Photography, History and Whatever Else Strikes my Fancy.
I went down to Blender Friday night to get a few shots of langsuir DJ-ing and do my small part to help promote the recent move to Friday nights. I'm very pleased contrasoma and crew have a Friday night. So there I am doing my thing, making my art, and some dread-headed hippy/raver "third-year girl" type decides to give me grief. "Did you ask permission of everyone on the dance floor before you took that picture?" I've heard that one before.
those third year girls who gripe my liver...You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture...They're officious and dull. They're always making profound observations they've overheard.
--Alan Jay Lerner (Spoken by Gene Kelly playing Jerry Mulligan in "An American in Paris" [1951])
Here's a legal lesson, in Canada, outside of Québec (where French civil law regarding privacy has priority over common law), if I am not trespassing on private property and have not be denied permission by the owner of the private property to make photographs (like, for example, the posted "no unauthorized cameras" rule at Sin City -- where, of course, I am authorized) I am actually on pretty solid ground for being within the bounds of the law. I have as much right to take these photographs and publish them as, for example, the CBC has to take close up crowd shots during a hockey game. After five years of doing this, after having my name dragged through the Sun, the Province, and the Globe and Mail, with the scrutiny of the Vancouver Police, trust me, I've considered the legality of my artwork. In fact I think about it all the time, to the point of having read the Copyright Act of Canada, the Privacy Act of Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and a lot about the Les Éditions Vice-Versa Inc. and Gilbert Duclos vs. Pascale-Claude Aubry case in Montréal.
And that is what it is: my artwork. In the tradition of early Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and other Belle Epoche painters.
There isn't much point arguing with someone who has a pickle up her ass (and, what at a slight distance could be mistaken for several on her head) so I didn't have anything to say beyond, "I can't believe you are giving me grief over this," and I turned away. She kept yammering for a while, I caught something about "not wanting to be all over the Internet" but thankfully it's pretty hard to hear someone you aren't paying attention to in a nightclub. The person I was paying attention to at the time, who had a much more lubricated wit than mine at the time, made the salient point that, "I wouldn't want to see her picture all over the Internet either."
Despite my effort to shrug it off he contentious attitude pissed me off and left a lingering sense of annoyance that clouded the rest of my evening.
I could go on and on. Consider these images:
Three Renoir paintings.
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My sense is that this cunt is of the hypocritical organic asparagus farting third-year women's studies solipsist sort, for whom rationality is a tool of patriarchal oppression and thus something be be avoided. That she is the sort who decries censorship of the arts when it is her crap that doesn't make the cut at an art gallery, and yet is willing to rationalize to death the reason why she alone is qualified to make decisions on what is acceptable artistic practice for anyone else. I suspect that she felt it appropriate to single me out from the countless others with cell-phone cameras and LiveJournals because people actually look at my site and I carry an expensive, professional looking camera. Yet the only reason my site gets roughly a million hits a months from about thirty thousand users is because my dedication to the people, music and nightlife sub-culture I find beautiful has kept the site up for over five years with a constant flow of fresh content. It is not Club Vibes or Club Zone, out there to make money and sell ad space. It is my website, my vision, my expression. I spent years saving for a camera like this because is an important tool for what I do. It's not my problem that other people like what I do, and come look at it more than Jane Pickelhead's deviantART page of poems on the misery of the cruel oppression she endures because her student loan and part-time Starbucks job doesn't bring in enough money to afford as much $14/Kg organic asparagus as she would like, and how she got a C- on her paper on "Sartreist existentialism and capitalist materialism".
Oh, yeah, There are a few new pictures from Blender up in the gallery...
Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/664403.html