a song by by Robin Holcomb

Deliver me
Deliver me
The light
Is only perfect
For a very short time
Deliver me

When
You’re blinded to
The moon
And it’s rise
How can you know
The planting times?
Streetlights
Tell lies

Castile soap, scraped fine, and half the quantity of very finely pulverized chalk; wet them up to a paste with strong juice of tobacco; when desired to apply to the eye, drop two or three drops of brandy into the box of paste; then take out a bit of it where the brandy was dropped, equal in size to the fourth of a grain of wheat, to the diseased eye; wet it on a bit of glass, and put into the eye with a camel’s hair pencil.

Apply twice daily at first, and from that to only once in two days, for from one to two weeks, will, and has cured wretched bad cases, so says Father Pinkney, of Wayne Co, Michigan, who has used it over fifty years, he being over ninety years of age. His only object in giving it an insertion here is to do good to his fellow creatures; and also for animals, it being equally applicable to horses or cattle.

- from Dr. Chase’s recipes; or, Information for everybody: an invaluable collection of about eight hundred practical recipes

an excerpt from The Book of Haiku

Some -
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry -
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don’t know and don’t know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.

- Wislawa Szymborska [translated by Regina Grol]

with mustered musement and merriment, a dispensation: at its most elemental, photography serves to reify that which the photographer deems worthy. to make a photograph is to assert value, and it is this assertion of value, in the form of a representation, that is, first and foremost, (re)iterated through dissemination. Instagram facilitates both acts: the taking and the trajectory, framing both as, as simple and as swift and as seamless as swiping a few onscreen buttons. And, unlike other models of making [a pro camera, being an artist, etc] and shaking [a book, the newspaper, a gallery or museum for example] that may by convention be bound by cost, time, purpose, profession, skill, education, social standing and/or experience, Instagram offers a relatively unencumbered mechanism to readily participate in a radically differing vista: the quotidian. to peruse a nexus of Instagram connections and to contribute your own photographs to that well, is to play a part in the real time accumulation, a steadying (re)valuation, of some of what gets us, singularly and together, through each day: friends, family, pets, places and food; something beautiful, something funny, something seen, and something done. it is in this way that the common practice of judging the relative merit of an individual photograph falls flat in the face of the Instagram interface. for the import of Instagram is in the very fact of each photograph having been produced and of the near-instantaneous shared profusion of countless such photographs across a network of exchange in which the legal tender is ♥ and minds [ie comments] and the reward, irregardless of the likes, is a reinforced sense of identification. every photograph a shiver not unlike your own.

i quit every other day and the other days i don’t even bother. i should’ve been a poet or a painter, or even smarter, taken those automotive repair classes in high school or got a good job at the shipyard like everyone else. maybe i should’ve went to a vocational cooking school, or better pestered my mother into buying me an electric guitar when i was twelve so i could’ve run away at fifteen to a southern california suburb to star in an angry punk rock band. instead what i’ve got are cameras, film, a darkroom i can’t afford, chemicals and paper. yet even with these riches i scarcely manage to fit any one thing worth your whiles to the confines of the material, never mind the unending erosion, for better or worse, of my very own wiles. it’s a feeble medium and it’s not keen to forgive. on my best days i think to tell the world important things, but let’s be honest, i cannot. it doesn’t work that way. it’s the cameras that do the telling and the most they ever tell me is what i’m in need of knowing. i scratch out the bits and pieces i remember and do what i can to smuggle them out to you. i try my best. i try to guess where you’ll be. i try to pronounce the languages you might speak. i try to carry on the mannerisms that might make your mind. i don’t know. the cameras don’t care what they do. the cameras don’t need to be used. there are long lonely days when i think the cameras are just fine by themselves as if maybe i should’ve been somebody else. like what i should’ve been is a clerk, a conductor, an electrician. some kind of catalyst. pure and invisible.

There is light. We neither see nor touch it.
In its empty clarities rests
what we touch and see.
I see with my fingertips
what my eyes touch:
                               shadows, the world.

With shadows I draw worlds,
I scatter worlds with shadows.
I hear the light beat on the other side.

- Octavio Paz

Fried­lan­der won’t admit an influ­ence, offer­ing a good pot of beans as inspi­ra­tion enough and my father always said you weren’t really poor until you drank off the soup and cooked the beans again. I make these every few weeks.

Rinse a pound of white beans, great north­ern or navy don’t mat­ter, and soak in water overnight. In the morn­ing drain the beans and put them in a stock­pot along with a large diced white onion, a minced clove of gar­lic, 2 bay leaves, and a ham bone. Fill the pot with water a few inches above the beans and tie together a hand­ful of pars­ley and as many sprigs of thyme as you can find and set in on top. Bring the pot to boil on high heat and care­fully skim off any foam and scum that forms up on the sur­face, then turn the heat down low and half-way cover with a lid. Sim­mer the beans slow for two or three hours – what you want is just the per­cep­tion of bub­bling. From time to time skim off any more scum that might rise to the sur­face and then give the pot a good stir. Once the beans are cooked through remove what’s left of the tied up herbs and the ham bone and stir in salt and pepper to taste. Should you have any leftover ham, cut that up and add that to the pot too and simmer another twenty minutes and then the beans will be done. Best if you wait a day or two to let everything marry. Invite friends over; the beans are fine with toasted bread and baked squash. Freezes well.
 

Clarence John Laugh­lin orga­nizes a lifetime of work — an excerpt:

GROUP A: STILL LIFES
This group, the ear­li­est on which I worked, was begun in 1935. I started with no for­mal train­ing at all as a painter or pho­tog­ra­pher, but with some back­ground as a writer, and a vast back­ground as a reader. Although this group orig­i­nated in a desire to develop fur­ther an inter­est in com­po­si­tion (incited by the dis­cov­ery of cer­tain art mag­a­zines in the 1930s) it even­tu­ally became involved in an urge to see how far my feel­ings about objects could become pro­jected through the cam­era; and in the dis­cov­ery of objects which could become the clues to changes in the nature of Amer­i­can cul­ture. Thus, here, as in much of my work, there is a pro­gres­sion from the semi-abstract to the poetic.

GROUP J: THE IMAGES OF THE LOST
Group J deals with the peo­ple rejected by our soci­ety; it is the first group pri­mar­ily devoted to human beings. But the peo­ple were very sel­dom pho­tographed where they were actu­ally found. Instead, a dif­fi­cult method was used: a spe­cial back­ground was selected for each per­son (often from places dis­cov­ered pre­vi­ously) with the inten­tion of mak­ing the back­ground work, not only in terms of design, but in terms of a sub­tle rev­e­la­tion of the over­all social sit­u­a­tion of the per­son. The peo­ple them­selves were not used as mod­els — they were not posed — nor were they used as “soci­o­log­i­cal doc­u­ments.” The attempt was to treat them as indi­vid­ual human beings. The over­all com­po­si­tion was deter­mined care­fully on the ground glass. But the expo­sure was not made till each per­son seemed to reveal him­self by some spon­ta­neous ges­ture or expression.

GROUP Q: NEW ANATOMIES
In this com­par­a­tively small group, which began in 1951, I have tried to show that the cam­era can explore the plas­tic poten­tial­i­ties of the human body in just as real a sense as, for instance, Picasso has done in some mar­velous draw­ings where he makes use of numer­ous kinds of dis­tor­tion in recre­at­ing the body; although in these pho­tos dis­tor­tion is not the method actu­ally used. Nev­er­the­less we are pre­sented with visions of the body which it would be impos­si­ble for the phys­i­cal eye directly to see. The pic­tures go com­pletely beyond the kind of “record­ing” func­tion usu­ally assigned to the cam­era, and instead of giv­ing us the results of direct vision, give us far more — the hyper-real vision cre­ated by the inner eye in man — the poetic, desir­ing, and dream­ing eye. Because of this, the erotic ele­ment becomes all the more intense. But due to the puri­tan­i­cal code dom­i­nat­ing this coun­try till recently, none of these pic­tures have ever been pub­lished or exhib­ited before. The basic quo­ta­tion for this series is from Hart Crane: “New thresh­olds, new anatomies!” And the last half of this quo­ta­tion is, lit­er­ally, the sub­ject for this group.

GROUP S: THE MAGIC OF THE OBJECT
It should be pointed out that Group S is the only one of the many groups I worked on which is entirely devoted to so-called com­mon­place objects. In this group I try to show how the pho­tog­ra­pher, like the painter and poet, can release a level of mean­ing from the most ordi­nary objects, which has noth­ing to do with their nat­u­ral­is­tic mean­ing. The pho­tog­ra­pher, of course, does this through intensely per­sonal vision (just as is true of the painter and the poet) and when this hap­pens, what the pho­tog­ra­pher is really deal­ing with is what the human mind has pro­jected into the object: the secret lan­guage of inan­i­mate objects, the hid­den images of man’s hopes and joys, his dreams and desires, by which he makes more human the inhu­man world around him. Although most of these pic­tures use the “found” object, all the objects are, in a deeper sense, “well arranged,” that is, light­ing, com­po­si­tion, and other fac­tors have been used, both con­sciously and com­pul­sively, to make more man­i­fest the hid­den mean­ings these objects have for the sen­si­bil­ity of the pho­tog­ra­pher. But, aside from all this, many of the objects in these pic­tures can be truly, con­sid­ered part of the iconog­ra­phy of our time.

to read the rest . . .

Read a recent interview conducted by Jacinda Russell about the cards I’ve made for the Postcard Collective’s quarterly exchanges. Spend some time on the site – you can view all the cards made by the participating artists and learn more about the Collective’s activities.
 

Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter [pdf]

by Geoff Ryman

Kwaidan

by Lafcadio Hearn

to plot those places
where i last remember you
time and time again
 

your feelings, your experiences, your ideas are an auspicious, even admirable place to begin, just know when you’ve finally reached an end none of that should matter anymore. what there will be is something you’ve never seen before and what that will be is the very thing you did not even know you most needed.
 

for those arriving here from the post at LPV Magazine or otherwise interested, you can view deeper selections of the accumulating forest fotografs. just use the arrows at the bottom of each page to navigate through the galleries.
 

 
I read that we’re all made of the same stuff: atoms, molecules and chemical compounds. That literally this could be that and that will become this. When they say all is one, they aren’t being kind. I know dead birds are a cliche, but figuratively it was on my doorstep and not many come knocking. When fitting energy to fate, and fate to phenomena, constellations are our only consolation.
  
made for a recent exchange for The Postcard Collective
 

– for Silvia Natalia Rivera

These rains,
I don’t know why they would make me love a dream I had, many years back,
containing a dream of yours
– your skull appeared to me

And it had an exalted presence;
it didn’t look at me — it looked at you.
And it drew near my skull, and I looked at you.
And when you were looking at me, my skull appeared to you;
it didn’t look at you.
It looked at me.

In the exalted night,
someone looked on;
and I dreamed your dream
– beneath a soundless rain,
you hid within your skull,
and I hid within you.

- Jaime Saenz

right hand: polophony
left hand: stewardesses
top row: typewriter
 

 
Kevin Slavin on how augmented reality research is too sight determined and not focused enough on what makes matter mean. Seeing is, in deed if not more, [yes i'm saying it] only the tip of an iceberg.
 

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.

- Frederick Sommer, from General Aesthetics, 1979