Ananda Shailendra: “Paint in Your Color”

 

Artists Unknown, (Paint in Your Color), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

“खो देना चाहता हूँ मैं अपनी रंग ,
तुम्हारे रंगों में ।
होली तो बस बहाना है,
अपनी “अहं” रंग छोड़ के,
बस तेरे रंग मे रंग जाना है ।
आओ चलो बैठते हैं ,
फिर से एक साथ ,
की ख्वाइस है,
की मैं तुझे देखता रहूँ , की बस तू मुझे देख रहा है ।
तुम्हारी “बराभय” अदाओं से ,
मुझे देखती तुम्हारी दोनों नैनों से ,
मेरी तो अपनी “अहं” रंग खो जाना है ,
बस अब तेरे रंग मे रंग जाना है।”

“I want to lose my color, in your colors Holi is just an excuse, leaving your own color, all you have to do now is paint in your color.

Let’s sit down together again, my desire is, that I keep looking at you, that you are just looking at me.

From your blessings and offerings, seeing me with your two eyes, I have to lose my own color, all you have to do now is paint in your color.”

–Ananda Shailendra

Ananda Shailendra was a popular Indian Hindi-Urdu poet and lyricist. He is considered to be the first to combine Hindi and Urdu poetry traditions. Shailendra won the Filmfare Best Lyricist Award in 1958, 1959, and 1968 for his songs in films.

Born on August 30, 1923,  at Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, Ananda Shailendra was brought up in Mathura, a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.  He started writing poetry during the time he began working as an apprentice with the Indian Railways workshop in Bombay in 1947. Shailendra became involved with the Indian People’s Theater Association, the cultural wing  of the Communist Party of India, writing songs and socialist-themed poems set in a post-Independence India. 

Actor and film maker Raj Kapoor first met Shailendra when he was reading his poem “Jalta hai Punjab (Punjab Burns)” at a poetry symposium in Bombay.  Kapoor offered to buy the poem for inclusion in his upcoming movie “Aag (Fire)” to be released in 1948; however, Shailendra refused , being wary of mainstream media. When Kapoor was filming “Barsaat (Rain)” in 1949,  he was able to purchase two songs from Shailendra:  “Patli Kamar Hai (My Slim Waist)” and “Barsaat Mein (In the Rain)”, with the composition work being done by notable composer Shankar-Jaikishan.

The team of Kapoor, Shailendra, and Shankar-Jaikishan produced many hit songs during their time together. Shailendra’s song “Awara Hoon (I’m a Vagabond)” from Kapoor’s 1951 film “Awaara (Vagabond)” became the most popular Hindustani film song outside of India at that time. All of Shailendra’s songs from the 1955 “Shree 420 (Mr. 420)” became super hits and are still sung on popular occasions. 

In 1961 Ananda Shailendra invested heavily in the production of director Basu Bhathacharya’s film “Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow)”, released in 1966 and starring Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehnam. Although the film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film, it was a failure commercially. Failing health resulting from tensions with the film’s production and its financial loss, coupled with alcohol abuse, resulted in Shailendra’s early death in December of 1966 at the age of forty-three.

Italo Calvino: “Invisible Cities”

Photographer Unknown, (A View of the City), Photo Shoot

“What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Human Nature”

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

“If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honorable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favor of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.

The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem the contrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.” 

—Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Always Being Right

Anais Nin: “We Travel”

Photographer Unknown, (We Travel)

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 7: 1966-1974

Anais Nin was a twentieth-century essayist, author, and diarist, born in France in 1903 to Cuban-born parents. Her father, composer Joaquin Nin, abandoned the family, prompting them to sail to America for a new life. This event at her age of eleven prompted Anais Nin to begin her life-long work of writing in her diary. 

In 1923, Nin married a young banker, Hugh Guiler, and moved to Paris. She continued her education by reading contemporary literature and writing analyses of controversial novels, Nin met writer Henry Miller and his wife June in 1932, beginning a period in her life of socializing with artists and becoming more liberated from society’s mores. She achieved some literary success during this peiod with fictionalized portions of her diary, including  the 1939 “Winter of Artifice”, a one-volume series of three novelettes published in Paris.

With Europe on the brink of war in 1939, Nin and her husband traveled back to New York, where she struggled to publish her highly stylized fiction. Experiencing many frustrations in the publishing world, Nin purchased her own printing press to self-publish her books, many containing artwork of her husband under the name of Ian Hugo. Beginning in 1947, she met and embarked on a secret relationship with Rupet Pole, marrying him eight years later in 1955 without divorcing Hugh Guiler. During these emotional years, Nin wrote a one-volume novel series of five books that fictionalized her experiences, publishing it in 1959 under the title “Cities of the Interior”

While living a dual life in New York and Los Angeles during the 1960s, Nin made the risky decision to allow her diary to be published, though she chose to remove the most private details of her romantic relationships.  The first installment, published in 1966, was titled “The Diary of Anais Nin” and it was an immediate success.  Though it was a profoundly personal work, it hit a universal vein of experience,  especially with women.  Nin found herself, then in her sixties and seventies, playing the part of an international feminist icon.

While Nin traveled the world speaking about her writing and meeting fans, subsequent volumes of her edited diary were published.  They covered the period up through the end of her life and totaled seven volumes.  In 1977, Anais Nin died of cancer in Los Angeles with Rupert Pole by her side.

Before she died it was Nin’s decision to have her early diaries published, as well as erotica she’d written in the 1940s.  As a result, “Delta of Venus”, “Little Birds”, and  the childhood diary “Linotte” were released. Also, in a decision that generated much controversy, Nin asked Rupert Pole to publish the “secret” parts of her previously-released diaries.  The first of these diaries is titled “Henry and June”; it includes the material removed from Nin’s first published diary and was made into a feature film.

Main Image reblogged with thanks to : https://ottersatplay.tumblr.com

Tope Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “.Anaïs Nin”, circa 1930, Granger, Bridgeman Imagesjpg

Bottom Insert Image: Irving Penn, “Anaïs Nin”, 1971, Platinum-Palladium Print, 49.8 x 49.5 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC

Italo Calvino: “Simultaneous and Divergent Messages”

The Black and White Collection: WP Set Ten

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?” 

—Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1978

The Stone Cat and the Man

Photographer Unknown, (The Stone Cat and the Man)

“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.” —Carl Jung

Cormac McCarthy: “Blood Meridian”

Photographer Unknown, (Blood Meridian)

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West 

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

Alan D. Rogers, “Zion Tobias”

Alan D. Rogers, “Zion Tobias”

New York-born Alan D Rogers is a fashion-style portrait photographer based in Atlanta, Georgia. His initial project with photography was the documentation of a concert series performed by singer and songwriter Janelle Monáe. Rogers’ work now includes portraits in the genres of stage and screen arts and music, modeling, and commercial print work. His website is https://www.alexdrogers.studio.

The image of Philadelphia musical artist Zion Tobias by Alan D Rogers was reblogged with thanks to https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com.

Zion Tobias’ Soundcloud site is https://soundcloud.com/ziontabias

Thomas Wolf: “This is a Moment”

Pjotographer Unknown, (This is a Moment)

“A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

This is a moment:”
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Joseph Campbell: “The Mystery Again Comes Through”

Photographer Unknown, (The Mystery Again Comes Through), Photo Shoot

“Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,… realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery….The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through…. The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order…. It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date…. But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”

—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Maurice Merieau-Ponty: “Phenomenology of Perception”

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

“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 Merieau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Dr. Suess: “Oh, The Places You’ll Go”

Photographer Unknown, (Oh, The Places You’ll Go)

“Out there things can happen, and frequently do,

To people as brainy and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen, don’t worry, don’t stew.

Just go right along, you’ll start happening too!”

–Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go

Image reblogged with thanks to : https://joselito28.newtumbl.com

James Joyce: “If He Had Smiled”

Photographer Unknown, (If He Had Smiled)

“If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.” 

—James Joyce, Ulysses

HardCiderNY, “Luis Coppini”

HardCiderNY, “Luis Coppini”, Photo Shoot for Yup Magazine

HardCiderNY is a fashion and fine art photography studio located in New York City. It is dedicated to natural-light male physique work. The studio works regularly with Wilhelmina, Ford, DNA, Soul Artist and the Red Modeling Agency. The site is located at: :https://www.facebook.com/hardciderny/

Luis Coppini is a Brazilian model working with the agency Q Management located in New York and Los Angeles. He has previously done photo shoots with photographers Ronaldo Gutierrez, Karl Simone, Thiago Martini, and Glauber Bassi.

Yup Magazine is a men’s fashion digital magazine based in NYC : https://yup-mag.com