insane busy week. more busyness to come.

todo:
1. realize short term and long term financial goals
2. thai reading and writing
3. send letters
4. reclaim my mental real estate
5. hello LA

pine flat

returning from an exhausting but wonderful short stay at pine flat lake, just south of the sequoias. california never ceases to amaze me. we had a big sleepover on the second floor of a motel room which looked out on to the lake and a perfect looking tree heavy mound named owl mountain.

boys woke up at 645 am to get ready for their race- coconut water, shammy butter, cute hip stretching, bananas, gear, gear, gear. wasn't long before they were off to register and i had the other early morning to myself with quinoa and hard boiled egg and a lazy lay in bed. i got up to catch my first sight of riders going by.

they look like a school of fish. they are also invisible as men. they can only be seen as war machines, or moving bodies. nothing idiosyncratic besides their jerseys and gear. that is amazing to me.

a great day largely because i hiked around the lake in forbidden areas and i am beginning to really feel the new camera as a serious keeper. it's slowly becoming my third arm. we will see how these pictures turn out because the camera is a breeze to handle and shoot. our hotel room, yucca, cactus, unborn poppies, fisherman, mountains and mountains, some cyclists, and oranges at the end.

i am slightly embarrassed because i did have a nightmare that night, and the boys heard me say weird loud things in my sleep. not long after i awoke, i described my nightmare very fast and then even more quickly fell right back to sleep.

test roll #1

exhibit zach iannazzi

TS: Yes, I hate that too. The word “series” is a diminutive attachment. A series is something that pretends as if one picture has no value and you need the series to give it that value. You wouldn’t say, for instance, that James Joyce wrote “a series of books”.

The oeuvre’s construction is indeed like that of a larger, complex building. While each room has a different size, quality, and function, and may be considered independently, all have reference to each other, and an expression and aim as a total. Every part in its own way serves the total, and without that inherent connection, it remains a merely personal statement, a matter of taste.

another photograph (j. wall) that brings a big calm

pilara, check!

fortunate to encounter mesmerizing work by thomas struth. strange to see what you've imagined all along, which confuses you in two ways: inspired and frustrated.





pretty funny how that works.

a voyage into exurban southern california

http://www.clui.org/pro_pro/exhibits/pdf/hinterland.pdf

reading notes

"...the naivete from which this view emerges also gives rise to the common apprehension that because we are bombarded by visual images we must, as a consequence, be visually literate. viewing images is a learned, skill-based activity. the experience of viewing a visual image differs from that of reading a written text. the templates we bring to considering and interpreting images need not be modeled on our approaches to linguistic utterances. expecting from images what we expect from words ultimately leads to frustration, since they are fundamentally different communicative systems."

"using pictures in social research requires a theory of how pictures get used by both picture makers and viewers. in order to us photographs either as data or as data generators we need to have some notion of how viewrs treat and understand photographic images, where those viewers are informants or researchers. rub has drawn attention to the pitfalls awaiting people who take up photography as a research tool with too little awareness of the social practices surrounding photographic productio nand use.

...approached from either of this perspectives (1. art 2. precise record) )the photographic meaning is conceptualized as being contained within the image of itself....

... the role of the spectator in the process of constructing photographic meaning.... meaning is actively constructed... not passively received.

barthes considers photographs as "polysemic," capable of generating multiple meanings in vewing process

not objective evidence

in order to benefit social research, photographic methods must be grounded in the interactive context

"i consider photographs inherently ambiguous, their specifiable meanings emergent in the viewing process. this ambiguity is not a disadvantage or limitation; rather, the multiple meanings negotiated by viewers can ge mined for the rich data they yield."

h. gruyeart

e. erwitt

my new camera came in the mail today!! so beautiful!! slightly larger than i expected, but after playing with it i'm really happy with the size and handle. it's really light and i can already day dream of foraging through tropical forests with this thing. doing test shots tomorrow!



i'm moved by mushrooms lately, and with a little bit more research i'm learning about the mushroom momentum out here. there is a mycology society that does monthly forages. very excited about that. i plan on visiting far west fungi's farm sometime this week. i watched a farm tour of far west fungi on youtube, and it shattered my expectations of backyard forests filled with logs and logs of oyster and shiitakes. the farm is actually made up of plastic bags filled with redwood shavings, saw dust, and spores in dark barns, but i think it'll be worth investigating either way.

the weeks have felt very busy. i'm happy. i'm working on photography; i'm saving money; and i have really great people in my life.

looking forward to:
an opinel knife
patagonia retro-x fleece
thai reference books
pine flat weekend!

philly throwback

more than positive externalities

tree-conomics