phocks

The stringing together of similarity, moments coincide, patterns present themselves to the guillotine, the chopping block, on judgement day. They seem to say, “but we are one and the same”.

After watching Adaptation the other day, with all its musings on orchids and adaptation and the like, I was a little taken aback to find, there in my inbox, an email requesting permission to adapt a photo of an orchid that I’d taken some time back. They wanted to use it for a Mother’s Day greeting card. Times as these seem to raise themselves above the mundane somehow, into prominence, into significant somethings. They hang there in the air, in the mind and can, at times, prop up curious wonderings of an otherworldly guidance.

It is as though echoes and reverberations in the mind are being bolstered by some similar perceived event, and these soundwaves are amplified by degrees depending on how closely the events resonate with each other. Sometimes it seems for the most part, we pay attention only to the loud, bellowing shouts of high coincidence, while the more subtle sounds resounding under their breath often go by unnoticed.

Perceive patterns, the coinciding of all things. Here is a flower.

The flowers of an orchid plant, some thrive, others wither

Dubious beginnings, a common trait of all good books, of ones worth remembering, worth recommending, worth reprinting, worth reproducing. We speak of both introductions and of origins. To introduce, our subject is what appears to be a book of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, large and heavy, hardcover, nicely bound, and coming with one of those jacket-like cases you slide the book into — just in case you didn’t yet realise the book’s obvious value.

How it came to be here, sitting edgeways upon my floor, was that a girl from work asked the question if I had ever heard of the man, the photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. I answered in the negative. The next day arrived this mass binding of pages and a warning about the material to be found between the two red pages, rather explicit gay bordering-on-porn imagery, the reason it was not to be handed around the office willy-nilly. Too large and bulky to carry, a good strapping to the floor of the Vespa saw it arrive home safe and sound.

I expelled a thought of wonder at who in their right mind would still buy a book of such massive expanse into physical existence. Flipped through the pages a few times, noticing the few celebrity likenesses the most and of course the overt homosexual content, one reason, I imagine, that our lender attracted a certain kinship to this photographer. Kinship, awe, and admiration, reason enough for this lofty purchase. That and a chance to strut it upon coffee tables when friends come to play, an aid to outward expression, or to lend to someone at work who will subsequently analyse its evolutionary origins in existence. Either way.

Tangible, an object, and replicable, an ideal subject. This photo book, still thriving it seems in an ever-changing environment, a fluctuating market, has evolved some very specialised traits that allow it to survive. It is big and well bound, suitable for showing off to friends; it has pretty pictures that when looked at correctly, in the right frame of mind, will challenge the viewer’s way of thinking about the word (we talking about art here); and it is about a quasi-celebrity photographer and so gives the reader some kind of knowledge about the history of society in which they are living. Other traits are common to virtually all books, such that it contains pages, a front and back cover, and is relatively portable. Perfectly fit for reproduction.

Designed? Surely not. This book evolved, dubiously, in minds, in markets, in existence, in this post, from its countless predecessors. It will continue.

Additional resources: Artsy

Photograph of a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger and a man in the tub

The periodic reading during hurried lunch breaks of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius seems to have spurred on previous ideas — ideas that up until now had been lying dormant — to take on something new, a new project, or whatever it was that had built itself up in my head as what would seem like a good idea to spend a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears on for a considerable period of time, in order to reap the perceived extensive existential gain, whatever that may or may not be.

The idea is simple, and It’s been brewing away for probably months, or maybe even years, up there in Neverland: to pick simple, everyday things, things you may not think twice about, and write about them analytically in terms of their evolutionary existence, etc, mainly in order to offer an alternative view on our perceptions of the things around us — something like that anyway. We’ll see how it turns out after things begin to take shape.

So what I’ll do is I’ll pick something, something from the day, or something that occurs to me during the day, and then I’ll write about that, just to make it a little personal. That single object will most likely then get expanded into its basic form, or what it is, like my tambourine over there on the bed is a member of the percussion family of musical instruments — stuff like that, all biological, and trace the history and origins and study its continued existence in the universe. Follow?

This will be it, and I’ll do it every day for a hundred days, or more realistically, as frequently as life allows for however long it takes for me to throw the towel in. That should theoretically fill a book; I’ll publish it, and BAM! thrust skyward towards ongoing influence and memory in high society, to an escape from a weary workaday worldliness, while at the same time helping a few lonely souls along the way reach the fabled “new” perfect bliss and enlightenment.

I have no idea what I’m going on about… or do it? It really depends upon the state of evolution that this sentence you’re reading now has in your mind at this given time, or down the track, or before you even read it, while I’m typing it now.

Self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows?

Probably more television than I’ve watched for the past year combined. Hit that mute button now to end noisy vibrations penetrating my inner cortex. It has been a big week, a strange week, and I’ve been laying low, flying high, I can’t decide; a vagrant heart.

Home it seems doesn’t feel as its name would suggest. So I’ve been the wanderer, the seeker, the midnight drifter, up and down this old town. Currently commandeering control of a friend’s slavish computer, whose master is half the world away, following the heart, or something similar.

Not much to report that hasn’t already been broadcast through alternative means, or that which lies lock-safe within. I need to write more, but sometimes it is what you don’t write… who am I kidding? The days take control, and the daze takes control.

In my head there is a future brewing, vying for evolutionary equilibrium… strange… attraction.

Seems I had WordPress 2.5 final already last night, but just didn’t know it yet. It was simply masquerading as a late revision of release candidate 3. This morning when the news came through the usual update channels to my awareness, I immediately went to upgrade from the subversion repository. I found that the only file that was updated to be one wp-includes/version.php which seems to just tell WordPress what version number it is running.

Actually now that I look at it, mine now says “2.6-bleeding”. I guess that’s what comes of this whole subversion beta testing thing, not ever really getting to try the release versions for very long. Probably in essence, it is like always running a broken, un(der)tested version. It is like a fleet of horses and carriages, with the newly designed carriages up at the front. Sometimes their new fandangled modifications will result in a wheel falling off, and as such, the rest of the fleet would probably not adopt that new modification.

You can obviously draw parallels between software development and the evolutionary process, especially with open source development, with each application being a separate species that slowly adapts over time. There is no one single designer, and indeed it would be impossible virtually for any single person to design and code something so complex as the WordPress base code. But with so many contributors building upon and changing the design to better suit its environment, the species plods along on its evolving path.

The audacity to speak only in the singular when referring to any creation so complex astonishes me.