A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
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
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
Photographers Unknown, (We Might Make Life More Fun)
“But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.”
—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Seventeen
“Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read the 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. Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.”
–Henry Miller
Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Three
“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― ahe Education of the Stoic
Photographers Unknown, (Numbers: One, Two, and Three)
“He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example) Maximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated…”
―
Photographer Unknown, (Looking at Mapplethorpe), Photo Shoot, Model Unknown
In June 1989, just a few months after his passing from AIDS, a retrospective of over 150 of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works, titled “The Perfect Moment” was due to open at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, DC. In a misguided attempt to avoid controversy due to the sexually-explicit nature of some of the photographs, the director cancelled the exhibition.
In protest, Mapplethorpe supporters congregated outside the gallery on the evening of June 30, 1989, projecting giant images of his work onto the side of the building, creating a powerful and moving tribute, and demonstrating the strong impact that the artist’s work had made on popular culture.
“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.”
-Robert Mapplethorpe
Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Two
“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― ahe Education of the Stoic
Artists Unknown, (A Private Point of View), Gay Film Gifs
“There is no single form or style of portraiture. Portraiture means individualism and as such means diversity, self-expression, private point of view. The most successful images seem to be those which exist on several planes at once and which reflect the fantasy and understanding of many.”
-Peter Bunnell, Creative Camera International Year Book 1977, 1976, p. 167
The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Seven
“Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual”, points out when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggest that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, you will have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together as one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.”
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Photographer Unknown, (The Journeyer)
“I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain. . .”
―
Duane Michals, “Narcissus”, 1986, Photo Shoot, Model Unknown
Duane Michals was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on February 18th, 1932. After taking art classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Denver, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1953. In 1956 after his military service, Michals moved to New York where he studied at Parsons School of Design, later working as a graphic designer for magazines “Dance” and “Time”.
A 1958 Russian tour of portraiture photography started Michals’ artistic career. His photographs in the mid-1960s consisted of mainly deserted sites in New York. In 1966, Michals started to structure his photographs as multiframe compositions, with subjects enacting set narratives. The writing of captions in the margins of his photographs began in 1974 and, later in 1979 the incorporation of paint into his treatment of the printed images.
Duane Michals’s narrative pieces rely on the sequencing of multiple images to convey a sense of alienation and disequilibrium. In his world, the literal appearance of things is less important than the communication of a concept or story. In his portraiture, however, Michals relies wholly on his subjects’ appearance and self-chosen poses to establish their identity. He believes in a direct approach for his portraiture instead of his usual metaphoric approach.
Photographers Unknown, The Colors: Pink and Blue
“The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road, the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.”
—William Gass, On the Color Blue
William Gass, born in July of 1924 in North Dakota, was an American novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and a philosophy professor, He taught for four years at the College of Wooster in Ohio, Perdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in Saint Louis, where he was the David May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities from 1979 to 1999.
Gass wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays. Three of these essay collections won Nation Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one collection the 2006 “A Temple of Texts” won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel “The Tunnel”, a bleak novel about the human condition which took twenty-six years to write, received the American Book Award. His novel “Middle C”, published in 2013, won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Gif images reblogged with thanks to a great visual site: https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com
Photographer Unknown, (Wet was the Light), Model Unknown
“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
―
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, known best by his pen name Pablo Neruda, was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet and diplomat. He became known nationally as a poet when he was thirteen years old, writing in various styles. He wrote surrealist poems, political manifestos, historical epics, an autobiography, and love poems of great passion. Often considered the national poet of Chile, Neruda wrote the collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” in 1924 at the age of twenty. The poem above is from his collection “100 Love Sonnets”, published in 1959.
Chris Teel, Model Unknown, (Hanging Philodendron), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs
Chris Teel is a well-known professional photographer, based in Toronto and New York City, who has specialixed in images and video work of the male form. His work has been published in numerous online and print media.