Category: guys

Daniel Mendelsohn: “There is Only Looking and Finding”

Photographers Unknown, There is Only Looking and Finding

“I did and do believe, after all that I’ve seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something that would not otherwise have happened, you will find something, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked our grandfather anything at all…There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking and finally seeing, what was always there.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

A Towel and a Nietzsche Quote

Two Matching Towel Sets and a Quote from Nietzsche

“Oh, these men of former times knew how to dream and did not find it necessary to go to sleep first. And we men of today still master this art all too well, despite all of our good will toward the day and staying awake. It is quite enough to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel–and right away the spirit and power of the dream overcome us, and with our eyes open, coldly contemptuous of all danger, we climb up on the most hazardous paths to scale the roofs and spires of fantasy–without any sense of dizziness, as if we had been born to climb, we somnambulists of the day! We artists! We ignore what is natural. We are moonstruck and God-struck. We wander, still as death, unwearied, on heights that we do not see as heights but as plains, as our safety.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Herman Melville: “Passion in Its Profoundest”

Photographers Unknown, Images from the Black and White Collection

“Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd

Calendar: October 10

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of October

Magician

October 10, 1916 is the birthdate of American character actor Benson Fong.

Born in Sacramento, California, Benson Fong’s acting career resulted from a chance meeting with a Paramount Pictures talent scout. He was approached and asked if he would like to be in a movie. Fong was given an uncredited role as a guerrilla soldier in the 1943 film “China”, a story occurring during the Japanese occupation of China. He was offered a ten-week contract at $250 a week.

First appearing onscreen in “Charlie Chan at the Opera” as an extra, Benson Fong returned to the series and is best remembered playing Number Three Son “Tommy Chan” opposite Sidney Toler in six “Charlie Chan” movies between 1944 and 1946. Othe films in which he appeared included “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo”; “The Keys of the Kingdom” as Joseph; “His Majesty O’Keefe”; “Flower Drum Song” as Wang Chi-Yang: and “Our Man Flint” in the role of Doctor Schneider. a mad scientist threatening the world.

Benson Fong’s career as an actor included appearances in several television series. He made four guest appearances on “Perry Mason”, seven appearances on “My Three Sons” as Ray Wong, and four on the “Kung Fu” television series. He also appeared in Walt Disney’s “The Love Bug” starring Dean Jones and Michele Lee.

While appearing in “Keys of the Kingdom” with Gregory Peck, a casual remark by Peck inspired Benson Fong to start a chain of restaurants. After two years of saving his own capital, Fong opened in 1946 his first Ah Fong’s restaurant on Vine Street in Hollywood. After the Vine Street restaurant’s success, Fong opened four more restaurants . He retired from the restaurant business in 1985..

Benson Fong died, at the age of seventy, of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, in 1987.

Jean-Noël Lavesvre

Sculptures of Jean-Noël Lavesvre

Jean-Noël Lavesvre is a French painter and sculptor who is living and working in Paris. He began his career as a set designer and costume designer in 1984 at the Opéra de Marseille with La Traviata. Lavesvre designed the atmospheric sets for the Canadian Opera Company’s 2012/2013 season presentation of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Trovatore”. 

Simeon Solomon

Simeon Solomon,  Frontispiece to His Book ‘”A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep”’, 1871

Solomon’s “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep” is an important early gay text, a prose poem,which was privately published in 1871. The image above is captioned “Until the day break and the shadows flee away”, a quotation from the Bible in the Song of Solomon 2:17.

The performance by Neil Bartlett, entitled “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep”, was an one-man homage to the life and work of Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. The performance was originally created and performed at the height of the first wave of the British AIDs epidemic in 1987.