scissoring the last days of disco

Most days, I'm fairly confident that I have either a stand-out Image of the Day, or an issue about which I want to say something - either something that grows out of the image itself, or else the image was itself generated because of the desire to write about a theme.   But here's today's dilemma: one image that I really like, but that doesn't do much for me when it comes to writing about it.   What, indeed, is there to be said about an anonymous pair of scissors on a table? - other than that the setting is a strange one: the corner of Sunset and Santa Monica, sometimes an empty lot, which claims to be rentable for shoots, and sometimes, at the weekends - and this is new - a kind of superannuated flea market cum yard sale.

But this picture is much more anecdotal, less aesthetic: it's Alice looking up for 11 seconds from revising the final chapter of the Disco book, due with her publisher at 4.00 EST this afternoon (a deadline met, give or take a half hour), and hence a moment worthy of commemoration and celebration (we've just been out to dinner at Reservoir).   And it goes in the memorialization category, too - this is my study (and the desk will be moving to Highland Park) into which Work Has Spread (and which is, indeed, a very good space in which to concentrate - though I'm finding grading easy enough downstairs).    And it also neatly references Alice's actual appearance with the tabby avatar - LucyFur - whose picture (framed on the wall behind her head) she's chosen to represent her as her FB portrait (an area of choice that stimulated various bits of class discussion this semester).  So there's much more to be said about this image than there is about scissors.   There are no compelling criteria that suggest that the personal should be privileged above the aesthetic (not that this is a bad picture - just a fairly conventional one), or vice versa - therefore, I'm keeping them both, as a demonstration of the relatively even handed (but not always resolvable) juggling act that goes into this daily pursuit, in which hitting a balance between the demands of taking photographs and the demands of writing is, indeed, the tricky bit.