Tag: seattle

by jad

Dog Days/Dead Media

Today has been the wildest day for technology, with copiers falling apart, messages not going through, PDFs mysteriously rendering darker, and emails landing in spam mid-thread; so if Mercury isn’t in retrograde, it really, really ought to be. I even posted this before I was ready. Sigh. Astrology’s connection to my “style” has come up a couple of times in the past few of days; one friend zeroed in on my Aquarian bent (“a bit cerebral in your aesthetics. edgy, understated and clean. futuristic”) while another noted the broadly #crabcore vibe (“Cancer Mercury explains your posts, your memory for so much like … Continue reading “Dog Days/Dead Media” →

by jad

Sickly Sweet Seven

We interrupt this regular broadcast to bring you a memory—this is #Istanbul, August 2015, a couple of days before we took a leap and made our first truly adult decision of our lives. x In October, it’ll be 11 years since you first walked into the room and set your scopes on me, saying “hi, what’s your name?” Today, it’s 7 years since we made it official and we’re still full speed ahead. Ahoy, Christine! ❤️🫠 x We liked it so much we did it again the next year, in #Paphos—here it is in October 2016. Slide 2 is the weird but meaningful … Continue reading “Sickly Sweet Seven” →

by jad

Summer Estrangement Series

Hi, my name is Jad and I have a scarcity mindset. Okay, so that’s starting off a little glib, but seriously, when you think about it, the term has become a catch-all for all things uncouth; if not a stigma, then a case of adult cooties. No one wants a scarcity mindset. But scarcity seems like a natural default for me when budgets are limited and resources are stretched. Digital media trick us into endlessly producing because the costs are offset way down the line—our millions of JPEGs cost *something* somehow, but we’re not the ones immediately fitting the bill. … Continue reading “Summer Estrangement Series” →

by jad

LIGHT/SHADOW

The French word for a camera lens is “objectif photographique,” a factoid I learned in a piece from a series of articles & books called “Object Lessons,” which, surprisingly, has yet to publish any histories of cameras. They’ve published a book on the potato, so… But maybe the story’s too big to tell too quickly; that’s probably why the article only touches on how the 50 mm lens came to be the standard for “normal” vision. Anyway, the French word is perfect because, as the author points out, it encodes much of what we tend to think photography is for: “truth and … Continue reading “LIGHT/SHADOW” →

by jad

LOOK/SEE

There’s an ethics to looking that takes on sharp relief when one begins writing with light. Photography is the craft of capturing emanations from “out there,” and so, with a camera to look through, the predatory urge to survey and ensnare becomes a very real possibility. But to look is not necessarily to see, and there’s an ethics to that moment as well. Viktor Shklovsky writes: “this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to … Continue reading “LOOK/SEE” →

by jad

Trip Like I Do—Seattle, July 4

“Processing” takes a much more visceral meaning when you’re literally waiting for a roll of film to develop. I’ve never really known a time when photography wasn’t instantaneous; I mean, I do remember those days, but they didn’t effect me personally. The gap between holiday and photo album was like the cash my father drove to retrieve from a robot in the wall—someone else’s magic trick. We’ve all been processing something very heavy and very large in the past few months. It rolled in like a summer storm and it just sat there, covering everything with the acid rain of … Continue reading “Trip Like I Do—Seattle, July 4” →

by jad

Resurrecting The Matrix

I’ve seen some grumbling headlines about Matrix 4 and I really couldn’t care less what the fundamental subject/hyperobject of the film itself has to say, but here’s what I feel like sharing today: this is a film for a very particular kind of person. Maybe you were planning to meet up with school friends at the cinema, but no one had a cellphone so they ended up heading there early and seeing something silly like You’ve Got Mail, or whatever it was, so you watched The Matrix by yourself and had your tiny brain blown. Maybe, some years later, in … Continue reading “Resurrecting The Matrix” →

by jad

INTRODUCING INCONJUNCT

I want to tell you about a little project called @INCONJUNCT. But first, a few words about “inconjunction,” a technical term from astrology that’s neither “conjunction” nor “opposition.” It might not even be anything at all as, indeed, it wasn’t for ancient writers like Ptolemy who called it a “non-relationship.” To understand the concept, you may want to hold in your mind a certain metaphysic of cosmic influence—as above, so below, etc—but even that is not entirely necessary; you may choose to follow the symbolic geometry instead: “Dividing a circle into two parts creates a diameter and two points on a circumference separated … Continue reading “INTRODUCING INCONJUNCT” →

by jad

Hexed Writing

I heard about a professional poet who was fired for her poetic rumination on the irrelevance of poetry the other day. I didn’t dig too deeply into the full story; I wanted to avoid taking away from the poetry of that brut fact—a profession, arguably founded on the two-faced angst of expression, closing ranks when foundational angst is expressed, does feel pretty two-faced, to me. The clickbait writes itself: from rumination to ruination—and you won’t believe what happened next. Wild Words, HEQ #5 (Read more…) This is a piece that came to me in a flash a couple of days … Continue reading “Hexed Writing” →

by jad

The Riot is the Light of the Unseen

“To be yourselfis all that you can do(all that you can do)To be yourselfis all that you can do(all that you can do)” How many of us play amateur detective in some psychodrama when we look back at lives that ended in tragedy? We go over the liner notes and find all the right clues—maybe they were always there. Or maybe the pressure to entertain a certain way was actually whodunnit. It’s hard to put the magnifying glass down; cold cases are kept warm by kinship. A song like “Be Yourself” will do that to you. What at first blush … Continue reading “The Riot is the Light of the Unseen” →