vacation.

I didn’t enjoy my time in Thailand as much then as I do now – I’ve been looking at the photos I took during that trip and am liking them a lot more, getting a warm, still, sultry feeling from them.  It’s probably a subconscious response to the just-bearable Melbourne winter depression.  Here’s another image that I forgot I had stowed away.  I should have done more in that space, it’s very geometrical and full of gradated, crisp whites.

vitamin D

the politics of time

Garbage Warrior has a cover that stands out in the ‘New Releases’ section of my local Blockbuster (Video Dogs was missing Dylan Moran standup) because it is a simple green backdrop with a white graphic.  The rest of the clutter that tends to grace the covers of anything mindless enough to make that shelf causes my synapses to misfire and I leave the shop emptyhanded.

It is a good film and I would recommend it, but I’m certainly not going into film reviews here so I will cut to one of the more existential questions the film seems to ask, which is about time.  The protagonist’s attempts to pass laws in the New Mexico senate which would enable citizens to experiment with sustainable housing designs are held back by the consumption of time by the processes of bureaucracy, begging some questions about the nature of bureaucracy and its effects on and explotations of time.  ‘Law is slow’ is one of the underlying challenges for a man who finds urgency in solutions for the present, and that asks us to consider why that might be and what political purposes it serves.  And what the consequences are for those living in the system it governs.

As someone who has applied for things like college and permanent migration, I have unquestioningly spent so many hours on the participation in bureaucratic systems of communication and recognition.  These are life projects, all-consuming for their duration and never without hoop-jumping, last-minute innovative solutions on the part of the applicant, and time spent attempting to control the outcome of a situation in which someone else is making decisions about your life.  I am not suggesting that these processes should not or must not exist in any form – I am simply not that sort of hippie – but I stand back from my willingness to offer so much of my life’s time, these hours I’m told are ‘precious’, and find it peculiar enough to warrant consideration of its implications on a larger scale of human power and control.  There are, of course, lots of them, and I won’t inimidate myself with the task of listing them all.  What I noticed in Garbage Warrior was that time was being used as a weapon against something that was too fast for bureaucracy (filibustering caused the rejection of his first attempt at the bill).  What Reyonlds is doing can be read as a form of resistance.  And so one might consider the politics of time for those in resistance, those who desire change, or those who simply do not fall neatly and readily into the status quo.

There is an interesting question as to whether the solution to the current human state is to speed up or slow down.  Law (legislature) is slow but the solutions to things urgent enough to be affected by it need to be fast.   If the speed of things like law (bureaucracy, the state…) is too slow to save that state, then we need to be faster than law, and doing much of that work ourselves, which generally requires that we take some steps outside law (bureaucracy, the state…) at some point.  This is a way of addressing the speed of the system.  If the speed of things like culture and humanity and development is too fast, then resistance might well take the form of slowing down.  This is what Slowmance (process-based living) is based on, though it’s more of a sentient concept than a political one.  Many ’slow’ movements hold at least some concept of themselves as ‘alternative’ or even ‘resistant’.  Perhaps the major contradiction is that things like bureaucracy, with its painstaking picking-apart of an entity, its consumption of time and energy, its micro-managing and its destruction of spirit (as in ‘the spirit of the…’) is not a system equipped to deal with the fastness we as a culture have so readily accepted as the status quo.

So on a basic human level, what is the speed of resistance?  Should I try to be faster or slower than what’s around me?  Or should I alter my conceptions of time altogether to account for the different levels of resistance and what they are addressing?  Does resistance lie in alternative consciousnesses of time?  What time is it?

This has been the anarchogirlie psychonaut review.  Tune in next time for more questions with no answers and other incomplete thoughts.

oh yes hello

Thanks for your patience whilst xobs came down, it is now restored but there were no renovations.

I make very few images and very many words these days.  However I have none of those available for here now, so I just offer this rather nice picture.

shuffling domesticities

I am here because there are lots of internet voices calling my name at the moment, because there’s a lot of a particular kind of me being circulated in its synapses so I need to make some move to balance that out, and because domesticity is a hot topic and I have a short piece to say about it.

I am shifting myself into a new domesticity, just when I was really, deeply getting into this one, which has really only taken place over the last month or two.  But things are such that I’m having a really abrupt jolt into a new domesticity.  I’m all about transitions – nice ones, slow ones, or just smooth ones – and so tonight I found myself closing one and tomorrow I will open a new one.  I don’t have enough time to talk about them right now so I will post a few photos instead, and direct you to Chica and Sequoia (just over to the right there…) for more on the above.

the scruffy kid.

Taken by Uncle Jed, this is what I look like most of the time.  If you see me on the street I will most likely be rubbing my eyes or some other part of my head.  This is the season of my scruff.

i arrive through a window, i leave through a hole in the wall.

In line with this batch of rather intimate images of my existence, this is my perch.  My most actualised form at this moment is one which, dressed in underwear and the jumper pictured below, perches in this window facing out into the laneway, smoking a joint and wearing headphones.  If anyone is interested in photographing me doing this, raise those hands, because I don’t plan to document myself doing it but feel that images might be useful in perpetuity.

This is what my perch looks like from across the laneway.  It’s a very good one.

jumper.

I got this jumper (’top’, ’shirt’) about two weeks ago and I haven’t taken it off since.  I even bought the same one in another colour but I don’t wear it much because it’s not as worn in as the grey one.  I feel really insecure when I’m not wearing it.  It smells fine, so don’t ask that question.  It’s the softest thing ever.  I don’t know if anyone has any opinions of the fact that I wear virtually the same thing every day, but I’m not sure anyone cares enough to have a conscious thought about it at all.  But for me, it’s a whole other existence.

hi bobby

I don’t really have much to post at the moment because I’m exhausted and because most of what I say is said in real-time to people in front of me.  But Bobby said ‘more please’ and I feel that I should oblige.  Most of the photos I take at the moment are quite explicit and I’d need permission from those who appear in them, which I can’t get at 3 am which is generally when I post.  So here’s yet another one that has some of me in it.

suvarnabhumi.

The protests at Suvarnabhumi are in denouement. I had no problems as I flew two weeks ago, but it did help me to realise the volatility of the situation there, which I actually didn’t appreciate when I was there, which probably has a lot to do with the way I travelled.  It happened that I wanted to post these.  I wonder what the same spots looked like with people stranded in them.

Suvarnabhumi is one of those space-age hubs and the architecture of the place is quite impressive.  The international terminal swallows you whole in its extravagance, which probably has a lot to do with its high-end commercial retail excesses.  But I stayed away from that photographically (I stayed away from most things photographically).  I like the symmetry and simplicitiy of an international hub at 5 am.  I wish I had done more there with the camera – airports are great places to work on your collection of images of liminal space.

xo
bs