Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

The Kiss

Manipulated photography, nothing more, nothing less... more to come.

Certain Female Spiders

Chivalry is dead, but that tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women and its echoes still resonate. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and postures, letting them pass through doorways and get into lifeboats first.

They set themselves up as the protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set some limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. Although, at the same time, the counter-convention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of privileged males against women socially inferior to themselves, showed that at no time did men cease to regard most women as fair game.

The exploitation of women by men, far from constituting a secondary formation dependant in one way or another on the organization of production, as good Marxists are taught to think, antedates the establishment of production based on private property. Needless to say, no slur clings to Odysseus for his infidelities to Penelope, willing or unwilling, in the course of his wanderings homeward. The faithfulness required of a man to his home and his kin did not include the chastity of his body as it did in the case of his wife. The long history of rape and seduction serves as a reminder that animal strength and nothing to do with the economic system, remain the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested in its most direct, ancient and brutal form.

Yet polite conventions, even when they are no more than a facade, function as an operational myth that provide women with a degree of ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. We have surrounded essentially exploitative relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else, obscures the exploitation, thereby making it perhaps a little easier to bear. Nevertheless, regardless of her poise and her intellectual maturity, the fact remains that Simone was still deeply hurt by Jean-Paul’s infidelities.

Male and female are subjective assignments. A society which grants the privilege of doing or being done to, exclusively to one sex or the other, warps its children. A child of either sex has urges to penetrate, devour, and possess; to be cherished, dominated, and contained. Who can resist a detailed account of how certain female spiders eat their mates?

World View

Observing the observer, mine clearance, Afghanistan.

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 1

Each According to Their Opportunities

The air has that distinctive southern smell of coconut and blossom and stale urine and dung. It is hot, dry and inhospitable for much of the year. Truck tires and marching boots kick up a relentless, choking dust. The rest of the time the monsoon is wet and uncomfortable. There’s mud and the shit of a multitude of species underfoot, and the rivers run, with floating tree limbs and garbage, brown and swollen.

The ride from the airport into the city centre is a bit like Dante’s circles of Hell, a divine comedy that isn’t the least bit funny; a meticulously-crafted moving diorama of the failures of civilization: broken-windowed factories, boarded-up shops, slums, tenements, and a prisoner of war camp. Everything looks temporary and contingent.

Feral cats hiss at one another. Feral children prowl through garbage. Obscene at first, but shift the perspective only a little, twist the thinking to dissociate from the actual human pain that this scene conveys, and think of it as a representation of the idea of pain miraculously made manifest. Sort of like a Bosch hell-scape you can drive through.

These people were the meek who had inherited the earth, but then some mean bastard took it away from them. For centuries they’ve been yoked to this land, first as slaves, then as share croppers, their existence governed by their skin color, together with the seasonal rhythms of the rain and of planting and harvesting, their pace matched to that of their draft animals.

Human bedrock, for a thousand years they’ve lived these lives, worn these clothes, guided these ploughs, bowed their heads to oppression and bent their backs to work, been conquered and re-conquered, ruled in turn by barbarians and kings, imperialists and the faceless bureaucrats of tyrants, uninvolved, unconsidered, un-revolutionary, uneducated, passive, almost mute. Then the war came, and with it naked rule, unrestrained by law, constitution or convention, unanimous, save for the enemies of the people, every action not mandatory, forbidden.

We see a soldier kissing a small baby, its mother despondent with her head in her hands, an older woman raising her arms towards the man’s face, in the slanting lights and shadows of a setting sun, an El Greco of beseeching gesture, of supplicating eyes and hands and sorrow.

Even this is not evidence which would imply that there might be a point to anything; for example, that good triumphs over evil, or that love matters, or that there is some difference between day and night or today and tomorrow. Now, there are no mothers radiated by the beauty of their children. There are no institutions of charity. The hungry sell themselves as slaves or as mercenaries or for a fuck, each according to their opportunities.

To be continued...

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Japan

The sapiens' powerful brain perceives the external world through a variety of senses tuned to the spectrum of vibrations and chemical signals coming from the environment. Each individual is influenced by their own unique experiences, leading to subjective views of existence and the passage of time.

Homo sapiens are said to possess consciousness, self-awareness, and a mind, which correspond roughly to the mental processes of thought.

Spain

Although the sapiens brain is the most complex in the animal kingdom in terms of both structure and cognitive ability, most of these abilities are known in a more primitive form among other species. Modern anthropology has tended to support Darwin's idea that differences in mind between sapiens and the other great apes, for example, great as they are, are differences in degree and not of kind.

To be continued...

Ruins of Tikal

Tikal, located in present day Guatemala, one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya, reached its peak about 900CE, only to be abandoned within a century due to over-exploitation, deforestation and erosion, exacerbated by climate change.

Coltrane

Through the inspired craftsmanship of Japanese electronic engineering I can hear, between sharp intakes of breath, the saxophone’s long-alienated apprenticeship with ragged Philadelphia rhythm and blues, effervescent against the sparse, intellectual understatement of the trumpet. Coltrane, intertwined with Miles, on a flight of fancy spontaneously conceived and expressed at Newport in 1958, but now, over half a century later, them both dead, originating in a beam of laser light bouncing off microscopic bumps, on the underside of a plastic disc.

The Dionysian howls, wild, unrestrained sensuality, are perfectly balanced by orderly, rational, self-disciplined, Apollonian grace-notes, slipping into essential melody notes and taking precisely half their time value.

The bass player momentarily abandons his walking line to reinforce two drum kicks, then imitates a third immediately after hearing it. In response, the drummer plays on-beat punches that reinforce the bass player’s return to a walking pattern. One part’s subtle phrasing shift, from an even eighth-note feeling to a triplet swing feeling, resulting in a near simultaneous fleeting shift in the other part. An intensified feeling of swing in the drummer’s part leads to comparable intensification in the bass part that progresses from straight to swing patterns and, finally, to triplet figures.

Coltrane always puts an aura of excitement in the air. Elvin Jones is, of course, central to this. He creates the collage of percussive sound fragments, linked by intuition to the tune. His infectiously swinging ride cymbal implies the basic time so strongly that he doesn’t need to state it explicitly. He just throws himself into the most dangerous musical situations, somehow managing to land safely and solidly back on the beat in the following bar, never without nuance, but so powerfully, so elementally, like a force of nature.

And on top, in between, and underneath this molten rhythm, the cries that come to the mind and the viscera, the horn as an extension of the self, the totality of commitment, the excavation of emotion, is the thrust of the imperious imagination of John Coltrane.

Don’t accuse me of hyperbole. Even these words are not strong enough to describe the feelings. Listen to the resilience, the risk-taking, and the sheer ingenuity of his playing; the intense probing into things far off, unknown and mysterious.

Think about the endless hour after hour of his practising, and the hour after hour of his thinking about the wholeness of the universe and of the ways in which one could become part of that wholeness through music. Conviction, dedication, spirituality, the excitement of discovery, the revelation of greatness, a substance so rich and full of unbounded beauty and fire, a musical power so incredibly strong, that no one could have imagined that all that probing and contemplation could often, and paradoxically, lead to what at first sounds like a primal scream.

But no, hear him pushing at the edges of a familiar tune, like My Favourite Things. The aggression and fury of his style, as he mows mercilessly through rain drops on roses and kittens with whiskers and snowflakes that stay on my nose and eye lashes, could only have been brought to a halt by liver cancer.

It puts things into a larger context if you remember that he was, at the time, a junkie. He kicked heroin by using alcohol as a crutch, only to become an alcoholic. Eased out of the Davis quintet, he dried out and found God. the last ten years of his life featured an ongoing but intermittent addiction to junk food with fat and svelte sets of clothes, to cycle through the binge and health-nut phases.

That Particular Fish

I remember once you leaned forward and brought your lips close to my ear. I could hear the wind and my own heart beat. In the twilight an owl flew by on silent wings. Birds were singing.

You pronounced the word love.

It had taken four thousand million years of evolution to produce those lips and that word. The muscle movements required to produce that single word are more intricately choreographed than any dance. Every tiny muscle fiber must contract at exactly the right moment in total coordination with all the others. Electrical impulses flash along neural pathways. Somewhere in your brain there is circuitry that stores the patterns of those movements.

“Love,” you had said. It was almost a whisper.

The sound radiated outwards, conveyed by vibrations in the air, propagating across the space between us, funneling deep into my inner ear, where it excited a tiny system of bones and membranes. Electrical impulses traveled to my brain where a network of nerve cells, which had also taken four thousand million years to evolve, distinguished the bird song from the wind and the sound of my heart beat from the significance of the moment, while the owl flew by on silent wings.

If that particular fish had not come out on to the land; if the meteor had not destroyed the dinosaurs, this could never have happened.