En Honour

my favourite mj song RIP

Zero Hour

Stephen Dunn is one of the first poets I got into and really wanted to fully understand/internalize. He is honest and very brilliant -- but often heartbreaking. His collection Everything Else in The World is one of my most loved possessions, although this poem isn't in it. He might seem irrelevant to a younger crowd, because most of what he writes is on loss, getting older, and looking back on your life. But for some reason, I still find his voice extraordinarily familiar, witty, and very real.

Zero Hour

Stephen Dunn

It was the hour of simply nothing.

not a single desire in my western heart,

no ancient system

of breathing and postures,

no big idea justifying what I felt.

There was even an absence of despair.

"Anything goes," I said to myself.

All the clocks were high. Above them,

hundreds of stars flickering if, if, if.

Everywhere in the universe, it seemed,

some next thing was gathering itself.

I started to feel something.

but it was nothing more than a moment

passing into another, or was it less

eloquent than that, purely muscular,

some meaningless twitch?

I'd let someone else make it rhyme.

Guillaume Zuili

Guillaume Zuili is so obviously French -- check out his website and you'll see what I mean. His work is definitely dirty and every image doesn't "work," but he's playful, experimental, voracious, and his love of taking pictures pours out of all he does.

One of his more recent projects "LA Fragments" is a collection of images mostly shot with a pinhole camera. Yeah, okay, so we've seen some of this stuff before. But in a world saturated with celebrity portraiture and bubble-gum tongue-and-cheek high-gloss stuff, in the moment, at least, he is a welcomed breath of fresh-er air.

My Girl

I just watched this for the first time in a long time. Overall, it's one big cornball of a movie ... but this scene is really wonderful.  

My new home

 I am fascinated but also troubled by the physical and emotional processes we go through to make a new place a home. I just moved far away from most people I love and have never really experienced this type of exhilarating independence mixed with very real loneliness ever before. I am not afraid of living or being by myself -- I would just enjoy having a good friend or companion to explore and just plain live/be with. 

But I am slowly beginning to feel alright in my new surroundings. There's this inner calming and warmth that seems to grow when I am able to discover joy and love in a place. It's a feeling of comfort and clarity -- something I cannot really explain.  

I will post more images of this exploration. I have to admit I haven't taken my camera out much since graduation. This is something I need to change.

The pictures below are really just for me. I took them walking home tonight. I was out doing some food shopping in my neighborhood. I'm not trying to make any kind of statement with them -- but I hope they will help me make more sense of what's around me and better understand a change that's happening within me. 

   

Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 

Breathless

Screenshots ::

Ed Ou -- a peer but out of everyone else's league.

Story by Ed Ou about a small village in the northeast of Kazakhstan where the Soviet government has covertly tested the effects of nuclear radiation on humans since the beginnings of the Cold War. Ou says the Soviets have detonated more than four hundred nuclear arms into the atmosphere and underground areas of the town. As a result, of course, an incredible number of people are now suffering from severe physical and mental abnormalities and cancer. 

You can see the full story on Ou's website :: here . He uses livebooks, which I respect especially since he is pretty well-known.  (Ou was recently acknowledged by the PDN 2009 annuals and made their 2008 list of the the 30 best emerging photographers.) Even better, he is only 21... damn, stiff competition. 

Anyway, there is a lot I could write about this, but my lousy commentary can't really live up to what the images say for themselves.