Category: Uncategorized

Heiko Thiele – Lili (2016)

My oldest friends is fond of describing me as ‘a girl with simple, yet highly specific needs’.

See where the notion of a basic bitch usually orbits Uggs (God, Why?), Yoga pants (I hate how they look but fuck me if they aren’t comfy) and Pumpkin Spice Latte (ewwww, ewww. Just no. Get outta my face with that shit).

My basic-ness relates to seltzer. I take it very seriously, y’all.

At this point La Croix’s coconut sparkling water is 1/3 of what fuels any sort of forward momentum. (I have super mixed feelings about their other offerings, the raspberry, for example is effing foul.)

But La Croix is primarily a US thing–so leaving the US is always a bit of a thing. There’s passable orange seltzer in Iceland but mostly you’re better skipping flavored variations there. I’ve yet to find a seltzer that isn’t atrocious in The Netherlands. (Tips welcomed since I’ll be back there again early this fall.)

Berlin is one of the few places I visit where I can actually get pretty damn excellent seltzer. I tend to prefer lightly flavored seltzer’s but the Spreequell Classic is probably my favorite unflavored seltzer out there.

I’m not fond of the flavor the model is sipping above. (It’s like carbonated apple juice, if I remember.) And the flavored Spreequell water is generally to be avoided. (Well, except their version of Orangina–I consume very little sugar so it’s sickly sweet to me but I actually enjoy the taste/texture of it.)

/basic-ness

Taylor Radelia – Untitled (2010)

This crossed my dash attributed to William Eggleston.

On the one hand I can understand why someone would think that. It’s an image of a piece with Eggleston’s oeuvre–fixated upon seeing the beauty of colors despite the often numbing interference of the mundane.

It’s almost like this photo by Radelia is–from the standpoint of photography math: this + this.

There are still notable differences anyone who has spent any sort of time with Eggleston’s work really ought to have caught: namely, Eggleston doesn’t really use a strobe all that often and although virtually all of his work trades in sublimated sexuality, the above is a little too direct in it’s perverse punning to be a lost Eggleston.

Radelia’s image is fascinating though because it’s a rare work that both stands on its own to feet but also holds up well when compared with the work from which it clearly draws inspiration. That’s not a small thing at all.

Source: Flickr / taylor-radelia

Diana Bodea – #1 The Shadow from Touched by light series (2008)

Looking at this my first response isn’t to pedantically point out that it features backlighting.

As I am sitting here struggling to wrap my head around how to write about it, I am uncertain where else I might start.

See the problem isn’t noticing it’s backlit; the problem is focusing on the backlighting emphasizes technique over a more organic handling of the unity between concept and execution.

And what I want to talk about has more to do with the dynamics between the technical and the conceptual in this photograph.

Two days ago, Amandine spent a lovely day sharing time and space as well as practice our respective crafts–me trying to capture the interplay between color and fog along the coast, her drawing and painting dunes, people walking in the distance and the subtly variegated beach grasses.

Driving back we were talking about music. She asked me what I thought of Joanna Newsom. I said I had liked The Milk Eyed Mender. Then back-tracked that I was only really familiar enough with the track Sadie–which I adore.

My ex hated both Björk and Newsom because of their eccentric vocalizations. I felt the same way about the former–at least initially (she’s subsequently become one of my all-time favorite artists) but I wasn’t familiar enough with Newsom, so I sort of missed her work.

Amandine was telling me about how amazing she was and how I really should check her out. But she offered a caveat that one of her favorite of Newsom’s songs contains a mistake.

See the song Emily contains the following lyrics:

That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor’s just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void
That lies quiet and offering to thee

She has it backwards, Amandine insisted. I mean it’s poetic and beautiful and brilliant but it’s the other way around, really.

I don’t know enough about it to comment but I do know–subsequently having listened to the album it’s on several times–it doesn’t matter, I don’t think.

Like maybe she created the lyrics based on being told it the wrong way around–which contributes to the meaning of the song, actually. Or it’s a John Donne-esque metaphysical metaphor of the soul–which again, contributes to the song. Or, it’s a rejection of science–again, something that fits with the song.

Whether it’s right or wrong, it works. And that’s kind of a rare and wonderful thing.

But it occurs to me that backlighting is the wrong thing to focus on in the photo about for the same reason it’s a mistake to get caught up in whether the rhyme about the difference between meteors and meteorites is right or wrong.

When I used to teach lighting workshops I would show kids how to set up a quick and dirty three point lighting setup. I’d explain that this is the key light, this is the fill light and this is the back/rim light. I’d then show them what each looked like independent of the others.

I’d then turn all the lights back on and explain the rationale behind this setup–it’s a stylization of how we experience light in the world around us. Like: if I’m standing in a field facing a camera and the lighting is behind the sun is behind the camera relative to my position–unless it’s straight on (a poor strategy if you’re trying for an aesthetically pleasing image because the light is too bright and people naturally squint when the light is in their eyes), then there’s one side that is incrementally brighter than the other. So natural light presents with a key and a fill light.

But light also falls on the ground behind where I am standing in said field. Yet, that light is like the fill light except it reflects enough light back towards the camera that because the body separates the light reflecting off the ground from the camera, it contributes a dimensionality to my body.

The point is–what we see we see only in relation to the way light interacts with it. The only source of light in this is presumably the window behind the shower curtain and the subject.

It’s interesting that backlighting combined with other lighting contributes dimensionality–yet we normally think of backlighting in terms of silhouetting. There’s a surprising amount of dimensionality in this. That’s partly due to the one point perspective imposed by the tile.

But the visibility of the mirror and the reflection of the hand, as well as the white sink gives a stark solidity to the image.

It’s a mistake to say: this is backlit and then just leave it at that because it’s how it’s backlit (how this is used formally and contextually to foster a sense of dynamic unity to between generally opposing elements).

An exquisitely refined work. Impressive and thoroughly unforgettable.

Gabriel Palencia Ubanell – Martyrdom of Saint Eulalia (1895)

I’ve been thinking about this painting a lot lately.

It post-dates John William Waterhouse’s acclaimed painting of the same subject by a decade.

The Waterhouse version is more formally ambitious and technically complicated. Ubanell’s version is simpler–but I honestly prefer it.

…

I am decidedly not Catholic so I was unfamiliar with Eulalia.

Apparently there were two martyrs named Eulalia–Eulalia of Barcelona and Eulalia of Mérida, although they may be the same person as both were martyred at very nearly the same age in the same locale.

Their stories do vary a bit. Eulalia of Barcelona–after refusing to renounce her Xtian belief, was subjected to thirteen tortures; among them: she was places in a barrel lined with broken glass and knives and rolled down the street, her breasts where removed, she was crucified on an X shaped cross, then decapitated.

Eulalia of Mérida, on the other hand, was a bit of a loud mouth. Basically bashing the Roman emperor and gods, until she was stripped by soldiers, tortured with hooks and torches and burnt at the stake–she apparently taunted her attackers until her last breath.

Interestingly, both stories involve a dove emerging from her mouth/neck stub when she died and after she died a snow came to cover her nakedness/indicate her sainthood. (Although I have an easier time buying the saintliness of the former Eulalia as opposed to the latter, who sounds like a bit of shitter, if you ask me…)

…

I showed this to a fellow trans woman when she asked me what I was thinking about. She took one look at it and was like: there’ve been too many martyrs already; we don’t need any more.

I think that’s actually the best way to point to my thoughts on this painting. It appeals to me because it’s so liminal, so between: life/death, sacred/profane, embodiment/disembodiment, public/private, physical/incorporeal, pleasure/pain.

Source unknown – Title unknown (19XX)

Looking at this photo I can’t help but ponder the notion of regret.

I encounter a lot of people who believe  life should be lived in such a fashion so as to remain completely absent regret.

Every time I interact with these folks, I find myself vaguely irked. I mean without regret, what motivates the urge to do better/be more/grow?

Yet, that thought is predicated by the belief that one should regret mistakes because a mistake entails a right way of doing things and a wrong way of doing things. By extension: there was the right way and a wrong way or more likely wrong ways and by not doing it the right way–one should regret doing it the wrong way.

It’s rarely that simple, though. I mean: very few people can sit down at a piano and having never taken a lesson before play a passable rendition of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. (No, you get to being able to play it by practicing–which means playing it for a very long period of time at varying levels of awfulness before it starts to come together.)

My reaction to other folks objecting to regret always surprises me–because I’m someone who claims to live in a way that seeks to minimize regret. What I mean when I say it is something more like: given a time machine and the option to travel back in time to fix things, the things I would opt to fix would do little to shift the broader outcome for a situation/scenario.

As a concrete example: When my ex and I broke up the first time, one of her reasons was that I so rarely walked with her back to the subway when she couldn’t stay the night with me at my place.

To her this represented a lack of motivation and concern for her safety and well-being. And I don’t have my head so far up my own ass that I can’t realize that it was occasionally due to the reason set that it’s freaking cold as fuck out, it’s late and I have to get up and get ready for work in 4 hours. More often than not I didn’t go because I knew she didn’t want to leave–but that she had to–and that my going with her would make it harder for her to leave. (Interestingly, she said that’s what she wanted–me to make it harder for her to leave instead of easier.)

So if you offered me a time machine, I’d go back and walk her back to the subway twice as often as I did. Not because I believe it would’ve changed anything about our relationship just because it was a small thing that would’ve meant a lot to someone I loved.

And that’s why I think of regret when I look at this: it’s not a great image, honestly. The foreshortening of the masturbating woman saves the composition from being unforgivably flat. The light is hard and over bright–tumbling in through a skylight and hazily blowing out in a blueish aura over the scene.

You can see just the faintest hints of the hanging tapestry backdrop. It’s neither great nor is it quite awful, either.

But what I notice–like when presented with the prospect of a time machine to go back and fix things I wish I’d done differently–are the four hands. The way the one woman is holding the other’s hips, how the woman is supporting the woman’s lower back while masturbating and the way the woman in the middle has her wrist clenched and locked.

The rightness of those elements–for me, at least–overpowers the shoddy and weaker aspects of this composition.

Source: oldtimepleasure

#1400

No matter how you slice it –setting aside the frequent intellectual pretense and critical/theoretical aspirations: Acetylene Eyes is a Tumblr sex blog.

There’s A LOT of invisible privilege that goes into the making something like that. Although I’m Asian-American, I mostly pass as white. I have a job that pays a living wage in New York Goddamn Fucking City–which is not nothing.

Additionally, I have several top of the line devices that keep me all-but-constantly connected. Not to mention enough down time after paying my bills, feeding myself, keeping a roof over my head and clothes on my back to keep up with this endeavor.

That’s amounts to a mountain of privilege and I don’t take that lightly/I realize being able to do this necessitates a certain social responsibility. So every 50th post, I make a point of taking a step back and point to the fact that the focus of this blog is an infinitesimal speck in a much larger, much more pervasively unequal and fucked system.

…

With these posts I usually try to opt for something comprehensive. I’m not sure that’s possible here. The western media is focusing on the continued terrorist attacks (both by Daesh inspired malcontents and Islamaphobe asshat bigots) in London; continuing the trend of overlooking much more staggering and brazen attacks in predominantly Muslim countries. (Also, in London there was a devastating fire in a predominantly low incoming high rise that was both preventable and had been warned about. No one listened and as many as 80 people died including Khadija Saye–an accomplished photographer whose career seemed to be on the cusp of exploding with notoriety before she perished in the fire.)

In the U.S., another trans woman Josie Berrios became the 13th Trans Woman murdered in 2017.

Charleena Lyles, a WoC + mother of four who was pregnant was killed by Seattle Police after reporting a burglary. Not to mention the miscarriage of justice that was the acquitting on all charges of the despicable racist piece of garbage that is Officer Jeronimo Yanez who as you’ll recall murdered Philando Castile for smoking pot in front of his daughter. (As a friendly reminder: don’t call the police; FUCK THE POLICE. And if that offends you, then maybe you should research the racist ass history of the police and realize that there is no differentiation between Blues Lives Matter, the KKK and the fucking pigs.)

There was a shooting at the practice for a charity baseball game for GOP house representatives. Of course the news is fixated on the fact that the shooter was a Bernie Bro. And are overlooking the fact that he had a history of domestic assault charges. Or, you know, that the slavish dedication to the NRA’s agenda that is a central facet of the Republican party directly led to this attack. Oh and the fact that virtually every mass shooting for the last 20 years has been perpetuated by a white, cishet Xtian male but no, one whiff of a potential leftist bias and the GOP are suddenly up in arms about how the left needs to chill their divisive rhetoric. Continuing the tone deaf Repub hypocrisy that is becoming the defining characteristic of the current regime. Oh yeah, and a queer WoC ends up saving the life of one of the most blatantly homophobic bigots/NRA supporters in the House. How’s that for irony…

And speaking of irony: remember how North Carolina wanted to protect women and girls from the threat of sharing restrooms with trans woman? Yeah, well they just passed a bill that once a woman has consented to sex, she can’t revoke it. So really the concern wasn’t for women, it was all about men policing women and access to them.

And that’s not even getting into the verdict in the Bill Cosby sexual assault trial or the current efforts of the Senate to ram through a disastrous health care bill, composed with almost no public oversight, a proposal that’s nothing more than an effort to give massive tax breaks to the fabulously wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class.

Lastly: the first year I lived in NYC (2007) I remember subtle shifts in the way things went down that signaled the dot.com crash. Those same premonitions are beginning to manifest on a much grander scale. I fear things are about to go from awful to much, much worse.

Kiss your friends and never let an opportunity pass to tell those you love most that you love them. Shit’s scary enough out there already. Worse isn’t something I can even begin to process at the moment.