and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

UPDATE: This link courtesy of raspil at bluecad.net

Blogging 101: credit where credit is due.

This is absolutely brilliant. Not brilliant because it's an original idea (I've had the idea a thousand times before and none of those times was it original, either)..but because he is actually doing it.. carrying it out. I love it. I love it because there is something in the black and the white of things that makes people look just so fucking real.

I like real people. There are enough fake ones out there to make the real ones special.

The face is the center of beauty because it's the physical embodiment of the mind. It's the obvious progression, really.

When we think, we think in our heads. Upstairs. Never are we feeling, thinking, emoting in our foot.. or our elbow. Never is our feeling of existence within our hand or even our torso. Sure emotion sometimes emits itself through the torso - through the heart in a tightness or a bleeding or in the stomach as nausea - but the real existence of us is in our heads. We always climb back upstairs with the baggage to do the real thinking. That's where the brain is.

Which starts to get pretty creepy when you realize how self-aware the brain is. Where it is. What it is. Thousands of years ago no one knew about brains, hearts, organs.. The insides of the human being was a pretty strange place - like visiting your uncle in Somewhere town and not really knowing where to go for lunch. But even back then I imagine people felt the same way. They thought from their heads. Faces - besides being one of the centers of physical emotion - is quite literally the face of one's brain. The facade on which ideas are expressed. The monitor of the computer mind. Like the keyboard, we never think of hands as the 'it'. They are peripherals. It's the face that projects.

In some Sci-Fi stories people's heads are removed and frozen. People's heads are placed on robots. People's brains are connected to computers. It's all in the brain. We ARE our brain. The body is a vehicle - a big mech-warrior that lumbers around carrying it's passenger as it's told. No, not as it's told - as it's driven. Somehow removing one's head - placing it in a jar or on a shelf to be talked to in passing, it all makes sense:

"Hullo head"

"Oh, hullo."

"How are you feeling today?"

"Oh, a little stuffed up.. but fine really. Can you take me off this shelf? It's an awful bore."

"No, sorry, I can't. You're for decoration only. Couldn't do it, you see?"

It's okay to think of the head alone as an existing being.

Hang a body in the basement and it ceases to exist as a person and immediately becomes a thing. Which is why the headless horseman was so fucking scary - it plays with our perceptions.

So the face is as close as we get to the real someone. The brain of it. Eyes, nose, mouth, brows. These are the best we can do. Which is why art of the body is technically beautiful but never more. It's the face that counts. How many millions of people have stared into the eyes of Mona Lisa and wondered about her thoughts, her cares, her worries.. How many millions of people have stared, eyebrows raised, loins astir, at David's buttocks. They aren't asking what he is thinking.

"Oh super", he thought. "They're lookin' at me bum again."

I don't think art as art means a whole lot. It's the art of recording that counts. Art as art falls under the one man's trash is another man's treasure mantra. Art as expression - a record of thought - a collection of meaning - that's where it becomes meaningful. Not so much in it's beauty but in it's existence. Sometimes the awe is in the creation, not in the work itself.

A photo a day - of a stranger's face - in black and white - now that's art.

And beautiful.