Montréal: Cohen & Kateri

On our first night in Montreal, we tried to watch a documentary called “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen,” but we were so tired that we started drifting off a few minutes into it. That was enough time, however, to catch a Leonard Cohen refrain from an old interview from his youth that would play in my head as we huddled under the world’s smallest umbrella in the world’s most terrifying sneak-attack thunderstorm. After asking Cohen what concerns him, and after Cohen laughed and demurred, insisting that he hasn’t the faintest concern, the interviewer pressed the poet to share what … Continue reading “Montréal: Cohen & Kateri”

Montréal from Seattle

Christine and I are going to Montréal in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be my first international trip since becoming a U.S. citizen and the first time back on an airplane since getting my green card and landing here. There are a half dozen reasons to be excited about visiting this oddball part of North America, but our primary impetus for wanting to go in the first place was to visit a Mohawk Catholic shrine as part of @christine.bingham.art‘s ongoing book project based on her series of mirror saint paintings. I’ve been reading a lot about the history of … Continue reading “Montréal from Seattle”

GEO+NAFSIYA: GREENING THE GREY

Another set of photos from Beirut that I found as old attachments is this series I’d apparently taken for the long-defunct outlet “Hibr.me.” It depicts GREEN THE GREY, a “public intervention” in June 2011 meant to celebrate green spaces in a city in desperate need of them, or what @beirutgreenproject‘s co-founder Dima Boulad would later call a “peaceful protest” to coincide with World Environment Day. Patches of grass were laid out in car-centric Sassine Square and we spent the afternoon hanging out. It was as simple as that. It pains me to reflect on just how utterly prosaic the politic instantiated … Continue reading “GEO+NAFSIYA: GREENING THE GREY”

Sleepless in Beirut

Google had been bugging me about my cloud storage for a while before I finally clicked the link the other day to hopefully free up some space; a couple of scrolls later, I was punched in the gut with attachments in emails I’d long forgotten about, with files and photos I thought I’d lost forever, including these from a project I worked on with a then-anonymous blogger in 2011. You read that right – an anonymous blogger; this was 2011, after all. More on that later. Thank God for metadata because I simply have no recollection of ever using a … Continue reading “Sleepless in Beirut”

Art Thoughts

Being around artists and in artmaking spaces makes me think about the impulses behind my desires to make, do, and express things in general. I have language to explain it and different vocabularies to define it with, like the stars and their imprint on the soul, or God, the Creator of co-creatives, or class distinction and its many corollary affordances. But all these are just words to make sense (♒︎) of a nagging feeling I don’t actually understand (♋︎). It’s the gnawing dissatisfaction I felt while flipping through craft books as a kid, desiring to make things without knowing why; … Continue reading “Art Thoughts”

Photo-Elicitation

Taking photos with someone else is an interesting way of looking at things differently. You’ll probably notice the same things, but you may not; you’ll pause to listen in one spot while the other is talking and vice versa; you’ll use these stops to compose or capture, or you may just peer through the viewfinder, too engrossed in the conversation. You’ll probably start off talking about what you’re seeing, but it’s more than likely that you’ll end up somewhere else entirely. Looking back at these, I’m struck by how most are imprinted with a memory of something said or remembered, … Continue reading “Photo-Elicitation”

Mother’s Day

“Je ne te quitte pasJe ne reviendrai jamaisJe ne te quitte pasJe ne reviendrai jamaisJe ne te quitte pasJe ne reviendrai jamaisJe ne te quitte pas.” We’ve all seen the posts about words that can’t be translated into English that inevitably include “saudade” in the list – saudade, that Portuguese feeling of “profound nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone.” This longing is “often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the recipient of longing ever again.” But what’s a word for the melancholy that comes with irrepressible presence? Does anyone else ever feel … Continue reading “Mother’s Day”

Luigi Ghirri

“I’ve always approached the ‘scene I was looking to represent’ directly, standing squarely in front of my subject to avoid any kind of slants or vanishing points, cuts or leaks.” (Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays, 1973-1991) That’s the thing about Luigi Ghirri’s work that struck me instantly when I saw someone sharing his work a few weeks ago; that, followed immediately by an eerie sense of familiarity: ‘I could have taken this very shot.’ This spooky feeling of déjà vu made me want to read what this man had to say, after having started this journey with Sontag, Benjamin, and … Continue reading “Luigi Ghirri”

Fragment Fragments

“If the fragment is truly broken (frangere), it cannot, it seems, be thought of in terms of a part (portio), for the part, as part of a whole, would deny that which is broken its broken nature, its different status, by relating it always to the former (whole). The fragment…must be thought of apart from a part, and therefore as wholly distinct from the whole (of which the part is a part) as well.” (Dan Mellamphy, ‘Fragmentality,’ 1998) x “Contemporary poets use all three modes of fragment, sometimes all at once. First, the fragment can illicit a response or echo … Continue reading “Fragment Fragments”

Why is Photography Interesting?

Why is photography interesting? The number of people who might care about what I have to say has almost doubled since I took it on as an intentional practice, so that question might be better posed to the people who took interest, instead. But why *is* photography interesting to me? I have often said that I am an inherently visual communicator, but those of you who have been here from the start know that I picked up the craft as an object of discourse or matter of concern first. Words came before light, in an isomorphism of what Dane Rudhyar … Continue reading “Why is Photography Interesting?”