mintcar

I had a talk with my dad the other night. Why is it that everytime I talk with him, I want to cry? I feel as if I'm finally able to speak to him after he's been thrown onto a remote dungeon on a craggy spire and he's finally returned. I'm amazed that he's still interested in my life, and it seems that he always was.

Today, I 'shot' my professor (Kelley) and then he 'shot' me. These lectures are just getting more and more interesting. I don't know how I could go on with my life without learning this stuff, it's this novel. I mean, you think that towards the end of your undergraduate career, you've covered most of the basics with your liberal arts education, and there isn't that much more indispensible knowledge to learn. But NO! This is stuff that none of my other classes have begun to talk about. I wish I learned it sooner, because I think I would be a different person indeed. Art 150 is like the perfect parallel and counterpoint to ED 100.

+Susan Sontag's "The Image World" 1977
+For a society to be truly modern, it must produce and consume images.
+Photography's mode of control lies not in image-making, but rather, how it changes the relationship between image and reality.
+What is profoundly important is that we now experience reality as sets of images--the real as cinematic--being photographed makes something real, and the distribution of such 'reality' is more important than the image.

+Political space was once physical and public; now it is entirely mass mediated, and the spatial dimension of politics is lost. Photographs also temporally fragment our contiguous lived experience.

+Photographs are the safest version of reality; through them we are able to "consume the world"--shopping for "glory, horror, violence, sensation" without having to risk anything.

This has to be one of my favorite classes ever. At the end of this lecture, Prof Kelley showed us slides of his parents and relatives in the 1940s to 1960s. There was a photo of his mother and father sitting leisurely on a park bench staring at people walking past; "This is what people did before TV. They sat in the park and people-watched." The best one was of his dad and this brother, age 15, sharing a beer on a Sunday afternoon, sitting side by side on a living room bench, staring into space. "This is my dad and brother, waiting for Sunday night football to be invented."

Later that night, I went to Cody's and bought Paul Virilio's "Ground Zero" and "Open Sky."




I can't remember, but ... who is this guy?