View allAll Photos Tagged KurtVonnegut
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
Quote ― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
Blue Monday
New Order
‘Now I stand here waiting’
Blue Monday is an unusual track in that its title doesn’t occur anywhere in the lyrics.
The title comes from the science fiction book ‘Goodbye Blue Monday’ by Kurt Vonnegut. Monday was a traditional day on which to wash clothes and the title is a reference to how the invention of the washing machine banished wash day blues!
The previous time I went for this picture a Class 150 pulled in and blocked my view just as the Class 68 arrived. As I stood waiting today, I thought I was in for a repeat show as a Class 802 approached. Thankfully on this occasion the view cleared!
A sight to banish the blues on any day of the week as 68021 ‘Tireless’ calls at Garforth with 1E27 07:54 Liverpool Lime Street to Scarborough on Saturday 18.01.2020
The Sirens of Titan is one of my favourite books ever!
We're Here: The Kurt Vonnegut Appreciation Society
Shot The Kutzin family sunday morning, as a kind of birthday present to Mama Kutzin. The Kutzin daughters, both of whom I've shot in the past, are heavily tattooed, and I believe this was one of their first, matching quotes on their arms. They've both got several more, but this is the only one that matches.
A fact I find incredibly cool, and excellent use of tattooing, to further establish the connection between you and your sister.
Se tra cent'anni arrivassero gli extraterrestri e ci trovassero estinti come i dinosauri, quale messaggio potremmo lasciargli su una parete del Gran Canyon?
"Avremmo potuto salvarci, ma eravamo troppo pigri.....e maledettamente spilorci"
(Kurt Vonnegut)
Symmetrical view of the main entrance to the "municipal slaughterhouse" in Alboraia, a small town in the outskirts of Valencia. I'd love to try this shot with a wide angle lens someday ...
An aside: While uploading this one I've been reminded of a book I read not long ago, Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut, whose satirical swing, cold as ice, is hard to rival.
You may want to see this image in large size. I think it improves.
I often think about the collective consciousness of the world and how, as we lose certain people and ow certain people are born into it, the world changes indefinitely each time. It's a rapidly moving fluid with a constantly dynamic sense of energy.
It's difficult not to feel the loss of what was left behind by the deaths of so many not just Kurt Vonnegut and Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty but all of the immigrants that couldn't be saved because of greedy governments. All of those people have a light and a life in their souls, have an energy that could help redeem us as humans and that has been stifled and not nurtured time and time again.
This photograph is of The Memory Wall in Dresden, Germany, which I photographed on a Kurt Vonnegut tour. This is literally inside the Slaughterhouse Five barracks. The center photograph is of the entire Memory Wall and the surrounding photographs are 8 closeups of Memory Wall tiles I particularly liked. If you are in Dresden or ever visit there, I recommend checking out this tour:
www.kurtvonnegut-tour.com/neu.html
I've always loved Kurt Vonnegut more than any other author because he was able to still see the absolute absurdity of life and the complete range of deplorable acts humans are capable of and yet I feel he still believed humans are ultimately worth saving.
The Tralfamadorians would have wanted us to continually experience Kurt Vonnegut's alive moments as if they were still occurring constantly and that he's just a corpse at one particular moment so let's keep reading his books and remember what he gave to the world!
**All photos are copyrighted. Please don't use without permission**
painted in a 10*8m hole in the ground on the abandoned slaughterhouse area in dresden,
probably the former foundation of a huge boiler plant to derive soap from rendered beef fat or other utilization of carcass.
however, even 15 years after closing down, it still smells nauseating.
the main slaughterhouse complex was built 1906 by hans erlwein,
kurt vonnegut's novel "slaughterhouse five" also takes place there.
caspar david friedrich painted that area called ostragehege in 1832,
and my favourite footnote is that his father was a soap-boiler ...
"Science is magic that works" - Kurt Vonnegut
I once posted a similar photo for the challenge "Words / Text" by the Flickr-group "Our Daily Challenge". I recreated the shot when I noticed that the original Periodic Table of Elements I used was copyrighted.
ODT - Science
flickr stream "Jawad Qasrawi", who recommended the reading of the book in a comment to one of my pictures.
And thanks to željka Gavrilovic (flickr stream: "Sappho et Amicae"), whose picture reminded me this morning that it is international book day - I almost forgot that it is today.
Pflückgedicht vom Zetteldichter Helmut Seethaler (gepflückt am Westbahnhof 6. 2. 2016):
"Je öfter meine Gedichte amtlich entfernt werden um so mehr Gründe gibt es sie noch öfter zu plakatieren!"
Part of "Weaving Diary Tapestry Aktion Tagebuch Teppich Tapisserie Tagebuch weben 365 days project 2: 2015 2016" 23. April 2016 UNESCO world book day Welt Tag des Buches / Pessach Sederabend 2 // Stillleben in der Küche still life in the kitchen // "insects bugs spiders Insekten Käfer Spinnen" // aquarius water wasser - fisch
Diptych: 2016-04-23 #danke #thank #anthologie #heiner #konditorei #seethaler #welt #world #spiegel #hut #hat #beard #bart #beardy #bärtig #zigarette #cigarette #glasses #goggles #specs #spectacles #mirror #liste #stillleben #evening #abend #frühling #spring #handschrift #schrift #dedication #widmung #fish #tier #animal #natur #audiotape #morgen #color #colour #farbe #bunt #farbig #braun #brown #sepia #gold #yellow #gelb #blau #blue #red #rot #weiß #white #line #linie #lineatur #warp #kette #tonband #stille #silence #improvisation #raster #handwerk #weben #inhalt #form #aufzeichnen #loom #webstuhl #öffentlich #rede #einblick #anblick #work #arbeit #schaubild #linear #idee #konzept #überlegung #gedanke #unterlegung #envelope #umschlag #kuvert #private #privat #privateness #metapher #symbol #analogie #bilderzyklus #tapis #tapiz #tapistura #wandteppich #bildwirkerei #bildteppich #textilkunst #assemblage #weben #gewebt #kette #schuss #werkstatt #werkstätte #webatelier #küche #kitchen #carpet #teppich #rug #review #preview #heute #beobachtung #view #blick #konkret #abstrakt
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, "The Sirens of Titan"
Taken @ Wetlands Pond at Urcho
It's hard to imagine that this open square where so much beauty and laughter can occur was the site for a Neo-Nazi Pegida rally just 24 hours beforehand. It was also the same square right outside the hotel I was staying in.
Times have changed dramatically in the US with these hateful Neo-Nazi rallies but, before Charlottesville, I forgot that hateful and racist conservatives had rallies too. I didn't know what Pegida even meant and their signs were in German so I walked up to one of the men, who instead of looking like a skinhead with swastikas looked like an older white male with thinning hair and I asked him what he was protesting. From my standpoint, I figured perhaps Angela Merkel wasn't liberal enough.
It took me awhile through somewhat broken English to finally get to the bottom of what he was saying-he didn't want more immigrants in his country. He wanted them all out and Merkel was letting them in. By this time, my husband had looked up Pegida on his phone and was literally dragging me away when he realized who these people were.
But, let me tell you what this man's belief systems were founded on: a lie. It's a lie that these people are gullible enough to believe. Immigrants aren't our enemies. People of different religions aren't our enemies. Governments that don't take care of all of their citizens are our enemies. War hungry governments are also our enemies. Why should our taxes go to war when they could go to food, clothing, and shelter for an immigrant? Doesn't this do more good in the world? We come from a perspective that, whether we realize it or not, values colonization and ideology and power over people. In America, just think of all of the immigrants that could have been taken care of just on Trump's golfing allowance.
Of course, after I read about what happened in Charlottesville while I was in Berlin, I realized again that the hateful lie to fight each other and fear each other is being told all over the world and that in America, we're not encouraging free speech-we're giving a platform for hate speech which is very different than the protections stated by our Constitution. And, when you allow a hateful rally to occur on your soil and don't offer the citizens in that city protections, you have failed all of your citizens. The neo nazis in America are terrorists who have been encouraged by their president time and time again. When will it end? In my opinion, Mueller must be getting closer and Trump is trying to detract from the Russian investigation but his actions and statements are very telling and aligned with Fascism time and time again.
I came to Dresden for one particular reason-to see the city that my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut saw the beauty in life but he also saw such absurdity in life and struggled with the sad and beautiful world he lived in every day as deep feeling and intelligent people often do. And so it goes that we must struggle.
And, so here we must take up that struggle again and again. For me, it is...is my kindness enough? Is my art enough? Is anything enough? Will intelligence and thoughtfulness win out over harmful ideology, ignorance and hatred?
It might not. I have to admit that even though I want to believe that humanity is worth saving. I knew there was racism in my country but I did not understand the depth of it until what happened recently and it is depressing and terrifying to me.
But, I still think we need to try to keep strong, even if it kills us. We must work to make sure our spaces in this country, in this world remain spaces that are safe and beautiful and not filled with ugly hateful ideology. Kindness makes us human. Fighting for what we believe in makes us human. Seeing all that absurdity in the world and trying to make sense of it makes us human. Every minute of every day, we must try to be human.
Though my mission to Dresden was about Kurt Vonnegut, I want to quote Milan Kundera, who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being which is again referenced in this photograph's title:
"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
and then end with this:
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
The heart knows that we cannot be free when any human is not free. The heart knows this inner sadness and the mind must follow. It's in our limbic systems. It's in our mirror neurons. We must stand up for those who are oppressed. We must remain ourselves, in all our flaws, in all our beauty, in all our sadness. This is what it means to be human. No one ever said it was easy.
**All photos are copyrighted. Please don't use without permission**
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and saw what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"
"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurts."
Rest in peace, grandma.
"My good, beloved wife, ... came to me from the girl pool. And there's an enchanting thought for lonely men - a pool of girls, teeming, warm, and deep."
Kurt Vonnegut "Girl Pool"
:::
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Farewell, Kurt.
:::
Taken at a press conference held before his speaking engagement at the College of Wooster. One of my all time favorite authors.
I didn't come up with this title. Kurt Vonnegut did. And yes, he said telekinetics, not telekinesis.
I guess it was time to do a floating object for Cliche Saturday...I skipped it during last year's Scavenger Hunt, but better late than never, right? HCS, guys!
Hereupon
गाँठ अगर लग जाए तो फिर रिश्ते हो या डोरी
लाख करे कोशिश खुलने में वक़्त तो लगता ह
प्यार का पहेला खत लिखने में वक़्त तो लगता है
“I am proud only of those days that pass in
undivided tenderness.”
Robert Bly
this one is kind of a mess. i made the trees and decided they needed grass and it still looked empty after that so i went to town with my pencil.........i need practice. anyway, here's my second collage, this one a little more mixed media than the last (magazines, a pen AND a pencil!)
"no wonder kids grow up crazy. a cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of x's between somebody's hands and little kids look and look and look at all those x's..."
"and?"
"no damn cat, and no damn cradle"
-kurt vonnegut's cat's cradle
the more i look at this the less i like it, ah well
I was going to make the first tag about how that's what is written on Kurt Vonnegut's tombstone but someone had already beaten me to the tags. But by changing the title to that quote from what was there temporarily when I first upped it, I ruined their fun. Sometimes you just can't win.
So here is sad little post-apocalyptic teddy providing us a Bench Monday shot of holocaustic proportions. Yes, that is a word. I couldn't write it down if it wasn't.
The settings I used to process this are now available as a free download. You can find the 'Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt' preset available for Lightroom and ACR / Photoshop right here (scroll to the bottom or download all six presets at once).
"And I asked myself about the present: How wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
Kurt Vonnegut
Yesterday was a great time spent with my parents for Father's Day. We didn't do anything fancy or elaborate; I made dad brunch on his flat stone grill (bacon, eggs, and pancakes) and we sat on the back porch watching the birds. It may not have been fancy, but we loved every minute of it- and every one of those "small" minutes meant the world to both of us!!
Theme: Power In Words
Year Fifteen Of My 365 Project
First, I had lunch in solitude; second, I enjoyed the experience in good company; today, I had expanded on my inner-circle with a presence that I am overwhelmed in delight to include in future endeavors. In my view, although I am more than capable of accomplishing many tasks as an independent, an assemblage is always appreciated in my travels of pleasant meals and recreational exertion.
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."