time for photography?

 

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There does seem to be a lack of entries here for the recent past. An easy explanation - beyond having little to write about: too much other media. Naturally the primary culprit is the damn teevee. Think it's seductive? Try living with a 50 inch screen and full "surround-a-sound" and see if anything other than couch occupation gets done at night. I feel intellectually engaged by my viewing, so it's not an entirely passive activity. But it's not an activity which generates any useable output, either. Unless I make the effort to come here and comment upon the material that has been consumed. It's still a consumer enterprise, and I'm trying to limit such things. Obviously the time spent commenting has been limited.

In an interesting intersection of media, while I'm reading a copy of Richard Price's Clockers, we're also working our way through the first season of the HBO series The Wire on dvd. (Turns out, Price was one of the writers at some time during the production of the series. Not, I guess, of the material we're currently viewing.) Perhaps not co-incidentally, the similarities between the book and the series  are quite striking: they both are told from the perspectives of the two sides of the "war on drugs." On the one hand there are the Clockers - the dope peddlers - and on the other there are the Knockos - the narcs and cops who try to catch them. They are given equal billing and equal respect.

This was really supposed to be an entry about my excuses for not doing photography, because I've devoted so much time to reading and watching. Added to books and teevee are the occasional magazine, revisiting favorite recorded music with an expanded audio system, blog perusal, and general curiosity. On top of this would be some unease generated by The Wire viewing. It's so good that it makes one want to attempt something similar. Damn, I want to put on a show too! What do I know about? My life at work, in the construction industry. And what is the primary culprit for hijacked time? My life at work doing The J-O-B. It still requires attendance during the major portion of waking hours, leaving only scraps of time to be filled with this or that activity: writing teevee scripts, reading books and blogs, making still photographs; and occasionally writing a blog entry.

It's certainly not that there is a lack of material to write about. It's rather that there are so many things going on, that entries here get pushed farther down the list due to the inherent observational quality of the material. To live  a life of activity, it is necessary to do more than reflect upon the possibilities of a life.

Anybody out there got anything to add?