you know who is the best?
frontalot is the best. his music is the best.
You know all those insipid love pop songs lamenting how you only really realize how good something is after it is gone? Man, I hate those songs, because they are right. Why is it that universal, deep Human Truths can be wrapped up in a 4 minute radio-friendly pop tune?
I have been reading Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. Few books have so continuously blown me away what with their “wide range of brilliant and amusing philosophical speculations”. Victoria Glendinning of the Sunday Times on the back of the book cover says “There are novels that are tragic, or entertaining, and this one is both. There are very few that give a fresh perspective on existence, and force the reader to reassess his own life and attitudes.” The fact that it deals with issues that are recently directly consuming my mind and life makes it even more interesting.
Recently I have been reading quite a bit. I re-read the Chronicles of Narnia which to my amazement was an event that had me at a book a night. I was amazed because the last time I read them I was in the fourth grade in elementary school the idea of reading an entire book in one day was not something I usually tried to do. I would read a while, and then scribble out drawings of Reepicheep or the Dawn Treader on the backs of my worksheets.
I have also enjoyed Rohld Dahl’s short stories for their twists and underlaid violence. They are dark! They shine! They make me uneasy and thouroughly entertained. This is what I like about the creative work of geniuses. Look at Van Gogh’s last paintings, Winogrand’s streets, Araki’s portraits… People who harness that edge of desperation in their work always impress me. Desperation is not about darkness, or being lonely. There is something more atavistic about the whole thing. The idea of a finite life must be dealt with. Humor helps.
If there is ever anything in my mailbox waiting for me when I come home from work, it is most likely a flyer for a new chinese resturant or for a newer, bigger apartment. These get tossed fairly quick. The only mail I ever expect to get aside from the occasional letter from home is my Vodafone bill, which arrives within a day or two of payday. Imagine my (slight) suprise then when I lifted the mailbox door and saw a nice fat envelope with nikon’s logo on it looking up at me.
The official acceptance letter for my photo exhibition came with a packet of stuff. I knew from last week or so that I got accepted but what I did not know is that my work will also be sent to Osaka to be shown in the nikon salon there as well (December 1st to the 6th). There was also some information regarding publicity- 9000 postcards will be made (holy crap! I am sorry, trees). They also gave me some lined paper on which to write my bio and a statement about my work. Guess which one will be easy to write, and which one will be terribly muddled? (hint, I know where I was born and where I went to school).
here is what I ended up with the a few weeks ago:
I went back to Tanaka Sensei’s studio last night but I could’nt get any other paintings to work. All of my photography is figuring out how photographs work for what they are, and to switch gears like this is a struggle. An important struggle! Photography has a nature quite unlike painting. I was trying to paint from a photograph and that’s what got me into a funk. I was getting frusterated by how my painting of the house I grew up in was nothing like the photo, and even worse, nothing like the mental model in my mind. So I put it off to the side to dry and began a smaller painting. Nothing was happening. Tanaka Sensei suggested to just start with a color and go and eventually I ended up with a painting of kim jong il. But again my mental model was way more interesting than what was happening on the canvas before me. So I took some rags to the canvas and wiped away an hour’s worth of work. I will try again next week.
