I just recently read George Orwell's, "Politics and the English Language," for the first time, though I probably should have long ago. What has been very impressionable is the idea of image-phrases that have been deadened by overuse. Expressions that originally created images in other people's minds become automated so you can't even see the snake that is right in front of your nose. The fact that I have been so oblivious to the idea of chameleon metaphors simply, should I say, 'drives me up the wall.' Nobody every imagines someone 'driving up a wall' when you say that, it just means angry. It's lost its punch. Orwell's guidelines have made me pay attention to the images behind people's words, and I have really been enjoying hearing novelties in the way of language. My history professor illustrated historical squabbles during the signing of the declaration of the independence. He told how George Washington described the 13 colonies unified by only a "rope of sand." I was impressed. But everything has images screaming from all over; it's as if I've understood it for so long that I've forgotten it.

With the understanding that we want to read words that make us see images, why is it that psychology teachers seem to have a need to label people as either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. To me, the practice of labelling itself is what education should be trying to prevent, an egg to be cracked, fried, digested and shat, not incubated! The fact is that the more senses we can connect together the better our limited memories and battered brains can store them. Let's face it, our neurons rely on connections, and the more times a dendrite is triggered and the neuron accessed, the more it retains a fixed state. The brain cells need repetition, which is why flash cards helps us cram and political messages are so redundant. We need repitition, but it also works if more senses are triggered. Memory works best when we hear, smell, see, taste, and feel at the same time (and don't forget the sense of balance).

But, to 'keep the ball rolling,' I'll 'keep my chin up' in order to not 'kick the bucket.' If I 'play my cards right' I think I can 'let the cat out of the bag,' and then we'll all be 'pleased as punch.' After all, I don't want to 'let sleeping dogs lie.' You may have already discovered my secret; I bought a book on cliches. But, I feel 'fit as a fiddle' not having a 'cross to bear' in making up my own images. But don't 'cry over spilt milk,' because I'll 'cut this story short.' But I'm not a 'glutton for punishment' so I think I'll 'hit the hay' instead of 'burning the midnight oil' so I can avoid 'getting up on the wrong side of the bed.' I'm going to 'call it a day,' so for the most supreme of cliches, 'Good night!' 'Tomorrow is another day!'

Hey Don, I just wanted to show you my settings and the results of them so you can see how NEAT and orderly everything is! Here is the paths preferences box:



And here are the options:



Here is my lovely directory structure. I use the program "powerdesk," which allows a double paned window for browsing, transfering, and all that jazz. You can see that if I make edits to the raw files that I just save it in the same directory with the same name. That allows that everything stays together. If I want to make a batch of prints I'll just keyword tag certain images in bridge and then use the image processor to throw em back onto a cf card, directory, or whatever.



Any thoughts on your file structuring?

It is quite the grave notion when Hamas, a group who has been encouraging young men (women, too) to accesorize in the latest brand names of plastic explosives, decides to put on a fully featured childrens show, grown men in stuffed animals to boot. Although the New York Times editorial tells that the stuffed animals will consist of "a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken," I can't be sure it's a fox, sly or not, whispering into Hazim's ear. I could be equally convinced it was a sheep. Sheep are known to be lemminglike so it's unusual to see one giving suggestions, but I daresay it seems so.

The room's appearance illustrates just how much we are supposed to be afraid of this man. He will soon be indoctrinating the young Arab masses, tens of thousands who already show up to his live Hamas performances, so the lighting is harsh and dramatic. The fact that harsh lighting will make an image look dramatic is one of the first things a photographer learns. If we pause from pondering the actions of the whitish stuffed animal, we see that the bear is giving what appears to be a neck massage to 'Uncle Hazim', although it looks incinsere. Could it be a bear grip which could snap the neck of the mouthpiece if things don't go in the right direction? Maybe not.. the eyes that look back do seem warm and friendly, even though the features may still evoke too much racism for many Americans to ignore; that the smile could be genuine is deemed impossible, the only alternative being the sinister plotting of someone who 'hates our freedom.'

I think the interaction between the three characters is very interesting though. The bear gives a dead stare, but the eyes of the fox/sheep seem to be alive. Hazim's eyes are in shadow, but we see that if we could see them, they would be drilling holes straight through our eyelids. From the looks of it, the photographer is making sure that we don't really understand much about the man. We can only declare 'evil' about what we don't understand, and so we don't want to identify with him too much. We must keep people shrouded in unfamiliarity in order to condemn them.

Now, what really makes us (US) nervous is that other countries might create their own television shows that emulate the programming that has been consistent with the United States since the youth became a market group. Captain America, patriotic war songs, police and soldier heroism, and many more social forces assume patriotism within the citizenry. We know how well indoctrination works to enlist young people to willingly kill on command when we need it. Every nation seeks to churn out nationalistic killers in order to carry itself on through force. Our main worry is that others might succeed as well as we have done.

A Flourishing Lichen

I remember loving the word "endosymbiosis" when I learned it in my 9th grade biology course. The idea that two organisms could cooperate for the benefit of each other was enchanting; it parallels the obsession our culture has with love, as well as the hope that we human beings are in fact more than the sum of our parts; we hope Newtonian physics isn't all it's cracked out to be. What made endosymbiosis so compelling, though, was that the two little critters which made up lichen, a blue-green algae and a fungus, were dependent on each other that the removal of one would cause the other to die. It's the (very)pre-cambrian Romeo and Juliet.

But we must concede that not all interactions are this mutually beneficial. We see ranges from parasitism to mass enslavement. Parasites take all the work and energy of another individual, and don't seem to mind bringing hosts to the brink of death to avoid having to evolve anything useful.

Hookworm

There are ant colonies who enslave other ant colonies and put them to work for the rest of their lives. If you had a microscope, you'd see works much greater and more impressive than the pyramids. What I'm trying to say is that, well, it really depends. When organisms are involved in things together, only in rare cases do they work out, but when they do they really flourish.

Very Cute Bulldog Ant

This image was posted on the Bag yesterday, and, reading other people's posts, I decided to apply some of my thoughts on the event. The image, by a white house photographer, topped an ABC article with the headline, Bush Says King's 'Dream' Not Yet Completed. Of course, it's impossible to avoid the connection with the current Iraqi operation, Bush bringing equality and democracy to monarchic countries. The Bag, always a source of major revelation and insight, pointed out how the contrast in King's mouth was the more distinct, whereas Bush's mouth was closed, non-descript, eyes being the sharpest aspect. So, whereas Martin Luther King used his speaking abilities to reach people and go about getting social change happenin', Bush's eyes (small and beady) are bigger than his stomach. I hope this point connects with the audience. Think about it.. King's eyes are blurred, with his mouth the most focused, and bushes eyes are the most appaent. A commentor on the site related:

Great juxtaposition. There is King who worked for inclusion, for peace, for freedom. And there is Bush who promotes exclusion, war and fear. Incredible.

But look at Bush's eyes. He is truly all choked up. He believes. He knows that he is carrying on King's work, bringing freedom to the oppressed and spreading God's good message.

He believes, and his supporters believe in him. I sure as hell don't understand how this works. The Bush team is a bunch of vultures feeding off of the greatness of King. Rove at his best.

But what I want to get down to is something that was not brought up on the post, and that is the greatness of King, moreso, the idea of the greatness of any one person. We seem to live in a culture that thrives of the idea of heroes. However, whenever the idea of these heroes pop up, be it Martin Luther King for some, George Bush for others, I think of Noam Chomsky's take. His view is that the whole idea of someone being a leader of a movement, such as Martin Luther King, or Chomsky himself, is ignoring the real reason why a person like that can exist in the first place. People like King are not the real heroes. The real heroes are general people who get concerned, the numberless nameless who will never go down in the history books but nevertheless organize and create a public sentiment so that the 'heroes' can materialize.

The idea of the hero appearing and then going about recruiting worthy people to their cause is fuzzy and nice for people to believe in--the story of Jesus is exemplary in this sense--but what I think people like most about it is this: it allows people to be complacent, because they don't have to be heroes themselves. It means that people can wait for the leaders to appear. If nobody does, whose fault was that? This hero concept marginalizes and subdues the populace, because almost no one believes that they could possibly be a Martin Luther King. What most don't realize is that it takes a lot of people getting together to make an arena of public sentiment for those that go down in the history books to appear.

CGC182.BLOGSPOT.COM

While browsing via the NEXT BLOG randomizer, I was struck at how so many people post little more than a sequence of crappy photos from their crappy digital cameras... christmas treasures, I'm sure. I've seen quite a few who simply slam photos up without commentary, context, or anything to sustain interest (the photography sure isn't going to keep me clicking). Finally, I stumbled upon a blog which actually does something with its images. The author takes one photo from his day and tries to find something negative about it, coined 'con', and then oppositely, a 'pro.' In doing so, he gives context, balance, conflict, complexity and depth to what might otherwise be quite 2-dimentional. For example:



Feeling slightly uncomfortable at the thought of eating a meal in the restaurant where you used to work: Con

Feeling wonderfully surprised at the non-stop warmth of your former fellow employees and even more wonderfully stuffed after the flooding of complimentary desserts to finish off the meal: Pro!

I like this simple approach to his life. He's not bogged down with silly complexity, but still gets the blog down and remains interesting! It reminds me of a ritual I used to do with my family every night. At the dinner table, we would make the rounds with the questions: What was your best thing today? What was your worst thing today? And what was your middle? Middle, meaning the most mundane thing that you shouldn't usually even remember. It was often 'going to the bathroom,' but it could have been anything that unemotional or neutral. It's funny to think of the boring aspects of one's day, but if it's TOO boring, then it wouldn't count at all.

Another observation from this guy's blog was an absence of attributed images of the author. I, only recently in writing this, became confident enough to know his gender. Most of the language seemed male, but there were no images that directly linked to him. The only reason I presume to assume the sex is because I started seeing the same face pop up in the images. The one that gave it away illuminated he and his boyfriend, and was entitled 'Anniversery.' Happy 6 months!

Daily Herald - Rough party forces smokehouse closure



They say it's a 'smokehouse,' but I think it was much more important as a Coffee Shop and a Venue. In Utah Valley, nobody seems to like the idea of kids actually hanging out in public - which is what most coffee shops encourage. The idea of the quick exchange of sin for debauchery back in the den is much more palatable--as long as they're not doing it in PUBLIC. However, this image is interesting, because it contrasts the idea of the article. It exhibits sentimentality, and shows a different side of sXe. To illustrate the "sXe" and the "BYE BYE, We Will" in the same frame with multiple fonts miss means that straight edgers, together with lovers of the coffee shop contributed to this art project. The image shows that you can't be so simple as to lump everyone together into one category.

Additionally, the broom on the left inevatbly says that this will have to be cleaned up by someone else (ghostly handprints), which assists the story. It shows that the partiers lack sense of responsibility and are unable to deal with consequences to their actions. However, the mysterious vibrant red blob bears a likeness to the infamous Rorschach inkblot tests. Could this indicate that the Steamer's community is performing public psychiatric tests on the viewers of the Daily Herald and the Utah Valley community?

My full name is John-Riley Harper, but I currently go by 'JR'. Straight introductions always seem weird, but I guess I'll give it a go. I don't take life for granted, and am amazed that so many people seem to think this experience as being 'normal' in any sense. This thought process CAN get a little annoying, as s/he sang in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, "...and the strangest things seem suddenly mundane." So school, for me, is a way to distract the mundane anomaly of life and see if anything happens in the meantime.

Sometimes there's a crescendo of disbelief in the global idea that humans seem to be question-answering machines. We know so little, and we struggle endlessly to combat the paradoxes of the universe. School seems to be a method to pretend to gain knowledge, but I think it is nothing more than a pretense. In short, we go and learn and try so we can pretend that understandings can be reached, but in reality, the only thing that can really be gained is the fake n' baked plasticized sadness that 'education is only job training.'

My current scholarly interests include image and literary analysis. I'm a frequent reader of contemporary rhetorical analysis sites such as the bagnewsnotes and http://rhetorica.net/. On one level, I'm trying to gain a greater understanding of, and ability to collaborate together, art mediums. Currently I'm a humble photographer, but I've been getting into audio, radio and lighting, and that may merge into video in the future. Anyway, I hope, in the end, that my life will not have been totally meaningless, but I'm afraid there's no escaping the tragic element of ultimate futility. Hooray!

Here is me yesterday: