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Thinking about picking up reading again. I want to see if my brain can handle it. I looked up my favorite author Haruki Murakami and found out he has written a book called "Kafka on the Shore." I remember the comment Le Souffle Blanc has left on this photo. I haven't really thought of myself as existential, but maybe his books has that influence on me without me knowing.
Sometimes titles alone are worthy.
How Carter Beat the Devil is a perfect example. Having read that mysteriously original novel several years ago, I've now forgotten most of the storyline!
But still, that title lingers.
1. What intriguing title do YOU most remember... and why?
2. How do YOU beat the devil?
3. As a person of faith, I beat the devil by... looking outside of myself for that... something or SOMEONE beyond myself. I beat the devil by spurning the ever popular mantra in the self-help industry "If it's to be, it's up to ME" or "I am the Captain of my own destiny". That's a tiring burden.
4. I LIKE the self-help industry and read from it often. But I resist it's all to often existential pull to rely on self.
5. I stare down the devil and the reaper.
6. Tyler Perry, CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Rick Warren, King David and Solomon all stare him down too. See for yourself.
:)
~Delmore Schwartz~
Common blackbird (Turdus merula) taking a bath in the garden.
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I’m taking part in an exhibition called Sisyphus Office based out of Skydive, a Houston, Texas gallery. Here’s an extract form the press release:
“The artists involved in the project are collaborating with businesses and offices in and around Houston in order to highlight art as a necessary distraction in our day to day life. The artists and offices involved in Sisyphus Office are working physically and conceptually with the notions of existentialism, capitalism, artistic romanticism and deadpan slapstickism as a means to examine the artifice that keeps us clinging to reality and distracted from the void. Sisyphus Office is about punching the clock, and then punching it again…but harder the second time. It’s about transcending the mundane through the beauty and absurdity of distraction. It’s about recognizing the comedy in the tragedy of the day to day… and then waking up again to do the same thing all over again the next morning.”
Anyway, my contribution is an installation KPFT entitled "What I do at work when I'm supposed to be working." in the offices of Houston radio station 90.1. It consists of a number of small works made entirely from office supplies. That have been pinned up randomly amongst the notices, flyers and memos that were already existing in the office.
You can see more of my artwork here: www.behance.net/Gallery/Sisyphus-Office-Exhibition-Housto...
Gallery website here: www.theskydive.org/
“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
European politicians more and more act versus the Roma / Gypsy / Gitane minority - for example: Sarkozy sent police to dismantle "illegal" Gypsy Camps in France - view also www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9rrvBjIxKU
This epic science fiction film, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, follows a voyage to Jupiter with the sentient computer HAL after the discovery of an alien monolith affecting human evolution. The film deals with themes of existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel” and other short stories by Clarke.
The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques, dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, among them “Also sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II, and works by Aram Khachaturian and György Ligeti.
The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, with Kubrick winning for his direction of the visual effects. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1991, it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the U.S. Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. [Source: Wikipedia]
Movie Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_e9y-bka0
Well before the very Parisian concept of "philosophy-cafés", based on the idea of a group of friends who enjoy a good discussion, the café Les Philosophes or "the philosophers" offered debating evenings where world matters can be chewed over and discussed...
Subsequently, the concept was put aside and only the dishes remained true to the history of this place: you can have an "Aristotle salad" or a "Plato andouilette".
Also taste the tomato tarte tatin: it might just change your philosophy on existentialism! :)
Merci beaucoup!
Hit 'L' to view on large.
A place filled with history including the hospital where a young 17 year old Adolf Hitler was treated in October and November 1916 after he was shot following a leg injury during the Battle of the Somme.
Beelitz-Heilstätten, a district of the town, is home to a large hospital complex of about 60 buildings including a cogeneration plant erected from 1898 on according to plans of architect Heino Schmieden. Originally designed as a sanatorium by the Berlin workers' health insurance corporation, the complex from the beginning of World War I on was a military hospital of the Imperial German Army. In 1945, Beelitz-Heilstätten was occupied by Red Army forces, and the complex remained a Soviet military hospital until 1995, well after the German reunification. In December 1990 Erich Honecker was admitted to Beelitz-Heilstätten after being forced to resign as the head of the East German government.
Following the Soviet withdrawal, attempts were made to privatize the complex, but they were not entirely successful. Some sections of the hospital remain in operation as a neurological rehabilitation center and as a center for research and care for victims of Parkinsons disease. The remainder of the complex, including the surgery, the psychiatric ward, and a rifle range, was abandoned in 2000. As of 2007, none of the abandoned hospital buildings or the surrounding area were secured, giving the area the feel of a ghost town. This has made Beelitz-Heilstätten a destination for curious visitors and a film set for movies like The Pianist in 2002, the Rammstein music video Mein Herz brennt and Valkyrie in 2008.
Another month, another tour. The Benzine tour no doubt on the name. On tour with Camerashy, Wiffsmiff23 and FlashandBlur. Countless hours driving, some iconic places visited and efficient Police and Security encountered and hid from. Not to mention lots of places sealed, trashed or locked down.
My blog:
timster1973.wordpress.com
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every year I visit several DJANGO REINHARDT Festivals in France, Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands; I am not only attracted by the music, but it's also the lifestyle, the laziness, the laid-back mood, the irony, the steady solidarity, the consistency of the community, making their persistent homages to the great Swing guitarist Django Reinhardt...
As I'm sure we all know French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said 'Words are loaded pistols'. I think we can all appreciate the sentiment behind this statement as surely we've all said something we regret every once in a while. And once those words are said the pistol has been fired and there's no turning back.
This design started life as the image of existential French Jean Paul Sartre's head with his loaded pistol words alongside but as I love an earworm if I can possibly get away with it I took some inspiration from the world of music to see if I could get Cher's seminal 1989 hit 'If I could turn back time' playing unheeded in your brain.
In the song Cher utters the immortal words 'Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes' and this rang a bell in my brain as it seemed close enough to Sartre's words to make use of. Hopefully that will strike a chord in your brain and you'll be singing it all day. Mission accomplished!
Whilst we were painting it some hapless busybody decided to try and let me know that I'd misquoted Sartre but, of course, I hadn't as she had neglected to read my 'Jean Paul Sartre as paraphrased by Cher' small print graffiti. id-iom 1 - random passerby 0. Ha! In your face!
Cheers
id-iom
Carl W. Goines, with Banksy's controversial "I remember when all this was trees." Carl Jr. is Co-Director and board member of 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios in Southwest Detroit. At the unveiling last night, part of me wondered if Banksy showed up. Who would ever know?
The debate over this one has been interesting to follow, because perhaps more powerful than the piece itself are the seemingly endless arguments for and against what was done AFTER it was painted...
what more can a man ask? freedom and good health to enjoy a day out exploring new places with his sons and a friend in November sunshine ;-)
También puede ser vista como un retrato del existencialismo perruno. Ser o no ser, diría Hamlet.
It can also be seen as a portrait of doggy existentialism. To be or not to be, Hamlet would say.
Website: www.johanniels.com
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Andrei Platonovich Platonov was a Soviet Russian novelist, short story writer, philosopher, playwright, and poet. Although Platonov regarded himself as a communist, his principal works remained unpublished in his lifetime because of their skeptical attitude toward collectivization of agriculture (1929–1940) and other Stalinist policies, as well as for their experimental, avant-garde form infused with existentialism. His famous works include the novels Chevengur (1928) and The Foundation Pit (1930).
Early life and education
Platonov was born in the settlement of Yamskaya Sloboda on the outskirts of Voronezh in the Chernozem Region of Central Russia. His father was a metal fitter (and amateur inventor) employed in the railroad workshops and his mother was the daughter of a watchmaker. He attended a local parish school and completed his primary education at a four-year city school and began work at age thirteen, with such jobs as an office clerk at a local insurance company, smelter at a pipe factory, assistant machinist, warehouseman, and the railroad. Following the 1917 Revolution, he studied electrical technology at Voronezh Polytechnic Institute. When Civil War broke out in 1918 Platonov assisted his father on trains delivering troops and supplies and clearing snow.
Early career
Meanwhile, Platonov had begun to write poems, submitting them to papers in Moscow and elsewhere. He was also a prolific contributor to local periodicals. These included Zheleznyi put ("Railroad"), the paper of the local railway workers' union; the Voronezh Region Communist Party newspapers Krasnaia derevnia ("Red countryside") and Voronezhskaia kommuna ("Voronezh commune"); and Kuznitsa, the nationwide journal of the "Smithy" group of proletarian writers.
From 1918 through 1921, his most intensive period as a writer, he published dozens of poems (an anthology appeared in 1922), several stories, and hundreds of articles and essays, adopting in 1920 the pen-name Platonov by which he is best-known. With remarkable energy and intellectual precocity, he wrote confidently across a range of topics including literature, art, cultural life, science, philosophy, religion, education, politics, the civil war, foreign relations, economics, technology, famine and land reclamation, and others. It was not unusual around 1920 to see two or three pieces by Platonov, on quite different subjects, appear daily in the press.
He has also been involved with the local Proletcult movement, joined the Union of Communist Journalists in March 1920, and worked as an editor at Krasnaia Derevnia ("Red countryside"), and the paper of the local railway workers' union. in August 1920, Platonov was elected to the interim board of the newly-formed Voronezh Union of Proletarian Writers and attended the First Congress of Proletarian Writers in Moscow in October 1920, organized by the Smithy group. He regularly read his poetry and gave critical talks at various club meetings.
In July 1920, Platonov was admitted to the Communist Party as a candidate member on the recommendation of his friend Litvin (Molotov). He attended Party meetings, but was expelled from the Party on 30 October 1921 as an "unstable element". Later, he said the reason was "juvenile". He may have quit the party in dismay of the New Economic Policy (NEP). like a number of other worker writers (many of whom he had met through Kuznitsa and at the 1920 writers' congress). Troubled by the famine of 1921, he openly and controversially criticized the behaviour (and privileges) of local communists. In spring, 1924 Platonov applied for re-admission to the Party, offering reassurance that he had remained a communist and a Marxist, but he was denied then as on the next two occasions.
In 1921 Platonov married Maria Aleksandrovna Kashintseva (1903–1983); they had a son, Platon, in 1922, and a daughter, Maria, in 1944.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating drought and famine of 1921, Platonov abandoned writing to work on electrification and land reclamation for the Voronezh Provincial Land Administration and later for the central government. "I could no longer be occupied with a contemplative activity like literature", he recalled later. For the next years, he worked as an engineer and administrator, organizing the digging of ponds and wells, draining of swampland, and building a hydroelectric plant.
Chevengur, The Foundation Pit and For Future Use
When he returned to writing prose in 1926, a number of critics and readers noted the appearance of a major and original literary voice. Moving to Moscow in 1927, he became, for the first time, a professional writer, working with a number of leading magazines.
Between 1926 and 1930, the period from NEP to the first five-year plan (1928–1932), Platonov produced his two major works, the novels Chevengur and The Foundation Pit. With their implicit criticism of the system, neither was then accepted for publication although one section of Chevengur appeared in a magazine. The two novels were only published in the USSR during the late 1980s.
In the 1930s, Platonov worked with the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz, who edited The Literary Critic (Literaturny Kritik), a Moscow magazine followed by Marxist philosophers around the world. Another of the magazine's contributors was the theoretician György Lukács and Platonov built upon connections with the two philosophers. A turning point in his life and career as a writer came with the publication in March 1931 of For Future Use (″Vprok″ in Russian), a novella that chronicled the forced collectivisation of agriculture during the First Five Year Plan.
According to archival evidence (OGPU informer's report, 11 July 1931), Stalin read For Future Use carefully after its publication, adding marginal comments about the author ("fool, idiot, scoundrel") and his literary style ("this isn't Russian but some incomprehensible nonsense") to his copy of the magazine. In a note to the publishers, the Krasnaya nov monthly, Stalin described Platonov as "an agent of our enemies" and suggested in a postscript that the author and other "numbskulls" (i.e. the editors) should be punished in such a way that the punishment served them "for future use".
In 1933, an OGPU official Shivarov wrote a special report on Platonov. Attached were versions of The Sea of Youth, the play "14 Red Huts" and the unfinished "Technical Novel". The report described For Future Use as "a satire on the organizing of collective farms," and commented that Platonov's subsequent work revealed the "deepening anti-Soviet attitudes" of the writer.
Official support and censure
In 1934, Maksim Gorky arranged for Platonov to be included in a “writers' brigade” sent to Central Asia with the intention of publishing a collective work in celebration of ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan. (Earlier that year, a collective work by over 30 Soviet writers had been published about the construction of the White Sea Canal.) Platonov’s contribution to the Turkmen volume was a short story titled “Takyr” (or “Salt-flats”) about the liberation of a Persian slave girl. Platonov returned to Turkmenistan in 1935 and this was the basis for his novella Soul (or Dzhan). Dzhan is about a “non-Russian” economist from Central Asia, who leaves Moscow to help his lost, nomadic nation called Dzhan, of rejects and outcasts possessing nothing but their souls. A censored text was first published in 1966; a complete, uncensored text only in 1999.
In the mid-1930s Platonov was again invited to contribute to a collective volume, about rail workers. He wrote two stories: "Immortality", which was highly praised, and "Among Animals and Plants", which was severely criticized and eventually published only in a heavily edited and far weaker version.
In August 1936, The Literary Critic published "Immortality" with a note explaining the difficulties the author had faced when proposing the story to other periodicals. The following year, this publication came under criticism in Krasnaya Nov, damaging Platonov's reputation. In 1939, the story was republished in the intended collective volume, Fictional representations of Railway Transport (1939) dedicated to the heroes of the Soviet railroad system.
Platonov published eight more books, fiction and essays, between 1937 and his death in 1951.
Stalin's ambivalence and Platonov's son
Stalin was ambivalent about Platonov's worth as a writer. The same informer's report in July 1931 claimed that he also referred to the writer as "brilliant, a prophet". For his part, Platonov made hostile remarks about Trotsky, Rykov, and Bukharin but not about Stalin, to whom he wrote letters on several occasions. "Is Platonov here?" asked Stalin at the meeting with Soviet writers held in Moscow at Gorky's villa in October 1932 when the Soviet leader first called writers "engineers of the human soul".
In January 1937, Platonov contributed to an issue of Literaturnaya gazeta in which the accused at the second Moscow Show Trial (Radek, Pyatakov and others) were denounced and condemned by 30 well-known writers, including Boris Pasternak. His short text "To overcome evil" is included in his collected works. It has been suggested that it contains coded criticism of the regime.
In May 1938, during the Great Terror, Platonov's son was arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy". Aged 15 years old, Platon was sentenced in September 1938 to ten years imprisonment and was sent to a corrective labour camp, where he contracted tuberculosis. Thanks to efforts by Platonov and his acquaintances (including Mikhail Sholokhov), Platon was released and returned home in October 1940, but he was terminally ill and died in January 1943. Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing his son.
During the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), Platonov served as a war correspondent for the military newspaper The Red Star and published a number of short stories about what he witnessed at the front. The war marked a slight upturn in Platonov's literary fortunes: he was again permitted to publish in major literary journals, and some of these war stories, notwithstanding Platonov's typical idiosyncratic language and metaphysics, were well received. However, towards the end of the war, Platonov's health worsened, and in 1944 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1946, his last published short story, "The Return," was slammed in Literaturnaya Gazeta as a "slander" against Soviet culture. His last publications were two collections of folklore. After his death in 1951, Vasily Grossman spoke at his funeral.
Platonov's influence on later Russian writers is considerable. Some - but not all - of his work was published or republished during the 1960s' Khrushchev Thaw.
In journalism, stories, and poetry written during the first post-revolutionary years (1918–1922), Platonov interwove ideas about human mastery over nature with scepticism about triumphant human consciousness and will, and sentimental and even erotic love of physical things with fear and attendant abhorrence of matter. Platonov viewed the world as embodying at the same time the opposing principles of spirit and matter, reason and emotion, nature and machine.
He wrote of factories, machines, and technology as both enticing and dreadful. His aim was to turn industry over to machines, in order to "transfer man from the realm of material production to a higher sphere of life." Thus, in Platonov's vision of the coming "golden age" machines are both enemy and savior. Modern technologies, Platonov asserted paradoxically (though echoing a paradox characteristic of Marxism), would enable humanity to be "freed from the oppression of matter."
Platonov's writing, it has also been argued,[by whom?] has strong ties to the works of earlier Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also uses much Christian symbolism, including a prominent and discernible influence from a wide range of contemporary and ancient philosophers, including the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.
His Foundation Pit uses a combination of peasant language with ideological and political terms to create a sense of meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and sometimes fantastic events of the plot. Joseph Brodsky considers the work deeply suspicious of the meaning of language, especially political language. This exploration of meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism and absurdism. Brodsky commented, "Woe to the people into whose language Andrei Platonov can be translated."
Elif Batuman ranked Soul as one of her four favorite 20th century Russian works. (Batuman is author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and was Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel The Idiot.)
Novelist Tatyana Tolstaya wrote, "Andrei Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the twentieth century".
Each year in Voronezh the literature exhibition is held in honour of Platonov, during which people read from the stage some of his works.
The style and subject matter
One of the most striking distinguishing features of Platonov's work is the original language, which has no analogues in world literature. It is often called "primitive", "ungainly", "homemade".
Platonov actively uses the technique of ostraneny, his prose is replete with lexical and grammatical "errors" characteristic of children's speech.
Yuri Levin highlights Platonov's characteristic techniques:
syntactically incorrect constructions, such as verb+place circumstance. «Think on head», «answered... from his dry mouth», «recognized the desire to live into this fenced-off distance».
redundancy, pleonasm. «Voschev... opened the door to space», «his body was thin inside the clothes».
extremely generalized vocabulary. "Nature", "place", "space" instead of specific landscape descriptions. «Prushevsky looked around the empty area of the nearest nature», «an old tree grew... in bright weather».
active use of subordinate clauses about the cause (“Nastya ... hovered around the rushing men, because she wanted to”), as well as subordinate clauses about purpose (“It's time to eat for the day's work”). Moreover, they are often superfluous or logically unmotivated.
active use of typical Soviet bureaucracies, often in an ironic way (“confiscate her affection”), but rarely.
According to the researcher Levin, with the help of these turns, Platonov forms a "panteleological" space of the text, where "everything is connected with everything", and all events unfold among a single "nature".
In the works of Andrey Platonov, form and content form a single, indissoluble whole, that is, the very language of Platonov's works is their content.
Among the key motives of Platonov's work is the theme of death and its overcoming. Anatoly Ryasov writes about Platonov's " metaphysics of death». Platonov in his youth came under the influence of Nikolai Fedorov and repeatedly refers to the idea of raising the dead. In the minds of his characters, it is associated with the coming arrival of communism.
Tribute
A planet discovered in 1981 by Soviet astronomer L.G. Karachkina was named after Platonov.
Works
Novels
Chevengur – 1928 (1972)
The Foundation Pit – 1930 (1969)
Happy Moscow [de] (unfinished) – 1933–1936 (1991)
Short fiction
"The Motherland of Electricity" – 1926
"The Lunar Bomb" – 1926
The Sluices of Epifany (novella) – 1927
"Meadow Craftsmen" – 1928
"The Innermost Man" – 1928
"Makar the Doubtful" – 1929
For Future Use (novella) – 1930 (1931)
The Sea of Youth (novella) – 1934 (1986)
Soul, or Dzhan (novella) – 1934 (1966)
"The Third Son" – 1936
"Fro" (short story) – 1936
"Among Animals and Plants" (short story) – 1936
"The Fierce and Beautiful World" – 1937
The River Potudan (collection of short stories) – 1937
"Immortality" – 1936, 1939
"The Cow" – 1938 (1965)
"Aphrodite" – 1945
"The Return" or "Homecoming"– 1946
Other
Blue Depths[29] (verse) – 1922
The Barrel Organ (play) – 1930
The Hurdy Gurdy (play) – 1930 (1988)
Fourteen Little Red Huts (play) – 1931 (1988)
Father-Mother (screenplay) – 1936 (1967)
English translations
The short story collection The Fierce and Beautiful World, which includes his most famous story, "The Potudan River" (1937), was published in 1970 with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and became Platonov's first book published in English translation. During 1970s, Ardis published translations of his major works, such as The Foundation Pit and Chevengur. In 2000, the New York Review Books Classics series republished The Fierce and Beautiful World with an introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya. In 2007, New York Review Books published a collection of newer translations of some of these stories, including the novella Soul (1934), "The Return" (1946) and "The River Potudan". This was followed by a new translation of The Foundation Pit in 2009, in 2012 by Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel (not published in Platonov's lifetime), and in 2023 a new translation of Chevengur.
The Fierce and Beautiful World: Stories by Andrei Platonov, introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, E. P. Dutton, 1970 (tr. Joseph Barnes)
The Foundation Pit, a bi-langued edition with preface by Joseph Brodsky, Ardis Publishing, 1973 (tr. Mirra Ginsburg)
Chevengur, Ardis Publishing, 1978 (tr. Anthony Olcott)
Collected Works, Ardis Publishing, 1978 (tr. Thomas P. Whitney, Carl R. Proffer, Alexey A. Kiselev, Marion Jordan and Friederike Snyder)
Fierce, Fine World, Raduga Publishers, 1983 (tr. Laura Beraha and Kathleen Cook)
The River Potudan, Bristol Classical Press, 1998 (tr. Marilyn Minto)
The Foundation Pit, Harvill Press, 1996 (tr. Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith)
The Return and Other Stories, Harvill Press, 1999 (tr. Robert Chandler and Angela Livingstone)
The Portable Platonov, New Russian Writing, 1999 (tr. Robert Chandler)
Happy Moscow, introduction by Eric Naiman, Harvill Press, 2001 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Happy Moscow, introduction by Robert Chandler, New York Review Books, 2012 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Happy Moscow, introduction by Robert Chandler, Vintage Classics, 2013 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Soul, Harvill Press, 2003 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Penguin Classics, 2005, (tr. Robert Chandler and others). Includes two important stories by Platonov: "The Third Son" and "The Return"
Soul and Other Stories, New York Review Books, 2007 (tr. Robert Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman).
The Foundation Pit, New York Review Books 2009 (tr. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson).
Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, Penguin Classics, 2012 (tr. Robert Chandler and others). Includes Platonov's subtle adaptations of traditional Russian folk tales.
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays, Columbia University Press, 2016 (The Russian Library) (ed. by Robert Chandler; tr. by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen; with notes by Robert Chandler and Natalya Duzhina)
Chevengur, trans. Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler (New York Review Books, 2023)
Some Fridays call fro a quick nine hole break from the office, the phone and the computer. For days like that, I try to find nice mellow courses where I can meet with the golf gods and discuss life and existentialism.
My summer,
There is too much to describe. I experienced so much, love, hate, sadness, reflection, inspiration, tears, fashion, doubt, headaches, sleep, naps, chicago, rush, attention, awe, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, avocados, frienship, confusion, growing, love, love, love, interest, learning, reading, writing, drawing, candy, light, missing, bike rides, dreaming, creeping, google, thinking, doubt, existentialism, words, doubt, motivation,
Love.
"Danbo's impressive new installation Danbo et les sables du temps - Tate Modern Mar 2015 to Oct 2016 - sees the metallic auteur grappling with his inner-self and exploring conflicting ideas of existentialism and examining the futility of mortality within the context of his time here on earth. It's a powerful exposé of humanity and humility in robot form. An unmitigated triumph. Five stars." - Waldemar Januszczak.
744 stills, interval of 2.5s, 60 fps, TriggerTrap on Time Lapse. Sequence to assemble. iMovie for PP.
How can we not be in denial when the sunflowers appear at farmers' market? San Diego's farmers' market in Little Italy is so full of color I had to tone it down in my favorite monochrome.
Daphne would be the perfect short-haired brunette for a film noir.
Film noir films (mostly shot in gloomy grays, blacks and whites) showed the dark and inhumane side of human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasized the brutal, unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience. An oppressive atmosphere of menace, pessimism, anxiety, suspicion that anything can go wrong, dingy realism, futility, fatalism, defeat and entrapment were stylized characteristics of film noir. The protagonists in film noir were normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes.
Film noir was marked by expressionistic lighting, deep-focus camera work, disorienting visual schemes, jarring editing or juxtaposition of elements, skewed camera angles (usually vertical or diagonal rather than horizontal), circling cigarette smoke, existential sensibilities, and unbalanced compositions. Settings were often interiors with low-key lighting, venetian-blinded windows and rooms, and dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances. Exteriors were often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleyways, rain-slicked or mean streets, flashing neon lights, and low key lighting. Story locations were often in murky and dark streets, dimly-lit apartments and hotel rooms of big cities, or abandoned warehouses. [Often-times, war-time scarcities were the reason for the reduced budgets and shadowy, stark sets of B-pictures and film noirs.]
Narratives were frequently complex, maze-like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), witty, razor-sharp and acerbic dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration. Amnesia suffered by the protagonist was a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent Everyman who fell victim to temptation or was framed. Revelations regarding the hero were made to explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life. Some of the most prominent directors of film noir included Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Howard Hawks. "
www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html
I absolutely love dox.media2.org/barista/archives/film noir.jpg' target= pool.
"Hello, my name is Treeson".
I like to say it out loud every morning,
it sounds like I am talking to someone...
Gilded in the oak savanna.
In the leaning hills, where the summer sun turns the grassland to tinder, the savanna is a wind chime, rustling a harmonious lullaby like a new deck of cards in nimble fingers. Grasshoppers and mayflies and the chaff of newly dried seed catch in the sun. A dry, hot blizzard in an amber streetlamp.
The Arastradero Open Space Preserve is home to rattlesnakes, coyotes, and mountain lions and innumerable flavors of insects and birds, yet it is the trees that bring me here time and again. Before the axe and the wheel came to this land, enormous oak savannas like this one stretched across the midwest, the southwest and here along the west coast.
But the axe and the wheel did come and the savannas left. I like to think of the craggy and twisted forms that remain as wounded but unbent descendants of the stalwart soldiers who resisted the blade and the advance of civilization to hold the dusty California soil to the ground and to provide shade for the coyotes and mountain lions and rattlesnakes that weave through the tall grass of the American Veldt. As these sentinels slowly march from mother to child up and down the wind-tousled steppe, we flit about the outskirts of this preserve as insects, building and gnawing and living and dying. I hope that’s all we’ll ever do.
I came to the Arastradero preserve to connect with a particularly beautiful oak I’d passed (and photographed) on hikes before. I found her on the hillside as ever, arms outstretched, singing in the late evening breeze, fluttering fingers of bright green.
As I stood for a while here on the hillside, gilded in the afternoon, alone with my thoughts but for the oak and the whisper of the breeze and the hum-drum clicks and tweets of grassland animals, I thought, “I’ve been away too long,” and was reminded of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
I came back to the preserve to reconnect with a spot where I’d taken an old photo. Only now do I realize that same photograph was made nearly a year ago to the date. Oliver (who now runs and speaks and laughs) was with us then, asleep as an absolutely tiny three-month-old infant.
The change over the last year in Oliver provided, for me, a stark contrast with the constancy of the natural world, of these stalwart trees. How little they’ve changed. How little indeed will they change over the next century. Long may they roam on these hills and long may they feed my heart.
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In the leaning hills.
I’ve cared a great deal about taking photographs for a long time. When people ask me how long I’ve been “into” photography, I often don’t have an answer. I can vividly remember becoming interested in my father’s camera when I was a kid. No idea how old.
In point of fact, my mother was cleaning house recently and asked that I sort through some old papers of mine. Tucked in a bunch of junk were loads of old prints made with a Vivitar point and shoot given me by my parents sometime while I was in fifth grade. The landscape/candid ideas are all there, but the execution was a long way from developed (and often still is)!
I found a renewed passion for image making when I was in college and then again in graduate school, although if truth be told, it’s been relatively steady for most of my life and those moments of renewed energy are likely just an interpretation of mine in hindsight.
I often return to the question of “Why?” Why should photography feel a bit like breathing and why should I derive so much satisfaction from it? I have loads of standard answers that you see on photoblogs and photo news sites ad naseum, revolving around physical/emotional enjoyment and the risk/reward of creativity and sharing, but these are pretty unsatisfactory.
I’ll tell you that the social networking and community aspects of photography are not what drives me to carry a camera to beautiful places. Neither is building a portfolio of images what puts my feet out the door. Although I run this blog and make every effort to post frequently, I often find myself going to great lengths to make images I find interesting and then leaving them on the hard disk at home for months or years at a time.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy every part of the process, from shooting to publishing; it’s just that, if those weren’t a feature of the photography/photoblog world, I would still shoot.
There is something about images and cameras that has always spoken to me, something in the process of making an extraordinary image that drives me across states and out of bed at strange hours. Images lie at the boundary between real and surreal, between ordinary and fantastic. They can tell the truth, they can lie, but good ones never let you know which. I find it thrilling to compare the different truths of the reality and the image made after. I like to imagine for a moment that the world is as strange as photographs make it seem, then I realize it’s far stranger.
I photograph because that’s who I am, it’s an authentic expression of myself. I mean authentic in the existential sense—that I am doing what comes naturally and being true to who I am. Sometimes explanations and reasons are trite and you just have to accept that you are what you are. Simply put, photography is.
Of course, existentialism takes for granted that, to the mind, the material world presents itself as incongruous and absurd. And maybe that’s what I find so damned rewarding about photography; the world is messy and strange and absurd, but there is a great harmony and undeniable humanity in standing amongst the nodding, tawny, and wind-threshed grain, catching on a wafer of silicon a few trillion photons that have spent eons bouncing around the interior of our sun, all the while inundated with the smells of flowering plants and buzzing insects, luring one another to sex and death in the burning heart of the afternoon, in the leaning hills.
Goth Rock -inspirations in gothic literature allied with themes such as sadness, existentialism, nihilism, dark romanticism, tragedy, melancholy and morbidity. These themes are often approached in a poetic way.
Tango with Nottoo on Saturday April 17, 2021 from 11 am to 1 pm SLT
Taxi : maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Hookton/230/93/57
Week 2 Dogs (2) (1006 – 1010)10/06 – 10/10/2019 ID 1009
Henry Koerner American (born in Vienna, Austria), 1915-1991
Under the Overpass, 1949
Oil on Masonite
In 1938, Henry Koerner immigrated to America from Vienna to escape persecution by the Nazis. Koerner later learned that his family members were among the millions of Jews who were systematically murdered in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. The artist described how that personal trauma and the general destruction wrought by the violence and chaos of the war made him feel that “Reality had turned into surreality…’normal’ life into existentialism.”
Under the Overpass is a meditation on the transience of life and pain of loss and death. The changing colors of the leaves and the streaks of rust on the overpass evoke time and decay. What looks like an urban streetcar or trolley could represent the train that transported the Koerner family to the concentration camp. Scholars believe the artist’s mother is the crying woman in the yellow dress as well as the woman on the train (sitting next to his father). The scene is intentionally ambiguous. His magic realist style—visible in the painting’s hyper-realistic details, improbable shifts in scale, and elimination of shadows—creates a low-frequency sense of confusion and unease in the viewer.
Marion Stratton Gould Fund, 2012.33
From the Placard: Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Koerner
listen to me, playing Johann Sebastian Bach, Praeludium BWV 999
profile.ultimate-guitar.com/frizztext/skills/play150281
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portrait done with available (bad) light by my wife Barbara
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Johann Sebastian BACH, Prelude 999, comes into my mind - listen to my guitar at
profile.ultimate-guitar.com/frizztext/skills/play150281
for colleagues: take a look at the tabs at www.chordie.com/chord.pere/?url=http://www.lindesign.se/u...
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