Talked to one of my several editors today spouting forth a fab story idea. And if I tell YOU what it is howinhell do I know that I willn't be scooped.
Therefore a smoke screen:
The story for the glossyhappy mag is to do an in-depth profile of the several Middling City fluffers employed by the region's burgeoning porn industry.
Had a coffee break to the max with MQM, better known here as Marky Sparky, Boy Colleague. He bought me not one - but two - jumbo coffees and I am roasted.
Amongst other things we discussed music, the pending re-re-re-union of 10,000 Maniacs (according to Blair W better than ever + with a new vocalist to boot), the state of my grad studenthood, the state of the Middling City photo industry, our various hilarities and firings & hirings about town.
Good to the last drop, I thought nearly aloud as I just completed coffee number two, dripping the ultimate spec of it into my awaiting and exuberant self.
I must mention that Ryan Adams is a-playin over there to the east of the room and as always he's got my heart all wonky poetic.
Reading The Necessity for Ruins, collected essays by a JB Jackson, rec'd by The Man, JR. After reading from the online course's reading packet, an expensive amassment of xeroxes from copyright-cleared books, it's a fucking pleasure to read hard copy from a real soft book. Texture! No keystoned words floating into a binding's replication.
I remain.

So I'm a photo phly on the wall today in the 30th floor boardroom, actually not, as I had been Perfectly snapping photos all about said room and en route to the room, as the Canadian Ambassador to the USofA and the Canadian Consul Général are looking over the Middling Cityscape before them/us.
The latter is mentioning how the streets are designed for three times the population, that that's why there is never - ever! - a Middling City traffic jam. Then he points out the crumbling Deco train station to the east, trying to be architecturally uplifting. A small Canadian woman says Well... at least they aren't destroying it, tearing it down, yet.
So the Ambassador is being walked in to his next speaking engagment by former Congressman/Perfect Nancy buddy John LaFalce when LaFalce sees me in the front row. He marched Mr. Ambassador over, gave me a big hug and kiss and said Michael, THIS is Nancy...
Mr. Ambassador looked at me quizzically, maybe not so sure that I was one and the same as the boardroom silent gazer.
During his big talk in the former church owned by the Catholic College Mr. Ambassador quite deftly answered the former Congressman's question of the American soldiers friendily firing upon the Canadian soldiers and our unfortunate country's presidential snubbing of the post-9/11 aide that Canada supplied - airspace for thousands of stranded travelers heading to American cities.

Onwards.

I have some serious posting to do for the online class. I don't simply want to do a reworking of the ideas but have to prove I'm still e-there. I've noted that about half of the class is eerily absent. Spending the cashmoney to get to NYC/PSD is well spent as it makes the online experience less distant, helps me to connect to that nouveau world.
Met with JR for advisement and he forced those struggling art ideas out of the folds of my (then hung over) brain lobes and miasma. I think he was getting frustrated but when he talked about my pending work I kept seeing, previsualizing, images that I described. I did my best to explain my main focus or concern: to document or to create to capture the essence of life, the desire and touching that we all are imbued in. The sensuality of everyday life that is not discussed. Life energy. Sensuality. The "gravity" (to borrow one of Jim's several quotes) between people.
And then.
And then.
He had me describe scenarios... Write a play that is one minute long.
I described three scenarios after explaining that they were inspired by Samuel Beckett - spare, minimal in gesture and staging.
Aside: Sam's work is about memory, our meandering through life, our inevitable encountering of our selves, our marriage to our memories and ourselves, breath, passion for the idea of passion.
I don't want to describe the three plays I created.
Jim said Let's make a video of the middle one.
I could weep for the feeling of elation, of being freed from the boundaries I created for my creative self.
I am going to make a series of digital videos of the middle play made yesterday. Variations of gestures.
And I am going to make *GloryBe* breaks in the variations that I am also not going to explain, yet.
I left Parsons and smoked a smoke with Jim before trundling off to the nearby french joint to be greeted as the regular that I am by the Victorias et al.
And then.
And then.
I realized Holy Pixels, this camera around my neck makes videos and I made my first video. Not so good. Then I made a surveillance video, a study of a couple interacting in front of me at the counter. Because of my framing you see only a triangle of her face, mostly her eye, and her man friend's back. At some point he stands and removes his coat and it's like a giant curtain over most of the frame and then her eye is visible again.
I really dig this video.
I am on to something and I have JR to thank for this.
Now to get the cast, the stage, the video camera.
I've outlined the gestures, it's even Sam-like in its numerological concerns.
All.
Love of All.

Why Your Perfect Nancy Loves Technology: Item 316

Technology, in my non-humble opining, fucking rocks. This is due to the simple fact that pixel molecules can be transformed while in card readers into email molecules after some simple friction and commands. Therefore one is able to make an image, say, in Manhattan, carry said card of images from one point to another and "send off" images, in jpeg format, to one's editor approximately 400 miles away in mere moments.
Previously, as I discussed with subject matter, a person, in the aforementioned images, a photographer had to (and this is back in the day, about two decades and even one decade ago) rush to the darkroom, process film, make contact sheets, select frames and then make prints and then deliver these to wherever the hell they needed to be.
Therefore technology rocks.
I rest my case.
During yesterday's study session in the rearmost table in a subterranean diner near Union Square with me, Philip, Sienna and Beth, we came to the following non-scientific conclusion:
postmodernism, to appropriate what Jim Ramer said on the front steps of Parsons this afternoon, is a slippery fish.
Or what it a slippery something else?
Whatever the hell it is, it's damn slippery.
All.
Love of All.