Take Your Bags and Shove 'em

Now that things have come to a stop, however briefly, I'd like to take the opportunity to express my dislike for the term 'unpacking'. I've only started hearing this term used to describe taking apart and analyzing an idea or text since I started grad school.


Whenever I hear it, I think of people on airplanes with rolling luggage, removing items one by one to reveal whatever looked suspicious on the x-ray.









I think of something roughly and rudely rammed into a too-small container.



Worst of all, I think of...of business school. Is that what I'm doing with myself now? Am I in business school? This type of jargon makes me fear that I am.

High school was all about juxtaposing and
simulacra. University was about context and worldview, meta- and post-.

Information studies borrows from other fields or makes due with combined words: access, informatics, and closure. Unpacking seems to have been borrowed from linguistics?

Dear teach,
examine, explain, analyze, interpret or pick apart, but don't unpack because I won't be joining you.

Growth...or Regression?

5 years ago I saw this place peeking out from behind several other hideous buildings.
I found out that it was a love hotel decorated as though it were X-mas every day.
I thought it was one of the silliest things I had ever heard. What kind of weirdo wants to f%&k in such a tacky, wasteful place?
I thought "The Japanese are a very strange people that I will never understand."
Now I'm beginning to see the appeal. The problem is, I don't feel that I've changed that much. What's different? Do I take myself less seriously and therefore have a more playful and wondering attitude about everything?
Am I developing a fetish?
Are they just way ahead of me on the curve (as they are with many other things) or have I fallen behind?

A Poem

Come find me,
I'm lonely.
I live in
The Li'bry

There's nothing
To hold me
Except for
The ivy

Procrastination. I does it.

I'm in the library, and up until this moment I've been trying hard not to be distracted by everything around me.
First there was the miniskirt with the bangles, jingling.
Then there was my discovery that I had access to two strangers' itunes libraries.
Then my t.a. came and sat nearby.
In a few minutes I'll go downstairs to sit in on a Microsoft Access tutorial...mostly for moral support. As I imagine going down there and spending an hour or more listening to my stuffy but kind professor discuss the attributes of a program I don't understand, I think of pregnant women and their partners. I liken myself to the one that's not pregnant--unable to completely relate, not as feverishly invested as the one carrying the child, but trying.
Trying to make the issue as relevant for me as it is for you.

love

liz

Did we talk about this?

About 14 months ago I read a Boingboing post about Kohei Yoshiyuki's 1970's photos of peeping toms. It was one of the most interesting groups of photographs I'd ever seen, and I looked through them and thought upon what I thought I knew about Japanese sex culture and what I felt or thought I felt about it.
Man, that was a mouthful.
Here are Yoshiyuki's images of voyeurism...
And here they're imagined for a fashion photo shoot. They get much, much racier than this one. I think that they're interesting for a whole different set of reasons than the originals.
I really enjoy that these images came back into the pubic public consciousness. They have stuck with me for a long time, and I've looked at them a few times over the last year. They're not exactly arousing, or fully disturbing. The originals seem so incredibly honest to me, stolen shots of animals straining against their sweltering, boxed-in city lives. I am uncomfortable with the general situation in the original series--after all, neither of the partners are consenting to be viewed by others...or are they? I lack the knowledge of context for this place and time. Would this be like making love at Hanlan's point? Or in Queen's Park?

The new versions of these pictures seem flat to me because of their staged-ness. They do a great job of capturing the light and style of the originals, but feel dirty because of how the models are portrayed. The women are on the bottom, they're prone, and they're often portrayed with more than one man in scenarios that make me nervous. Also I'm not a fan of their 'outfits'.

Call me a prude if you like, but I like old fashioned fashion photography...