truths?

Santayana-

"we do not merely live but act; we compose and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush. We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have uttered, as we try to believe in the religion we profess. The greater our difficulties the greater our zeal. Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly our self than in the flux of our involuntary dreams."

I'm not entirely sure if I should feel a bit lame for quoting all this-- but hey, in my utterly exhausted and slightly delirious state.. it was quite lovely to read it.


oh, p.s.:

I've always liked skies.

From the norm





To the torrential










All from my Flickr

Wow wow

Originally uploaded by Emir Ozsahin

I had to blog this.

-That'd be all.

Packing

So I'm moving away from home semi-permanently in 3 days and I haven't started packing. How long does it even take to pack everything you might need for the next 3 months or so? I'm clueless.

In other news I bought a Zenit the other day to replace my bust Olympus, though I do plan on replacing the body of my Olympus all the same-- I think the idea of using a Soviet camera kind of amused me.

Marc Isaacs - Lift

MUST recommend this film short, created by Marc Isaacs.
It's a great exploratory piece- Isaacs films in a lift in a tower block in London for 10 hours a day, everyday-- meeting the residents of the building and prompting them to share various thoughts and opinions with the camera. It's really endearing and at some points even shocking.

Watch it!

LIFT

Hasisi Park

I found a wonderful flickr, well in fact, I found two - one being Hasisi Park and the other Jackson Eaton.

They both share in their photostreams a really intense relationship (between the two) wherein Eaton, a newcomer to Korea, teaching English, meets Hasisi - falls in love - and stays in Korea for three years. It's pretty eye opening- Hasisi takes lovely, if sometimes a little strange, self portraits alongside everyday snapshops. Jackson shows a more intimate insight into their loving relationship, it's really quite captivating!

I think Jackson Eaton is exhibiting his photos in Australia at the moment--

oh +ve is a love story. In 2006 I moved to South Korea to teach English; after only a few weeks, I met Hasisi Park. These photographs document the next three years. They are not only a story of love but also of the search for belonging in a foreign culture, and the difficulties associated with needing one thing to constitute your ‘everything’.

Most of the images that make up this exhibition were originally part of a joint project entitled Jackson and Hasisi Were Never Married. In late 2008, we self-published a book of these photographs and intended to have a show. We broke up a few months later. Truthfully rather than playfully looking back on the relationship, I titled this exhibition oh +ve, a name that suggests two opposing yet equally futile forms of finding answers in relationships. It cynically refers to both the self-directed method of maintaining a positive attitude and the deterministic theory of blood type compatibility. Not knowing my own blood type, Hasisi would tell me that if I were not of type B then we would never get married. O+ is the most common type in Australia. With this exhibition I aim to present some fragments of our intimate, fragile, comical and passionate narrative and invite viewers to piece them together and explore the belief that ‘all you need is love’


A few photos I quite like:

















In other news, I finally have a student bank account. Shame about getting the Student Finance money.. I gave up holding the phone after 27 minutes of particularly shitty music.

I hate money

No really, I wish it weren't so important.

I was sent an enormous list of architectural equipment I'll need in all of two weeks' time, and it's worth a small fortune. Not to mention a very explicit laptop specification that my planned Macbook buying doesn't adhere to (apparently, I need a 15" screen and 13" simply isn't good enough). Great.. so that means what was going to cost me roughly £700 is now skyrocketing to over a grand. Not to mention suggested graphic cards and security locking systems.

And also on the subject of money, I've been temping at an office to scoop up a few extra pounds before university. I spend most of my time browsing flickr to be honest. Here's some finds:





Ohhh Hedi Slimane... (I thought he was a woman until a few months ago, doh-- the photographer that is, not the above model)







Pavlunka photography







"Hello Hand's" photostream



That'll do for now. And I'll continue to mourn over the loss, or imminent loss of money which I'm about to or have just spent.