Writing Good English: A talk by William Zinsser (link)
Repeat after me:
Short is better than long.
Simple is good. (Louder)
Long Latin nouns are the enemy.
Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.
One thought per sentence.
Click on the title to go to the article.
Posted 2 years ago
Interview - Cormac McCarthy on The Road - WSJ.com (link)
Cormac McCarthy sounds like a cantankerous sense maker. I imagine most people make sense and also cantankerous. Some good tidbits about filmmaking in here as well:
The Wall Street Journal: When you sell the rights to your books, do the contracts give you some oversight over the screenplay, or is it out of your hands?
Mr. McCarthy: No, you sell it and you go home and go to bed. You don’t embroil yourself in somebody else’s project.
WSJ: When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw “The Road” in your head?
CM: I guess my notion of what was going on in “The Road” did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [Director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, “This is just hell. Who would do this?” Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.
WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?
CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.
…
WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?
CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?
CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?
CM: I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.
…
WSJ: You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in Tennessee. Why did you end up in the Southwest?
CM: I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.
…
JH: Be glad you didn’t have to sit through the assembly cut, which was four hours. Look, I’ve never made a film anywhere near two hours. I admire the films, back in the day, when they were 90 minutes.
CM: One school of thought says that directors shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own films. But the truth is they should be. And they should be really brutal. Really brutal.
JH: Viewers are being hardwired differently. In film, it’s harder and harder to use wide shots now. And the bigger the budget, the more closeups there are and the faster they change. It’s a whole different approach. What’s going to happen is there will be the two extremes: the franchise films that are now getting onto brands like Barbie, and Battleship and Ronald McDonald; then there are these incredible, very low-budget digital films. But that middle area, they just can’t sustain and make it work in the current model. Maybe the model will change and hopefully readjust.
CM: Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.
JH: No, you’re absolutely right. Just as an example, the Toronto Film Festival is one of the biggest in film festivals. They have made it, for the first time ever, much more difficult to submit a film. They charge an entry fee and they still had 4,000 submissions just this year and they boiled that down to 300.
…
WSJ: Do you feel like you’re trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?
CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up. I tell people I’ve never read one of my books, and that’s true. They think I’m pulling their leg.
I didn’t know the director of The Road was Australian, but he is.
(Click the link in the title.)
Posted 2 years ago
X
So you met this girl on the last day right? At a gallery?
Y
Yeah, a Bauhaus exhibition. The biggest one ever put together anywhere ever in the history of our universe.
X
Oh yeah? And how was she put together?
Y
It wasn’t like that. Well, it was. I really liked her nails. They were this electric orange. Shocking orange. But you could tell that she wasn’t shocking, that she liked to fit in, to not splash around too much.
X
How did you run into her? Did you run into her?
Y
I was in the line to the exhibition, and you know how I get in lines. I get anxious. I feel subversive. Well then I see her, in a bright green shirt with a question mark on the back.
X
Hah. That’s a little obvious even for you right?
Y
Well I don’t make the world up, I just try to alter it slightly. Anyway, she has her hair done up. Not quite the Tutonic braids but it’s up and tight and she has a small figure to go with the hair. And, you know how it works. You like the way a girl moves, the way she drags her shoes across the floor. You like the slight turn of the head as she answers a question. The wide open eyes as she looks around. You like everything and really, nothing. You know nothing about her and that’s lovely. It’s all you, it’s your drama.
X
Drama. How do you survive with this stuff in your head?
Y
I barely survive.
X
Anyway, you shouldn’t think this way. You’re always talking about work. You’re going to get WORK tattooed on your arm, how can you justify this much effort on a girl? This much thinking? You do this all the time.
Y
Well, I can’t; except to fall back on that most cliché of artistic tropes: it’s life, I’m making life. I’m making myself up. And to do that I need to act, I need to shift the reality that’s presented to me.
X
Well the reality here is that you’re perving on a girl.
Y
Perving has gotten a bad name. It’s the classic past time of the aristocratic classes. So, I’m in line and I see her. Maybe 20 meters away. And she starts walking over. An old English lady, helpless as can be, asks her a question. And the girl in green answers so sweetly. To the point, but nice. German, definitely. And suddenly I’m so interested. Everybody needs a German of their own.
X
No disagreeing with that. Who couldn’t use their life straightened out?
Y
Right. So she comes over and this is where my new found craziness comes into play. I just stare. Boldly, uncontrollably, no sneaking around. No coyness. Just a hard stare. She can feel it and looks over and looks away. There’s a doe like recognition of danger. She moves away. I think about something else. Maybe she never noticed me at all. It doesn’t matter.
X
Girls always notice. Or they never do.
Y
They’ll never tell you in any case. ‘Oh, you saw me first?’ It’s so funny, all the pornographers tell us that girls like narrative, but in the initial contact it’s always brashness that wins with them. It’s always aggression that they want. Maybe, it’s a naunced aggression? They want the representation of danger without the actuality of it. Certainly not initially. I think they do want narrative, but they want an exciting, dangerous start to the story. Something which isn’t what happens to them everyday. Something which they can dream about.
X
You are so up yourself.
Y
Yeah.
X
But you’re probably right. For the girls who matter anyway. So anyway, what happens next?
Y
I have to tell you this story doesn’t end well. I cry softly at the end.
X
Softly, huh? That’s, that’s you.
Y
Well, it’s the child-like wonder in me. So I walk into the exhibition the wrong way. Through the exit. I like doing that. As I’ve said I’ve already forgotten her. I realise that the exhibition is huge. Like really huge. And that it’s chronological and that I can’t just go back to front. I walk sheepishly past the security guard and start again the right way.
X
I like doing exhibitions back to front too, it’s nice to see people’s faces as they are walking past you.
Y
Art and faces and bodies, I love museums. So I’m walking through the first couple of rooms at my usual glacial pace. 30 minutes per room, you know me. And I’m always looking at the people looking at the art too right? It’s busy. People milling, and suddenly two rooms away, she’s there. And she’s just floating about. And I see the question mark on the back of her green shirt again and it just draws me. I falter. It’s all very risky. So I slowly walk over, getting faster and faster as I get closer and closer.
X
Stalking?
Y
No, my fears are stalking me. She may not even be there. Actually she could just disappear from this story and it wouldn’t change the ideas.
X
How L’Aventurra of you.
Y
So before I know it, I’m there, and her face is eloquent. Her eyes are luminescent and stands out in the soft elegance of the museum’s uplit atmosphere. Her nose is catastrophically beautiful. And she has the lightest patina of freckles that gives her face such a tenderness, such a depth that you feel like fainting. I fainted.
X
Right. You’re such a wanker.
Y
Right. So I instantly jump back to my feet from my temporary nothingness and I’m thinking that she helps with pointing out where the information desk is and where the exhibition continues to rather than the finer points of the evolution of the Bauhaus. And so I ask her why Architecture was considered the umbrella art at the Bauhaus and why such great artists such as Klee and Kandinsky would become servants to what seemed like an architectural style, a technological style. She doesn’t even blink.
X
What does she say?
Y
Basically she tells me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but she says it with those eyes. Those subtle, caressing eyes. She says that although Gropius had his own practice as an architect, the actual Bauhaus was interdisciplinary from the beginning. She quite charmingly doesn’t tell me that the room I had just walked into makes the same point. I need to recover. I say that perhaps it was that the key problem of that age was mechanisation and technological design and competition and all the arts were affected in the same way and it was an organic alignment of stylistic innovation. Of course I said it more eloquently than that, more simply. I also throw in the Expressionists, that they had run out of ideas by then and the horror of war was such that art could not recover from the shock fast enough to tackle it directly.
X
That sounds kind of right. But also pretty banal.
Y
Yeah, I was flailing. But there’s something about her. She has been helping people so long, that she can’t help but help. And there’s something about the German sense of completeness. They are very reluctant to let things peter out. Slowly and elegantly I claw my way back and she leaves me enough room to do that.
X
Was she leaning in?
Y
Not at first, but then we started talking about our own art. She’s studied architecture. She’s from Berlin. It’s so heartbreakingly cute how she pronounces her English. She says, ‘cue-ol.’ She talks all over me in her excitement, and for once in my life I’m happy to be interrupted, five times. We talk deep art. We talk a little life. We know that something’s going on here but I can’t tell, she’s German. And from the initial looks of it, a hipster. I enjoy the conversation and then suddenly we both realise that it’s gone on for a little too long. That it’d gotten a little too personal. And we slowly wander out of our dream. I stop talking. She says “You have a long way to go in this exhibition.” I pretend that doesn’t have a triple meaning.
X
Whoa. You know it’s such a hard thing when you’re talking to someone who’s there to provide a service. To be able to tell when it goes beyond that. When you’re out drinking there’s a lot of touching, a lot of eyes lingering on eyes, heads bent. You know what’s going on.
Y
I think the rules are the same anywhere. It just happens more slowly, more quietly. The things you’re talking about happened. And actually, to totally contradict myself it all happened pretty quickly.
X
What was her body like?
Y
Petite. Great, great ass. She was wearing calf high leather boots. Very cool. Tight jeans which forced her bum into a transcendental state. Her name was Anja. Yeah, with a ‘j.’ We both walk off.
X
Theatrical.
Y
No it wasn’t, it was very natural. The funny thing is, although I’m playing up the story, it was all very organic, linear. It fit, and the actions weren’t grotesque or large. Just really small looks, touches, but fast words, our conversation clicked together.
X
So you shagged right? Like, it gets bad after you shagged?
Y
I went back to the exhibition room that I was in. I was intrigued by the Bauhaus even more after talking to her. She did her job! I was thinking about things deeply. It was the early, more abstract works that were testing out the theories of the Bauhaus before they became sophisticated. (Although I’m not sure if they ever did to the level they could’ve if they had more than 14 years). I started my half step, tap the back of my shoe with my other foot, another half step dance that I do in galleries for some reason now. I kept on wandering. I didn’t think about her for another two rooms. And then I started wondering.
X
This seems very well paced. It’s good to have that time apart. To get a beer, or a pee, or a line of coke whatever. To have time to be amazed at what just happened, don’t you think?
Y
I do think my friend. But it can be crushing. Your imagination can crush you. You’re amazed at what you’ve done, at what she’s done, but you don’t want it to end, but you also don’t want to go through that emotional high again. It’s this contradictory urge for adventure.
X
Where is she now?
Y
With her boyfriend in Berlin.
X
Ah.
Y
But I wouldn’t find out about that till later. I walk around and she isn’t in any of the rooms that I’m so slowly meandering through. Maybe she never existed. Maybe I spoke to some video art. Some conceptual outpouring from some tortured male artist’s inner being: a beautiful, intelligent girl who makes objects, who wants to talk to you about all your ideas. I was dreaming. I was high. I was lonely.
X
Sure sounds like it. Did you masturbate before the Bauhaus?
Y
No. Sadly no.
X
Well, that most likely contributed to this whole imaginary saga.
Y
But it continues. It goes on. Oh hang on, I did see her one more time. It was fantastic. We slid by each other in the fifth room and she nodded her head. I hardly moved my eyes. We were both wondering what the fuck was going to happen.
X
Enthralling.
Y
Tell me about it. So I do see her again, in a darkened room with a light installation by Moholy-Nagy (she humiliating corrected me into pronouncing it Moholy-Nach, the bitch). She’s answering some guy’s questions. He’s quite obviously a graphic designer. Talking about typefaces and shit probably. I nearly puked. I walked past and neither of us recognised the other. There was no tension. I felt a little disappointed really. I walked out of the room.
X
Does anything actually happen in this story of yours which isn’t just two ships passing in the night?
Y
Patience! She finishes her talk with the failed artist and comes into the room that I’m in. It’s full of beautiful things that she loves and she wants to tell me about it all. She approaches so directly that I’m thrown by the suddenness of it, the elation of it. She comes in, looks into my eyes and silently guides me to these gorgeously complex, but organic, structural paper models made by some students in the workshops. We’re both happy just to be talking together. We could’ve been talking about anything.
X
So what’s your purpose, what’re you trying to do here?
Y
Just be around her. Just talk.
X
Pathetic.
Y
And other people notice it too. People know when something like that is going on, it’s like a mugging. No one wants to get involved, but no-one wants to miss it. And you can often see the pathetic need in the guy, the blank, unthinking desire. No matter how high my talk was. I was attempting something. And it’s never pretty to watch someone attempting something. What if it goes horribly wrong, you know?
X
I love the way you save your self from judgement. You’re always one step further in thinking about what you are doing and the paying out each little piece. You don’t leave any room to hurt you.
Y
Thanks.
X
And you call this art?
Y
I do. I do. I do. So where was I?
X
You’ve re-met. Rekindled. Whatever.
Y
And we just talk, and flirt, and brush up against each for just a little too long. And she laughs and looks at my eyes. And I look at her mouth. It was all very intellectual.
X
Did you just stop looking at the art?
Y
No. As I found out later she had to pretend to keep on talking about Bauhaus to me just in case the director walked past and so we just spent hours telling each other what we like and revealing ourselves through aesthetics. “I like this.” “Well, I like this too.” So I like you. Well, I like you too. Well, that’s what I thought was happening at the time.
X
Surely this exhibition ends at some stage and why isn’t she helping anyone else?
Y
Because we’re together now. The exhibition did end. With a sign saying DAS ENDE.
X
And?
Y
Well before that I told her I was a photographer and that she should see my photos. That she’d like them.
X
What did she say?
Y
She had to say yes.
X
But what did she say?
Y
Yes. She said sure. But that she was busy tonight. She didn’t tell me that it would be with her boyfriend; meeting some friends who were going to LA. She asked me what I was doing tomorrow.
X
What did you say?
Y
I said I was flying to Paris.
X
Nice.
Y
It was. But everything about being in Europe is nice that way. All the nouns have deep histories. Deep romantic histories. So she says, ok, we’ll have to meet early then. I said, “yes, I fly at 4pm.” We walk out and she looks around keenly for observers. I propose fruit.
X
What?
Y
I propose fruit. I’ll bring two different kinds of fruit. And she has to bring two different kinds of cheese. And we’ll meet at a park and I’ll show her my photos. It’s decided. She gives me her number with no reluctance. We’ll meet at Friedrichshain Volkspark. The people’s park. It’s an illicit meeting deep in the Soviet east. I nod.
X
Are you confident she would come?
Y
Well after the history of the past week. No I’m not. But I’m excited. The meeting is a good one, a story at least. At the least a bad story. And that’s something.
X
You sound a little sad about it all.
Y
I’m just a little tired. These aren’t ‘good’ memories in the end. They give a dark, warped pleasure, not a bright one. The problem was I didn’t know what I wanted beyond an experience. Or maybe the problem was that I wanted something beyond an experience and that just wasn’t possible. It’s a funny thing that there is a cliché that art comes from the artists extreme suffering but that’s not really true. Art comes from the artist’s usual suffering. That may be extreme for some but for other it can be the slightest, sweetest sorrows. Small. The littlest unfairness’ of life can be the most powerful drivers to creation.
X
Yes. But it’s still a sad life.
Y
We don’t get to pick the kind of life we have. We don’t get to pick ourselves. It’s the great lottery right?
X
So what happens after she gives you her number?
Y
Well we had been flirting a lot and I knew I could lean in and kiss her on the cheek although she was at work. It’s Europe so it’s both cheeks. Twice the fun. But it wasn’t that fun. And then she threw me out.
X
She definitely sounds like she was into you.
Y
I thought so. And so I’m on some magic carpet, or knowing her, on some van der Rohe created flying roof. And I run out of the museum … but without my bag. I walk back in to get it feeling a little dumb and she’s walking down the stairs, we give each other a nervous smile. I wonder if that created some doubt in her mind.
X
Seeing you coming into the Museum again? Probably. She was most likely thinking about what had happened, and then to see you again, coming in? Weird. But I’m just saying what your pessimistic personality is telling you. She probably didn’t give a shit.
Y
Yeah maybe. But I think that kind of little stuff matters.
X
Only to you.
Y
Stop flattering me, you cunt. So I’m rushing to get back to the Hostel because I have to meet Ben to go out that night. And Berlin seems to be lit like some nativity scene, a deep orange of the sun going down, all peace and harmony. It seems like I’m the only one excited about anything. I keep on thinking how cool she was. I can’t stop thinking about how pretty she is.
X
You’re so shallow.
Y
Am I? I did just talk to her about the Bauhaus, Art, and Life for 3 hours. That was “deep” right? I like to think that I have range. You shouldn’t ignore the beauty of a girl or a guy just because it’s politically correct to do so. It matters. We care about aesthetics when we buy clothes, or furniture, or decide to live in a home, or a neighbourhood, or when we make art, why not in the people we want to be with? And whatever people say, it happens, we care, we notice how someone looks. Maybe it’s the whole Nietzchean idea of powerless ugly people trying to claw themselves back into the game.
X
But, that’s the main thing you notice.
Y
So? I make art. Aesthetics is important. And more, I make a silent art, photographs. And so the surface, and the capability of the surface to say something, or have an effect, is really important. In any case, I thought she was hot. And so I have a good night out with Ben at some bars and head back. Now I start doing shameful things.
X
Oh? Jacking off?
Y
No. There is no shame in pleasuring yourself. I start thinking about what it’ll be like. I start creating these narrative threads. What she’s going to say. How I will get close to her. Where to touch her first. The steps to get me to kissing her. Adolescent things like that.
X
Fun to think about though. For you that is. Other people are just busy living their lives. Busy kissing girls.
Y
My life needs to be augmented. It’s not enough that a situation is happening, that situation has to be raised to a higher pitch. Then of course that has to be recorded and reproduced as art. So I think about how I may spend the rest of the year in Berlin if things work out with her. That I shouldn’t cancel my flight, but that maybe, just maybe I could come back from Paris to live happily ever after. But I know this is all a crude but personal fantasy. That things don’t happen like that, that is, unless they extraordinarily do. That the configurations of a situation are powerful determiners and you can only adjust them only so far in such a short time.
X
But your life is good now. You don’t need a girl.
Y
Not in actuality. But I still need to need a girl.
X
ight. Pathetic.
Y
Maybe, but that’s who I am. And it’s getting too late to change things. Anyway, so I get up in the morning and I’m going to be flying to Paris that day and I have a list of ten chores to do beforehand. I try not to think about her but Time turns oozy. It drags. I want Time to get lost until I see her. But then suddenly it’s there, it’s time. I have to rush to the park with my strawberries and oranges and drink and chocolate croissant. My loose bike chain falls off like three times, and I’m in a sweet panic. I get to the park and it’s huge.
X
What were you going to do if she doesn’t come?
Y
Well, Ben said, “at least you’ll have something to eat.” I was deeply hoping she would come because at this point she was an opportunity for … I don’t know. For salvation. To not think about myself for awhile. For intellectual pleasure and maybe some physical hedonism. But also, a better me. A smarter, funnier, faster, stronger, harder, softer me. I believe in something called ‘reflective’ art which only appears as a reflection from something else. Perhaps that’s what a relationship is, an enjoyable reflection of yourself. I wanted her to be there. We said we would meet at the main gate, but I didn’t know which one that was. But I finally found it and sat down a little exhausted. It was a leafy entrance. For a Volkspark it seemed quite aristocratic. I could hear fountains and a pool in the background and see a wide white cobblestone walkway into the park. I’d just sat down and she appeared like a dark apparition.
X
Haha. So it begins huh?
Y
And so it begins. I didn’t recognise her. She looks like she had slid off the pages of French Vogue. No piece of clothing was especially noteworthy but the way it was all put together: with such Modernist precision, that it chilled your bones. A dark jacket that was cut for her by some Milanese master, and a deep purple jumper underneath. No bra. Her chest, skin, a gorgeous golden in the tree dappled sun. Hair loose this time, flowing behind her and around her, a majestic veil about her doll like face. Aviator glasses took away her eyes and what remained was someone I had never met. Her small leather boots clicked on the cobblestones. As she pushed her black bike over to me, I fell into a deep disappointment. She had come dressed to be unattainable.
X
Uh. Wow. Did you feel weak?
Y
No. I now know Disappointment as an irritating neighbour. I’ve learnt to handle her. Even take some wry enjoyment out of her. Sometimes she does some funny shit. But the first thing Anja says to me and my cycling-battered fruit is “I’m so tired. Me and my boyfriend went out with friends last night, and I drank too much.” I said, “I told you not to drink” trying to wring some power out of this heavy stone I’d been given. She ignores that and continues, “And then he wouldn’t go to sleep and kept on walking about all night.”
X
Ouch. How efficient of her.
Y
Then she gets cruel. “I’m so sorry, but I also don’t have much time.” I’m thinking, well why the fuck did you come? Traumatised, I decide I won’t even sit close to her. But I need to show my photos. I need to show my work. And it’s a nice day and we have fruit and cheese. I want to see what happens. I decide to not react at all. And that’s not difficult actually. I didn’t feel shocked by what she was saying, I’d expected anything, and this experience was another to add to my tattered bag. When you can get benefit from the good and the bad, life becomes far more manageable, far less stressful, and far more engaging.
X
Stop the bullshit, I feel for you man.
Y
No seriously. I knew that nothing could have really happened from this. Even if it did it, it couldn’t continue. And even if it did, it wouldn’t have been ultimately all that valuable to me. I need to do my own work. She’s not going to take my pictures for me, no matter how eloquent she is on the Bauhaus.
X
It must have been disappointing on a dick level though.
Y
Dick level? You mean on the level of being a dick?
X
No, I mean just intimately, sexually, the penis urge etc.
Y
I didn’t see her as a sexual thing. That was too far away. Except she did have a really nice ass. I saw that sexually. Both me and her ass were disappointed by the turn of events. So, we’re both surprised that we aren’t super uncomfortable and we find a place underneath some shade. We lay out our picnic and it looks good. She has bought some good semi-hard cheeses.
X
The same hardness as …
Y
Oh, come on!
X
You know she fucked you over of course.
Y
Yup.
X
She could’ve easily told you at the museum that she had a boyfriend. She could have not touched you and flirted with you, and done a million of those little things she did.
Y
Yup.
X
By not saying anything she lied to you. Why?
Y
I really don’t know. She said her life was “boring.” But then I asked her if she wasn’t enjoying it, and she contradicted herself by saying that, no, she was just cruising and it wasn’t so bad. That she was always trying new things out to see what she could do but she hadn’t found that thing yet. She knew she didn’t want to do architecture because she was always attracted to the smaller things, the things inside and around the architecture. She has a cool idea for a product design that I can’t tell you about. She’s working on that.
X
Are you avoiding the question?
Y
No. I guess I got a little off track. I asked her about her boyfriend, and he’s putting together a fashion fair. That’s all I needed to hear about him. I think she’s very lonely. And loneliness makes everyone an adventurer. I think she saw me as an adventure and got carried away between 1922 and 1928 in the evolution of the Bauhaus. And then she went home, saw what she had with her boyfriend, saw that life was a liveable thing. Slept next to him, and told him that she had met me and given me her number to create or feed a pool of jealousy that she is filling.
X
Did she tell you that she told him?
Y
Yeah, she did. But, I think she liked me. Her movements, her touches were so natural, with so much ease behind them. But overnight, she realised that that wasn’t possible, and that she didn’t want that, and she had to work with what she had.
X
Do you think she even thought that way? That there was something more really happening between you two than a day in a museum and a day in the park?
Y
Well I told her I was going to Paris that day. She knew that there were no traps, strings, pulleys, ropes or cages. It must have still been hard to come if she thought what I think she thought. Or maybe she had come to hurt me. Maybe she knew that she would be doing me a favour by hurting me. Maybe she was just being nice to me, and that I’d like it, and be able to use the pain. But there were the photos too. I hope that she really did want to see the photos. But most people make such bad art that being shown something by someone is the most painful chore on earth, so I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t like the way I looked outside of a museum. People just get carried away sometimes.
X
By you?
Y
By things which are different. And I’m becoming very different to everyone else. And I can feel how people deal with me. I like it.
X
So did you actually get to show her your photos?
Y
She loved them. She was very impressed. She saw that I was going to be big. She saw that I was not just a talker but that I work too. She softened towards me. We started looking into each other more. I got excited talking about my work and I said things intensely. She spoke about the work a little, but I don’t think I really gave her the chance. I have my spiels for the work down so flawlessly now that I close off interpretation for others. Well, maybe I don’t close of interpretation, but I think I close off their desire to express it. I think she could have said more but didn’t get a chance, or didn’t give herself a chance. I was pleased that she liked them but I knew she would.
X
What did she say about herself?
Y
Not much more than I’ve already told you. She’s still looking. I think that she really is bored. And her boyfriend’s never there. They’ve been together for 4 years. She’s being a coward. It’s time for her to move on. If I was in Berlin, I’d do that for her.
X
You’re so arrogant sometimes!
Y
Or maybe not, because she had come so prepared. I felt a little antagonistic towards her. Only a little. I saw some imperfections in her. She didn’t seem as in control as she did in the museum, as confident. At the exhibition she was the queen of her realm. I was really attracted to that. She’s polish.
X
So?
Y
Nothing, it’s just a fact. Well, don’t Polish women get larger later? The whole East European gene?
You suck.
Y
I still loved her eyes. But the softness in them, the luminescence only came back a couple of times. She purposely covered it up and that made her a little hard. Not always, but certainly in the beginning. Maybe in the end as well. She said she felt bad that she had to go. That she wanted to hang out in the park, in the sun, and talk. I didn’t mind that she had to go. I’d said what I wanted to say and now I wanted to think about what had happened. I wanted to be a little sad about everything. She said that we should keep in touch. I said she should grow some balls and travel. That she should come to Australia. I had to explain that balls were testicles. And in Australia men talked like that to each other and how theatrical, how entertaining it all was.
X
What did she say?
Y
She said she wanted to. But, inside she didn’t really want to. Or her internal dialogue is that she couldn’t possibly afford it, she could, or she had too much going on here, she didn’t.
X
She’s still coming to grips with what she can do.
Y
Yeah, she’s making the first steps. I’m worried about her though. She’s too pretty, too stylish, as I was saying she wants to fit in too much. Maybe she wants the simple kinds of happiness too much. And I wonder if life gives itself too easily to her. Not real life, but the go out to cool parties, meet ‘interesting’ people, be gawked at by guys kind of life. When I initially told her about my WORK tattoo she was horrified. She said, “how about happiness?” Things get a lot harder from her age on. I think she’s realising that deeply. That’s just what I think. Maybe she has it all under control. I’m always looking for girls with problems I can solve. I lose interest after they’ve solved them.
X
You’re like a knight in brown armour.
Y
Yeah, thanks you racist fuck. Anyway, I took a couple of photos of her. She got up, and I said I wanted to take some photos. Ever since I went to the Helmut Newton gallery and saw how he dealt with a model I’ve wanted to try it. And she was there. I took a photo with my phone from the back of her hair which says everything about that day. And then I turned her around and minutely controlled everything about her. She initially really didn’t want her photo taken but as I gave her more commands she realised that the choices were so deeply mine that the photo, and her representation in the photo would be my doing, my thing. And that she isn’t the one who will be judged but it would be me. I really wanted a shot of her nails. The second picture didn’t come out well. We kissed on the cheek. She got on her bike, and without once looking back she rode away fast.
Sunset?
Y
No, the harsh glare of the midday sun. I felt like she was going to come back. I didn’t want her to, but it felt like she was. I sat down, put my headphones on and felt so deeply lonely, so helpless in the throes of sadness. I tried to cry but I couldn’t get there. I stayed in the park for an hour. I felt happy of course. I felt glad to be going through it and that it’d make something in the end. Throughout the whole thing she refused to acknowledge that anything romantic had happened between us besides the obvious fact that we were a boy and girl who had planned to meet today and enjoyed talking to each other. Of course she wouldn’t tell me what she was thinking about all that, she couldn’t considering her circumstances. But it felt like she didn’t feel anything at all. She is a good German. I don’t miss her.
X
Here, have a joint, you serious fuck.
This story is a pastiche of my fevered loneliness. It’s all lies. Paris.
Posted 2 years ago
What do I look for? I look for something that no one has seen before. Since this is impossible, I look for something that I’ve never seen before. This is possible.
I look for something that means something. Since this is impossible, I look for something that may mean something to me, that may hint at something in my psyche. This is very possible.
I look for unadulterated, raw emotion. Since this isn’t always possible, I look for humans being human beings.
I try to get close so that I can see what I’m looking at. I’m short sighted. I also try to get close so that I can smell, touch, taste, and hear what’s going on. It helps me to understand.
I don’t like to make moral judgements. Not because I’m saintly, but because I find ethics, positions, and values (even the lack of values) boring. Also being definite is very bad for a work. It is the best way I know to making something mediocre. Better to be ambiguous, maybe even enigmatic. Best to be entertaining. On this, I take instruction from the methods of astrology.
In a way what you are fighting is what is obvious. Is how most people will think of a situation. What is obvious isn’t interesting, or, it’s interesting to those who aren’t interesting. You must ask in any given situation, what is the expected reaction to this. Ok, that done, how else can this be seen? What other ways can this be understood and explained. As an example, if you are to shoot a lodge for rich people in an alpine setting. The expectation amongst people who look at photography is that you’ll take photos of the ostentation, or the banality of rich people, or concentrate on insentient objects as a representation of what you want to say. It may be best however, to not show any of that. To instead show rich people just being like us, being more normal than you and I, but with these very abnormal things being around them. It would be great to get a photo of a gentleman tripping as he gets off the helicopter. But it mustn’t be us laughing at him, the photo should make us understand that it is easy to trip in that situation, that we could have done it ourselves considering how far you have to jump, and we want to maybe care that he doesn’t get his head chopped off. Also, if he does get his head chopped off, you may want to get a picture of that.
As I was beginning I was worried that I wasn’t a ‘concerned’ photographer. I now know that that shouldn’t be a concern. I’m interested in something else and that’s more than all right.
It’s good to look for something that you rarely find. Because once you find something you stop looking for it.
Posted 2 years ago
1
Look very closely at what the others are doing, and then make absolutely sure that you do something different. Preferably something that will make them laugh at you.
2
Talking about yourself is really quite like pissing on yourself. In the end, you’re going to have to clean up.
3
If someone asks you what camera you use, ask them what hammer they use.
4
The act itself is it. There really isn’t anything else. It’s all right to only like it at the start, over time you will come to love it. As a caveat: love only comes about through work.
5
But what if I’m not interested in poor or black people? What do I photograph then?
6
Editing is choosing what you want to see. It is seeing again, seeing more slowly, seeing more selectively. When you’re taking the photo, you have minimal choice.
7
A face is is a face is a face, is a collection of pixels.
Posted 2 years ago
A photographer should be scared of talking too much about his work.
But there is suspicion that talking and thinking about it may help. And so I do, very reluctantly.
A new test for all writing: how does this help you take better photographs?
Posted 2 years ago
1
Often what is only half seen, darkly, is clearer and more transparent to the heart than a ‘better’ photo. I’m thinking again of Winogrand’s picture from a car in Utah, 1964. The trick is that you aren’t making photos, you are making emotions in someone else’s chest and the photo is a tool (the camera is even further removed). The apocalyptic death of a beast under fractured light with a gathering darkness would have been destroyed by a better picture. Who cares about technique? What happened to the beast?
2
Why have so many photographers wanted to see in black and white? Is it hubris? Is it the need for power? Tradition? Romanticism? Or did they just forget the settings? Cameras can be very confusing.
3
Who was the greatest? Surely it’s Winogrand. I want every picture of his to be my picture. When he succeeded, he was infallible, we was unnatural. And even as he failed at the end, Sophoclean, he failed with a magic Dionysian dignity. The thing to admire most was his graphic sense.
4
They will always think it’s easy. It’s just operating a machine. And such an easy machine. Just one button really. Make sure you thank them, they’ve just handed you your freedom.
5
What separates you from everyone else on Flickr? Nothing. Stop caring.
6
I can’t think when I’m shooting. This can be distilled to: stop seeing psychoanalysts and forget yourself.
7
Fuck light.
8
Photography is the constant breaking of the fourth wall. As if one of the audience had run on stage. The actors take it in stride, the show cannot help but go on.
Posted 2 years ago
1
As a photographer I’m not interested in what people say about themselves. There are better arts for capturing that kind of thing. I want to collect the things people don’t say about themselves, can’t say, or didn’t know they wanted to say.
2
Photography at heart is about angles. Looking at a scene from 10 meters to the right often changes it entirely. The light is now elegiac, instead of exuberant. The composition plainer. The contrast grayer. The people hidden rather than revealed. Everything changes according to your positioning in space. Meaning is created by your positioning. So move about! Dance!
3
One cares for his subjects by creating a real picture, not by respecting their wishes, not by making them comfortable, nor by leaving them alone. Be prepared to get punched in the face, just make sure you turn the camera away.
This may be distilled to: Your face is less important than your camera.
4
I wanted to not change anything about my photos. For good reason: so that I could shoot even faster, even more. But I’m learning from Kertesz that cropping is a guilty pleasure. But, for god-sake, don’t tell anyone that you are doing it.
5
When shooting someone in the street, treat them like a cobra. Transfix them with your eyes and flute, or ignore them completely. Either way, hope they don’t see the machine in your hand.
6
Hold it still, still, still! Figure out how to freeze your hand although the rest of your body is moving. Socrates would stop in the middle of a stride for hours to think things through. You think through your camera. Also, shoot high speed. So what you get some noise? Noise is real. Keep the shutter speed above 200.
7
You can’t slow down, really look, and respect each individual image, until you figure out that nearly all of your pictures are shit. Cherish the good ones though, otherwise you may think that you are shit. And that’s the end.
8
Look at great photos to see how you should select, not to figure out how to shoot. How could you ever replicate all of the shooting conditions, including the photographer’s heart?
9
Beware of woman. They can drain out all of your sadness to the point where you have nothing to say about the world.
Posted 2 years ago
1
Photography is important because love is important. A photographer mustn’t ask what am I going to photograph, but rather, what is it that I love and what loves me?
2
Your camera must be the least interesting thing about you.
3
If you aren’t rejecting 1 out of every 100 photos, then you aren’t doing your job. It could be three things: You’re not being brave, or you haven’t thought about who are, or you haven’t studied others enough.
4
A photographer captures his own reflection. But not in a mirror. He sees himself in clouds, buildings, cars, other faces, streets, carts, women, etc. Sometimes he sees himself in an angle, or a colour, but mostly he sees himself in light.
5
Photography is essentially walking. Good shoes are a must. I like Volleys (watch out, intensely bad music) because they don’t stand out, have well cushioned, comfortable soles, dry quickly, are cheap, and simple.
6
If you must photograph pretty women, do it. Fight for non-objectification elsewhere.
Posted 2 years ago
