Category: guys

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”, Photo Shoot for “Kaltblut.” Magazine, September, 2020

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1991, Elys Berroteràn is a photographer, fashion designer, model and actor. He started his career in fashion modeling and television commercial appearances. Deciding to make the fashion industry his career, Berroteràn formed Caracas Fashion in 2009, which, under his direction, is now one of the largest fashion showcases in Venezuela. One of his latest photography projects is “Moda Caracas Moda”, running the current fashion campaign “Born to be Wild”. 

Nicolas Quevedo is a model signed with the fashion and talent company Grupo 4 Colombia. 

Images reblogged with many thanks to the fashion magazine“Kaltblut.”, located online at https://www.kaltblut-magazine.com

Many thanks for inspiring this post to https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Gary Snyder: “The Blue Mountains March Out of the Sea”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Nine

“The blue mountains are constantly walking.” Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. — “If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.”

— Dōgen is not concerned with “sacred mountains” – or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.” 

—-Gary Snyder, Practice of the Wild

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “The Lived and Preceived Worlds”

 

Photographer Unknown, (The Lived and Perceived Worlds)

“Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science neither has, nor ever will have the same ontological sense as the perceived world for the simple reason that science is a determination or an explanation of that world.

Scientific perspectives … always imply, without mentioning it, that other perspective – the perspective of consciousness – by which a world first arranges itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves is to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive, and dependent, just like geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest, a meadow, or a river is.”

—-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Preception

William Gay: “An Infinite Number of Lives”

Photographers Unknown, (An Infinite Number of Lives)

“Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them for his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.”
― William Gay, The Long Home

John Steinbeck: “A Trip Takes Us”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: A Trip Takes Us

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. 

I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself….A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.” 

—-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Henry Miller: “We All Derive from the Same Source”

His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Eleven

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” 

—Henry Miller

Gregory Maquire: “The Edge of Things”

R Breathe Photography, Untitled, (The Edge of Things)

“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.” 

—Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

Rainer Maria Rilke: “(Life) Holds You in Its Hand”

 

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: Life Holds You in Its Hand

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Born in Prague, Czechia, in December of 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke  was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. He was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of imagery and syntax and with an aesthetic philosophy that rejected the precepts of Christianity and worked to reconcile beauty and suffering. 

In 1899 Rilke made the first of two pivotal trips to Russia, discovering what he called his spiritual fatherland in both the Russian people and the landscape. There he met Leo Tolstoy, L O Pasternak, and the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin, whose poems he translated into German. These trips provided Rilke with the poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. 

Rilke’s verse became firmly fixed in his major poetry collection “Newe Gedichte (New Poems)”, with its verses becoming more objective, evolving from an impressionistic personal vision to the representation of this vision with impersonal symbolism. The major influence of this was Rilke’s association with French sculptor Auguste Rodin, under whom he worked as a secretary from 1905 to 1906. These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe subjects experienced in everyday life, transforming his observations into art. 

In the last few years of his life, Rilke was inspired by such French poets as Paul Valery and Jean Cocteau, and wrote most of his last verses in French. Rilke suffered from illness his whole life and died of leukemia in 1926 while staying at the Valmont sanatorium near Lake Geneva.

“Letters to a Young Poet” is a collection of ten letters written by twenty-seven year-old Rainer Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Kappus corresponded with the poet from 1902 to 1908, seeking his advice as to the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke’s early poetry and his working process.

“Remarkable, this journey from the youthful music of Bohemian folk poetry… to Orpheus, remarkable how… his mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear.”

—Herman Hesse, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art,  (A summary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s evolution as a poet)

Ian McEwan: “Waiting”

 

Photographer Unknown, (Waiting), Silver Gelatin Print

“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”

—Ian McEwan, Atonement

Born in 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England, Ian McEwan spent most of his childhood in the Far East, Germany, and North Africa, where his father, an army officer, was posted. Upon his return to England, he studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in 1970. He later received his Masters of Arts degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia..

McEwan’s  2001novel “Atonement” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award and was the winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Award in 2002. The novel, beginning in 1935, tells the story of Briony, a young girl and aspiring writer, and the consequences of the discovery she makes about Robbie, a young man destined to play a part in the Dunkirk evacuations. This novel was adapted for the screen, with the film, directed by Joe Wright, opening both the Vancouver International Film Festival and the 64th Venice International Film Festival.

Ian McEwan is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in 2000.

Steven Millhauser: “His Black and White World”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Black and White: The Dark Images

“He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer’s trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible–indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible–therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise–well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.” 

—Steven Millhauser, Little Kingdoms

Walt Whitman: “Fulfilling Our Foray”

Photographers Unknown, (Fulfilling Our Foray)

“WE two boys together clinging,

One the other never leaving,

Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,

Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,

Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.

No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,

threatening,

Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on

the turf or the sea-beach dancing,

Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness

chasing,

Fulfilling our foray.” 

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900

Brian Andreas: “The Room Filled with the Sound of the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, (The Room Filled with the Sound of the Wind)

“The day he first told me he was starting to disappear I didn’t believe him & so he stopped & held his hand up to the sun & it was like thin paper in the light & finally I said you seem very calm for a man who is disappearing & he said it was a relief after all those years of trying to keep the pieces of his life in one place. Later on, I went to see him again & as I was leaving, he put a package in my hand. This is the last piece of my life, he said, take good care of it & then he smiled & was gone & the room filled with the sound of the wind & when I opened the package there was nothing there & I thought there must be some mistake or maybe I dropped it & I got down on my hands & knees & looked until the light began to fade & then slowly I felt the pieces of my life fall away gently & suddenly I understood what he meant & I lay there for a long time crying & laughing at the same time.
—Disappearing”

― Brian Andreas, Still Mostly True

Ray Bradbury: “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

Photographer Unknown, (Leather, Beetle, and Snake), Photo Shoot, Model Unknown

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people’s salt and other people’s cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.”

—Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes