"DEAR LEADER"

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As promised, I will now attempt to dissect the killer formula behind these starlets’ photographic replicas. The power, the éminence grise, behind these two pixies, I so generously posted in today’s and last Tuesday’s entries. BTW, I have no idea who Josie Maran is, but I am familiar with Jessica Alba and of the ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony, between hers truly, and Miss Jessica Biel. If I am not mistaken, these two young women are being currently toted as America’s hottest shakespians, or rather, “best in show”, in a supporting role as a bathing beauty.

Notwithstanding this aside, and in order to properly complete this task, I undertook to partner with a literary companion to search the internet and settled with a symbols dictionary, so as to remain as objective and un-lascivious as might be expected of a male of this specie. One who could infuse this entry with credibility and referential certitude, as oppose to vaguely self referential ineptitude.

Without much thought or premeditation, I briefly transcribed into words what I was seeing on screen. Also, and as previously mentioned, least we forget; I stumbled upon these screen saving beauties, on the same website where as lady luck would have it, I also found a very atonal, Middle Eastern version of Nokia’s iconic ring tune. (Furthermore, and as you may already know, cell phone manufacturers are forced to devote a lot of their precious, and limited global resources, to transcribing their “flagship” ring tones into other languages, and craft multi-culturally appropriate Pavlovian melodies, to win, the hearts and minds of the masses).

Josie Maran(Tuesday the 18th): Image includes three obvious and visible references.

Sunset :

As the orbit of Venus, is closer to the sun than is the earth’s, it is never seen more than 48 degrees from the sun. This means that Venus is visible as the Morning star or Evening star in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. Thus Venus can only be seen from earth just before sunrise in the morning or just after sunset in the evening. As you can see, the use of the sunset, as a background for the Josie Maran image, wether, conscious or unconscious can be easily associated with Venus, the goddess of beauty, love and fertility.

Rocky Seashore (Ocean scape included)*:

As for the rocky seashore behind her, I will have to subjectively interpret its meaning, as a quick search on the internet did not reveal any interesting references, or reasons why the creatives, behind this image, decided to incorporate it in the shot.
Based on my knowledge of classical texts, and secure in the knowledge that water is supposed to represent nature’s passive element and is the ultimate solvent, I may be correct in presuming that the viewer is to feel non-threatened by this beauty but not so much so as to render her bland and unexciting.

The rocky shore line, is, I presume, meant to spice it up so to speak, infuse the scene with a bit of danger and mystery. Josie wants to be remembered as the girl next door, who might also, just as well spank you if you misbehave. She wants to pack enough of a punch so that you’ll keep a close but admiring distance. She’s just out of your reach, someone else’s treat. Unless, that is, you can in turn prove that, you are indeed equal to her needs. A task, not so easily achieved, as the competition for such a beauty is stiff. In order to join her archetype on these rocky shores, you will have to earn it, and prove to this Aphrodite, that you can swim.

And what about that autograph, which also happens to be our third and final peek: After-all, she may seem unapproachable and beyond reach, but still, she is a human being and would not want you to think that she does not appreciate her legions of teenage fans. Think of it as a kiss on the cheek, a smile, a look back and a wink as she steps into the limousine.

As for Ms. Alba, I would venture to think that the image above is meant to have you believe that she’d be a better mother to your kids than Josie, who, if you’re not jealously careful, might run off with Neptune, when you’re not looking. Frankly who would blame her, have you seen how well hung Neptune is? and from the looks of you, all you’ve got going; besides that hair piece, is a few moles and that gun you’re holding.**

* To separate these two, into distinct symbolic representations, seems at this point in time, inappropriate.
**A Corsican Welcome.

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A quick note please: To experience this entry, as it was meant to be, it would be best to click the MP3 above. A pop up will appear, which you will need to forcibly shove aside, so as not to obscure your reading pleasure. Until such a time as I can figure out how to play it automatically, you will need to comply with this directive. Thank you, the management….

Begin:

On a whim, I undertook to search for Arabic ring tones and in the process of expanding my search, as is so often the case, I quickly became mired in a tangled web of baroque web pages, MP3s, MIDIs, pop ups, Dubai mortgages and Arabian real estate.

To my here disbeliefs, the Muezzin’s MIDIs is, if well intoned, not a bad way to shake off some dream sleep and double check, how red delicious, Kabul’s sunsets might look to the Almighty™, after a long day. In the meantime, while browsing afore mentioned website I nearly picked up my pen to sign these dotted lines: “Allah is defined as the ONE who ALONE, without partners or helpers created all that IS created in creation, either known or unknown.” Sounds like an all rights grab to me; and because we should be so lucky, his excellency, rimes with intellectual property…… How’s about 72 attorneys…..?

While desperately trying to extirpate myself from a dozen web pages, I inadvertently followed a link and came upon afore posted, Kafir beauties; which, to my manly delights, featured scantily clad celebrities. Cell phone mementoes, that to many a teenage dream screams: “Call me…!”. Afterall, it does not hurt to dream a little, every time you hear that ring tone and pick up the phone; like snacking between meals, sneaking a peek, or coping a flat screen, when no one’s looking….. If only that damn LCD didn’t fade to black, with such annoying regularity.

As an aside, later today, I shall also explore why we primates find such images so compelling, and how they are, ever so deftly constructed to lure so many fishes with nothing but a hook and no bait. Why is it that images of such enticing and classically trained young ladies, always seem to say: Why isn’t she calling.?
Some day, I promess, I shall reveal, lay bare and peel back, the many layers of this cake. Trust me, nothing but good things awaits us in this future and upcoming journey.

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Two things for Friday Sept Sixth:

Thing One: I just took a nap for no other reason that I had to drive to Berkeley to deliver some promos for bulk mailing. After that, I went for a walk through UC, the university. Like an old man on his afternoon walk, my hands behind my back, I reviewed the offerings laid out on small tables where students proposed to let others, not I, join various ethnicities, to presumably once again bond and share a common ancestry, find solace amid a sea of unfamiliar kissters and grins. As if that was a barrel of monkeys, or something.

When I first moved to this country, when I was fourteen, it never failed, I had to be introduced to every French, Dick and Harry who happened to live within a 200 miles radius of me. Wether I like it or not I had to play the little diplomat, shake their sweaty paws and prove to the peanut gallery that indeed we were French, not some knock off, some cheap Chinese copy. That generally was achieved by muttering a few words, twirling our mustaches and cursing “Les Roast-Beef “.

As if sniffing a terrier’s crack somehow smelled better to another terrier than a pug’s posterior or a shepherd’s ass. So, as I was saying; I strolled by so many recruiting stations that I became frightened and had to turn back, retrace my steps, return to my car and begin the short ride home to Saint Francis; but not before noticing the Future Business Leaders’ hermit crab convention and the Future Accountants of America ‘s kissing station. Like a fucking Carny, but scary…. I quickened the pace and then down right ran as fast as my shackles would let me.

Thing two: When you are forty two, going on forty three, you’d better not succumb to the culinary temptations of Telegraph avenue, which as you might have presumed, and rightly so, are chuck full of tricks and treats for teens. I made the mistake of ordering a large frozen yogurt on this empty stomach. Large frozen treat came with a paddle, for scooping, and could barely be dragged, never-mind carried. It came oozing, out of the frozen yogurt machine, all 50 gallons of it and had to be consumed alone, with no other posse or company than my own.

Needless to say, on the bridge back to San Francisky, my lids were droopy and my killer driving instincts severely diminished. I hopped into bed, closed my eyes and threw off the main switch. When I woke up, I did not really wake, just dreamed that I was waking and cutting myself a piece of salami. As I was chewing I came to realize that there normally is, no cutting board or salami in my bedroom; let alone on my bed, at least not in the past several years of domesticity. I decided to double check that what I was tasting was real, not some fucking dream, that it was indeed a piece of dried and smoked meat I was indeed, masticating. That did it, and next thing I know, I am truly awake, with both my hands deep inside my mouth, searching for that salami treat I could have sworn I was chewing.

Thing Three: Look up, not at the night sky, just the top of this page and behold the galaxies. I love this image. Every point, every spec, a galaxy. I even tried to run the dust and scratch filter in Photoshop and momentarily cleaned a few billion errand stars, clusters and galaxies. But not to cause, any real, intergalactic damage, I, promptly, commanded Z, and reverted to saved, right away.

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I had forgotten how much fun it is to shoot what’s on broadcast TV. In the seventies and the early eighties, a lot of photographers built their entire careers on taking pictures of what was on the telly. The resulting images are somewhat gimmicky and never that interesting, but undeniably fun and entertaining. At the end of the day, the appropriative ease and speed with which you can take pictures of television screens is just too much of a no brainer; which is not to say that ease and speed are not photographically good things. I make enough sweeping generalizations as it is already. Come to think of it, TV stills are to photography, what comic books were to Pop Art in the sixties, it’s seen better days. Nevertheless, I am sure that somewhere, somehow, a lone genius is reviving the genre, and is being ignored because of flippantly opinionated people like me.

Still, I would not mind seeing a new wave emerge from that Phoenix’ ashes. Problem is, flat screens don’t flicker, which is unfortunate since half the fun is working with and around the cathode’s flickering rays. On top of it all, to add insults to injury, digital cameras are making the process ever cheaper, quicker and easier.

Case in point, last saturday night, after returning from Slideluck Potshow, which included my work in the mix, I sat in from of my TV, with my girlfriend’s new point and shoot and captured “digitally”, close to six hundred pics while she slept next to me. Out of those six hundreds, I’d venture to say that almost half turned out nicely, even if they are, in my mind, devoid of value. The other three hundreds fell victim to flicker and delay.

So, out of guilt and shame, I further combined some of them into diptychs to feel like I was actually being creative, as opposed to some late nite fingering perv, pleasuring the trigger for leisure. As for screen stills, the ones I like the most are those where the photographer steps back to include the TV dinner, a fork and a spoon. Something I did not do.
In order to make this photographic sub-specie more interesting one would need to create a story board and hunt down images* that best fit the script to create “cathodovelas” using found images available on TV, Youtube or DVDs. If I feel like it some day, I might experiment with it, as for now, I’ll stick with large format. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be a bad way to spend an idle saturday night.

*which I am sure has already been attempted.

Andreas Gursky and Massimo Vitali (pictured above). Can’t I just say that I like Massimo Vitali but don’t care much about Gursky? Many happy returns to Mr.Gursky, but still, have I suddenly become French, or something? Do I not like him because he comes from a people who rapes our women and drinks our champagne, indulges in blitztkrieg, pre-cooked sausages and dubious sexual practices. Is it possible that deep inside, I equate German successes with grape shot and pillage. Is it possible that despite our common humanity, I still find myself looking east and wondering when Death Heads will violate our borders and grace us with their raves, chainsaws, black socks and speeches?

Do we really need another German theory of everything? Is it absolutely neccessary? Can’t I just jaywalk in Berlin, at four o’clock in the morning, without wondering if the Politzei will come out and slap me like a bitch? Do I really have to endure another lecture on American foreign policy, while his traveling companion reaches round to borrow my money?: “wir möchten etwas Geld borgen. Herr, wir möchte überwachen unser Kamerad sodomise Geschlechtsklaven….! Run it thru Google translate and see what it means…!!!!! Results may vary.

As for Gursky, have you ever walked up to one of his prints*? Don’t get me wrong, I love large prints, I have been dreaming of enlarging ever since my brother got me into photography, back in the mid seventies; but until recently anything larger than a 16by20 was so expensive that you actually needed to be rich to afford one; let alone two or three. It meant that you could afford to show the Jones that their 4by6s didn’t quite cut it.

Large prints can compete with paintings, if it’s big it’s easier to call it painterly, and that’s what they call it, besides monumental and panoramic. Afterall, color photography did not become respectable until the nineteen seventies, and black and white before that, was not considered an art until the 40s or 50s. In a perfect world, who gives a shit: “Who cares if its black and white, as long as it catches light”**.

I keep being told that Gursky is important in the grand scheme of things but I just don’t get it. For my money, I’ll take Massimo any day. His work is so much more interesting, cohesive and pleasing, it doesn’t feel contrived or labored. Unlike Gursky, Vitali’s images manage to make you feel that maybe, just may be, humanity has some redeeming qualities. Am I partial to Vitali because he’s more stilettoed than jackbooted? Who knows; I’m so over big ideas anyway!

I know fine art, isn’t supposed to be funny but does Gursky really need to remind me. Call me Ishtar but it seems to me that contemporary German art’s schickt is to exploit our need to believe that, if it’s disciplined, dark, tortured and haunted(!), it has to be deep, important and arrestingly ravishing(!), well worth paying with those chocolate coated Prozacs you’ ve been hearing so much about these days. Kinda like Mao and contemporary Chinese art. Without the Great Helmsman***, how the fuck are you supposed to know where it’s made! Afterall, you’re never too happy, as when the passion of your Christ happens to be a canvas, techno, straw and bee’s wax.

Fame is frightening isn’t it, doubly so because it has become so neccesary to achieve, especially when a simple “I love you” from your girlfriend or your kids is all you need to keep you happy. Unfortunately, I would like nothing more than to have enough cash to do as I artfully(!) please; without having to think about market forces, audiences, or the foods and staples that graced the tables where I ate. I’d rather not have to perform financial miracles and multiply the fishes, but just the same, fame too often means that to get what you want often involves bringing attention to yourself, and doing so over and over again. May be someday, after years of repeated efforts, I’ll manage to squirrel enough cash to pay the ransom I’ve put on my head. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining …… it’s just that my piriformis hurts like shit. I hear that at this age, it’s perfectly normal to feel pain in my ass when it pisses down my leg and tells me it’s raining.

* They look like shit.
** Personally adapted from the words of the powerfully diminutive Deng Xiaoping.: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”.
*** Or the “Mao Lisa”, as I like to call it.

Here are some of the books I have read or re-read in the past year and would highly recommend. Since I have reviewed some of them as of late, I figured I’d throw in a few more. All these books are great but I’ll add a star next to those which I felt were better than good, two stars to those I considered excellent and three stars to those few tomes I think are simply exceptional. I am afraid that my reading list does not include fiction. At some point I’ll go through my bookshelves and the basement to put together a list of the past five years(may be). I also tend to give away books to friends and acquaintances when I am done with them, less clutter and it saves trees even if I am never quite sure if anyone reads them or just simply humors me.

In no particular order:

How the Scots invented the modern world, Arthur Herman ..+.. The Gate, Francois Bizot ** ..+.. The Battle for Spain, Anthony Beevor ..+.. Churchill, a biography, Roy Jenkins ..+.. Imperial life in the Emerald city, Inside Iraq’s Green zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran** ..+.. Samurai William, Giles Milton* ..+.. Collapse, Jared Diamond ..+.. Mao, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday** ..+.. Chinese Lessons, John Pomfret* ..+.. Civilizations, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto ..+.. Under the loving care of the fatherly leader, North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, Bradley K.Martin ..+.. Ivan’s War, Catherine Merridale*..+.. Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman ..+.. Mapping mars, Olivier Morton* ..+.. The Places in Between, Rory Stewart* ..+.. Stumbling on Happiness, daniel Gilbert ..+.. Red China Blues, Jan Wong ..+.. The Bounty; The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty, Caroline Alexander*re-read ..+.. Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz re-read ..+.. Ghengis Khan and the making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford ***re-read ..+.. The History of Money, Jack Weatherford*..+.. Paris 1919: Six months that changed the World, Margaret MacMillan ..+.. The Best American Science and Nature writing 2005, Jonathan Weiner(editor)..+.. Krakatoa; The day the World exploded, Simon Winchester..+.. To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman ..+.. King Leopold’s Ghosts: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa*re-read ..+.. Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair, Matthew Hart. All these books taste great.

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In the early spring of 1938, my grandfather was approached by a representative of Chang Kai-shek’s government and was invited to lecture at Chongqing’s Polytechnical Teachers’ Institute. Chinese forces had recently moved their capital from Nanjing to Chongqing to continue fighting Imperial Japan’s brutal occupation of China’s coast and cities.
China’s strong man had been impressed by my grandfather’s easy wit and strong command of the Chinese language and following a chance encounter, while attending a conference on Sichuan’s largest city, the two men had struck up a friendship which was to last for forty years and enrich both their lives and families.

It had been during an extended trip to China’s western provinces, where my grandfather had hoped to further refine his already prodigious knowledge of Chinese dialects and languages, that he had unwittingly walked into a temple in the hopes of visiting with the local abbot, but had instead stumbled, quite innocently, into Chiang and members of his extended family. The two men had exchanged pleasantries but had soon been engrossed in conversation the likes of which his aide de camp had never seen him indulge in. At the time, the great man was secretly planning on leading a million nationalist conscripts in a bloody campaign to flush out Mao’s red bandits from Gansu and Shaanxi; instead of fighting the Japanese with the help of the communists, to which he had earlier agreed.

In 1934, Mao’s troops had managed to regroup and lick their wounds after enduring a forced march and a fighting retreat to escape Chiang’s military advances into their original soviet base in Jiangxi province. His army, thinned by hunger, disease and fiercely contested military clashes had seen it ranks severely diminished, as well as those of the first Chinese Soviet Republic. Only a few thousand bloodied and exhausted veterans remained.
Strategic plans to finish them off had been drawn in 1936 but Chiang had been kidnapped by Chang Hsueh-liang and forced to agree to a truce and a much hated treaty between him and Mao’s communist party to fight the Japanese menace together in the East.

A few weeks earlier, after a long and treacherous sea voyage on the HMS Bering Straits and a fourteen day trip up the Yangzte, my grandfather had found himself gazing upon a great alluvial plain, absentmindedly marveling at the expertly planted rice paddies over which so many tanned and bare chested natives toiled night and day. To get this far into China’s countryside, he had managed to hitch a ride in Chiang’s private car which had now just stopped to let its half dozen military officers and their mistresses stretch their legs and smoke the french cigarettes, he had bought in Hong Kong upon disembarking in Tsim Cha Sui; knowing that someday he might call upon this camaraderie to achieve his many aims, dreams and wishes.
Making life long friends out of casual acquaintances had always been a gift he by now, almost took for granted; but this time, it was to forever change his life in ways he could never have anticipated. While China tried to march onward and away from its troubled and tortured past, my grandfather found himself swept up and transformed by events far beyond his grasp, and which were to irrevocably change his life; in ways his children and grandchildren would to this day marvel at. China was about to be further put to the sword and the torch but his fate was about to become more unexpected than his already storied escape from the impoverished and vengeful hills of his Corsican birthplace.

My grandfather started life as the youngest son of a family of merchants whose fortunes were being rapidly diminished by an influx of cheap imported salt and a new road recently built and completed by German prisoners of war; as part of reparations designed to punish, but also to compensate French economic losses suffered during the first World war. The road brought my ambitious grandfather new found opportunities to escape the family’s trade but along with the outside world in came the Spanish flu, and the cheap salt which had previously brought them the great wealth and prestige this family of Corsican aristocrats had grown accustomed to, in their distant and storied past. The back of the family’s mules and it’s fortune, were soon broken by this newfound commercial route and the dreaded flu sent most of his siblings and relatives, to early and unexpectedly rocky graves.

Shortly after burying a sister and an older brother, in November 1920, he rode the last mule train to the sea and boarded the rusted hulk of an Italian ship ferrying a load of wine and tangerines to Sorrento, on Italy’s Amalfi coast. From Sorrento, he made his way to Padua and called on a family friend his father had befriended in World War I. Over a glass of wine, tomato slices and Bruccio cheese he recounted the family’s fall from grace and called on him to make good on the promises he had made while battling the guns the Kaiser and his Huns had so fiendishly and abundantly mass produced in the Ruhr valley.

Luciano Battesti had met my grandfather’s father in the trenches and had been billeted in small rain beaten, beet farming villages, between Lille and Cambrai. Even-though my great grandfather was Corsican, and Luciano Italian, they had managed to disregard the ancestral enmities between the two countries, and in and amongst the muddied guts and rotting corpses of their compatriots, the two young men had become friends in Pozières and Bazentin.

Four years had past since that summer and Luciano could do nothing but mourn the death of his old friend and offer my grandfather a job as a clerical Orientalist in Padua University’s Institute of Far Eastern languages; where he remained until 1922, when he was releaved of his duties after refusing to help Padua’s militias torch old books and anarchist manuscripts, deemed unpatriotic by Benito Mussolini and his fascist brutes…..

To be continued……

In other news:

A man walks in his house with a duck tucked under his arm.
Upon seeing his wife he pronounces out loud:
“This is the pig I’ve been fucking all this time….!”
Upon hearing this, his wife, perplexed and amused, responded in surprise:
” Honey, that’s not a pig, that’s a duck under your arm…!
” I wasn’t talking to you….” the man quacked back to his wife.

#

Since all we get these days are data files and images, is it too much to ask to get to know what Mars sounds like….?

Like any self respecting fan of all things celestial, I take great pleasure in reveling in the facts that no matter how self-obsessed or delusional I may get, there is always a place, far from where I dwell, where I can go and marvel at the unmentionable vastness of the known universe.

A few weeks back, in early July, I went camping in the Sierra Nevadas where, as luck would have it, this god fearing, prostate packing, 42 year old’s tool, made him get up and take a mid-summer’s night piss on the closest evergreen he could see. Not too close to my tent as one might suffer the consequences….. le lendemain…..but not too far either, as to not fall, and off that precipitous cliff he might have imagined. Being that it was the middle of a dark and moonless night, it seemed reasonable to assume that a precipice might be harder to anticipate if your neck is cranked way back, looking up and away.

I like to wonder as much as the next guey**, but plunging to my death while relieving myself, is a stunt I’d rather wait to taste just before I finally take my last steps and kiss The Little Prince’s cape…… But when I do, we’ll kiss and greet on both cheeks, and I’ll finally get to piss on that snake, the one that looks like those hats men used to wear, before JFK caught a bullet with the back of his head (if he had worn a hat, that fateful day in Dallas, instead of baring his head to an assassin’s rifled gaze, he might have lived out a more lead free and prosperous presidency).

There’s nothing like looking up at the sky and pissing on the ground beneath it. There’s still nothing like reminding the forest and the beasts that a man will pay twenty bucks to stay the night, eat a steak and drive home the next day. It’s not every day that he gets to piss on a stump beneath the Milky way……Just another way to further remind this here Universe, that free will and a tank of gasoline brought me here, while ‘they’, will spend the rest of their natural living days trying to open garbage pales or chase down four legged protein shakes…….
At the very least, not bothering to treck on over to the latrines, at three o’clock in the morning, feels better than splitting open my chin on the bathroom sink…….and it’s good way to keep my feminine side humming………since whatever estrogen I have coursing through my veins needs as much tending, as the peaches in Voltaire’s silk breeches; those same treatises where Buddha meets Plato meets Rousseau meets snow globes or the cold wet steel of a French Guillotine (I have a hard time believing that Voltaire did much gardening and will presume that he meant it metaphorically).

As I stood there, I thought about the fact that there are millions of great images of Mars, Saturn and the Moon***, but that galactic sound files are not that easily found or downloaded on the information super highway. I understand, but regret that because there are no molecules for sound waves to travel within the vacuum of space, that there is no sweet celestial music for us to hear. Nevertheless, Mars has an atmosphere and that ought to be worth at least an MP3.

The only space recording I have ever heard came from what the Cassini/Huygens probe sent back and recorded while descending into Titan’s atmosphere. That was sweet… but in the future, can I please listen to other atmospheres.

In other news, landslide and meteor strikes; how on earth are we supposed to get out of the way if there is not a sound to be heard on either side of the Moon.

* Multi-year mission to Saturn and it’s moons.
** Guey. That would loosely translate as “dude”, in Spanish.
*** Hell, as we speak, they are sending a giant camera to Pluto which will reach the icy body in a little more than a decade.
# Also commonly known as the Red Eye nebula.

My friend Raul posted an image by Peter Henry Emerson who “was one of the first vocal proponents of “naturalistic” art photography (photography done out in the field) at a time when most art photographers worked exclusively in the studio” and it got me all thinking and shit.

Looking at these photographs reminded me of how great it would have been if photography had been invented by amphibians, in a Cambrian swamp the size of Switzerland. I’d kill to see some pics, of the first flowering plants, Napoleon and Josephine or Polynesia, circa 1465.

Emerson(1856-1936) quoted*: “I have…I regret it deeply, compared photographs to great works of art, and photographers to great artists. It was rash and thoughtless, and my punishment is having to acknowledge it now… In short, I throw my lot in with those who say that Photography is a very limited art. I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion…”

History proved him wrong, even if it took far too long. After him came the throngs who blissfully ignored the ruminations of a man who lacked the imagination to understand that, given time, any new form of self expression will eventually blossom.

Over time, artistic expression accrues and grows like those interest rates your bank charges. Despite what he thought, there is nothing like traveling back in time and seeing what it really looked like; at least through someone else’s eyes. To my eyes, it’s actually more interesting, than any thought he might have ever had in his lifetime.

*Via Raul Gutierrez.

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I am currently in the process of writing and editing a white paper for submission in the “Dawson City, Boeuf/Meyer/Ju’dGazon, Neo-pictorialist Ontological Filipo-Acadist journal and foundation”; an on-line, bilingual, Canadian bimonthly publication and society, dedicated to the advancement and promotion of contemporary post-Jungian cross-gender boundaries in French Canadian neo-pictorialists. Here are a few excerpts in lieu of a preview…..

In other notes, I originally delivered a ‘pre-print’ version of this paper, in lecture form, to the Supreme First-Nation Tribal Gerontology Leadership Council for the Preservation and Advancement of Pre-Columbian Lingual Atrabilism and Gender Representation in Sub-Arctic Agrarian Atavistic societies.*1

Synopsis:

“Post-Jungian empirical naming conventions and cultural appropriations in French Canadian contemporary Photography”. Authorship by Olivier Laude, ‘Proboscis Annum’ Post Doctoral recipient of the Judith Butler Gender Prognosis Honorary academic medal, awarded yearly to an outstanding post-doctoral candidate involved in the promotion and dissemination of academic excellence in the fields of Lingual Atrabilism and Pre-Columbian gender representation in sub-arctic neo-agrarian consanguineous societies.

Begin excerpt*2:

Post-Jungian literary critics have only recently started dissecting the contemporary ontology of sub-arctic still-pictorialists and are presently adopting interdisciplinary gender-branding polities to deconstruct social and cultural post-reconstructivist cross-gender appropriation theories in urban and pre-urban socio-representative agrarian societies. Once the exclusive neo-conformist stomping grounds of post-modern gender theorists these institutionalized social constructions, or “artifacts”, have recently been adopted by Acadians, who, ten to twelve years ago started using the pictorial representation of their “non de plume” as boundary cannons; itself a revolutionary and transformative ontological construct designed to outline the regenerative nature of perceived cultural exploitations at the hand of filipo-lingual deconstructivists…………..Unwittingly, subsequent generations of Acadian pictorialists quantified these empirical and cultural appropriative naming conventions within the same socialized interpretative and anti-deterministic “artifacts” as their filipo-lingual theoritical nemesis……….More recently, an ethno-political fracas over the abuse and overt use of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has both prefigured and enriched the current social and resulting filipo-Acadian discourse by injecting much needed Durkeimian dialectics between Filipo-lingual pictorialists and Filipo-Acadists……….. Might we be living in a time when these feuding and long standing epistemological rifts between Filipo-pictorialists and Filipo-Acadists are to be resolved once and for all ? We shall see……

In the meantime, I am looking forward to seeing you all next spring at the 53rd annual convention of the “Dawson City, Boeuf/Meyer/Ju’dGazon, Neo-pictorialist Ontological Filipo-Acadist foundation”, in Dawson City.

*1-I understand this method is unorthodox but ‘in the text’ annotations were deemed necessary to these pre-journaled intrusions .
*2-Courtesy of the “Dawson City, Boeuf/Meyer/Ju’dGazon, Neo-pictorialist Ontological Filipo-Acadist foundation”.