detached

I am a little late on the Blip post for today. Granted, I still have about three hours left in my day. And it is not like any of you, Sweet Viewers, are waiting with baited breath for the latest blowfish harangue anyhow.

Had the family style dinner tonight at Liz's with the old cast of characters, Brighton and Dave were there. It reminded me, so warmly, of the first time I had been there for this, so many months ago at the beginning of it all. As for the photo: the other day when it was just Leah and I over at her place, I caught something out of the corner of my eye on Liz's bedroom wall. I have been wanting to blip this fine specimen since that moment.

Early this morning I filmed a fifteen minute piece with the camera lashed to a shopping cart at Central Market. It documented the entirety of my trip: from parking lot to store to checkout to parking lot to cart corral. An interesting study in movement, really, from several perspectives. And unmovement, too, in the way inanimate things morph into fluid objectifications of themselves in blurred corner-turns. I thought a lot about Jean Baudrillard:

"There is all around us today a kind of fantastic
conspicuousness of consumption and abundance,
constituted by the multiplication of objects,
services and material goods, and this represents
something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology
of the human species. Strictly speaking, the humans
of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by
other human beings, as they were in previous ages, but by objects."

This is from the seminal The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970). I am both an active servant of this but I want to become detached severed from it all sometimes as well.

But let's be frank and honest with each other here, Viewer, that is simply not a viable option. You know it, I know it. Just as sure as if I see a Q-tip in someone's bathroom, I use it. Or a paper-clip, I unbend it. Every time, without fail.