Bits and Pieces

Originally Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2013

It's Spring.

"Women look like one thing when you don't know them and another when you do." - James Salter, Solo Faces

The quote came by email from Q yesterday.  Salter is The Rage lately, having won some big awards, being the subject of films, and having a new book coming out next month.  Q and I met Salter in NYC a few years ago.  Like most writers I meet, Salter was antagonistic toward me.  Perhaps that is overstating it.  He didn't care for me.  But he and Q got on like old friends.  C'est la vie.  

Please don't get me wrong.  You can substitute "men" for "women" in that statement.  I think.  I've never really known what men look like one way or another.  But by all rights, I'm certain the statement would work in a more democratic way to simply say "people."  That is not good writing, though.  That is just covering your ass and being correct. The statement is more provocative as it stands and says something other than what universalizing (sanitizing) it would.  

But I drift.  This is not what I meant to talk about at all.  

My friend just returned from London where he spent a week museum and gallery going to the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, Courtald, the Sloane and the Wallace Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, etc.  And of course martinis at the Ritz.  I couldn't believe he missed our local art festival and after party for that.  But it makes me feel better just to know I have friends of that ilk.  And to think he has two of my images hanging in his office makes it even better.  

Yesterday I got an email from The Impossible Project telling me they had made me some sort of Pioneer member and that they were inviting me to try a prototype of their new 8x10 color instant film.  I've been waiting for this!  I am one of only thirty photographers in the U.S. who to have gotten a pack, it seems.  Pressure.  I shall have to try to make something interesting.  But I am seriously jumping up and down excited about it.  

image from Impossible email 

I saw the last part of a movie on HBO last night called something like "The Magical Marigold Hotel" about a bunch of old people who are living in a hotel in India.  Why does India seem so appealing in film?  Such rich colors and vibrant settings.  I am always desperate to go.  Really, though--and this is so wrong, I know (which is perhaps what makes it so desirable)--I feel that way every time I see a film based on any part of the old British Empire whether it is Africa or the Far East.  If they fucked things up, they did it with much panache, didn't they?  The people who left England had a flair, I mean.  For my money, they were far and away the most interesting Imperialists, and there have been many.  The French were cute but far more cruel.  Modern day Americans and Russians and Chinese have made nothing interesting at all.  There are the Romans and Persians and the Egyptians, of course, but that was so long ago.  Still, they knew to make something pretty.  Yes, if you are going to build empires and be imperialists, at least have the courtesy of a good aesthetic, for you've already abandoned ethics.  

As if ethics and aesthetics were real.  But they are certainly present in the image I posted at the top of the page which might be titled "Ethics vs. Aesthetics."  I think you lean one way or the other.  It is difficult to stand in between.