The Instagram View

THE ORIGINAL

Which I like, is the complete instant: the woman is alert, curious, alive, listening to someone she knows. It’s a snapshot, but it has an extreme version of a snapshot’s qualities – the sense of life, character, arrested or potential movement. The downward drape of her bangs echoed and lengthened by the long fall of her necklace suggest being pressed upon by more weight than she can bear. The whole figure in itself suggests a sophisticated awareness, but a physical vulnerability.

The space around the figure gives the woman's eyes and the slope of her shoulders: isolation, an awareness of distance, a possible sadness. It leaves room for her to exist and think; it allows her an inner dimension, readable/unreadable as it may be.


THE FIRST CROP

The edit straigtens the image. The figure now has an air of diffidence and uncertainty. The glass of beer is still visible, still off-putting, still reminds the viewer of the setting and the world beyond the frame - the lines of trailing foam mean clearing up, washing up, drying, putting away, sweeping, dusting, the entire labour of maintaining the functions of a space. The glass is large, the standard size. It’s anyone’s glass. It is not particularly a woman's (stereotypically smaller) glass, let alone a beautiful woman's (sterotypically more elegant and expensive) glass.

If you look at the shadowed side of the woman’s face and read it upwards, past the eye and onto the forehead, there is something like the trace of an old scar or other slight damage. This woman is not flawless and without history. She’s not necessarily as young as she might have seemed at first glance.

Eliminating the space behind her left shoulder and back makes her seem physically stronger.

Like mine, one of her eyes takes everything in, unfiltered; the other eye judges. Behind her skin she is evaluating. She is listening, but both her arms are loosely folded near and across the core of her body. She is listening but not abandoning thought or defence. She seems curious, compassionate, gentle; but not a fool.


THE INSTAGRAM CROP

When I first saw this image I was stunned. It’s beautiful. (How could I have taken such a beautiful photo?) This beautiful skin, flawless, this balance of composition, this woman, who is beautiful, offering beauty, vulnerability, dependence?

An instant later: how many other beautiful photos are still hidden in images I thought were finished? (Had some part of my mind, which I should have been listening to all along, seen her this way?)

For a long time I was stunned by this seamless perfection. The photo reminded me of thousands of other photos I'd seen. (Somehow something I'd done achieved parity with the well-regarded. Somehow I'd finally learnt my lesson.)

(How? When?)

It was almost as though that was why I thought it was beautiful - that its agreement with so much I’d seen was its achievement. The beer glass has become Platonic!

The Instagram crop at the bottom of the photo is very, very clever.

That image wasn’t an image of my making. It was what Instagram had done with the interim version, the one I'd tried to post. I think I'd asked for "original" as the crop, but it's more than possible that I misremebered 4:5 (one of the other choices) as being "original".

In the Instagram edit there's no isolation in a pub booth, no glass needing washing after, no possible scar on the forehead, no loosely defensive body position. The woman's eyes aren’t considering so much as fastened on whoever is engaging her. They seem beseeching more than anything.

The photo is otherwise occupied with the woman’s flawless skin, her long necklace drawing attention down to the deep v-cut of her dress and up to her neck and face and eyes.

In this image there is no question of consent: there’s no distance, no evidence of thought, history, evaluation, mind, soul, personhood. The woman is wholly beseeching eyes and undefended skin, beauty and ornament. The image is all invitation.

With a small shock, not much more than a blink of the mind, I realized that the Instagram crop gives us the essence of the male gaze.

Stained Windows & Xfixes

Mark Mordue reminded me of staring at stained glass windows out of boredom.

What you absorb staring at stained glass out of boredom! At stone or brick walls, through windows, at gardens, statues, sky! (Newtonian gravity slowing the brick's ascending arc, muscles and the sun rippling on the brickie's labourer's back.)

Those Stations of the Cross in so many parish churches: cream bas-relief, the figures so exaggeratedly moulded they seemed about to fall off the wall, Mary & Veronica minor-key harmonics of the anguished Holy Face… rounded calves & thighs, strained & cabled tendons, gaping spear-wounded flesh…

There was a slightly self-conscious modernization in the illustration style of a lot of ecclesiastical art & devotional artefacts & ephemera from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, of catechisms, prayer-books, rosary beads, saints’ medals, holy pictures, gospel study handouts. The very streamlined illustrations in paper media seemed to emanate from the U.S.

The crucifixes of South Australian Catholic churches & cathedrals from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s were often designed & executed by Middle-European artists who came to Australia after World War II. These were noticeably more symbolic than those of the old style derived from the southern (mostly Italian) renaissance art & its C16-C19th descendants.

I suspect this was symptomatic of new confidence, consumerism, money and medicine: a not necessarily consciously-formulated perception that life was no longer itself a kind of crucifix, no longer had to be "offered up," was no longer predominantly made of or for or by constant difficulty and unrelieved suffering.

Aah, security

Alarm at 3. Taxi at 4, airport at 4:30 because Alaska strongly suggested we “needed” to be at the airport 2 hours before the flight. There might be long lines at Security.

Ah, Security... Shoes off, the raincoat you’re carrying into the basket, also, if you’re less than 75 years old, your black plastic vest into the basket, also, phone, keys. No, no iPad, tablet, laptop hidden in the bag, only the phone. Step this way into the x-ray chamber. Feet on the yellow footsteps (i.e., legs apart). Hands meeting above your head.

"Step over here. You alarmed the machine in these areas." Yellow circles on the shoulders of the outline I suppose is mine. "So I’m going to have to pat you down."

My shoulders contained, surface to centre: cotton shirt with cotton seam-stitching, no metal studs; camisole shoulder strap, black, indestructible, with perishing spandex, possibly made from recycled milk cartons; skin, sub-surface skin layers, veins, capillaries, layers of tissue, bone, bone marrow.

The girl pulled my shirt sleeves up to my armpit, both arms, and found: nothing up my sleeves, nothing under my arms.

So, firstly: the machines don’t work. Giving false positives isn't "working."

Secondly (looking around): this is an industry.

Thirdly: the industry’s primary purpose is to make money for the manufacturers of the machines. Michael Chertoff – remember him? Heckuva job Brownie’s best friend? Dubya's Administration? – had invested in that company. If the machines don’t work, i.e., if they give false positives all the time, then their primary purpose cannot be to detect explosives. The only thing they do do, unfailingly, all the time, is cost money. So costing money has to be their primary purpose.

Fourthly: the industry’s next purpose is to make you understand that officialdom can do whatever it likes. To you and to anything else.

And tangentially, lastly, but not leastly: Homeland really doesn’t mind if whatever you’ve inserted into your Nike heels blows up in a Social Security Office. SoSec offices have metal detectors, but no transparent, feet-in-the-yellow-circles x-ray chambers.

Delicate Marvels

May it Please the Court

The American workplace is top-down, modelled on the military, on slavery, on the late mediaeval court: management is capricious and treacherous, with quasi-absolute power. The true business of employees is to dance attendance on these petty kings – hence the universal sentiment when the boss is gone (for the week, for the day, for the morning): Thank God. Now I can just do my fucken job.

That's why I'm so engrossed by the York and Lancaster queens, consorts, and relatives of Phillipa Gregory's depictions: they are (also) surrounded by capricious, treacherous, and absolute power, which they must navigate past and through to survive. The fact that these books of Gregory's are so popular, that the Tudor period is so much on our minds & in our media (or the other way round), suggests our growing intuition of the nature of the epochal divide we've crossed.

And so here they are, in historical chronological order:

The Lady of the Rivers (2011) - The story of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the mother of Elizabeth Woodville
The Red Queen (2010) – The story of Lady Margaret Beaufort and her quest to place her son Henry Tudor on the English throne
The White Queen (2009) – The story of Elizabeth Woodville, the queen consort of King Edward IV of England and mother of Edward V
The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012) – The story of Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick "the Kingmaker" and wife of Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, and later of Richard III of England, and of Anne's elder sister Isabel Neville, wife of George Duke of Clarence
The White Princess (2013) – The story of Elizabeth of York, daughter of Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV. Wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII of England
The Last Rose (TBA) – Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (not yet released)

Arundhati Roy Speaks of Our Fridge

The fridge died sometime Sunday afternoon. Stuff in the freezer was melting. There was no running sound.

This had happened several times over the life of this particular fridge. It was 8 years old when it died on January 15.

The life-span of a refrigerator used to be between 20 and 30 years. (Remember The Secret Life of Machines?)

Since this was Sunday afternoon and Green Bin Day wasn't till Tuesday, we had to throw out anything that might have been damaged wholly or partially by defrosting or wholly or partially by de-cooling. Between $200 and $400 dollars' worth of groceries. Between one and two thirds of a week's net income for the household. This had happened at least twice a year for 8 years, and after the 3rd year Amana refused to reimburse us for the losses.

We emptied the freezer first.

Frozen tacos, chicken-legs, ice-cream, ice-cream bonbons (for my birthday the night before); buffalo burgers, chicken legs, frozen sections of Italian loaves, & French baguettes (for toasting later), the ice-packs for strains & muscular treatments.

Then the fridge. Half and half, non-dairy hazelnut vanilla, butter, olives, artichoke hearts, salami, brie, cheddar jack, pancetta, bread, English muffins, tortillas, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, vinaigrette, balsamic vinegar, peanut butter, almond butter, cranberry spread, pumpkin butter spread, English muffins, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, As the contents went down the sink or into the Green Bin I almost began to cry.

Greek olives, Italian salami and pancetta — all that work, growing them pickling them pimento-ing them transporting them, unpacking them stocking them storing them — all those ships across all those seas, all those trucks across all those mountains, along all those valleys — all that history and effort. The whole world was going down that drain.

The Amana: $1600. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.
The new Frigidaire: $1500. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.

Between them a month's gross income. This year we will donate a twelfth of our income to large corporations for products which have, in the first case, already proven to be — what, glossy rubbish? A waste of time, energy, steel, and oil, of the ships and the lives of all who made & moved the food, and all who bought it to prepare and cook it to eat.

And in order to enable the continuing production this glossy rubbish, civil wars are being fought in India, warlords are running slave-mines in Africa... And the question — whether corporations will permit any mindset but their own to survive — goes on walking through the Adivati resistance movements of India, and the loss of habitat everywhere.

Walking with the Comrades, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Books, New York, 2012

Stow, Schepisi, White, Craven, Joyce, McCaffrey, Stow

7.8.10

Took A Counterfeit Silence to work to look at it. Towards midday I found I wasn't feeling well and looked forward to being lunch behind a closed door... Then I made what turned out to be the mistake of reading an article in The Australian.

Fred Schepisi filming The Eye of the Storm – Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush – Schepisi doing an Australian pic (at last, again), doing White, and I hadn't known, hadn't known, and it was happening, and it was going well –

Except that the article was by Craven. Sprawling, sloppy, fundamentally unorganized, reeking of stale alcohol (no Hepworthian lyric or charm, nor even Gopaleen anger/wryness); just critical gush about White, the sensitivity of Schepisi's direction and its necessary femininity in this case.

Now look: I've read enough over the years to know that Schepisi doesn't normally whisper emotions into his actors' ears. Rampling only had 3 weeks for the shoot. So this essentially feminine whispering, this seductive mesmerism, instead of being a function of Rampling's schedule, is, in Craven's universe, Schepisi becoming a Rampling-White Svengali, channelling gayness and White, bringing forth the hidden feminine –

Schepisi's never less than sensitive! Doesn't Craven remember Uluru at the beginning of A Cry in the Dark, remember how The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith turns on the difference between a cut and a dissolve?

But that's not enough. Now Craven has to claim that The Devil's Playground is "the greatest representation of an Australian Catholic childhood ever done"…

What does he know of Australian Catholic childhood? He doesn't know that nothing had changed since The Dead, not even the cooking: there were still heavy, thick, cut-crystal bowls at Sunday lunch, the big meal of the day (roast lamb, also had cold for dinner), long discussions about Irish tenors (the Irish tenor voice now in Gilbert and Sullivan, the G&S societies everywhere), lace curtains, Sunday afternoon visits, verbal political brawls, all held below hung portraits of those gone to The Great War and in front of mantlepieces with smaller upright photographs of those from Changi and Tobruk.

He has no idea how as very very small kid you dreamed in all but Gaelic, how those Sunday afternoon visits took you to the house of the great-aunt who remembers Sydney Kidman coming to say goodbye to her mother when he left for the interior, to create an empire and the over-grazing that has been Australia's bane.

He has no idea about the Pellegrini's, suppliers of incense & other necessities: rosary beads, prayer books, missals, scapulars, holy pictures, Immaculate Conception medals, first communion medals, confirmation medals, ordinary saints' medals, statues – he has no idea of the bric a brac made a Catholic childhood of that era, the happiness of the school holiday on St. Patrick's Day, the rose-petals on Holy Thursday (still weeping for Adonis)...

He has no idea that The Dead is more relevant to Australian Catholic childhood than Portrait of the Artist or The Devil's Playground. He doesn't mention Catherine Keneally's books at all. He doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, doesn't care because it doesn't matter: the copy's in, the paper's out, right, wrong, or blue in the face – no one's going to challenge it or him because Australia can only have one eminence at any one time – critic, climate scientist, poet, director, jurist.

Craven knows The Devil's Playground is a critique of the Catholic Church; he doesn't bother or have to bother to distinguish the church from the childhood. He's read Portrait, and there's a speech in Devil's Playground straight from it, so there's Irish Catholic Australian childhood for you: subject signed, sealed and delivered. The church stands in for the childhood and male stands in for all. There's your bloody article and that's that.

As for Devil's Playground itself: Arthur Dignam will never be convincing as a heterosexual, Thomas Keneally will never be convincing as anything; the speeches about The Rules, The Rules, are heavy-handed, forced and false; the ominous music by Bruce Smeaton laid over the opening shot as we peer around the bend in the very muddy river makes us wonder if Picnic at Hanging Rock has taken to the water. It's a far less perfect film than we thought it was or wanted it to be. It was a first feature by a new director; it was achieved against formidable odds; it was the work of a potentially great film-maker with an already impressive control of sound perspective and a visual technique that remains unique, and who has done outstanding work since.

So why does Craven even bother to make the claim? He doesn't know the subject or he'd know The Dead is more relevant than Portrait. He's telling us, again, that he knows more about everything than any of us ever will, no matter what experience or expertise we may have been forced to inherit or internalize, no matter what knowledge or experience he actually lacks.

And the writing! The badly-constructed sentences, the implicit dissing of everything he's not in the act of praising,  the self-aggrandizement via the utterly unnecessary inclusion of his own history ("now so different from reading it at 20"), the sheer sense of dissipation the prose always exudes: reading it's like being within reeking-range of a drunk man spewing.

A spewing drunk. That's what we've got for a critic. No wonder I feel ill.

And so, lunch. A closed door, some cold water. Some more cold water.

After a while I betook myself to the Stow. When he died I looked him up – Wikipedia, probably – and found a biography so painfully discreet it screamed. The first paragraph of The Merry Go Round in the Sea, quoted somewhere on the web, a detailed description of the central iron post of the of the merry go round rendered in terms of tailoring / costume, is not something any straight man would have written. Well, no straight man after Henry James.

And it was clear as I read, with greater and greater depression and horror, that Stow's closeting had destroyed the poetry: it was opaque, portentous, hysterical, and twee; lots and lots of borrowing from Judith Wright, and not much done with that… The best thing in the book was the adaptation of Lao Tsu, though at times he seemed to be calling the Tao God (I can see why, but no)… But if I want to read Lao Tsu I'll read a translation that starts at the beginning and goes through to the end.

It was miserable… I won't be critiquing Stow, though; I've heard and am glad to have heard that the novels and the stories are good.

For the rest of the day I read an inept Anne McCaffrey book, that being all the strength I had; it was derived from The Sword at Sunset and The Crystal Cave and the knife-fight at end of Dune; it had an utterly Sutcliffian plot-structure.

It seems I like the story of Artos the Bear getting horses from southern Gaul no matter how badly it's told – hope at the beginning of the tale set far in the past, all the arguments done with.

Half an Hour Well Spent

I went right through the 800s at my local library the other day. I'd never done that before.

Found a book of Grace Paley's poems (a real poet), a late book of Annie Dillard essays, and Antonia Fraser's memoir about Hard Pinter.

Snagged 'em all. With a graphic novel in drawings and photos about Afghanistan, from 1986, from the graphic novel section.

The bag is full of riches. Life is full of amplitude.

The Karate Kid remake

11.13.10

The U.S. is now officially a client state. I saw it for a certainty when I watched The Karate Kid remake. Dre's mother had to go to China for a job.

That feeling of no bottom to my stomach was fear.

We've watched and lived through an epochal shift in geo-political power, and that moves the foundation of even an individual's identity.

You absorb the major power relations of the world as a cognitive and emotional foundation, a major indication of your place in it; and you do that when you're very, very young.

Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 1

Jan 2010: It's almost impossible to know the truth.

One day on the web, one of the Australian sites – I think it was the SMH – had an article about the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen late last year. The writer said he'd been in a closed-door session and that the talks collapsed because (impossible to say in the "left-dominated" discourse of mass-media) they were torpedoed by third-world countries – India and China – and not by the wicked imperialists. He went on to say that India and China do not want severe carbon emissions controls because they want a Western standard of living and are using coal-fired power-plants to get it. In this version, India and China calculated that, if the talks collapsed, Obama would be blamed.

Two days later, on the web, I read an article by George Monbiot – the BBC? New Matilda? – saying that he, too, was at the Copenhagen talks and behind closed doors (in a position to know what happened there). Monbiot said the talks collapsed because Obama gave China no option but to walk out. The proposal Obama put, Monbiot said, would have caused China grave loss of face, had been calculated beforehand to cause the walkout, and so to cause the climate talks to fail.

Who am I to believe? How on earth am I to judge between these two diametrically opposed insider reports?

So much of my world is like that. I've lost track of how many times a day I say "I don't know." The public wants to know why "my computer is doing […]." I want to know why management is doing […]. I don't know why General Motors isn't building electric cars, why Obama is raising troop levels in Afghanistan, why Guantánamo and Bagram haven't been closed, why our Central Asia policy and our green energy policy aren't the same policy, why car-repair costs so much, why offices aren't routinely equipped with full-spectrum lighting.

I had some idea of industrial processes from working in a steel-town once and then teaching technical report-writing for several years; I had some idea of farming from working in a dairy-farming district once and having distant relatives who were farmers. But at this point I seem to have very little idea about anything at all – and I'm well-educated, literate, book-reading, and, by most standards, well-informed. I join the dots about current western / global circumstances much better than my colleagues. And yet my ignorance about how the world around me functions is staggering. This is no way to run an adulthood, let alone a democracy.

At the same time I'm aware that steel production has been offshored, that farming is now a corporate mega-enterprise, and so is government. I'm aware that a vast mechanism for obscuring and obliterating the truth now exists: paid proselytizers, presented on the news as independent observers and commentators; corporate mainstream media determination not to report on its own funding of legislation; corporate mainstream media determination to maximize profit / audience by substituting staged and vicious games for investigation of news, politics, education, world affairs, local government, the environment, the climate talks in Copenhagen.

Because corporations now do almost everything that genetic people used to do, the details of almost every process that feeds, transports, houses, and employs us, have become commercial, proprietary information.

I shouldn't be puzzled at my inability to know what's going on. The world, all of it, even the undiscovered creatures at the bottom of the sea, even the things We the People are supposed to own – is now topper than top secret.

It's trade secret.

Dry December

12.9.09. Arctic air, still; the temperatures somewhere between 20 and 30 degrees Fahreneheit. It's cold and whitegold at walking level and blue and calm above.

But yesterday at lunchtime I drove to Fred Meyer because it was windy. I got out of the car and began walking through this unbearably bright silver-white sunlight. I looked down because looking up was painful. Under the SUV I'd parked next to there was an exhaust pipe dripping, and in and around the puddle beneath, three small, black birds chattering and bathing and drinking.

For a minute I wondered if they were bathing and drinking in oil – and then realized the pipe was dripping water. It hadn't heated enough to burn off the overnight condensation.

I looked up. Asphalt, pale concrete, bright hard ground, withered grass; no water between the SUV exhaust-pipe and the river, two miles north.

And then I realized that we, the birds and everyone else, were surrounded by a bright, cold drought.