Post-Election Blues

What you wanted was a
rock'n'roll
Jesus who would eat your creditors and excrete codeine.
What you got was a hay-ride with 500 horny oldsters!

Suck my eggs!
 
 

Charis Wilson - Edward Weston

From Charis Wilson's obituary in the Economist, December 10, 2009...

"Soon she knew Weston's ideas well enough to write the text for his photographs,
his applications for grants and his articles for photographic magazines, for words
came easily to her as they never did to him. She took the notes, on her clackety
Royal typewriter, and also drove their puttering Ford on the giant western trips
they made in the late 1930s; the books that resulted, notably “California and the
West”, were as much hers as his, but she was seldom credited."
 
 

Diet

Transmute drunks into umbras,
nausea into abasement, debutantes into butter,
meerkats back into debutantes, butter back into butter.

Then what?

Then nothing!

No more drunks, umbras, nausea, or abasement!
No more debutantes!
No more butter!
 
 

A Sacred Pause at Time Inc.

"A sacred pause?" Are these cogs in the great machine of Time Inc. self-important or what?

"The pitch meeting is a moment for the department to come together to look at images and discuss
ideas as a group. It is a sacred pause in our very hectic week."

The sacred pitch meeting! Gag me with my Nikon!

But apart from the grotesque personality disorders of the staff, what I hate hate hate about
"Lightbox" is that you can look at 50 of their photos in which people appear, and there aren't
any recognizable people in them! Nothing but "examples!"

I'm looking through their Best Pictures of the Week for January 11-18 and after 22 just about
the most individualized is "A Hindu Holy Man."



Would you recognize this guy, or anybody else in the frame, if they all jumped out at you right
now, while you're looking at the picture? Of course not!

This is anti-human garbage, and it deserves to be "appreciated" with a hammer.
 
 

Two Photos from Kanaval in Jacmel, Haiti - Leah Gordon

 
 

Indus

My name is Khalid Irfan.
Today I woke up in Skardu.
Tonight I will sleep in Mohenjo-daro.
Five stars are my fathers.
Five rivers are my sons.

In the mists above Karachi,
how many droplets jostle and coalesce?
Contracts and marriage vows dissolved
by the law of water.

From Kang Rinpoche to Sapta Singhu,
water woven into wind,
wind woven into water,
blue into blue.
 
 

Orphans in Paktia Province, Afghanistan

I keep trying to conjure this image out of my brain. There are maybe five
or six versions of it floating around on the internet, all the way from black
and white to super-saturation, all of them attributed to different photographers,
but as far as I know, nobody lays a definite claim to it, and neither would I.
The traditional textiles of tribes from as far away as Oruzgan are represented
in one or another outfit here, and now they all dwell together in some God-forsaken
shed in Paktia, while 96% of American "aid" to Afghanistan is devoted to military
operations.