a_picture_you_should_see raze hanging begonia, chameleon (arie van't riet) a physicist specializing in radiation physics and low energy x-rays, arie van't riet hit on something unique when he thought to "apply x-ray eyes to nature". he started with flowers and worked his way up to insects and animals, adding colour to his black_and_white images in photoshop. you've never seen roosters or azaleas captured quite like this. look: http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/12/xray-photography-Arie-van-t-Riet-4.jpg 140307 ... Risen The problem with the internet is that if you go looking for something, you'll find it. You'll find a picture you should see. A picture you wouldn't want to see, but nonetheless you see it. The happy couple. I think I figured it out. I think I know the truth. 140308 ... raze in voluptas mors ("voluptuous death") photographed in 1951 by philippe halsman, from a sketch by salvador dali. the bodies of seven nude models combine to form an enormous skull. it took three hours to get the composition just right. look: http://cp12.nevsepic.com.ua/65-3/1354567125-0365987-www.nevsepic.com.ua.jpg 140309 ... raze still image from "a woman under the influence" (1974) i read about john cassavetes before i saw any of his films. they weren't so easy to find in the years before criterion came out with the "five films" box set (which criminally omits "husbands" and "love streams"), but i found them, some on bare-bones DVDs, some on discontinued VHS tapes that had once been rentals. watching them was like finding the oxygen i'd been seeking without knowing i needed it until i was breathing it in. there's never been anyone quite like him as a writer or filmmaker. his films are not for everyone, but if you get them, they get you, and they hit right where it hurts. something he said that does a neat job of summing up what his work was all about: "that's all i'm interested in: love, and the lack of it. when it stops. and the pain that's caused by the loss of things taken away from us that we really need." there's no escapism in his movies, and there are no tricks or brain-bending plot twists. just people loving and hating one another, falling in and out of those feelings, trying to connect, usually failing, rarely saying what they really mean or feel until it's too late, if they ever do. kind of like you and me. cassavetes had a habit of claiming he didn't really direct actors, but he had a way of getting the performances he wanted through misdirection and manipulation. someone who hadn't really acted before would come to him between takes hoping for encouragement, and he would give them some vague non-instructions that made them even more nervous, or he'd do something to upset them or make them laugh, depending on what he wanted from them on the screen. that they didn't "know" how to act became a strength, because, as he put it, they "[didn't] know how to be bad". their anxiety became a part of their character, and what came out in the performance was the very real, specific set of emotions felt by the person behind the person, blurring the line between acting and being. he loved giving nonprofessional actors supporting roles, but he also had some heavyweight actor friends to call on, like peter falk and ben gazzara. he would return to the same faces and voices again and again, and they would engage in a kind of communal cinematic jazz. the words were almost always tightly scripted, but the way they were performed wasn't. the actors were given great freedom within their roles to arrive at their own truths about who they were and what their motivations were. acting in "a woman under the influence" was a gruelling experience for gena rowlands (also john's wife). near the end of filming, before the climactic dinner scene, she came to him for reassurance. she felt like she'd lost herself in this character. she needed to hear a few kind words from him as a husband and a friend, not a director. he refused to give that to her. he wanted anger in her performance, and he thought he'd use the old tactic of getting under an actor's skin to get genuine pathos from their acting (there's a great story about the way he did this to wring an unsettling performance out of val avery against his will in "minnie and moskowitz"). instead of anger, she gave him quiet vulnerability, profoundly changing the tone of the film's ending, twisting it into something even more powerful in the process. her performance in that film remains one of the deepest, most affecting performances i've seen by any actor, in any film. there's so much going on in her eyes alone. it isn't always comfortable viewing, and i haven't been able to force myself to sit down and watch "woman" a second time in the ten years that have passed since the first time i saw it. there's an emotional honesty there that most movies and performances don't get close to, and i remember how hard it hit me that first time. i couldn't move for about twenty minutes after it had ended. movies don't do that to me. someday i'll be ready for it again. until then, here's gena's face. look: http://missindiestyle.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/woman-6.jpg 140326 ... thwa my wife and i saw this film back in frozen january. your review of it is spot on and dares me to view it again. i heard similar things about cassavetes. we were equally stunned by rowlands and falk. 140326 ... raze it's a little sad that peter falk didn't get to show what he could really do that often. he had a lot more range than something like "columbo" allowed him most of the time. but in that movie, "husbands", and elaine may's "mikey and nicky", he really got to show his stuff, and it's all good stuff. 140326 ... raze salföld, hungary, 2001 from "still movies" (zoltan vancsó) zoltan vancsó is a hungarian photographer, photojournalist, and musician. in looking at his photographs, i'm not sure there could exist a better title for a collection of his work, or a better blanket description for what he creates, than "still movies". i don't know much about him. most of the information available on the internet seems to be in hungarian, and google translate does a suspect — and often hilarious — job of translating hungarian into english. as far as i can tell, he releases much of his work independently through his website, making it available to anyone and everyone. he sees pictures as another form of music and believes their worth should be determined not by who can afford or gain access to them, but by how many people are moved and made to think by them. he makes an interesting comment about his sensibilities in his site's bio section. it translates to something like this: "i worked for twelve years in the press, which was a luxury neither i nor my pictures could afford. so the personalities of two photographers came to exist in me. one is trying to get more specific, to reflect reality as clearly and comprehensibly as possible. the other one acts in the opposite way; it takes pleasure in discovering the improbability of reality, and that this is a quality that can be transmitted by a theoretically objective tool like photography." look: http://blog.atrium.hu/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/vancso_salfold_2001_2.jpg 140330 ... thwa what he says does an excellent job of capturing his original sense of perception. i loved viewing his work. he is a hard-working, fortunate observer but his talent for framing is unique. thanks. the triangle shot featuring the black dog was my favorite, perhaps. it reminded me somehow of dog_king. 140330 ... thwa check out the trailer for the film: "finding vivian maier" 140331 ... raze i remember reading something about her on the internet, but i didn't grasp the full scope of the work she did. pretty incredible stuff. makes you wonder how many other secret artists there are out there. 140331 ... raze the law of retraction (victoria strehlau) this is the image making_the_possible_impossible was inspired by / about, and this is the person her_name_rhymes_with_euphoria was written for. putting aside the sadness of that whole situation, i think this is a great little visual world to get lost in for a while. i used to smoke in that park with friends. it always felt like there was a strange sort of magic there when it was covered in snow. look: http://th09.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/f/2011/130/1/d/1d2fbf9d2c283358ab402d424fb458af-d3g2r22.jpg 140403 ... thwa magical indeed. the lighting is superb. i like the lamp post, considering it is almost identical to the three i just finished drawing for an illustration that will appear in the children's book my wife and i are trying to get published. 140404 ... epitome of incomprehensibility This also reminds me of when I snapped a photo of someone doing a flip and caught him exactly upside down. Summer camp, outdoors. I'm 22 or 23, he's 19 or 20 (I forget whether it was my second or third year working there). He tells the campers not to copy him, and does a running jump-flip onto blue mattresses due to be thrown out. Encouraged, he takes another jump, and I click a picture of him. When it appears on the screen I laugh. He asks to see. He zooms in. It looks like he's meditating in midair, legs crossed as if sitting, eyes half-closed, head a couple of feet above the mat. He asks if, on the weekend, I can send it to him so he can post it on Facebook, so I do so via computer (no cell phone, just a camera is what I brought with me). That leads, later, to a thought: do pictures belong to the person they're of, or the person taking them? But I don't want to claim ownership of a lucky accident. 140405 ... raze my thinking in a case like this is that it's sort of a collaborative dance between the person with the camera and the person being captured, so the picture would belong to both of you. but some photographers have different ways of looking at this stuff. some are very rigid about guarding their work and claiming ownership, and others are very relaxed about it. i played a show a few years ago where a guy i'd never met asked me if he could take some pictures while i played. i said sure. he ended up taking several hundred throughout the whole show, capturing a lot of interesting moments, including the gradual progression of my hair from "tied back and fairly neat" to "a giant sweaty mess". it turned out he was a serious and seriously skilled professional photographer with a big studio and he made a good living at it. but after the show he emailed me the files for every picture he took and let me have them all for free. he said he considered the images to be the product of a collaboration, and since the show had been free to the public, he thought the pictures should be free too. i thought that was pretty cool. 140405 ... unhinged i took a picture recently of a blue sky reflected on the glass of a highrise with very little men dangling from ropes presumably washing windows i saw the end of their ropes on the sidewalk; the picture is of what i saw when i looked up 140406 ... raze train (liu bolin) liu bolin is a chinese artist best known for photographs in which he studies his surroundings and camouflages his clothes and skin accordingly with paint before a picture is taken, becoming a part of the background. the effect is that he becomes almost invisible, easily missed if the eyes aren't given time to adjust and recognize his presence. so he literally paints himself into his photographs. some of them are powerful statements of protest, while others (like the images in which he hides himself in the midst of many books) are just cool to behold. look: http://www.the-drone.com/magazine/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/liu-4.jpg 140620 ... e_o_i Cool. It feels like it should be called The Train Ghost. 140620 ... raze protestor playing piano (sergey dolzhenko) a ukrainian protestor making music on a barricade during the third month of the euromaidan protests, in february of this year. look: http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/multimedia/photo-gallery/2014/2/photos-pianos-andprotestinukraine/_jcr_content/slideShowImages/slide1/image.adapt.960.high.jpg 140720 ... raze they needed to talk (william eggleston) a private moment made public, shot in such a way that it almost deceives the eyes into thinking it's a painting. a little out of step with the rest of eggleston's work, but one of my favourite photos of his. i only wish i could find it online at a higher resolution. look: http://gentlebear.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/eggleston.jpg 141006 ... raze rehearsing "three plays of love and hate" (steve reisch) these pictures were taken in 1981, and then they sat unseen for thirty five years. this one stands out for me because of the intensity, the mid-gesticulation, and because gena rowlands is beautiful. what the pictures capture in its early stages: john cassavetes spent months refurbishing a run-down theatre at his own expense. he designed the seating to accommodate less than a hundred people, almost gave the tickets away (the most expensive of them went for a whopping four bucks), and mounted three interlocking plays featuring dozens of actors, music, film-like lighting effects, and ambitious scene changes. each play was more than three hours long and challenged the audience's notions of what a play was supposed to be. he turned down money and offers to film the performances. he designed the whole thing to lose money, to stay small, to be something unique that would belong only to the people who were in the room at the time, and after one five-week run he shut the production down. no footage was shot. the plays were never performed again. as peter falk (who was one of the actors involved) said, "only john would spend a couple hundred thousand of his own money on a production that would bring in ninety nine dollars a day." one night falk forgot his wallet in the theatre. when he doubled back to grab it, he found cassavetes on the bathroom floor, on his back, fixing a broken toilet at two in the morning. this is a guy who acted in hollywood films that were sometimes steaming hunks of crap, did what he could to try and bring something interesting to the material, and then turned around and put the money he made into searing, uncompromising films he wrote and directed himself outside of the system — films that would give nervous breakdowns to the ones he acted in to bankroll them. when he ran out of money, he mortgaged his house. when he ran out of film, he snuck recycled reels from a low rent studio that shot porn. when he needed music, he said to a young sound man who was learning on the job, "you'll make the music, kid" (and bo harwood rose to the occasion and did a brilliant job). it didn't matter that his movies got rotten reviews and made no money. it didn't matter that almost no one seemed to like them because audiences didn't want to wrestle with something as messy and real and unpredictable as life. he made them because he had to make them, and he found a way to get them made. my goddamn hero. 160323 ... raze it helps if i include the picture i'm talking about: http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/10/THE-CASSAVETES-PROJECT_Gena-Rowlands-and-John-Cassavetes_Steve-Reisch.jpg 160323 ... raze half the links on this blathe don't work anymore. that's the danger of linking to anything on blather that doesn't exist here. some things are going to go dark at some point. here are some replacement links that should last a while, since i've uploaded them myself. the only thing i can't find now is the zoltan vancsó picture (that dude seems to have scrubbed all evidence of his "still movies" series from the internet). arie van't reit's "hanging begonia, chameleon": https://i.ibb.co/PzVgb6q/Hanging-Begonia-Chameleon-by-Arie-Van-t-Riet.jpg john filming gena with a handheld camera in their kitchen for "a woman under the influence": https://i.ibb.co/Jz0dWrD/John-Cassavetes-and-Gena-Rowlands-filming-A-Woman-Under-the-Influence.jpg liu bolin's "train": https://i.ibb.co/BLjGNwC/Train-by-Liu-Bolin.jpg sergey dolzhenko's "protestor playing piano": https://i.ibb.co/xSn1WjD/Protestor-Playing-Piano-by-Sergey-Dolzhenko.jpg william eggleston's "they needed to talk": https://i.ibb.co/nCbgVQt/They-Needed-to-Talk-by-Willian-Eggleston.jpg i finally found a copy of this last one that does the image justice. i can't even articulate how stupidly happy that makes me. it's one of my favourite pictures. it was taken in memphis, tennessee, sometime late at night in the summer of 1973. the woman in blue is karen chatham. the woman in red is lesa aldridge — the same lesa aldridge who had a tumultuous decade-long relationship with alex chilton and inspired some of the best songs he ever wrote. her soft, wraithlike voice is an important part of "third/sister lovers", though there was a lot more of her in the mix before alex started erasing her vocal tracks out of spite. she haunts the whole album even when you can't hear her. the night this picture was taken, lesa was about to leave for her first year of college in new_york. the dress she wore was something her mother made for her. it was inspired by an austrian folk costume. the two women were at a house party. karen was drunk and crying. lesa took her into a bathroom so they could talk. karen fell into a full bathtub. she dried off and put on the blue housecoat that was hanging on the bathroom door. she stretched out on a couch, lesa sat down next to her, and william eggleston captured this little moment of visual poetry. 210806 ... kerry god i love william eggleston, especially his photos of his wife and kids. hope this link works: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-william-egglestons-colorful-photographs-everyday-shocked-art/amp 210806 ... raze it does work! i love how the picture that was used for the cover of "radio city" is in there. all of these are incredible. i don't know much about photography, but i love the way he uses and captures light. the shot with the guy pushing the shopping carts, the way the sun hits him, just ... so good. 210806 ... unhinged artsy.net 210806 ... raze abutilon striatum (photographer unknown) this is a plant. a plant that looks like a chinese lantern. a plant that blooms year-round in frost-free areas. a work of living art. it's even edible. nature is incredible. look: https://i.ibb.co/frNznx9/abutilon.jpg 210818 ... tender square spatz (1932) photographer unknown https://www.hippostcard.com/listing/spatz-kobal-collection/21840962 i’ve carried this postcard with me for 22 years; continually rediscovering this black and white image among collected papers and memories i’ve boxed away—it arrests me every time. i kept it displayed inside my locker after finding it on a school trip to the west coast when i was fifteen, and later, on a wall in my bedroom during my twenties. now, i will keep it on my desk. the action centers around a small club table, the kind that makes you feel like the only person that exists amidst the teeming room is the one seated across from you. the two figures photographed appear from the waist down: a man on the left and a woman on the right. their arms are crossed atop the table, seeming innocent enough. but below the circular top, her legs slightly part; her knee-length dress invitingly stretches as her legs extend from her hip. his right foot’s planted firmly on the ground, resting between her calves—the heat of her frame almost grazes his pinstripe leg—their knees are nearly knocking. there’s a smolder of shared space here, the language of their limbs beats softly like wire brushes against a tight snare. and if you study the crook of his left foot, you’d notice that the only contact between them occurs where his spatterdashed shoe tucks beneath the arch of her right high-heeled foot—an intimate gesture passed between them that no one else would track unless they peered below. 211007 ... raze i think your description of the picture is as evocative as the image itself. man . . . that's some good stuff. 211007 ... e_o_i This still from a film; two people are in what looks like the basket of an air balloon, scattering what may be someone's ashes into the desert landscape far below. The white of the powder echoes the clouds: https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2023/03/10/concordians-are-in-the-spotlight-at-the-41st-edition-of-the-montreal-international-festival-of-films-on-art.html 230315 what's it to you? who go blather from