Posts
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Ombra mai fù
Frondi tenere e belle
del mio platano amato
per voi risplenda il fato.
Tuoni, lampi, e procelle
non v’oltraggino mai la cara pace,
né giunga a profanarvi austro rapace.
Ombra mai fu
di vegetabile,
cara ed amabile,
soave più.Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.
Never was a shade
of any plant
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.From Serse by George Frideric Handel.
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Paul Kelly
We are shelves, we are
Paul Kelly, from Mushrooms
Tables, we are meek
We are edible
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves
Our kind multiplies
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth
Our foot’s in the door -
Ode to a Nightingale
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
…
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Stanzas 1 and 6 -
Truth
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”
Oscar Wilde -
Minor White
“A SEQUENCE of photographs is like a cinema of stills. A cinema arrested at the high points and which lock the story to the memory. Each image is economical because of what has led to it and what it leads into. Each contains the thrust of forward movement as well as the foundation of what has happened. The gaps between pictures are as important as the images, tho they have to be filled by the reader from what he can grasp of the intentions of the artist, the implications of the subject, the implications of the treatment.”
“ABSTRACTION in photography is to reach towards the non-objective without ever breaking camera’s strongest point—the magic of its tether to visual reality.”
– Minor White, Material proposed for the foreword of the Fourth Sequence, 1950“From time to time various images in front of my eyes lift themselves
– Minor White, Letter to Helmut Gernsheim, 1953
up and beckon to me— I approach at their command— and make the exposure, sometimes reluctandy, but always with such a complete projection of my mental state onto the object that it seems as if the object commanded and not myself. At this intensity I photograph. The result is a record of an experience between myself and the object. The object may be a cloud, a door, a rock, a person, a situation.
If the result happens to look like contemporary “abstract” painting, or happens to look like Leonardo, or Hoffer [sic], or a painter yet to be born, or like nothing on earth, I do not care (As one of my friends said when looking at some recent negative prints, ‘They make you remember things that you have not known yet”).
People often get tangled in the categories, whether the photo looks like abstractions, Picasso, Rubens, documentary, etc. This is hardly surprising, I have done it a million times. But as a photographer I pass up no image because it happens to resemble another man’s work. I am slowly learning to recognize those images that are in the thin red line of uniqueness to the man.” -
Into the Wild
Somebody left the gate open
LP (Laura Pergolizzi), PJ Bianco
You know we got lost on the way
Come save us a runaway train
Gone insane -
The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
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The Ocean
“The ocean, by virtue of its size and apparent emptiness, invites attention outwards from our petty landscapes, away from ourselves… The sea is too vast to understand and too awesome to avoid. It attracts us as it offers a final liberation from human scale.”
Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography. -
Destiny
“The destinies lead those who follow and drag those who don’t”
Unknown -
Art according to Ray Ortner
“Art is an attempt to connect the sacred and the profane, dark and light, life and death”
Ran Ortner via Roger Imms -
We the Animals
“Everybody’s got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don’t got is power.”
“Always more, always hungrily scratching for more. But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn’t slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings when we’d fix ourselves oatmeal and sprawl onto our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mold, when the air was still and light, those mornings when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment—we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this.”
“God’s scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me Joel, we’re nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We’re on our own.”
Justin Torres, We the Animals -
Y B Yeats on Nature
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will. -
Plant Trees
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
– Greek Proverb -
Opportunity
Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison -
Dombrovskis on Wildness
It is a wild land and I think that there is a certain wildness, a certain wild element, in mans nature that is essential to the humanness of man. If man becomes contained, too docile, programmed, then he becomes less human. The wildness in the wilderness allows the wildness in man an expression.
– Peter Dombrovskis, Wildness documentary. -
Be these three things…
Magnificent.
Foolish.
Tender.Stephen Taberner, Spooky Men
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The Waste Land
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.Extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
