René Burri (1933-2014)
Tokyo train to Kamakura with young lovers - 1961
René Burri (1933-2014)
Tokyo train to Kamakura with young lovers - 1961
Bear Nation (2010). Excerpt from a documentary about the gay bear community.
[ID: A bear with a flat top haircut and a grey beard sits in a chair, speaking to the interviewer. He is wearing a grey top. He has hairy arms, a hairy chest, and is heavy-set. He says, “I call the bear community The Goonies of the gay community. ‘Cause they accept almost anything, and they want you to be comfortable. I just think it’s really important that people know they’ve got a place to go.” He becomes emotional, tearing up. “Society can be very mean. All I want to do is have a chance to find somebody to love. Live a pretty normal life. And enjoy it. And be able to shine. And the bear community allows you that." END ID.]
Kaveh Akbar, from "Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)", Calling a Wolf a Wolf
‘The Eternal Idol’ Auguste Rodin, 1893.
View from Dùn Na Cuaiche, Inverary Castle, Argyll, Scotland by adambulley
Adélia Prado - Denouement, tr. by Ellen Doré Watson
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams. (Harper Perennial June 21, 1991) (via The Vale of Soul-Making)
Toor’s scenes possess a kind of solemnity or quietude that does not suggest equilibrium so much as tender regard. Toor’s protagonists, obvious stand-ins for the artist himself, at least at an earlier moment in his life, seem held in suspension between two worlds, Old and New, never entirely at home in either. But he also holds them at emotional arm’s length, as if these images were tempered by time, less observations than memories, and they begin to assume the lineaments of archetype, despite their depiction of technology à la mode.
(Many of the pictures have an overall green palette, appropriate, perhaps, for the nocturnal illumination of bars or apartment parties—although more readily suggesting fin de siècle gaslight—but also reminiscent of the discoloured varnish of old paintings hanging for generations in smoke-filled drawing rooms.)
on Salman Toor