panorama

So this is the view from my window tonight - that is, three hours ago, at late dusk.   We were looking at Muybridge's panoramas of San Francisco, and considering them as deceptive images: deceptive, that is, if one thinks of them as one static moment of city-ness, floating in time - because any composite picture is something that is built up of sequential moments (something that Solnit tries to remind us of in her lay-out, segmenting the SF images so that they appear, scroll like, over several pages).   In the case of this image, Photoshop's merge feature allows one a very basic way of signaling the overlap between frames, before, that is, one trims the agglomeration of images down to a neat rectangle, which I've refused to do.   I tried taking several panoramas - one doesn't want to waste the view from the 37th floor of the Millennium Hotel, on UN plaza - and in someways the most interesting one was formed when I looked directly downwards, rather than leveling my camera in conventional way at the horizon.   However, the completely crappy internet connection here hasn't yet let me upload it.   And at $12.95 for each 24-hours on line, one would expect a better connection than one receives - if one's lucky, there's a small flicker of interest out there in the ether every ten minutes or so - rarely enough to allow for any kind of sustained contact with the world.   So I'm going to cross my fingers, and keep pressing "send" till this posts...