rinue | The Reason Don't I Eat Bacon More Often

When I have a very good breakfast after a good night's sleep and a sort of leisurely waking up with Ciro, it is hard to convince me to do anything with the rest of the day; I have clearly accomplished quite enough and feel safe going back to bed. This is well established. However, an excellent lunch has the opposite effect of making me want to go on a rampage and pull down several buildings. It is awfully hard to be calm about a good lunch.

Last night at the DMA went relatively well, although the staff spent basically the entire evening apologizing to me for not providing grander equipment. I kept trying to reassure them that technical difficulties were simply something that happened in filmmaking even with very expensive productions, and that one of the main jobs of a director is making the best of what you have at a given moment -- but I think they believed I was just being polite.

Crowds were thin thanks to a decision to shift Thursday evenings to a paid model. (Until recently, they were free to the public.) As someone who remembers the museum a decade ago, when it was always free to the public unless one cared to donate, I can't help but lament this final loophole closing. Was it so much to allow people in free for three hours of the week? As someone who has often donated and often been a member, I'm grumpy about this, even though I know that large donors have been scarce this year (for museums and for colleges) and it's hard (if not impossible) for small donors to make up for it. At least high school students get in free -- and are coming more frequently now that they know there's a time limit on it.

In any case, everyone was enthusiastic and delighted with the results of the project -- each person made a story told in three panels, like a comic strip or a human storyboard. This was originally intended to be done with photographs of shadows on a sheet, but I was not provided with a strong enough light source, so I just switched to black and white photographs in front of a white backdrop. People were thrilled to see photos of themselves in which they were emoting rather than smiling, portrait-style; a lot of them were suprised to realize they could look powerful and persuasive. As always, it was a revelation for people to realize they could stage in depth or change camera angles from panel to panel -- that the camera does the job of flattening to a 2D image and it is not necessary to stand in a horizontal line of pictograms.

Following yesterday's entry, Ciro and I were talking about the Apple brand, and it occurred to me that Apple has a gender identity in my mind, and that gender is gay male. Note that I think this of Apple, not of Apple users; I have known devoted Apple users of both sexes and any number of sexual proclivities. But the Apple products themselves I see as superficially feminine but with an ultimately male-centered viewpoint. They're outside the mainstream and very stylish, but totaly uninterested in how I use them -- if I say I want some function I am wrong and stupid and don't understand anything about the underlying sexuality, er functionality, and need to adjust my desires to this other model or go away get out of our club you are not fabulous and anyway you don't have the right equipment to interface with us and your equipment is gross. We will have this benevolent patriarchal leader, Steve Jobs, and you will not speak against him and this is for your own safety.

We have also been talking about double consciousness, and how odd it must be not to have one -- not to constantly look at yourself not only from the view of your own culture, but also how you might look to people from other cultures. A family friend (white/male/straight) has recently gone through a nasty breakup from a rather horrible person and has moved in with a fairly unreconstructed relative, which means he is now continually saying things like "ladies, please don't do [random thing]. I promise we are more attracted to you when you are [this way]" -- which both assumes that women only act to please men and that all men are pleased by the same things he is. I suspect this is a fairly accurate test of privilege: if you have ever presumed you speak for everyone, you probably have it.