Tuesday 19 June 2012

on the desire to run

{These photos have come from the internet and none of them are mine, this is kleptomania.}

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Sometimes I get moments,

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not dark moments, not necessarily,

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though often they are,

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where I just want to RUN so far away.

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Where I wish I was more of the reckless,

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the piebald,

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the steel-spirited,

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the selfish,

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the winged,

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the illuminant,

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the gargantuan.

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And sometimes I do  run,

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but I always end up somewhere. Somewhere bigger, maybe,

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stranger,

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wilder,

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or somewhere smaller.

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You can’t run from everywhere.

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(You can still try.)

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Saturday 9 June 2012

solitary solipsism

I just came across Alexey Titarenko, a photographer from Leningrad who has made a series of haunting, unsettling images that simultaneously imply claustrophobia and isolation.

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“der Körper ist eine dünne Haut über mühsam unterdrücktem Wahnsinn”
{our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness}
Im Westen Nichts Neues / All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque

The series is called ‘City of Shadows’’ and was shot in the year I was born and the two years following. If you want to see more of his work, you can follow this link.

Photography is powerful. This photograph is strong. It makes you think.

It makes you think about how you are so unique and individual and profound. Everything you feel you feel fully, you think so fast you think a thousand thoughts a day, images and expectations and concerns flashing through your head. What freaks me out is that every person is like that. Every single person. Look at all the people in that photograph. They’re not nondescript cold Russians. They’re all self-contained universes, each of us is. And look how many pass by, just in the time it took for this photograph to be taken. Maybe an hour or so. Too many to conceptualise. Too many to see distinctly. So many that they become transparent. How can we be sure other people really exist?

It makes you think how absurd it is that you can have so many people around, can be surrounded by other complex beings, a see of sentience, but still feel so lonely.

I’m falling in love with photography. It has such an incredible ability to shape perception of reality, and really, that’s all reality is. Perception.

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Thursday 7 June 2012

capitalist swine

I’ve been making some rash impulse buys recently. I’m sure you’ve been through phases where for some reason or another your life just isn’t satisfying you and in some attempt to bridge the gulf between yourself and sanity you buy stuff. It’s a mundane activity, it involves little concentration but enough to occupy your mind, and you feel part of the world when you go into a shop and perform the simple task of buying something.

Like a ukelele.

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Or festival tickets.

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Or a poem.

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Or a pretty CD and a movie about civil war in a central-African state.

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Or wedge flip-flops.

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I’m not proud of all of these purchases, especially the last ones. Wedge flip-flops for someone who hates heels and lives in England have got to be the most pointless possessions, but possess them I do and I will make sure to delight in them. I have recently come to the realisation that if you do something in order to make yourself happier, no matter what, even if it’s something as fundamentally ridiculous as buying frivolities, at least then don’t go on to deny yourself that happiness.

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