Control

"On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of feeling like an immigrant in a place where your children are natives--where you're always going to be behind the 8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can learn it. It's what I call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not everybody feels that way. That's not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's based on the ability of people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion as a way of life, concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't control anything. At best it's a matter of surfing the whitewater."

Words by John Barlow - photo by Shapeshift

Less Than Zero

There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called "Los Angeles" and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.

Words by Bret Easton Ellis - photo by Cuba Gallery

Flow of Life

(7/365) Flow of Life
Originally uploaded by Photography is an art...

"The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order.
Events did not flow.
The facts were separate and haphazard and random even as they happened,
episodic, broken, no smooth transitions,
no sense of events unfolding from prior events"

Words by Tim O' Brien - photo by Jonathan Gonzalez

ArtAttacked

I don’t quite know to whom I am addressing this letter, but I do know why I’m writing it and I believe that under the circumstances it is both critical and inevitable because two Iranian filmmakers, both of whom are vital to the Iranian wave of independent cinema, have been incarcerated.

Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof are two filmmakers of the Iranian independent cinema, a cinema that for the past quarter of a century has served as an essential cultural element in expanding the name of this country across the globe. They belong to an expanded world culture, and are a part of international cinematic culture. I wish for their immediate release from prison knowing that the impossible is possible. My heartfelt wish is that artists no longer be imprisoned in this country because of their art and that the independent and young Iranian cinema no longer faces obstacles, lack of support, attention and prejudice.

By Abbas Kiarostami

Soccerisation of society

Art by Sarah Lucas

"Two"

Staged and directed by Dimitris Papaioannou, music by Konstantinos Bhta

Prometheus Imprudent

artwork by Kostas Tsoklis

Laurie Anderson - World Without End

" I remember where I came from There were burning buildings and a fiery red sea I remember all my lovers I remember how they held me. World without end remember me. East. The edge of the world. West. Those who came before me. When my father died we put him in the ground. When my father died it was like a whole library Had burned down. World without end remember me ..."

words and music by Laurie Anderson

Sputnik Sweetheart

The first time Sumire met Miu, she talked to her about Jack Kerouac's novels. Sumire was absolutely nuts about Kerouac. She always had her literary Idol of the Month, and at that point it happened to be the out-of-fashion Kerouac. She carried a dog-eared copy of On the Road or Lonesome Traveler stuck in her coat pocket, thumbing through it every chance she got. Whenever she ran across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory like they were Holy Writ. Her favorite lines were from the fire lookout section of Lonesome Traveler. Kerouac spent three lonely months in a cabin on top of a high mountain, working as a fire lookout. Sumire especially liked this part:

"No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength."

"Don't you just love it?" she said. "Every day you stand on top of a mountain, make a 360-degree sweep, checking to see if there're any fires. And that's it. You're done for the day. The rest of the time you can read, write, whatever you want. At night scruffy bears hang around your cabin. That's the life! Compared with that, studying literature in college is like chomping down on the bitter end of a cucumber."

"OK," I said, "but someday you'll have to come down off the mountain." As usual, my practical, humdrum opinions didn't faze her.

Sumire wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel - wild, cool, dissolute. She'd stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-frame Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her 20-20 vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversize herringbone coat from a secondhand store and a pair of rough work boots. If she'd been able to grow a beard, I'm sure she would have.

Words by Haruki Murakami, photo by Jasek Gasiorowski