You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
– Ansel Adams
These are the two basic controls at the photographer’s command: position and timing. All others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them
– David Hurn
When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.
— Robert Mapplethorpe
Be tender with adults, they’re just disillusioned children.
— Clayton Cubitt
I photograph subjects that have a mystical power to me. In that sense, every click of the shutter is an act of worship.
Clayton Cubitt
Mo quoted last night, “Everyone is experiencing the worst thing in the history of the world.”
…Until you talk to someone else and find out what their worst thing is.
You’re going to mess up sometimes. But the good part is, you get to decide how you’re gonna mess it up.
— Marilyn Monroe
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
? Saul Bellow
It’s a new year. You can be anything you want. You can do anything you want. You have nothing to lose. And everything to gain.
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
— Kurt Vonnegut
A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.
— Groucho Marx
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
— Oscar Wilde (via Clayton Cubitt)
Acknowledge that you are worthy of receiving something so that love becomes authentically mutual and reciprocal.
— Cornel West (via Clayton Cubitt)
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
If you go home with someone, and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck them.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
3 grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love & something to hope for.
To an artist, first an audience is a life jacket, then it is a dinner jacket, then it is a straightjacket.
My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.
If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.
- via Holly
Seems very fitting right now. *shrug*
Sometimes girls go gay when drunk. Sometimes gays go girl when drunk.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain, via (Dave T)
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Unknown (via Paul Long)
“She was one of those giant broad beamed Scandinavian giantess warrior women types; the fucking Russ Meyer buxotic women, you know what I mean: WOMEN with breasts and hips like we don’t have anymore. Oh my god what was that horrible- what is this god awful frightened 14 year old boy runaway cul-de-sac we’ve gone down in regards to women? These fucking shaky dog waif model Chihuahua girls with the visible heartbeat through the rib cage, that Lara Flynn Boyle: “If you fuck me I’ll tear!” I don’t want that! I don’t want to fuck a box kite! Jesus Christ! Starches! Finish my fries! She was huge and Nordic, she was a fucking Valkyrie and she began to construct my joint. SHE CONSTRUCTED MY JOINT. And to give you an idea of the care and concern and craftsmanship that went into my joint- it took her an entire song on the mixtape to roll it. Unfortunately you know what the song was? Queen’s We Are the Champions. I say unfortunately because as it was starting to play I was like, “Oh I wish this wasn’t happening because now this sounds a bullshit story!” But it really happened this way literally as she opened the paper and put the fucking weed on: I’VE PAID MY DUES TIME AFTER TIME! I’m like, “No! Not this song! This is turning into a Robert Zemeckis film!”
— Patton Oswalt discusses purchasing weed at a pot cafe in Amsterdam
Better to be ridiculous and make an impact, than to be polite and unremarkable.
– me
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold.
– Andrew Lewis (via Daring Fireball)
Let the philosophers rave on about the summum bonum and mystics about embracing God. They are still vertical humans and therefore even their adorations still have something aggressive about them. Humans in the horizontal position have always struck me as less likely to be violent and destructive. So I take my place beside the poets, and less arrogant than the philosopher or mystic, am prepared to find the greatest good and embrace God whenever I hold a woman in the act of love. It is then I know with assurance and inexpressible delight that whatever it is life promises us, this must be it; and that a universe containing this experience must have something grandly important going for it.
— Irving Layton (via Katie West)
I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.
- Albert Einstein, (via Holly)
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single minute before starting to improve the world.
- Anne Frank, (via Holly)
The ways of God and government and girls are all mysterious, and it is not given to mortal man to understand them.
Robert Heinlein
I like her because she smiles at me and means it.
- Anonymous
Thought I shared this a while ago, but it came up again in reading today:
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
- Francis Bacon
We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!
— Nicolas Cage to Cher in Moonstruck
I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
J. D. Salinger
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
- George Santayana
Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion.
— Tina Fey
One reason a dog can be such a comfort when you’re feeling blue is that he doesn’t try to find out why.
– Author Unknown
Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
– Theodore Roosevelt
You may see me only as a drunken, vice-ridden gnome whose friends are just pimps and girls from the brothels. But I know about art and love, if only because I long for it with every fiber of my being.
– Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
– Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005
Whenever anyone asks me how I got the photographs I did, why I was often the only photographer present or got such unique access I reply simply, ‘Trust’.
– Jim Marshall
…there isn’t going to be any turning point…there isn’t going to be any next-month-it’ll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don’t have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say, So this is it. This is really all there is to it.
– Janis Joplin
Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.
- Jacques Barzun
Photography is the embalmers craft. When I photograph something my camera kills it, and I must gently and with love restore it with the life I witnessed with my own eyes, so that others can see what I saw. To do less would be merely to exhibit a corpse.
- Clayton Cubitt
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
- Bertrand Russell
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
- Diane Arbus
Mamihlapinatapai: a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.
Finally went to the Avedon exhibit this weekend. Watching a video they had playing, he had an interesting quote. He said that every photograph is accurate, and that no photograph is the truth.
I’m sure even he would define photograph — in this instance — as the image as originally taken, since apparently early in his career he was not afraid to touch up his photos to improve their idealism.
I’ve heard friends describe my photos of people as “very honest portraits”, with the implied message that they’re not necessarily flattering. While I won’t share pictures I think are insulting, I think it’s good to keep in mind that any photo is simply capturing one particular point of view of one specific moment.
“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
– Ray Bradbury
“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist – a master – and that is what Auguste Rodin was – can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be… and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply imprisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart… no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
“Live forever, or die in the attempt.”
– Joseph Heller
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
“…the larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, the first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide…the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre… The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people… On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a moron.”
—H.L. Mencken, writing in The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
Excellent overheard quote: “It’s better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for who you pretend to be.”
“A monster is a creature with no consciousness.”
– God
Since corporations are legally considered “people”, and they have no consciousness, then what does that say about them?
pakgwei: “do you feel like an adult?”
sunfl0wersara: “not really. i feel like a fraud, most of the time.”
What about you?
“No, I will not crochet you an angora vibrator cozy for Christmas. Christmas is evil and bad.”
“a heavily made-up woman whose affections seem to be negotiable.”
Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favour of simple English (or French or Spanish or Chinese or whatever). Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth.
– Helena Rubinstein, CEO, www.labgroup.com
Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved. Too often, people are assumed to be empty chess pieces to be moved around by grand viziers, which may explain why so many top managers immerse their calendar time in deal making, restructuring and the latest management fad. How many immerse themselves in the goal of creating an environment where the best, the brightest, the most creative are attracted, retained and, most importantly, unleashed?
– General Colin Powell
The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances. Sometimes I play things I never heard myself.
– Thelonious Monk
Creativity is the fine line between deep concentration and sheer insanity.
best comic discussion comment ever:
“I’ve never put out for comics before…
…but if someone would give me a full run of “Hitman,” I’d give’em a big sloppy blowjob.”
Every so often the people fighting sharing slip up and tell us what they really think. Ed Felten points to an article about a program that lets you copy DVDs. “It’s like somebody selling a digital crowbar,” said Patricia Benson, an attorney for the studios.As Felten points out, crowbars are available at the local hardware store, even though they can be used to break into private property and actually steel things, as well as attacking people. Last time I checked, you didn’t need a license to get one.”
“(1) The most important first indication that was absolutely clear from the argument is that our fear was misplaced. The Court clearly got it. Though the other side had written literally 300 pages trying to show all the good CTEA did (and pronounce it like it is a disease — sateeeya), the Court hadn’t bought any of it. Congress was not acting to promote progress, it was acting to reward "court favorites." The only question the Court was struggling with is whether it has the power to do anything about it. “
– Lawrence Lessig
You have been living in a cave the last few years if you’ve heard nothing about Copyright. Whether it is the record companies useing it as a bully club, or the now famous Eldred case, everyone want’s to own something.
This past week, the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against the reversal of the Copyright Extension Act. No matter what side you’re on, this article by the lawyer for the People is in depth, interesting, and strangely enough, optimistic.
Read it.
NOW!
“There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statue or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”
– Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
October 9th, 2002
Eldred v. Ashcroft
Fuck the mouse. If you cannot make a profit off your creation in the entire span of your life, PLUS 75 years after you are dead and rotting (as is the already ridiculous copyright standard), then just maybe no one gives a shit about what you have to say.
“At least one person was arrested Saturday afternoon as about 300 neo-Nazis rallied near the Capitol.
“Police arrested a counter-demonstrator who threw a stone at a neo-Nazi. About 1,000 police officers placed themselves between the two groups.”
– Associated Press
This shows you the typical District police reaction to any protest.
300 Nazis + 300-400 anti-Nazi protesters = 1.4 cops to handle each protester.
I will give the cops this… the cops were slightly less instigatory this time. That may be due to the fact the main force this time seemed to be comprised of Capitol Police as opposed to the usual MetroPD.
Pictures later.
“Americans are a broad-minded people. They’ll accept the fact a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, but if a man reads comics then there’s something wrong with him”
– Author Unknown
“You apes ain’t gonna make it, just swinging from the trees. Better learn to walk upright before she brings you to your knees.”
– Meg Lee Chin
If that isn’t Sara…
When national security is threatened, there are times when the United States cannot afford the luxury of adhering to the Constitution
‘The actual monetary loss to piracy might never be known, but the recording industry can count at least one statistic. "The music industry is still looking in the wrong direction," Allen said. "The customer is always right, and the customer in obviously voting with her feet.’
– Wired
Beautiful.
Great quote.
The music industry lost money again last year. They continue to blame Napster.
Small problem… Napster has been offline for over a year.
How many of you out there copied and stole a lot more music, probably guilt free, back when you just copied it onto a cassette tape? You can try to make the argument about quality differences… but copying is still copying.
It occured to me a few days ago that the modern music labels are some of the only art producers who want to or try to maintain a total control over their product. Almost the only people who insist that every single copy/version/performance is reimbuirsed seperately.
Authors never lobbied to dismantle libraries, and would likely be burned at the stake if they tried.
Painters, scultpors, and other visual artists often dream of being exhibited in a museum, where people don’t generally pay per piece.
You could argue that dancers and stage actors often do get money from each audience member for each viewing. But honestly, how far up on the pop culture scale do those artforms rate, today?
I read an interesting comparison the other day, relating digital music to software. Software manufacturers have not tried to hunt down the individual copyright violators, but instead take reasonable steps to protect the software when it is distributed, and go after the people violating the ccopyrights on a mass scale. And unlike the music business, the software programers have not asked every other related industry to protect their product because they cannot.
Lets face it. The RIAA and associated labels are scared senseless. They haven’t known what to do in over 15 years. Fifteen years of the most technological innovations in over a century. It’s a public secret that the music labels killed the release of Digital Cassettes, because they would have been duplicated so simply. Since then, music companies have not supported a single other distribution format with any vigour. Although this bit of history will surely be rewritten, it was the users and customers themselves who decided what new format they wanted. Consumers who were tired of waiting decided it was not only time for music to go completely digital, but also ambulatory. And you can’t blame the electronics manufactorers from fulfilling the demand. MP3 may be the modern superstar, but it was hardly the first. I was downloading AIFF files 7 years ago.
Seven fucking years.
Note to the music industry: pull your heads out of your asses and try to catch up. We are no longer waiting for you. While you expend great sound and fury trying to protect the status quo in the courtroom, we continue to evolve without you. Be prepared to jump again.
“BT has few friends in the U.K. The company has consistently been slow to take up new technology which really frustrates Internet users in the U.K.,” Ian Hill, a London-based technology journalist, said. “And BT now seems to be focused on trying to spread the ill will directed at it beyond Britain’s shores. Does this mean we’ll be seeing links floating in the Boston harbor soon?”
yesssss.
links floating in the harbour. I love it.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but it uses up a thousand times the memory.
JESUS SAYS “NUKE THE UNBORN BABY WHALES”
“These are the words that will infect your soul, curve your spine and bring, God help us, peace without honor.”
– G.Carlin
“Nobody should write with an audience in mind. That way lies only mediocrity.”
– Warren Ellis
“For a generation taught that Sex is Death and Rain is Poison, what else is there left except for TV and incessant maturbation?”
– Dr Hunter S. Thompson
And I Quote
from Nextdraft, 10.17.2001
“…and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”
– excerpt from A Litany for Survival
Audre Lorde
“It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was just a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke. “
- Unknown
Everyone should know of all information that others have deemed unfit for public knowledge.
–Author Unknown