Image of the Day [1]

Wendy And Lucy, Kelly Reichardt, 2008.


Portrait of the artist at work in the night. How many of our ideas about nighttime (its colors, lightness, energy, danger) come from film/video's general inability to capture it with any but the softest detail? Did people feel differently about the night before film came along? Or do images like the above capture what was always there? Reichardt's evocation/depiction of night can look a bit like a happy accident of technical limitation, but it's also so precise that it ends up equal parts poetic and hyperreal (the latter maybe only because I've been trained by years of (digitally) photographing the night to think that it really looks that way: brown and yellow smears on slightly blemished black). The brief, beautiful "wandering ghosts" shot works better in real time, as the two figures are only identifiable as such from their movement, but they register faintly in the still.

"Image of the day" copyright the always brilliant and inspiring Glenn Kenny (example, sans vague, unnecessary, contextualizing questions); I hope to do more of my own. Image capture is my favorite feature on my computer--sometimes I feel it's the only reason I own one. Back before my disc drive broke, I was continually frustrated by the fact that image capture is inaccessible during DVD playback. On a whim yesterday, I discovered that the print screen feature in Windows doesn't have the same limitation. Needless to say I'm pretty excited.

Speaking of Mr. Kenny, let me tell you about a dream I had a while back that is actually relevant to this blog. I was reading an imaginary book version of Kenny's Some Came Running blog, and there was an extensive entry about Reading (b)log (it was weird to see the name as anything but a hyperlink--in print), in which he commented on something I'd recently written, took me very seriously while recognizing some of my shortcomings, in sum very critical yet encouraging. It helped me realize (in the dream, and a little bit in real life) I need to take myself more seriously than I maybe do.

But before I change, one more somewhat distant dream: The band Big Troubles places a classified (where? I don't remember) about plans for their next album. They don't like the way they've been written about ("indie rock" or whatever, though aren't they so awesomely exactly what they aim to be, and generally heard as such?) and want fans to help them brainstorm a new hockey-themed album (??) so they can blatantly dash expectations of subject matter, so that definition (as controlled by the band) can precede the music, and not vice versa (i.e. proceed from...) as that's not working for them. Also, the word "gigification" appears somewhere in the classified. I know or sense what it means in the dream, but not upon waking.