visual fodder

These are the first few pictures I took with my new camera. Each of them has something I'm trying to teach myself more about - trying to activate. In this case it's reflections of lights in windows.

Here's the giant white whale in the room: the giant white hand with the giant white device, overhung with strange piano-key lights. Visual economics of what I call "public art," which includes everything that contributes to the aesthetics of public spaces: from building-face ad-banners to graffiti. [the Packaging = the Mask]

Media history through urban landmarks, including corporate logos as visual poetry.

Death of venus: skeleton exhibit, no cameras allowed, reflections on being a figure model, movement and stillness, shivering statues, high heels, growing up, skeleton chandelier, rearranged (dinosaur?) bones, application, dead lines.

Self explanatory. More words, layers of signs, etc.

This picture blows, but it's about where it's taken (from the bridge), plus the sounds that go with it. (The sounds of an upturned bucket as drum refer to the "can we make sense/cents?" question from a mural, and my video-activation of its visual poetry. Mural activation is a continuing series I'd like to do, including research on existing documentation of Chicago murals.)

many-track minded

Everyone in the city is a DJ these days, channeling crates of vinyl and generations of history through ever-shrinking devices connected to the internet-cloud or some digital "library" somewhere. Right now, Dorothy Ashby's "look of love" pops into my headphones. I lift one ear in the underground train station as i walk toward a street-performer, an old black man, stomping and singing "A Change Gonna Come" and then "Tracks of my tears." He blends in and out of time with Dorothy Ashby, and soon she's given way to Paul Simon. Share with your friends on facebook: Isaac is listening to "Sounds of Silence (Live)" on Spotify or the shuffled iPod, or the echoing halls of the underground. Like it or not, thumbs up or down, the one-song-at-a-time status update seems a little one-track minded, because here comes the train roaring over the man who now sings "Rock Steady" on request. As i step through the door while a disembodied voice tells me it's closing, i wonder, Maybe the words of the prophet are written on the Subway walls, which Paul Simon whispers into one ear. Or maybe the neon gods of SUBWAY, Bank of America, and the Blue Man Group have already colonized the walls that now rush past me on the train. Maybe i should like them on facebook, and write on their walls: "Eat fresh? Eat money? Eat with both ears, if you've got'em."

talking about the weather

Recently, i've had many brief conversations about the oddly spring-like days here in Chicago at the top of 2012. With many strangers i meet, especially grown white men in business suits, "the weather" always feels like it's on the cusp of a political discussion about global warming where we're both lying a little bit about what we don't believe, or what we blow out of proportion. But bringing up the apocalypse scheduled for next December is a sure-fire way to curtail any number of large-topic conversations, especially relating to the "current climate."

letter to a man i've never shaken hands with

Hello,

12pm thursday sounds great. You addressed me as Kyle (not my name), which is only a problem if the scheduled interview was meant for someone named Kyle. Otherwise, I'll see you soon!

Best,

Isaac

id/ENERGY(?): ideas for blogs with different taglines

i
d?
license and registration, please?
id/ENERGY crisis: ideas for blogs with different headlines
id/ENERGY crisis: ideas for blogs by other people
or,
how i decided not to capitalize
(on) the first person pronoun:
modern reflections on terrorism of self in the media

green graffiti font

- red white and blue kamikaze background
- auto-correct spelling ("kamikaze" and "graffiti")
- what font should i use
- this too shall pass
- other common fonts include:
- shit white girls say (about black girls)
- shit girls say
- shit yogis say
- "if i had a dime for every"
- white cup, unlabeled and half-full, at the yoga studio
- other people's similar predicaments
- hydrate
- hydrate?
- hydrate
- should i recycle this

- should i get an iPhone

- txt me the address

- what is that person's name again
- i said, "hey, how's it going?" but did she just say, "goodbye, have a good one"?
- what size bandaid?
- here, take a few of these
- can i even recycle this?
- what size font should i use?
- what is the current state of the color-name "skin tone" as it applies to Crayola crayons and band-aids?
- have these new sleek windows really made it warmer, on the whole, for yoga customers?
- hydrate
- hydrate
- hydrate
- breathe

sea my laughter clearly

It's only laughter, just like anything else,
but after that, she tells me
i'm a "nuke-ya-lurr reactorr."

Practically, the fear itself's
a sign of something slightly wackier
than books upon my shelf
bleeding shadows on white paper.

Sable skies so smoked and smothered by
the dollar bill's disaster...
the other joke the nuclear reactor never told
was the stocks piled high by the old white brokers.

After that i say: Go,
be broke, be bold,
break beyond the stolen clocks
with cloak and dagger on the docks!

The wind blows up the sandy fractals
caped across the actor's motion
as he angles t'ward the ocean
treating trust like he's a painter.

He reaches his lust deep
down into the evening.

From above, the seagulls just de-flower
the patterns of the rusting love
contained within the ship as it is heaving
heated bodies who are
bound to be grieving
at the sound of the bloody kiss of slavery, a-sleeping.

But SOMEbody did say to me that they'd be
leaving on time, this ship -- "Believing what? Baby,
it's something i'm just not at liberty
to discuss with you,"
the captain says...
and i caress the metal cubes, and i
hang upon the curtains, screaming
"hold me closer TO the building, sir,"
and certainly, YER dreaming
of exacting up the knife,
YER a pair'a part-MENTAL eyes distracting
fortune-5 hundred fact-or-fiction life from
the fast-romancing soldiers who ride, without wife,
into combat, on the chaos-dancing horses
from the countryside...

And their beat
of prancing feet seem
to answer his echoes so bitterly sweet:
with that same
old cry
of liberty / not at liberty
and suddenly
an unknown flag
waving goodbye.

Floating from this age, in a melting cage of ice
we sit side by side.
And now it's night-time, baby, soon
we'll be howling at the moon to change the tide.

number of shapes per/mutation

striking nearly every bone the brain's got left / like a
broken coconut skull underneath a thunderstorm
forming / balloons / / out of / breath
breathing / bones / / out of / form

bones / bones / bones / [breath]:

striking all the tones, but the brain's gotten left
behind, underneath, inSIDE OF the thunderstorm
wringing / blood / / out of / breath
ringing-cloud-silence from the violence of horns

light / light / light / left

singing all the right hands, but i've gone deaf
understand thunder / stand under the brainstorm
thinking / wind / / into / tongues
winking / lightning into being / born

Bienvenidos a la Dark Room

The word camera in Latin means "vaulted room," and is also the origin of our modern word "chamber." On the first day of school in sixth grade, a strange skeleton of a man called Mr. Lang spoke to me and the other children only in Latin. He seemed in his faux-foreign tongue to insist that the classroom was a camera. The camera obscura (literally "dark room") is the ancient ancestor -- in name and in form -- of the modern camera. The old model involved an enclosed box of darkness with a small hole (an aperture) allowing light from outside to cast an upside-down image onto the facing wall of the chamber. Over time, film and digital technologies have allowed us to shrink the chamber and capture the image inside it by absorbing the light with photo-reactive chemicals or light-sensitive cells that save a pixelated map of digital information. (As a side note, the word photo-graph [literally a light-carving] stood the test of time in favor of such other contestants as photogene, heliograph, and sunprint.)

Today an increasing number of people carry some form of camera on their bodies at all times. Regardless of the quality of the camera or the carrier's level of interest in photography, somewhere in the device is a small dark chamber that lets in light only when asked to. And that little room is floating around in our purses and pockets, quickly taken for granted as a necessary part of the all-encompassing pocket knife, the package-deal they currently call a Smart phone. The functional metaphor of the room is able to hide within our devices much like the camera's history hides within its own name.

But in a certain sense we inhabit those dark chambers in spite of their microscopic proportions, and we experience life as if hidden inside the cameras. I am often critical of this behavior. But on second thought, it needn't necessarily be a retreat into isolation: like the mask, the camera is a social tool that can reveal information, in the moment, about the user who seems to hide behind it. And perhaps this is nothing new: the little dark room (and the wall collecting patterns of light from an upside-down image) is included in the packaging of each eye set into the human skull. Some of our ancestors, too, must have suffered at times from living too much "in the head," clinging to memories and obsessing over the process of preserving things. Indeed it is not too difficult to imagine early humans experiencing a fear of death. I discovered the other day that my first and only photography teacher is publishing a book on what he calls the Paleo-camera theory.

He speculates that the camera obscura was discovered by humans of the Paleolithic era, and cites it as the possible origin of representational art. By his account, small openings in the leather walls of early dwellings would have allowed pinpricks of light to penetrate and cast an inverted image on the opposite surface of the tent. (The picture above tells around 1,000 words.)

Now, I'm not here to lecture about the primal origins of photography or insist that all technology originates in the body, but one thing the human eye and early human dwellings have in common is that they are not enclosed with right-angles. A bizarre feature of most of today's cameras and dwelling-rooms is the fierce, almost unanimous persistence of the rectangular frame. I have spent many hours griping about linear thinking, square attitudes, and cubic building-strategies, which can lead to a comically hypocritical tirade against elevators and "concrete ideas" in a few seconds flat. After toppling my own building enough times, my current and more neutral comment is that in any dimension a square is a fine shape indeed -- just not the only shape there is. (In spite of our modern calendars, it's also not a very good shape to describe the movement of time. But happy New Years nonetheless.)

I look
forward
to developing a more open-source camera for myself -- a room that invites others inside. With this strange new post in the underbelly of cyberspace i am expanding the corners of my room and rearranging it daily, trusting that with time it will take the shape of an ancient (or eventual) invitation.

So with that, welcome to my dark room.