I am experimenting with layouts and design while I post these first photos and hoping that all of this doesn't end up looking to awful.
I took these first photographs in Bejing. I went to China with images in mind shaped by old movies and photographs and novels. In Bejing, those images are not in the foreground. These photographs do not accurately represent what I saw in Bejing. I had to search for and create the images I post here. I was with a tour group, so I had little time for searching, but at every opportunity I would rush down an alleyway or sidestreet with my camera. Once in a while, I would find something that interested me. Most of the Bejing we saw was the New China which is replacing the old at a brutal pace. But I am far from knowledgable about such things and will try to limit my comments to what I actually sensed while I was there.
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An eclectic reflection about life in the present. Photography. Brief writings.
About Me
- cafe selavy
- You'll know me if you read the blog. You can't just look at the pictures. You have to read.
Blog Archive
Inventory of Mortality
Photography is the inventory of mortality. . .
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Success
"The only thing that ever stood between me and success was me."
Woody Allen
Arrested Development
"You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development."
- Chapter 6, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 6, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Tiziano Terzani
"The truth is, at fifty-five one has a strong urge to give one's life a touch of poetry, to take a fresh look at the world, reread the classics, rediscover that the sun rises, that there is a moon in the sky and that there is more to time than the clock's tick can tell us."
Wild At Heart
"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top"
Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart
Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart
Secret About A Secret
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus
I am, I am
Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.
Cormac McCarthy
Suttree
Transformation
The photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. . . . There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.
Gary Winnogrand
Gary Winnogrand
LIfe Is Short
Life is short,
But by God's Grace,
The Night is Long
Joe Henry
But by God's Grace,
The Night is Long
Joe Henry
Safe Passage
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen
A Generation of Swine
"What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?. . . [T]here is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation."
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Orson Welles
"If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am. . . . Do you know the best service anyone could render in art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man--and not the contrary."
Orson Welles, 1962
Late Work
“ ‘Late work.’ It’s just another way of saying feeble work. I hate it. Monet’s messy last waterlilies, for instance — though I suppose his eyesight was shot. ‘The Tempest’ only has about 12 good lines in it. Think about it. ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ Hardly ‘Great Expectations,’ is it? Or Matisse’s paper cutouts, like something from the craft room at St. B’s. Donne’s sermons. Picasso’s ceramics. Give me strength.”
"Engleby"
Sebastian Faulks.
"Engleby"
Sebastian Faulks.
The Sun Also Rises
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
Ernest Hemingway
What's Remembered
"The only things that are important in life are the things you remember."
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Winesburg, Ohio
"One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant. . . one love life so intensely that tears come into the eyes."
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Perception
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Joyce's Lament
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Stephen Dedalus, "Ulysses"
Stephen Dedalus, "Ulysses"
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