of me moved in and out, like the earth’s sigh. Sigh. I watched myself let go.
I had told myself by the end of the week that I would be out of that thinking, technological hole (a particularly awful type of thinking). I drove home. Everyone that takes their work seriously should be familiar with the technology of their work. That is a no-brainer. But to be focused on that alone (this is an image-maker’s trap), on the aesthetics of a technique, as if that were enough (and gosh darn people do sure often treat that as enough) is to forget that there is a larger world taking place around us. That representation is more than just a stylization; it can be for our purposes, for our sense of the world and a sense of life.
I’m finding that starting with an idea, or a curiosity about the world, or a particular feeling or perspective, for me, must come before technology (of course these are not so neatly split). A feeling like a nap, a sense of contingency. Photos can come after.
It’s been a while
since I’ve updated this last. So let me just update very quickly.I have not been writing. I’ve been printing, photographing, and working. So the world spins around a bit, and the past week has especially been hectic, productive (in one of those ways where you don’t know what to do with your hands, so you dig in a bit too deep). I play ambient music to ground, but it feels noisy and saturated. Ironically, this entire time, I’ve thought that I cannot watch some of my favorite movies: they are too slow, with too much thinking and feeling, and now I just need to put my head down and be productive (I know this feeling will end; what an awful way to live).
So I think, before rooting out this feeling, that I should attach some images. I should put a timeline onto my weeks, and finally, as we all do, I need perspective.
There are some images I made; the ones on the left (the one of me and Yashuko Bush taken by Snooze) are from my exhibition on March 3rd, of LGBTQ people: gay and queer men. The rest are printed for fun; testing paper and concepts (shitty camera, sequencing, perspectives, how saturated can matted paper go). The triptych was submitted to an art showing. Thinking of putting things for sale.
So March Third until now has been a bit of a blur.
I think of some mystical terms, along a mystical path from a Sufi book I read five years ago. And two notable terms, used as if they were scientific, were “expansion” and “contraction.” These reflected inner states, supposedly. I have no idea what the author meant, so I put the book away five years ago and have not returned to it. But for the past few weeks, after a fever-dream encounter of trying to buy paint chips at a car paint store, I’ve returned to these words. I may be attempting a new reading, but I’ll try to explain...
...how, as an interior state, I felt “contracted,” as if the scope of my life narrowed, as if I could get things done, feeling completely and incontestably like myself, passionate with no foresight, when (as has been the case for the past couple weeks) I focus creatively, not reading much, and not feeling too social. The astrology app says this is normal. Bundle of emotions, and passion, going and going and going. Photographically, this means I can print and print and shoot and shoot, but I might teeter on burning out. I could fall in love, too, by the way.
Expansion is the feeling of looking at clouds. They come. They go. That’s it. Empty.
So I’ve dug into my archive (before last week), printed (last week, this week, etc.) worked and bought another camera, worked and printed and submitted to an art show, and have lost my bearings. It’s a bit Bataillian, unintended, no concept, like life is there and I am living like an unthinking animal--or is it machine--and I’m caught up in this sort of work season.
It’s scary and feels like risk to have the time to think, to conceptualize, to work on a problem, to think bigger than myself. To feel expansive instead of whatever feels blind and intuitive. I feel like I need to listen (hence ambient music) with an open heart and mind.
I listened to Krista Tippet speak to Justin Vernon today, while I was working at church. And it made me realize how silly my church job is. Justin Vernon talked about how he’s come back to the word “God,” as if it’s the only one that encapsulates a certain discourse, or the only way you can talk about the transcendent. It reminds me of what the pastor says, and a certain argument in religious studies. But Justin moved on from that, and both Justin and Krista are vulnerable, and Justin made me wonder about a vulnerability that is not confessional, not linked to wrongness or sadness or badness. A vulnerability, an opening up, to what (why close off in the first place)? Vulnerable to be aspirational, naïve, vulnerable to dream and think of a bigger life. Expansive.
If there is only one thing I remember from this entry, it is that those who are thoughtful must feel. And those who feel must be thoughtful if they are to feel themselves in a world around them. Susan Sontag (I finished one of those books in March...another thing in that blackout season of post-exhibition life) says something similar: thinkers aren’t killers. Thinking is feeling’s mileage, its longevity. Thinking is feeling’s memory.
Gesture
I got done with my final meeting for photo project. At least before the exhibition on Monday. And my professor met because he read my “didactic,” and said, “this is too academic,” and I said, “alright,” and wrote one five minutes before our meeting. I showed it to him, saying, “I need to get things done, so make this fast.” He read my artist statement (“what is gay and how does it land in your body,” I wrote that I asked my photographic subjects…and later…”in the absence of an essentialist theory of sexuality…”) and the professor said it was very good. “You need an elevator speech,” he said. I replied, “that’s easy,” and then said, “it’s a project dealing with gesture as a fundamental, but not stable, marker of sexuality and identity. Sexual identity, here, is constructed.”
And my professor asked, “what’s the title?” and I said, “Gest/Post-ure” because it focuses on how our bodies shape the identities we have, plus it’s a bit of a nod to a certain form of academic terminology, and he said, “oh no I like this question you raise, that one phrase you used earlier, the thing having to do with bodies: oh, there it is, ‘how does that land in your body?’ That should be the title.” I replied, “well that’s sort of terminology you find everywhere…I feel like I’ve heard that phrase…inhabiting bodies, things landing in bodies, things in relationship to bodies…all over the place. It’s cliché,” and he said, “how does that land in your body” (no punctuation) should be your title, and I said, “I already got my title printed,” and he said, “oh never mind never mind, but that should be your subtitle,” and I thought “ick,” and he said, “because when you’re born, right when you’re born, the first thing you do is touch. Touch is the first thing that happens to babies–babies need their mother’s touch” and I thought, “is this the time for this I have to go reprint my artist statement because you said mine sounded like a term paper earlier so I want to go and do that,” and he kept going, “touch is the first thing babies learn, and a baby needs their mother’s touch,” and I thought, “COME ON,” and he said, “and then the baby learns language,” and I thought, “absolutely the fuck not,” and he kept going, “so that a baby learns slowly touch and language, and a baby is constantly learning the world around them. The baby touches, the baby speaks, and the baby learns from their mother. But these things, gestures, this thing you focus on, those aren’t either of those–gesture is something that isn’t speaking nor touching. So…we’re getting into soul territory here,” and I wanted to slam my laptop shut, although he hits on a good point about the ambiguity of gesture, between (in Agamben’s terms) action and signification–here, analogously, touch and speech–and Agamben deals where the “uninitiated” into the critical-theory cult might call “soul” or “freedom.” (This is all retroactive thought.) “And we’re in soul territory here,” and I said, “oh boy,” and he said, “there’s not enough time to get into the soul, but a person who’s different” (what my professor calls gay people) “expresses himself through these ways that are baked in, that he’s born with, that are natural to him,” and I thought, “this is everything my project goes against,” and finally, he said, “so what you really mean, when you say that a sexuality ‘lands in the body,’ is that somehow, before birth, a person’s identity is given to them, it becomes part of their body–what you mean to say is that, by landing in their body–a person, instead of having a sexuality landing in their body, is expressing their sexuality–you’re not showing landing in body, but what they’re expressing, which had to have landed in their body at some point, which is what you’re trying to get at through gesture,” and I thought, “I have to go,” and said, “that’s a long elevator ride,” and he said, “well you already have a speech because you’ve thought of this,” and I said, “yeah,” and I began to think.
I began to think in the car today. I thought my professor, whom I do not know if I will speak to again, made a fundamental, but very representative and understandable misunderstanding. He thought, as many people think, that sexuality, especially if there is a project dealing with sexuality, must be natural, it must be an individual’s fate. And if something is inalterable; if someone is born with a sexuality and cannot change it, then it must be ethical. There’s an apologetic to this sort of thinking. A progressive apologetic. And I thought, “oh,” because, well, I wish sexuality were a choice, I thought, as I drove, stick shift into fifth gear, pedal to the metal, to meet with Ben the barista for my coffee before a shoot today–the same Ben, who, years ago, when we barista’d together, told me gay people were mentally ill and should pray that away.
So I talked to Ben (who has since changed), pulling out Call Me By Your Name, and we talked about jobs, moving into cars, whether corporate life is worth it, and all of the things, and I told him about my exhibition.
Of course sexuality is no choice, I thought, except for the bis, pans, and fluids. But to present sexuality as a choice–as something someone would or would not choose–to present gay as a complex cultural construction, dealing with masculinity, and present these desires as if I had chosen them, and to choose to interact with them continually–waking up each day deciding that gay people are good and worth my time–is what sets gay and queer culture up not as a fate like a sickness, but as a world worth building. A world worth choosing. And as long as people are either on defense–needing to present sexuality as a fact of the world, unalterable, and therefore (somehow), worthy of acceptance–or a short-term offense–gay is natural and biological therefore we are true and right–then, I don’t know, sexuality stays limited and literalist, and we would never get a book (nor movie) like Call Me By Your Name.
The argument behind gesture is that it puts a little bit of freedom into ethics, into so many things we see as determined and set as true. It wiggles ethics. And so this is what I did.
Break
I need a break from images, I think, so I read poetry by Mark Doty. “Sweet Machine” from Sweet Machine, a book where Doty is so himself, coloring description upon thick description, a language of surface glimmering. How many colors can you name? Mark Doty knows more. I take a break from images, but how can this be, except entirely literally, a break? I need a break because I’m constructing a project of pictures in which it is difficult to turn away, to find a rest for your gaze. I want to confront. I do not want the viewer to back away.
In 2003, Kate Bush writes a review of contemporary art photography. She, writing in the early 2000s, notices a trend that makes me check the date of Doty’s book. She notices that against “prohibitions against photographic exploitation of ‘others,’” photographers have returned to “stock subjects of liberal or humanist documentary: the representation of ‘real’ people whose lives have unfolded outside societal norms.” This time, she insists, the return is complex, raising questions about gaze and Otherness implicit in photography, instead of reifying our exoticizing glare.
In Doty’s “Sweet Machine,” we view a (tentatively labelled through another person’s whisper) “Crackhead,” rubbing himself through frantic gestures on a subway platform. Doty notices his baggy jeans, his hands rubbing up and down to his “skinny ass.” A boy exposed: Doty, with a self-conscious stretch of the imagination, calls him “lovely.” Now, onto the streets, Doty views bus advertisements. A model with a skinny torso that could have been the man from the subway becomes an advertisement, plastered all over. He represents “what we’re supposed to want,” and Doty notices how “the imagery aestheticizes.” The link between circulating (marketing, desiring) images of a body and the encounter with the abject finds a place in Doty’s poem.
“One never understands anything from a photograph,” says Susan Sontag. They don’t tell us much about the world. We just, according to her, accept the world as the camera records it. Understanding, instead, comes from contestation.
I think of the contestation my professor gave to my images. They were “too much.” A contestation against understanding, I thought, which is as good as photography gets. “How do you deal with such narrow-minded people?” my friends asked me.
I do not want a viewer to back away (but I speak too much of my own intentions). With time, even the most abject becomes touched with empathy.
Mild Hallucination
If the past few weeks have been a mild hallucination, it is because I have not spent the time to sit down reflect. Not only is Los Angeles on fire right now, but Tiktok, controversially, is about to turn illegal. So, Daniel texts me, I wait for him to pull up, and he pulls out his phone, with a new app Red Note—apparently, also, “little red book.” It’s a new Chinese Tiktok-imitating app. The Americans are flooding the app. “Welcome to our app,” multiple Chinese people say on video, as Daniel shows me his new endless scrolling feed. “This is insane,” I say. “It’s number one on the app store,” and Daniel shows me an app with Chinese characters scrawled on its icon. Half of the text I read is in Chinese. I stop looking, thinking of a video my friend sent me from the Food Network, where viewers count the length of each cut: one-second cuts consistently. Something about attention span, they said.
I put on a ten minute song to write this. It’s more difficult to listen to new music than it has been in the past. It’s more difficult to read new writing than it has been in the past. And while the days grow longer and longer, I do not feel like I’m growing. I feel like I’m learning how I will grow when I stop putting it on hold for a few months.
I try to think in photos now. I’m figuring out what a visual language is, but it’s too slippery for my mind. When I read, my mind cannot get a grip anymore. I write about Giorgio Agamben’s Notes on Gesture. I wish I had more time.
Nothing I read online seems real anymore, as if writing were ever real in the first place. It’s a digitally dissociated world screening before my eyes. I think if we could choose to create a fantasy, it would be better than the world we’ve made…
I watched an Instagram Reel yesterday. And a woman asked me which video was AI: the two looked nearly identical. Except in one, the woman had more makeup and her face looked more rigid and less expressive. So I said, “that one is AI,” and no, it was not. I thought it did not matter anymore. If I cannot tell the difference, what does it say about her?
I buy a Ruby Haunt recording online on Bandcamp. I got a trial for Apple Music today, after seeing consistent protests against Spotify. I opened the app. And it felt strange adding streaming music to the same library that my purchased music (which has been with me for so many years, that I regret it’s still around). I do not think trading one streaming service for another is a viable option for artists.
Seeing Apple Music with no music to stream yet is like having the option to opt out of social media before it even starts. Before we were all feed-junkies. It’s like I could go back in time and say, “streaming will only impoverish your listening habits: although streaming introduces breadth and algorithms and exploration to your ears, you will never, ever, listen to a song twice.” I know what I own now. I am content. I wonder about Red Note.
I am slowly going through my old playlists to buy each album, with the songs on them. It forces me to listen. Two days without coffee means an album or two singles. I listen to the Ruby Haunt album I just bought, with the song “Carrie.” On my little FLAC player on my computer that I’m using to type this, I feel a small amount of relief. I cannot share this music. I mean, I could. But I cannot push “share” and have it uploaded to a thousand tiny fractals of feeds. I want to tell my friend about this album. I will tell him tomorrow. We will watch a movie. I want to put my phone away, but it is difficult. I feel better after writing this, the hallucination deferred. Feeling like the more my writing seems like a journal, the more scattered life has become, and that it’s time to stop thinking in images, but to turn back to new music and new writing. My eyes are tired, so I will not edit this.
I tell Daniel that I think my style of writing is difficult for AI to imitate. It’s dense in terms of content. The style is more approachable. And Daniel says, “Chat GPT could do it,” and I get angry. I think I’ve fallen into a sort of despair.
I listen to Ruby Haunt. Life fuller please, I think, and wonder about a sort of digital truncation of experience. I think of Byung-Chul Han’s book on Non-Things (or was it The Scent of Time). Rage is all the rage for him. Rage, as a sort of negative and overwhelming, full energy, for Han, is, well, simply, go watch Fight Club: it’s cathartic, it’s antithetical to the ordering of our late-capitalist digital lives. Rage is probably what the arsonists felt, who started the fires in Los Angeles, walking around with blowtorches and destroying the environment and communities. Pendulum from numbness to rage. I listen to Ruby Haunt, and think I’m exempt.
“These little moments are all that we’ve got,” says Ruby Haunt, in a song that plays as I type this. I wish I could say something about the stars, or the universe, or the world around us; I wish I could think of life much bigger than myself right now. But all I can think of is community with a focused, intentional attention. “I’m trying to read more poetry,” I told Daniel, as he showed me Red Note. “It might be good to be away from the feeds,” I told him. “I used to put my phone away, and I’d be without it for a few days,” I said, “but I’ve gotten away from that practice. I need to get back in the habit.” Which is what I said years ago, before starting the habit.
Photo Galleries
Yesterday, I talked to Kathy. We looked at images. And Kathy talked about how, after wandering through a few galleries, pieces started to look bad. We entered a room at Bergamont Station, which is a cluster of art galleries.
In the room: still lives of fruit, burning. And paintings of houses on tableted arches; an abundance of gold foil; little paintings on what looked like the ends of benches. Almost pueblo-style, it looked religious to me. Kathy shrugged. “It looks intentional,” she said. I noticed the gold foil. “It looks like religious icons,” I said, and then, “the benches are sort of pew-style benches,” and “like a pueblo-mission style, with images of Los Angeles,” and Kathy all of a sudden had an entry point to the work. Everyone else started to interpret. It was an entry point that made the work engaging.
We exited the gallery, walking toward another, through an empty parking lot. “I was talking to Agatha,” (who is a photography professor) Kathy said, “and images do not excite me anymore. She said that’s just a part of getting older,” and I said, “I thought the same thing. I almost sold all my camera gear. But the other day, I saw an artist, and his work made me fall in love with photography again.” Kathy said, “well it’s just a part of getting older.” And I wondered whether that was true.
In a class four years ago, I learned about novelty through meditation. Novelty, according to these meditation practitioners, was the first thing to let go of, while we sit and watch our thoughts. We’re attracted to surface, to shine, to chasing after glamour and what seems new to us (which is what photography is great at, especially as marketing). For art, it’s a chase after the original, the provocative, and the authentic. But, as part of this stage in meditation, we will be trapped in our own desire if we are continually drawn to these states of mind. Novelty, like this, is exhausting, keeping you trapped in your own desire—so they say.
We walked through the parking lot towards the fine art photo gallery, looking at pictures of dogs. John Divola on Display made me smile. “Look!” I said. “It’s Divola’s work—I love this.” Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert.
“I’m not familiar with him,” Kathy, the one no longer excited about images said, and I said, “oh he’s big, and I love the movement, and the attention to the chase.” Although so many others can take a photo of a blurry dog—I certainly have—there is a little joy in staring at these prints, with the energy of dogs running. They might not feel difficult nor original, but they have a good energy to them.
We exit to the next room, to the gallery I’ve been looking for. Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living. And Kathy said, “this looks like Ansel Adams,” and I said, “yeah, a big critique is that these medium/large format desert wanderers all look the same. It’s become a trend. So what differentiates an artist from their genre? How do you transcend the feeling of being just another photo in the same world that others also photograph?”
There is an answer to this, but no one I was with answered. I pointed to some formal decisions, of printing, tonality, and composition that make a work dynamic. The answer, I think, is to look at a work in its own particularity (this might look like Ansel Adams, but what makes it different?), breaking down its elements, and its presentation, and the choices an artist would have to make to present a work. “Look at the tension here,” I told someone, pointing to a light spot at the edge of the frame. “To the way it moves your eye, in contrast to the other edges; the way a fallen pear next to those standing works through repetition and release, adding movement to the frame.” You never graduate from looking at composition, even if it feels naïve to continually point it out. It would be like saying you graduate from language. You must see a work as a language and then it will hit.
We drove to an exhibition of William Eggleston’s dye prints. The images radiated color. And Kathy noted how the composition was technically “bad,” and I pointed to an image I had seen before as an example of what some call anti-composition.
“Everything is composed in one way or another,” I said. “It’s sort of a feature of photography to feel accidental; it’s difficult to do that, maintaining a sense of referentiality, with painting or sculpture.” We looked at an Eggleston print. “Just because an image might not feel balanced properly does not mean that it is not composed. Who determines what proper balance is?” Kathy, at the end, after taking another lap to look at the “formal elements” of the pictures, said, “I feel like I learned how to become a better photographer,” even though we all admitted that Eggleston’s prints felt like an early Instagram the 1970s. The photos transcended that sort of nomination.
I feel like I’m always too late to discovering photographers. Last week, I found Mark Mcknight’s photographs. I stared and stared on a computer screen, so I bought his monograph. I was excited.
I had been asking questions of “what counts as pornography.” I had been asking people about photography outside of the homogenizing image culture of Instagram; or photography outside of chiseled gay male bodies; image culture outside of the same trends I had seen across queer photography. I wondered what a post-Mapplethorpe provocation would be in photography. And I wondered where my own work, on a queer photo project, fit into the history of queer photography. I stumbled onto Mcknight with these questions wandering in my mind. The photos affected me.
A writer from the LA Times, according to Wikipedia, wrote “150 years of the medium at once embraced, absorbed, and reworked.” Which is a way of saying, Mcknight played within his genres, synthesizing and transcending it. No work exists outside history, and the best work embraces it.
To answer my question to Kathy from earlier: treat photography not as a surface to dazzle—that may come on its own—but as an attention to our own curiosity. Photography’s strength is its ability to reference a world (its sticky referential function!); if you are curious about a world, then photography, as a visual language, might articulate an answer.
At the end of the day, Kathy told me that I should get an MFA in art photography, if I choose to go to grad school. And I told her that I’d choose between religious studies and art history, trying to focus on how art shares a structure of religion. It’s a structure where we expect to turn our brain off and just be affected by a work, like walking into a religious service. That somehow art has a power to break beyond the discursive--or at least that’s what we expect from it (think Malevich; think abstract expressionism; think Sonia Delauny). But in reality, all this unmediation; all this desire to be affected (Mark Doty: we sometimes give up our own agency as viewers to try to allow a work to impress upon us) will only make us tired and lose our excitement. We bring an expectation of transcendence without language, and are continually disappointed.
Christianity & Technology
Today, I walked into church for a church meeting early. I sat in the library and picked up a Mary Baker Eddy book. Lead pastor Luther walked in, saying, “if you don’t know, everyone is always late here.” And Ann walked in, looking at the Mary Baker Eddy book that I took from the shelf, which was crusty and corroding in my hand, and asked, “oh is that your bible?” and I said, “no it’s Christian Science. I’m learning about Animal Magnetism,” and Luther said, “We’re very open minded here,” sarcastically, and I said, “it shows,” before starting the meeting.
Pastor Luther and gay intern are going to Cameroon to do some work. They’ll miss a Sunday. So, we decided to broadcast their trip over Zoom. “We will do magic,” the pastor said. Gay intern will send me a video of Cameroon-style worship. Two steps forward, one step back, in a processional dance, before singing, pastor Luther described. Gay intern said, “will we be able to upload it in time for the Sunday service?” and I thought, “maybe if we compress the video correctly,” but did not say that, and instead, on my blank page notepad, wrote down, “Christianity and Technology: the Virtual,” before the Pastor ran into a problem.
“No one will be there to do communion,” he said, and Ann the worship leader looked at Julie the office secretary, and they said, “we can have Lynn do it.” Silence cut the room. The pastor looked at Ann, and said, “I am not opposed, but,” and gay intern interrupted, “the council did not like that last time. They do not like that regular people can distribute communion,”
“But Lynn deserves to distribute communion,” Ann said, and gay intern said, “what about Carol,” and everyone turned to the intern and said, “that’s a bad idea–Lynn could do it but Carol could not,” and the pastor said, “this church does not like progress,” and then the meeting continued.
Pastor Luther and gay intern debated dates for preaching. “Oh, the congregation will get all upset if their pastor is across the world preaching to another congregation.” Or, “they will get upset if their pastor is about to leave and does not send them off with a message,” and gay intern, who seems to want to preach every Sunday and take over, continued to negotiate: “oh you’ll be preparing for your trip…let me preach,” and I thought, “won’t gay intern also be preparing for the exact same trip?” and I thought of this strange little power struggle between the intern and the pastor, knowing, as Julie said earlier, “the congregation is very susceptible. They’re impressionable.” And I looked at Julie with wide eyes, knowing.
For Christmas Eve service, Ann and pastor Luther talked about candles. “Will we have candles on the outsides of the pews?” Luther asked, and Ann said, “yes, as always.” And Ann added, “you know, last year you did not hold a candle, and that did not go well with the congregation,” and pastor Luther said, “well jeeze I guess I need a candle then,” and the gay intern said, “it does not have to be a big candle: just a small one will do. We don’t need to differentiate ourselves from the congregation,” and Ann said, “they’re expecting a big candle.” Two men up front, gripping large and burning candles: A Happy Christmas Eve it will be.
Progress this sanding down of church roles. A democratizing of the church. I thought of a Queer Theology essay, describing the church as a microfascist institution, adopting the structures of “capital,” (especially in ways where the capitalism, as a secular ideology, relies on self-proclaimed freedom from the repression of the church…) which, in some senses, means that the church markets itself in particular ways. God is up for consumption & mediation, implicitly. The divine made real through a contemporary medium. Isn’t that what religion does?
Pastor Luther left the meeting, and Ann and gay intern talked about where Jesus was from. “Was he from Bethlehem?” gay intern asked, knowing that this was a sort of game. “Or was he from Nazareth?” and Julie said, “I thought he was born in a cave.” And Ann said, “well, what’s the answer?” and gay intern (playing a little game), said, “it depends on the source,” and I thought of the synoptic gospel problem, and how these questions were sort of useless (or worse: boring!), and he said, “some authors want to fulfill Old Testament prophecy,” and I stopped listening because I learned this all in a community college class once, and undergrad gets you into trickier territory of “method,” but gay intern continued to speak about reliable testimony, and how the census was “improbable” (why would people travel home to take a census?) and I thought of a book I was reading about first century “reality:” how first century populations believed statues walked and talked, so there’s no point talking about proof based on ancient documents (really: what is there to prove?). Maybe we can talk about imagination. Belief stacked on belief.
My mom and I talked about Donald Trump. About how people expect that he can just do anything. That even before he’s become president, the news is reporting on the legislation that he is passing. People just expect some authoritarian leader; people will believe then make real; people shrug off “democracy,” as if that’s a certain way of looking at things, a certain disposition, and hold on to their masculine authority figure.
I sat at a coffee shop before church today, editing nudes of a guy. After the meeting I told Ann and gay intern about it. Next to me, Christians held a bible study, saying things like “synoptic gospels,” and also, “John’s eyewitness accounts,” and “why are Matthew and Luke the same plot?” without recognizing that the term “synoptic gospels” really sort of breaks down the two latter themes. They were religious with their knowledge. Or they were religious because they did not know. They were susceptible.
And two men sat next to me, on the other side. One opened his laptop. The other stared at him while they talked; the one on his laptop, all of a sudden loading and playing League of Legends. He played League of Legends while his friend sat there trying to have a conversation, and so, I told Ann and gay intern, I sat there shocked and took a picture. “Why did you take a picture?” asked Ann, and I said, “well isn’t it strange? That two people show up to a place to meet and one brings his videogames and stares at them throughout the whole conversation?” and gay intern said, “that’s just how things are these days,” and Ann said, “Patty’s daughter married a man like that. They’re divorced now,” and I thought of the term “virtual,” and told the gay intern, “do you want to go set up the livestream so it works for Cameroon? Or should we do that later?” and he said, “let’s do it later.”
Animal Magnetism, I learned from the two pages I read of the Animal Magnetism portion of the book (before the meeting started), was studied by the French Government and denounced. “The seizures are made up. It’s all a performance.” And Mary Baker Eddy acknlowedged that. But she had something else to say: “its effects upon those who practise it, and upon their subjects who do not resist it, lead to moral and physical death.” Mary Baker Eddy still, in opposition, believed. The government did not.
For Mary Baker Eddy, and for many Christians (or Christian Scientists) that believe today, and for many that believed a while back, freedom only was truly free if you did what the Christians believed. God’s order was the only free order. It was, ultimately, a freedom to believe that we will do magic.
Brat
I put gas in my car yesterday. A tin-can clip of a song from Charlie XCX’s Brat played on the small, advertising speakers (normally broadcasting commercials on a touch-screen) right next to the pump. I recognized the few seconds of the song. The pump clicked. Gas tank full. I put the pump back, twisted the gas cap on, and drove away.
Two Tuesdays ago, I played ambient music while working at church. The sanctuary filled with tone. I explained, while Ann walked in, that I was listening for the relationship (in a recording) between very acoustic instruments and an electronically-processed environment. How do they occupy the same space in a recording? I have a dobro, and wonder how it will play with synthesizers. And I put on examples, and Ann asked, “is this music?” and I said, “that’s a good question,” and Ann and Lynn (her husband) recommended (then later bought me a ticket for) a bluegrass concert, in the spirit of dobro.
When I heard the gas station clip of Brat, I heard, in spite of its garbled, tin-can noisiness, a song. A song labelled a song, then popularized, abstracted, commercialized, and placed on an advertisement screen. A song stripped of its qualities of glamour, surface, and the verneer of production that normally defines a “pop-art.” A song recogniziable, still, through its distortion, its sound-bite status (a song, which is a growing trend, as sound-bite, as fragment-of-song), assimilated into a gas-station experience. A song in five seconds on a gas station advertising screen, as a nod to the culture we belong to.
It is December 12th today, and I am thinking of New Years Resolutions. I completed 2 out of 9 last year, which is not very good (I bought a dobro; I am in the middle of planning an art exhibition, which are the two I completed). And one that I’ve discussed with friends is a commitment to long-form mediums. It’s more difficult to assimilate a 20 minute song from Longform Editions, for example, onto an advertising screen, than a song cut and produced in ways that allow it to be shared through a phone speaker on TikTok.
If I’m more and more convinced that art can be political (art can be public--art can mediate our common life, art can help situate us in the world), then, it’s silly to say this, but art (music, here) should help us pay attention. I read about Felix-Gonzales-Torrez, who, my professor described, engaged in identity politics without being didactic; how do we engage a “politic” without being literally confessional; how do we consider life when it is not so easily reduced to 5 second clips of something that has become ubiquitious? There’s no simple answer, except through a long process of attention.
Hm
My body hums. “Hmmmm.” You know. The way tired bodies do. “Huhmmmm.” A bit more voiced the second time. My foot rings in pain. I wonder the way out by counting the day around me.
I read today about cameras, especially large format cameras, and their ability to render field of view, perspective, detail, tonality, and other technical things. The optics people wrote articles with their hands on fire, minds cold as steel. The artists (the optics people acknowledged this) did not listen. The artists (they said) saw the fire and believe in magic.
So I thought of Gursky and Photoshop, who “brought traditional and new technologies together,” an art book tells me, “using large format cameras for clarity” (which contemporary tiny cameras can do) “and digital manipulation to refine and tile multiple image files into a single photograph.” No more magic camera.
So that’s number one. “Hmmmm” I say.
I read Anne Carson’s book. Not all of it. It would kill you in one sitting. Pilgrimage, desire, foot pain, and complicated lovers. She gets me. I’m working on a photo project. Men I’ve hooked up with next to pictures of a hermitage. She gets me.
For number three, I’m packing up cameras to shoot a dinner tonight. It’s where sustainability people all get together, eat dinner, and talk about what they’re doing to try to help the world. (Many people I know, when I tell them about this, say, “that’s not enough,” but it’s better than nothing. Plus free dinner.) One person, once, asked me, before dinner, if I shot film, and I said, “nope,” and they said, “well it looks like it,” and I said, “the magic is in the appearance of things,” and he said, “Huhhmmm,” and I said, “you understand it.”
Let me tell you (quickly) of desire.
I type slides in at church (slides, like a road, guide worshippers). Archeologists of the digital age will look back and say, “look how faithfully this transcription occurred–there must be some credibility to it, or a strength of faith,” and let me be the first to tell you that I don’t give a damn about God. But I was reading a line, as I was transcribing onto a slideshow, that was naming God: “Refining God; Rescuing God; Renewing God; Ruling God; Reforming God; Reassuring God; Savior of the nations.” A whole lotta God, I thought, because God takes the shape of desire. Who could know these things? I’m no theologian. I only know desire. God of foot pain…I typed out the slides. On Sunday someone will tell me about how lovely this liturgical God is. Who could make this up?
Anne Carson walked a Spanish-road pilgrimage for half of her book. Later in the book, she admits that these were just dreams, supposedly. Captivating dream, a dream I re-read, dream the metaphor for love, dream the hands on fire the ears turned off the eyes blinded in sleep. A dream I read. Hm.
The sustainability group hosted an event last night. This is before the one tonight. And a woman named MJ walked up to me, telling me about recycling in Pasadena. She could not believe it. According to a video that she had seen, given to us by the recycling plant, you do not need (contrary to this woman’s recycling practice in her childhood) to sort your trash. No, the factory does it for you. “That must be really tedious,” she said. “A really bad job,” she continued. “The turnover must be really high,” she said. “Odorous!” she commented. But she saw a video, making the work easier for these hypothetical employees, that she could not believe. Paper gets sorted, on a conveyor belt, by pointing giant fans all around. Whoosh! And the paper, being paper, flies everywhere. It definitely flies out of the trash pile. Sorted! And she did not believe it. “Death by papercuts,” she said, about the workers.
“The camera gives cheap, prompt, and correct facts to the public,” said Naim June Paik in 1957 (I took this from Anne Carson’s book). Correct facts, supposedly, are a magic that MJ does not believe. Who could blame her? Who would believe her?
I’ve stopped counting by now, although you can keep track. There must be some credibility to it. My body singing its hum, my body singing its song of tiredness, longing for a Spanish road pilgrimage in the shape of a dream, not my desire, not my dream. All appearance. Take its shape. Put out the hands of flame.