Archives for July, 2010

In the summer, bodies take on new geographies. Light maps itself onto skin in new formations of shade and shadows fill out more carefully the curves that stretch slow from neck to shoulder. Bodies now mark their borders more clearly: forearms melt into elbows and darker calves meet paler thighs at toughening knees. The soft, small hairs that round shoulders start to fade into diffuse blurs that glow and forget to glint. On people I’ve known for barely a month, I can trace how the sun has fallen on their bodies, can chart the deepening of their skins over the course of my knowledge of them. Can trace, therefore, how clothes sat on their bodies, where the edges of cloth fell across their arms, their legs, their chests. Like the movements of tides, I can watch after the fact how the sun moved across your arms, leaving shorelines darker against lighter, the imprints of sporadic afternoons of heat and rain.

These are the bodies geometry was invented for, bodies whose lines meet at angles so sharp I could take compasses to them and analogise out of the thrust of muscle along arm and through chest formulas that trap into small symbols and beautiful numbers the clean long lines of their bodies. At the base of your neck, your bones slide into each other, forming hollows that you can’t see, and those are wells so deep I could drink out of them. Your belly caves into a shallow indentation just above your hips, reorienting how I will from here on in think of the word ‘button.’ The tendons that wind up your calves fall into the backs of your knees, catch on the lock of bones there, and open up wells deep enough to drink out of.

But thankfully, there are things about you that my eyes cannot speak to, which I cannot reduce to painstakingly focused stillshots. Like the unexpected softness of the tip of your nose, which, if touched just so, is no less soft than the lobes of your ears. And somehow I lose track when I set to tallying your ribs. They are as difficult to count as the beats of your heart, as difficult to trace out from under your skin, or my fingers aren’t as gentle as I need them to be, or I must not be listening closely enough. But somehow your ribs do go on forever. Sinews weave determined and gentle along the length of your arms, like roads hugging mountains, and the tips of my fingers are careful, careful, careful to cling close to those careening routes, conscious of the heights from which they might otherwise fall. There is a dark and raised birthmark along your back, mapping out like rocks newly raised from land its upper right quarter a rough terrain that cuts harsh under my palm.

In the summer, skin turns into its own language. I learn it again, and again, how every other science I know can exist to speak about just this one thing.

Goddamn, photography is hard. I am tired of sucking so much at something I love*. Every time I download a day’s collections of pictures onto my computer, I want to give up.

Especially people — why the hell are my pictures of people so poor? This is why I like urban photography better: streets are much more photogenic than all the beautiful people I know.
And I know lots of disgustingly beautiful people. Which makes my mediocrity all the more infuriating.

To hell with this trial-and-error shite. Come September, I’m enrolling in classes.

Goddamn.

On the other hand, a girl I met very very briefly last month emailed me the other day asking if she could model for me. The world confuses me.

—
* Yeah yeah, laugh it up.

At exactly midnight, I walk by the bus stop closest to my house. One of the men I would at other times call the concierge is sitting alone inside the shelter, head cocked to the west, in the direction of absent oncoming traffic. He’s wearing a red t-shirt now, instead of a blue suit. And he has on glasses and his jaw is set loosely, in an impression impossible to read. The sight strikes me as tragic for no other reason than that I’m sad already.

What they never tell you is that moment when you fall cleanly and wholly out of love with that person you used to adore — that moment is a fantastic moment.

“Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons.”

– David Sedaris, “The Girl Next Door,” Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

“I could take pictures of this tree or this swing, and no one would know their significance.
“Except you and me.”

He laughs and laughs, a shadow of noise and skin in the park’s night quiet.

Just as fear creates grounds for suspicion, it needs to be treated, both intellectually and politically, with suspicion. Unraveling the antecedents of fear is crucial to keep governments and other protagonists of nationalism in check. Without constant vigilance that probes the production of fear and crisis, both of these commodities will be used creatively and strategically to justify violence and exclusion. Insecurity expressed at scales of the body and household will remain largely effaced if militarized nationalisms continue to reproduce geopolitical life as a matter of nations and states, fear and violence.

– Hyndman, J. “The Securitization of Fear in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(2): 361-372, 2007.

(I have the full article if you want it.)