Had an interesting meet-up with a Mad Scientist yesterday. For a shoot for Middling City U.
The Mad Scientist (heretofore dubbed MS) revealed to me nearly immediately
(here I would like to interject that as I'm trying to blog, a brief respite from concurrently going blind and reading online articles for class, being a really good grad student, I am being distracted by a fat lezbo drumming a nearby table with her fucking chopsticks and I am listening to Interpol on iTunes yet I can still hear the clinkclinkclink and I'm about to go over and grab the chopsticks out of her chubby hands and throw them across the tea house. Then I'd like to ask her overly-mascara'd date this How in blazes can you put up with this crap.) that he had Cyber-stalked me, Googled me. He said You've done a lot of weird things. Now, as You can probably imagine, a plethora of images from the past of Yours Truly popped up, Google-style, in my mind. As we discussed what he'd seen (she's still chop-drum-sticking...) online about YT I then told him that he was going to be blogged, that a blogpost was happening as we spoke.
So the MS is being posed by YT, pressing his back against a whiteboard of a gigantic formula of numbers and icons and at some point I look at it, stopping shooting, and query So what IS that. He then goes on to explain how it's basically (basically) a formula for how the brain works, how it uses visual information in front of the eyes, processes information. The MS works with machine intelligence and this formula is how the brain works as the formula for how a computer does the processing of visual information would take, he says, a bajillion years as it would process each item, moment separately. So he's talking about Bayes, Bayes this, Bayesian that. So WHO is Bayes, my ever-queryful self wanted to know as the way things are being discussed are curiously a whole lot like the manner in which Roland Barthes describes postmodernly objects, sight, experience of same. So Bayes was a nineteenth century man of the cloth who wanted to prove if god existed or not by a happening formula. Did he. Who knows. But the fab thing is I have another little tool for my grad school toolbelt which, as a premonition I had shitloads of years ago, which I told Academie Guru/The X, was leading me into science, of all conflated things.
Regaled the mad scientist with a moment I could not blog a few weeks back, involving a photo shoot with a bevy of cops (femme, men) and the incessant sexual haranguing on the set - of each other, of me. It was quite an unforgettable experience and it was the premier time YT had e-ver been called Tootsie.
So I regale him with that and then, conspiratorially, he asks if I'd encountered any crazies at Middling City U. One person jumped to the forefront and I dumped some details on MS. We then revealed to each other that we are both somewhat (and here I hear the cackling of Beth who will immediately, as I know her well, think HA! She's 1000% crazy, and April Fools' Day proved it) crazy and therein ended the happy shoot.
Back to school, virtually.
Whereas I was in a snit earlier I am free-wheelin' Perfectly Myself, diggin' on Interpol, Learning, Reading, green tea, art ideas that are swirling around me like good, protective ghosts.

Love Protects.

Perfect word to You, the wise.
Rediscovered Rickie Lee Jones's (for real) Ghostyhead from way back when, 1997.
Scaring up all sorts of items pome-deep for Sunday, certainly not the day of rest of Yours Truly, homework day and annual Urban Epiphany, megamarathonreading.
Thinking how I am being handed all sorts of discreet respites to do all the following, in no particular order of descending or ascending import, deport or ex.
1. Write research paper for the ultimate online course - primo op to get MFA thesis move on.
2. Plant garden(s).
3. Get ready for Middling City, end-of-May exhibition at Brad's joint which will include screen captures and neato digprints of same.
4. Hammering out, whacking to bits, summertime details and logistics and time and stress management.
5. Make sure Good Vibes Team of Yours Truly is really understanding what I'm asking of them, although they assure me that they are.
6. Pet Extra.
7. Scare up the aforementioned and then some fine words stored here and there.
8. Shoot, make, do and burn new digvid pieces for me, for JR's viewing pleasure, for skewel, for fame.
9. Complete application for NJPPhD Plan.
10. Think more deep and complex grad student thoughts as time is quickly running out to do so.

Lists of Love.

Nature. Nature. Nature.
Turns the Middling City into a big reheated miasma of flora.
The started seedlings are totally sprouting, the baby nasturtia reaching like mad with their tiny, hand-shaped leaves and I worried this AM that they might get leggy before it's their time to hit the soil. So therefore I'm holding back on starting the tobacco plants, this year's big garden theme.
Have to get a new metal trellis for the second of the honeysuckle as it's pulled down the former and have to also get a new jolly roger as the one from Liz has finally been shredded to bits, only its skull remaining with bits of black fabric around it. I'm sure the Holy Eucharistic Rock Band as well as those at Bleak Bakery are thrilled to see that I've changed my ways and have removed what they viewed as a harbinger of death flag. Jack of Bleak Bakery told me so once, in his Yogi Bear voice... how much he loathed the jolly roger as, you know, in this world flags are to be either ol' glory or something really barfy suburban like a whimsy-rich drapeau showing something really really fluffy.
Editrix Sue just asked me to shoot a bunch of things, amongst them a doctor (of bodies, not of the high-falutin' mind sort) who engages in limb-risking drag racing. Neato. As well as annual Oozefest, the event where volleyball merges with a field of mud.
So it's the tenth anniversary of the OK City bombing of Murrow Building and watched part of the ceremoniousness with Kennedy today as we worked out... Clinton the highlight for me, speaking poetically of the American Oak that made it through the trauma. Thoughts meandered over to this week's school readings about murder and just shot off a post about trees, hanging trees, the remaining hanging tree at Washington Square Park in the Shiney Apple in the NW quadrant, an elm that stands still.
Tree of Life. Tree of Wisdom.
Me and Ro's golden tree about my neck.

Tree Love.