This photo is important

"This photo is important," I thought, crouched in the street cradling my coffee and the dog's leash with my left thumb while clicking the phone with my right. I thought about what filters I would later apply to it in PhotoShop to accentuate its importance. Then I applied them and they looked terrible. Then I tried the original photo and it was terrible too. Then I asked one of the student photo editors I work with and she was all here, here, and here and that did it. Maybe. It might still be terrible. The student gifted some carefully wrapped praise for the shot - "pretty well balanced". Maybe that's the only important part of this photo.

Wednesday:
Desert Noises, Mountain Sea
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
Wild Birds (of Heaven), "Killing Time"

Thursday:
Clinic, Free Reign
Jim Jarmusch & Jozef Van Wissem, The Mystery of Heaven
Alvin Lucier, "I am sitting in a room" and "The Only Talking Machine of its Kind in the World"
Nico Muhly, Drones & Piano and Drones & Violin
Charlemagne Palestine, Fifths In The Rhythm Three Against Two For Bösendorfer Piano 
We are so deft with our thumbs now, how we type and take pictures and, in high security environments, identify ourselves with our thumbs. We are all thumbs.



This reflexology photo popped up on Facebook the other day. I have a trackpad instead of a mouse so my desktop digital life and well as my mobile is a thumbed indexing of data. Notice that the part of the thumb by which we navigate the world, or at least the one I use to hit the command and option buttons, is tied in the reflexologic sense to the anus. Thumb-ass relationship. If you admitted being bored to my Uncle Jack, a farmer, he'd suggest you go sit on your thumb and lean back on your finger.

Uncle Jack had a guy that worked for him who we'd then label as being "slow". Once over dinner (which is what farmers call "lunch") the guy remarked, "Jack... these cabinets are just like ours, except they're different."

All of this is possibly important.

But, yeah. The photo. I thought it looked like liquid splashing, like flat planes unfurling, like how nature is so comfortable with the bending of dimensions, that there is no up and down and left and right in the non-human world.

I am loving the hell out of Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, a dovetailing of failures in both life and business that makes a particular Everyman and how the timeline of that Everyman's Everything is a "hurry up and wait" and so he hurries and waits and doesn't have any other idea on how to be. Even as nothing happens.

It's a couple of hours now since I started this post and now I don't really care for  the alleged important photo. It looks completely different to me. Just like it was except it's different.  Which, again, important. So it stays.