there once was a boy named Jack...

we tend to think of obesity as a condition of our times along with anxiety and depression a side effect of the modern lifestyle. but there have always been heavy people, especially in the late 19th century when hardy meant healthy and meals were banquets for the rich of their times. jack however, was not of the gentry and so his weight was unusaul. in fact it was his mother's greatest pride that by feeding him a diet of cow's milk with a soup spoons of flower mixed in 8 times a day from his birth to his 3rd birthday she was able to get him up to a weight usually found in a 12-year-old at just 36 months.

ack was a healthy boy, fit as a fiddle, if somewhat capricious and prone to tantrums when hungry which quickly began to become almost all the time. it was one of these tantrums that led to his demise. his mother no longer able to keep his sated watched as he jumped the fence of Andre Johannson's pigsty one hungry afternoon God knows what he hpoed to acheive, eat a live pig? but in was the pigs that ate him. RIP.

frank horvat

i was going to say that it felt like we were never going to get old but that would be a lie because it didn't feel like anything except for a sensation of whirling... just a minute before we'd been complaining about the weather and how the sky was always gray and felt so heavy and how oppressive it was and then she leaned ever-so-slightly forward and our lips were touching and everything else, and i mean everything, dissolved into a mist of unimportance... by the time we broke apart again we were old and our children had left home and the garden was finally how i wanted it and all that was left was to wait...

joyce Bryant

Joyce Bryant, ballad singer, once known as “the black Marilyn Monroe”, photographed by Philippe Halsman.

Back in the day...

ahhh, yessss. i remember, the days of wine and song, the 1980s...i can clearly remember sitting in the back of a yellow cab heading west on houston, off to an evening in the west village or soho. it was summer and still light out. we'd heard of keith, i'd seen his work in the elevator he tagged in a friend's loft building in noho, and of course the classic crack is wack mural on the upper east side you could see from the fdr (which this may be but i think it's the downtown version). we all appreciated his style, so modern, so post-modern, such a perfect mix of high and low and as for the subject, crack was wack and still is. i never understood how is took root in the ghetto, after all its horrific effects were visible to one and all with the psychotic drooling zombies it created, far worse than the drowsy junkies, this was fucked up.

yes i am in fact talking to you

beware the dark

last night when driving home through the forest i nearly crashed my car into this bremen menagerie. thank god, i'd tuned up the car just two days before. the breaks worked perfectly and i escaped unharmed. (as did the beasts). but i really got a scare and when i came home i had to lie down in the dark and the silence and try to process what i'd seen. four animals one on top of the other, like some satanic rite, and yet, i knew it wasn't evil that had motivated this animals to climb on top of each other's back but a yearning... for harmony. harmony amongst beasts in the world. they were acting out of love. the cat and dog not actually laying down together but working together like chinese acrobats, balancing as effortlessly as if they'd spent their whole lives practicing for exactly this moment.

the next day i returned to the scene on my bike (i was too spooked to drive for days) and in the gray cloudy daylight i saw nothing. no evidence of the miracle i witnessed the night before. at first i was relieved and then disappointed but ultimately i realized that what was important was that i'd seen it at all (and managed to photograph it!)

end of the world/beginning of the day

dropping my daughter off at school on yet another foggy day i am struck by the apocalyptic vision just behind the trees. i hope this has nothing to do with that dream i had to many years ago about a nuclear bomb going off in boston.

i spy with my little eye...

something sad and terribly real. i spy lost love. despair. a willingness to give up. to call it a day. i spy sadness and regret at not having told the truth earlier. i smell surrender, a strangely familiar smell from the past when love died. i spy the truth and it emboldens my fears.

the spiral of history

bowie as sad clown (kinda)

this morning...

... i dropped off my daughter at school in the fog, thick and creamy, like a bowl of cracked pea soup. it was delicious and i almost went back for seconds but had a train to catch...

mommy dearest

“I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.” — Marguerite Duras

via: http://i12bent.tumblr.com/

more tilly

i'm speechless

by david seymour

weird guy from long ago

an upright and steady member of the rotary club and the young(ish) republicans in fort collins, bernard wayland enjoyed dressing up as an indian every year on february 5th. although in later years, his grandchildren tried to hide then destroy this photo as insentive to native peoples, for a good three decades there dressing up like "sitting bull" was bernie's claim to fame, his signature so to speak.

Toulouse on the Beach

“In 1898, Parisian art gallery owner Maurice Joyant photographed his childhood friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec defecating on the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie. A year later Toulouse-Lautrec was committed to an asylum, and in 1901 he died from complications caused by alcoholism and syphilis.”

Liu Bolin

Chinese artist Liu Bolin: no digital photo manipulation to achieve this see-through camouflage effect. Just paint and a painstaking amount of patience.

Tilly Losch. circa 1925.

photo by Trude Fleischmann

Anton Giulio Bragaglia

From 1911, the year he published the treatise Fotodinamismo and began lecturing on the concept. In the same year he became the chief editor of the art and theater newspaper "L'Artista". He was an early Futurist.

the past

for me the subject of these photos i post (for me, i say) is the fleeting nature of youth. which i don't find boring but titillating, kind of like standing on the edge of a precipice and looking down...