Hard Up

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

-e.e. cummings

Causality

Its days like this that make me want to scream.
Scream so loud that I cry blood.
Sitting thru the 9 to 5 drill.
Falling
Naked
Zombie
Drool
Blistering, backwards, bludgeoned day
I’m not about to go home today.

I’m causality in my 9 to 5.

I’m fighting to keep sane.
I’m wishing we would have some rain.
I’m trying not to listen to the news.
It’s all a bunch of lies that buzz around my brain like big fat deer flies.

I’m a causality in my 9 to 5.

Humanity can’t take it anymore.

They run through the streets and hit strangers with bats.
Right on the back of the skull.
Splitting them open all over the fuckin floor.

I heard that today.
On the news.

I’m causality in my 9 to 5.

I’m not so different from you.

I like to drink, curse and screw.

The problem is.

You think you’re so different.

"question and answer"

 he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
 night, running the blade of the knife
 under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
 of all the letters he had received
 telling him that
 the way he lived and wrote about
 that--
 it had kept them going when
 all seemed
 truly
 hopeless.

 putting the blade on the table, he
 flicked it with a finger
 and it whirled
 in a flashing circle
 under the light.

 who the hell is going to save                                
 me? he
 thought.

 as the knife stopped spinning
 the answer came:
 you're going to have to
 save yourself.

 still smiling,
 a: he lit a
 cigarette
 b: he poured
 another
 drink
 c: gave the blade
 another
 spin.

--from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

-Bukowski

Like an Animal

“Don't allow your animal nature to rule your reason.”

-RUMI

In the White

Minor White (1908-76) was one of the greatest American photographers of the period after the Second World War as well as one of the greatest teachers of the medium. One of the best-known names in photography until the end of the 1970s, his life and work has since then virtually dropped out of photographic discourse. Probably for many younger photographers his name means little or nothing.

White was a deeply religious man whose whole life was a spiritual journey. His photography arose out of this and was an inherent part of this pilgrimage. It isn't an approach that has been fashionable in academic circles in recent years.

His legacy to photography has been an important one, but not without its negative aspects, which in recent years have perhaps been encouraged to obscure his great achievements. It is unfair to tar him with the brush of those lesser talents who followed some of the more superficial aspects of his teaching while failing to follow its main thrust, the need to find yourself.

White was a truly great teacher, but one who tended to overpower his students, turning out too many who mimicked his methods but with little real understanding or talent. There are plenty still around, taking out their view cameras as he did and justifying their technically perfect but spiritually empty landscapes and still life with the doctrine of self-expression.

As well as his photography and teaching, White's other vital legacy to photography is the magazine 'Aperture', which has done more than any other publication to improve the quality of photographic publishing in the last 50 years. It was founded by White, together with others including Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Dody Warren in 1952, and White continued to edit it until 1975.

Aperture is still going strong (since 1963 it has been published by the non-profit corporation, Aperture, Inc) and remains the finest photographic magazine in publication. I've been a subscriber to this quarterly for many years and it now occupies several feet of shelve space in my front room. It isn't the sort of magazine that you read and then throw away, and many issues of the magazine have also appeared as books. Aperture is now the leading photographic book publisher and also publishes some fine limited editions of photographs and photogravures.

Later, in 1978, Aperture published 'Rites & Passages' in which White's pictures are accompanied by a lengthy biographical sketch by James Baker Hall, including lengthy excerpts from White's own writing. As a view of his pictures it was disappointing only when compared to 'Mirrors Messages Manifestations', since it contains much of his best work. Hall's text and the chronology included are the major source for most of the biographical information in this feature. Another fine book on White is 'Minor White: The Eye That Shapes' by Peter C Bunnell, published in 1989.

Descriptions abound of White's unconventional teaching methods, which alienated many of the students. There were some who felt they had come to learn photography and were upset to find they were expected to spend long times in relaxation exercises and meditation. Some assignments would involve activities such as simply standing on a street corner, watching. For most his methods were hard to take at first, but he was an imposing figure, very tall with striking and appropriately white hair that made, a prophet or guru. Those who stayed long enough usually came to admire him, and to take his ideas seriously.

For those who survived the initial shock of his methods, one of the major parts of his method were the field trips where he and the students would go out to photograph together. There was much to be learnt watching the way he worked with his 4x5" Sinar view camera in the field and it was also greatly instructive to see later how the prints they produced compared to his taken in the same place.

Workshops would involve pre-dawn body practice in the fields, vegetarian food, and camera projects such as 'What is your original face?' He aimed to make students aware of what they really felt about the pictures and their lives, asking them to question themselves and probing their responses.

It was a teaching method that was at odds with the normal methods of schools and also with the inhibitions of his mainly male students who were used to hiding their feelings even from themselves. Even many of those who came to benefit greatly from them often had a great deal of initial inhibition to overcome. For many it was a dramatic turning point in their lives; one militant atheist went on to found a Zen monastery.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

-MINOR WHITE

essay by Peter Marshell

Nick Cave

Taken at Slim's San Francisco 7/07 at the Grinderman show.

An artist's duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.”

-Nick Cave

Wasted History

“We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar”