View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
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
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.
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timster1973.wordpress.com
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Lay down
The sheets are white like the moon, my love
Dream with me in my room
Lay down...
Susanna Hoffs
Café de Flore, at 172 boulevard St-Germain, dates back to the beginning of the third Republic, sometime around 1887. Its name comes from a small divinity sculpture which stood across the boulevard. At the end of the nineteenth century, charles Mauras, who lived on the second floor, wrote his book, Under the Flore Sign here.
Around 1913, Apollinaire and Salmon transformed the first floor into a newspaper office and les soirées de Paris was born. In 1917, Apollinaire introduced poets Philippe Soupault to André Breton here, and in turn they to Aragon, laying the foundation for the Dadaist movement. Apollinaire called 172 home and died here in 1918.
In the 1930's, Pascal, a waiter-philosopher, better known as Descartes, served Trotsky or Chou En Laï. Yvest Tanguy introduced Leo Mallet to de Flore, and he in utrn wrote La nuit de Saint-Germain-Des-Prés. In 1939, Paul Boubal purchased the Café de Flore and through the occupation, French intellectuals Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre would meet "The Family" and evolve their existentialist philosophies over drinks. Sartre asserted that "during 4 years, the road to the Café was for me the Road to Freedom." Simone Signoret wrote in her memoirs, ""I was born in March 1941 at night on a bench of the Café de Flore". Following the War, drunk with freedom, existentialism became the fashion and Saint-Germain-des-Prés became a principal meeting place and think tank drawing in the likes of the PCF (French Communist Party), and Boubal's Poully Club of France, which drew its name from the famous white wine served at the café. In the 1960's, cinema and fashion seized the café and all the best filmmakers, models and designers would frequent the haunt.
Today it still attracts its fair share of celebrities and tourists. Robert DeNiro will spend full mornings people watching. Johnny Depp will drop by any time of day. Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, and Isabella Rosselini will find their way when in time. And Francis Ford Coppola declared that his dream was to live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés so he can eat his breakfast at the Flore each morning.
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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...
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!
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.
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
"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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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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.
We’ve had a death in the family recently. I remembered reading Frankl years ago where he described how to find meaning in grief. It was useful, but I think our cat “Junior” is more helpful. He’s a grey short hair, the third we’ve had in 3 decades. They are very sensitive cats and seem to be able to read their humans’ emotions. Junior has been very attentive towards us lately.
The cat in the background is “Wendy” who is a tortoise shell. We all know how torties are. “Sorry for your loss, but when are you going to feed me?” She’s a sweet cat too, in her way.
In my case, it’s true !
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Juliette Gréco, French singer and actress, grande dame of French art song, icon of post-WWII France and the St-Germain-des-Prés “existentialist” scene, died in Ramatuelle, France, today at age 93. A very classy and talented lady, a “free singer and songstress of freedom,” as the daily Le Figaro described her. 😰 😰 😰
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From BBC News
Juliette Gréco, the sexy chanteuse who personified the spirit and style of post-war Paris and who later inherited Édith Piaf's exquisite mantle as grande-dame of French song, was born on 7 February, 1927 in Montpellier on the French Mediterranean coast.
Captured by the Gestapo
Her father, a police commissioner from Corsica, walked out when Juliette was still small. She, and her sister Charlotte, were raised mainly by their grandparents, and the nuns at the local convent, until their mother moved them to Paris.
It was wartime and Paris was an occupied city. Juliette's mother risked everything working with the Resistance. In 1943, disaster struck and the Gestapo arrested them all. "A French Gestapo officer humiliated me," she recalled. "I became so upset that I punched him on the nose. Well, that cost me!"
As a teenager, Juliette Gréco was captured by the Gestapo and thrown into prison. Her mother and sister were hauled off to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. It was a women-only prison opened on the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler.
Many were gassed, thousands more perished of disease, starvation, overwork and despair. In all, 50,000 women died within its walls before the war was over.
Juliette was spared the camps. Just 15 years old, she was thrown into the notorious women's prison in Fresnes, just south of Paris. It was a foul place where the Gestapo held, tortured and often murdered members of the Resistance.
Released a few months later, all she had were the blue cotton dress and sandals she'd been wearing when she was rounded up. It was the coldest winter on record and she had no home to return to. So Gréco walked the eight miles back into town.
Miraculously, both mother and daughter made it through Ravensbrück. After the liberation, Juliette went every day to the Lutétia hotel, where survivors were arriving. One day, among a crowd of skeletal, liberated prisoners, she spotted them. "We held each other tight, in silence. There were no words for what I felt at that instant."
Existentialist muse
The war over, Juliette moved to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the left bank of the Seine, making ends meet singing in cafes. "I had no food, so I bought a pipe and some very strong tobacco, and I smoked it in my room so I could forget my hunger", she said.
Orson Wells and Juliette Gréco were friends from the post-war Parisian social scene. Dirt poor, she was reliant on male friends to lend her things to wear. Everything was too big but it kept out the cold. The baggy clothes, the long black hair, her stunning looks and dark makeup meant you couldn't miss her. She was "the black muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés", captivating the Parisian post-war beau-monde.
In 1946, they would gather at the famous cellar club, Le Tabou; Juliette Gréco at the microphone, Picasso, Orson Wells and Marlene Dietrich at the bar. Marlon Brando would give her a lift home on his bike.
The existentialists loved her for the way she looked. Juliette was fascinated by their unconventional style and mindset. "Black provides space for the imaginary," she said. They all believed in living for the now.
Photographers Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson captured her beauty with their cameras. Jean Cocteau asked her to star in his film, Orpheus.
But she was also loved for her voice, the perfect interpreter of melancholy songs capturing a post-war generation's hunger for life as freedom returned to the city.
Philosophers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus both wrote lyrics for her. "Her voice carries millions of poems that haven't been written yet," Sartre insisted. "It is like a warm light that revives the embers burning inside of us all. In her mouth, my words become precious stones."
Miles Davis
Existentialism gave post-war Paris its intellectual identity. But its soundtrack was American jazz. They had a passionate love affair but never married. "You'd be seen as a negro's whore in America", he told her.
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Django Reinhardt were all huge stars. Of course, she knew them all. One night, unable to afford a ticket, Gréco snuck back stage at the Salle Pleyel on the Rue Faubourg Saint Honoré, to watch the legendary jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis.
It would be the beginning of a passionate love affair that would last until the end of his life. He was already married, with a child fathered at the age of 17. He spoke no French, she had no English. None of that mattered in bohemian Paris.
Gréco was transfixed by his looks and his talent. "In profile, he was a real Giacometti", she said. "He had a face of great beauty. You didn't have to be a scholar or a specialist in jazz to be struck by him. There was such an unusual harmony between the man, the instrument and the sound - it was pretty shattering."
"Why don't you marry her?" asked Jean-Paul Sartre. "Because I love her too much to make her unhappy," came Miles Davis' reply. The problem was his colour. "You'd be seen as a negro's whore in America", he said. "It would destroy your career."
Years later, there was a terrible incident in New York, which Davis said proved him right. Gréco had a nice suite at the Waldorf Hotel and invited Miles to dinner. "The face of the maitre d'hôtel when he came in was indescribable", she recalled.
"After two hours, the food was more or less thrown in our faces. The meal was long and painful, and he left." She took the waiter's hand, made as if she were about to kiss it, and spat in his palm.
At four o'clock in the morning, Davis called her. He was in tears. "I couldn't come by myself," he said. "I don't ever want to see you again here, in a country where this kind of relationship is impossible." She realised they had made a terrible mistake. The humiliation bit deep.
"In America, his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn't even notice that he was black", she later wrote.
He was not her only lover. There were dozens of heartbroken men, and some women, left reeling in her wake. Some even committed suicide after she left them.
She was unapologetic that she spread her affections so widely. "What do I care what other people think?," she'd say to anyone who asked.
It was said she loved the philosopher, Albert Camus, and the racing driver, Jean-Pierre Wimille, until he was killed in the Buenos Aires Grand Prix.
There was Hollywood movie mogul, Darryl F Zanuck. He gave her a starring role in John Huston's Roots of Heaven, alongside Errol Flynn. Another tycoon, David O Selznick, sent her a private plane so she could dine with him in London and offered her a fortune to sign a 7 year contract.
"I declined politely, trying not to laugh," she said. "Hollywood was definitely not for me."
There were three marriages; to actors Philippe Lemaire, with whom she had a daughter, and Michel Piccoli. And then, for twenty years, to the pianist Gérard Jouannest until his death in 2018.
Music and politics
Gréco was less a composer than a great interpreter of other people's songs, notably Jacques Brel and George Brassens.
The French newspaper, Libération, said she spat and caressed "the words like a Fauvist painter crushes colours onto his canvas with his knife".
Si tu t'imagines, Parlez-moi d`amour, and Je suis comme je suis were the big hits of the early years. Later, there were collaborations with Serge Gainsbourg, never one to miss working with a beautiful woman.
She became a sought-after performer far beyond the cafes of Saint-Germain, constantly in demand world-wide, including Germany, the US and Japan.
Scarred by her experience with the Gestapo, she hesitated to star in the country responsible for Ravensbrück. She finally agreed in 1959, singing with tears in her eyes remembering her mother's treatment.
She was very proud that young people made up most of the audience. But she kept returning to Hamburg and Berlin, mixing her own material with songs by her friend, Marlene Dietrich. In 2005, she even released an album in German, Abendlied (Evening Song).
Politically, she was firmly on the left. She campaigned against the wars in both Algeria and Vietnam. And then, there was her command performance for Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator in 1981.
He thought it was a coup persuading the great star to perform in Santiago. She walked on to rapturous applause and gave him a show entirely consisting of songs he had banned. "I went off to dead silence", she recalled. "It was the greatest triumph of my career."
Musically, she forever experimented. In 2009, she released Je Me Souviens de Tout, an album mixing the traditional with cutting-edge French song, including rapper-cum-slam-poet, Abd Al Malik.
Gréco refused to remain forever the existentialist it-girl of the 1940s, preferring to look forwards rather than back.
But a few years later, at the age of 87, it was time to say goodbye. It would not be long before a stroke would cut her down. She launched a worldwide farewell tour, Merci. Thousands packed the great Olympia Hall in Paris, to see the legend for the last time.
The “high priestess» of existentialism played out in style, treating the crowds to classics such as Déshabillez-moi, Sous le ciel de Paris, and Jacques Brel’s great anthem, Amsterdam.
The grande-dame of French song, she may have been. But on that emotional night, she performed to an audience made up almost entirely of young people.
After an astonishing life and career that had lasted more than 70 years, Juliette Gréco was immensely proud of that.
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Adieu, mademoiselle Gréco, et merci !!! 😰 😰 😰
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.
"Hello, my name is Treeson".
I like to say it out loud every morning,
it sounds like I am talking to someone...
Mirrored Metropolis: Finding Self in the Cityscape
Story:
I am lost in the endless cycle of this cityscape, constantly seeing myself reflected in its modern shiny surfaces. The red traffic light blinks intermittently in a never-ending cycle, symbolising urban monotony. Taking a selfie, I see myself being captured in countless fragments, reflecting the driver, pedestrian, and street lamp. I am a quantified self, trapped in the repetitive narrative of city life. Each photo is a breadcrumb leading me back to myself. I am a loop within a loop, echoing endlessly in the digital corridors of eternity. To break free, I must acknowledge the prison of my gaze. But for now, I remain trapped in the perpetual selfie of existence, a figure multiplied yet diminished. It's just another form of content.
Description:
Dive into a visual journey where philosophy meets urban photography. "Echoes of Existence" is a series that explores the Sartrean concept of self through the medium of the selfie. Witness the seamless blend of self-awareness and city vibrancy, and join us in pondering the eternal question of existence amidst the chaotic beauty of urban life.
Keywords:
Urban Philosophy, Self-Reflection, Existentialism, Cityscape Photography, Selfie Art, Sartrean Thought, Reflective Imagery, Contemporary Art
Blogger: www.jjfbbennett.com/2024/04/finding-self-in-cityscape.html
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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as a nation we must prioritise correctly. so far our choice has been wrong. power at the cost of nature will leave us nowhere
Overwhelming in its repetition and immensity!
* Important note* please enlarge the picture to truly get the full visual effect!
Seen in EXPLORE
Photo by: Eugene La Pia
compare flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/weekly-photo-chal...
... takes me back to the fire hyrdrant playing days of my youth. This kid will probably never learn how to aim the water with a sawed off soda can, nor will he be allowed to... (comment by joe wig)
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
Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Anita Brookner
playing with the Man Ray group
www.flickr.com/groups/man-ray/discuss/72157600006647641/
original image from Grand Paul
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.
Highest that I know of in Explore- #236 on 9.27.07
For as long as I can remember, I've felt viscerally tied to the ocean.
One of the rare clear memories of my first few years, when we lived in New Jersey, was of my father walking along a boardwalk carrying me on his shoulders. He would stand at the rail and we would gaze out over the water to the horizon for what seemed like forever. I think it's because of that that I've always vaguely associated my love of the ocean with him. He had grown up in Germantown, Philadelphia, and occasionally when I was older and after my younger siblings had arrived, we would vacation with the extended family- grandparents, aunties and honorary uncles, and a gazillion cousins- in Ocean City, New Jersey... escaping the heat in the same place his family had when he was young. Salt water taffy and carny rides and boardwalk pizza vendors who expertly spun dough on their fingers ... it was a paradise for impressionable kids like me.
When I was five we moved to a small house in Stratford, Connecticut that was just half a mile from the ocean, and the town's very modest Short Beach. I was there again a few years ago when my siblings and I tried to look casual walking out to the water all dressed up in our funeral clothes to (illegally) scatter my father's ashes near the shore where he'd held our hands as children, and walked his dog daily in his later years. There was a nice architect-designed recreation center and bath house there that day, and a slew of modern condos (probably time shares) lining the beach. But in my childhood, the only things there were a splintery and weathered shack with half doors where you could stand in line to change into your bathing suit, a cooler where a high school kid sold ice cream sandwiches and cold soda, looking bored unless a pretty teen girl walked by, and five ramshackle cottages on the edge of the beach which town residents could rent for a week or two a year.
Every year that we didn't go to Ocean City, my grandparents- who lived in the other half of our duplex- would rent one of the innermost cottages for two weeks. As an adult I kind of shake my head at the notion of "going on vacation" less than a mile from your home, but as a child those trips were magical and something you looked forward to all year. You could swim before breakfast. Noone yelled at you for tracking sand into the house. The adults were always in a good mood. Best of all were the Friday nights. My grandfather would go to a great fish market and bring home buckets of fried fish, french fries, cole slaw, and ice cream. After the feast, after the dishes were taken care of, and just about when the sun was hitting the horizon, the yellow screened-porch lights would be turned on and the games would come out. Yahtzee & Dominoes & Go Fish & Scrabble. The kids would be on one team and the adults on the other, and somehow the kids always seemed to win every game. Later, when the younger kids were falling asleep, as the precocious oldest cousin I was allowed to sit at the table with the adults while they played 500 Rummy and Canasta. They'd make me some equivalent to the popular Shirley Temple to make me feel like I was having a "high ball" like them, and by the time I was in 4th grade, they were letting me sit in on the games. It felt like a momentous rite of passage.
That beach is also where I learned to swim; our local playground would bus us there two afternoons a week for subsidized lessons. Of course, learning to swim in the ocean has its disadvantages as the tides have a will of their own that doesn't conform well to classes at a particular time, so every other week we'd have to walk half a mile past the lighthouse to find water deep enough to dive into. Most of my companions would "belly-ache" about the walking, but I adored the lighthouse, so secretly- and illogically- hoped for more low tides.
Between the weeks at the cottage, and the fact that I was usually the only one on the swim lesson bus who couldn't wait to get there, I developed an obnoxiously proprietary attitude about the beach. An attitude that only got worse when I was about 10 and discovered it was a great and quiet place to study by myself in the fall and spring. Or I should say it was a great place to TRY to study. I'd read a few pages, or do a few math problems, and then my arms would drift to my knees and I would commence to staring at the horizon. Or counting the waves. Or giving names to my favorite seagulls. Or picking up starfish to look at the under side. Or collecting shells. Or following a crab. Or digging for clams. Or, or, or, or.............. the distractions were endless. After the first year, I began to really resent it when the warm weather came and other folks seemed to think they belonged there too. Harumphhhhhhhhhhhh!
Just before junior high school we moved an hour north, and inland. Something felt quite wrong to me the first few months, and it took me about that long to realize it was the ocean I was missing. I couldn't smell it any more. There were no shore birds flying overhead. Storms felt different. I couldn't hear the comforting rhythm of the tide kissing the shore. I was bereft... as if I'd lost a best friend. It was years before I'd live near the shore again. In high school and college I put away my "attitude" about "other people" on MY beach occasionally so I could enjoy outings with my friends (especially in college when beach days inevitably ended up dancing at beach-side bars where the guys were hip and the rum drinks accompanied some hot blues guitarist), but to this day I prefer an empty beach in October to a lively one in July. And I much prefer the lonely rocky beaches of Maine to the sun-bunny playgrounds of San Diego or Miami.
In1973, I worked for the summer in the English coastal resort town of Cromer, not so far from Norwich. I was a lowly waitress and budding bartender, so with an insincere apology, the proprietors showed me to my room in the damp, dank basement of the hotel complex I was working at. The hotel sat on a cliff right above the ocean, and I forgave every iota of mildew in that room when I discovered that the tide broke loudly on the wall beneath my window. It was thunderous and my roommates complained about it all summer, but I found it to be the most comforting sound I'd ever heard. I don't think I've ever slept as deeply as I did that summer.
Most memorable about that summer were the late nights when I, and the co-workers I liked, would close down the bar and take our own drinks (saved up all evening when patrons insisted on buying us one) out to the beach to dance and party. Almost every one of those impromptu gatherings would end up with all of us lying on the beach staring up at the moon, and philosophizing about politics (we were from many countries) and existentialism. I'm pretty sure it was one of those late nights when I came to fully understand the powerful connection between the moon and the tides... an important and compelling concept for me. It's also when I developed the notion that I could never live very far from the ocean. There's a sense of infinity for me that comes from watching the horizon over the tide, and a sense of connection to everyone and everywhere, that is unmatched anywhere else for me except- perhaps- in the/my buddhist notion of karma.
I've lived in the Boston area now for about 27 years, and though I live only a couple of miles from the shore, I don't actually see it near as often as I'd like. Somehow, though, knowing it's nearby is enough for me. Often you'll see a gull swoop overhead... and when a storm's brewing you can smell salt in the air. It's easy enough to get there by subway, and sometimes- when I've been away too long- I make the trip.
My sweetheart Matt- who feels about the desert where he grew up much the same as I feel about the ocean- says that the first few years he lived in Boston he only felt at home when he was crossing the Charles River on the subway, because it was the only time he ever felt like he had breathing space and could see the horizon. I understood that intellectually the first time he said it, but didn't understand it emotionally until he took me there and I got to experience how much that endless horizon feels like gazing out to sea.
Matt wants to move back to the desert sometime, and I used to despair that one day I would have to make a choice between the ocean and him. But then the first time we travelled to southern California together, he pulled out of his pocket a stone he'd collected from a beach in Maine on one of our trips there, that he'd brought along specifically to skip it off the Santa Monica Pier... connecting in a small way the east coast ocean with the west coast one. And I knew in that minute that he understood. And that I could go anywhere with him, without fear of losing my connection to the ocean. It's part of me now... like breathing.