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This is really a day for going back to bed for an hour or so. Unfortunately, I have school in an hour. Or, really, work.

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I was woken up early this morning by my dad, who called to ask me to have my mom come and get him because he was feeling ill over at the school where he works. My mother went out to get him. The next development was a call from my mother a few minutes ago to tell me that he's being taken to the hospital again. I guess I won't go into detail without talking to them first, but I'm a little worried about him. I'm going to stay home in case I can do something and 'cause I'm stressed and kind of don't want to deal with work stuff, as much as I enjoy being in the archives.

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This is a socio-architectural look at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. It's an interesting talk. Soja describes the space as so alienating, so hostile to the independance of its users, that I have to wonder if he's exaggerating a bit. At the same time, some of his talk reminds me very much of how I feel sometimes when trying to drive somewhere unfamiliar and I get lost and try to deal with my topgraphical agnosia. It is, in fact, an experience that makes me feel very dependent, very powerless.

Have any of my readers ever been to this hotel? What did you think?

"John Linnell - Montana" (Watch on YouTube)

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Once again, several of my classes come together in terms of the concepts we're exploring. We're touching on post-modernism in urbanism and urbanization as well as in LGBTQ studies. The talk of how modernism privileges language by marginalizing things we don't have words for into a position of virtual non-existence keeps making me think of a famous quote from Taoist thought; "The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao". What a contrast in world views!

In other news, I'm painting my toenails blue today. Whee!

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Riki Wilchins keeps quoting Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. The quotations and hir descriptions of Foucault's approach are enticing enough to me that I want to put it on my reading list. I wonder if there's an audio version....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality

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As a photographer, I think it's particularly important to think about what photographs are saying. How they'll be interpreted. There's an ethical responsibility for me to consider how a photograph might end up affecting the people or places I photograph, even if in the answer in the end is "I don't know." I think there is a place for photography that exists in an ethical gray area, but it should always be well-considered photography.

As for images in general, I wish people could be in the habit of *always* asking, when they see any image, what's the cultural context of this? What is really being documented? Whose purposes are served by the various understandings?

This Week in Photography: the famous Vietnam war photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong man.

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. … What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?“

-Photographer Eddie Adams

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More news on my dad. He's going to be in the hospital for a couple of days, but his blood pressure is nearly back up to normal. I'm going to go and visit after I'm done at work today.

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I like love. I believe in it. I feel it. It's a wonderful thing. But I think I have a much more rationalist view of it, in some respects, than many folks.

I see the story about the dead man (and of course it's a man, but let's leave aside the gender stuff) who prepaid for years worth of Valentine bouquets before he died and it kind of weirds me out.

If my partner died, would I want to keep getting a reminder, every year like clockwork, that here it is Valentine's day (which, given the story, was apparently important to the widowed spouse) and my partner of many years is dead and won't be sharing it with me? I'd like to think that if I was dead, that my partner would move on from that experience, maybe keep a few things of mine as physical rememberances, and not be taken by surprise by such a powerful emotional symbol at an emotionally volatile time.

I'm not saying it's wrong to enjoy the story, or to think that it's a really positive, romantic gesture. I guess I'm just saying please don't do it for me!

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This reminds me of the abandoned pianos I've seen in places like City Methodist church, the Palace Theatre, or Horace Mann high school. But this one was in a public place where it could be played as it decayed in the sea air of the California coast. Something about this really tugs at me. I wish I could have been there for a concert.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Piano-sounds-its-last-notes-by-the-ocean-4267465.php

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I'm making a considered choice to start using gender-neutral pronouns when appropriate. I have a chunk of writing to do about gender in the near future, but for now, I'm going to use he/she/zie and his/her/hir as appropriate.

I've been hesitant in the past because the words sound affected. Artificial. But I think the reason they feel that way is largely because they are not in common use. That's not going to change without people commonly using them.

Using male and female pronouns construct and reinforce social gender categories that reflect a false dichotomy, and I think it's important for me to recognize that publicly and keep it in mind (Yes, it's true; the Stormdog has discovered post-modern linguistic deconstruction. Be afraid? Honestly, I'm a little self-conscious about choosing to stand outside established norms regarding language use in this way, but who if not us?)