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| Larry Wolf at Wisdom 2.0 (February 2017) |
The glass of water in the photo has mud at the bottom which has settled over the course of a meditation retreat. The critical step is to stop stirring, allowing the dirt to naturally settle. So too with our minds.
I wrote about the retreat on my work blog back in February 2017. The need to combine stillness and action continues.
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| Double rainbow extending over the lava lake in Halemaʻumaʻu crater - January 6, 2021 |
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| Kīlauea summit eruption continues from the west vent - January 2, 2021 |
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| Thermal image of the lava lake at the summit of Kīlauea - January 7, 2021 |
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| Lynette Yiadom-Boakye A Passion Like No Other (2012) Collection of Lonti Ebers © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye |
"I learned how to paint from looking at painting and I continue to learn from looking at painting. In that sense, history serves as a resource. But the bigger draw for me is the power that painting can wield across time.
"I work from scrapbooks, I work from images I collect, I work from life a little bit, I seek out the imagery I need. I take photos. All of that is then composed on the canvas. [This lets me] really think through the painting, to allow these to be paintings in the most physical sense, and build a language that didn’t feel as if I was trying to take something out of life and translate it into painting, but that actually allowed the paint to do the talking."
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/lynette-yiadom-boakye/exhibition-guide
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| Unknown Photographer, Prisoners in the Concentration Camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany (1938), US National Archive of Foreign Records |
Who are these people?What was their experience before and after this photograph was taken?
Have they told their own stories?
How have others used this as part of their artistic process?
[These are listed in the order in which I read them, with the most recently read book first. "Read" is a relative term, for example, Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhause is 378 pages of German. I used Google Translate to read the essay on Richard Grune. Perhaps I'll tackle more from that in the future. This book is completely on topic for the photo.]
Harlan Greene: The German Officer's Boy (2005) WorldCat
Stephen Koch: Hitler's Pawn, The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust (2019) WorldCat
Andreas Sternweiler and Joachim Müller, editors: Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhausen / Homosexual Men in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (2000) WorldCat
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| Larry Wolf, Personal Buddhist History (2020) |
The books are roughly in the order they read. As I revisit them over the next several months, I'm sure other titles will surface, ones I have and ones to track down. Some of these may get commentary. For now, here's the list.
Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
Suzuki Roshi - Zen Mind Beginners Mind
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (not here because my copy was falling apart), Myth of Freedom, Shambhala
Jack Kornfield - A Path With Heart
Thich Nhat Hanh - Peace Is Every Step
Bernie Glassman - Instructions to the Cook, Bearing Witness
Pema Chodron - The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are
Clark Strand - Wooden Bowl
Sue Bender - Everyday Sacred
Shantideva - The Way of the Bodhisattva
Koshein Payley Ellison & Matt Weingast (eds) - Awake at the Bedside
Larry Yang - Awakening Together
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche - In Love With The World
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| Nat Pyper, GB Jones Poster (2019) |
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| Larry Wolf, You Can Be Anything Queer (2020) |
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| GJ Jones, The Lollipop Generation (2008) |
G. B. Jones’ The Lollipop Generation is a film about runaway queer kids, a gang of lollipop-eating social misfits let loose on the streets of Toronto. They stumble into drugs, danger, and prostitution, and inhabit an underground culture infused with a pervasive yet innocent kind of sleaze. Seasoned with a bottom-up punk aesthetic and a good handful of homemade porn, the film presents an altogether refreshing critique of the stultifying norms of convention.
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| Nat Pyper on Instagram (November 16, 2019) |
A Queer Year of Love Letters is a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. The series aims to make the act of remembering these overlooked and illegitimate histories accessible to other people, as easy as typing. Better yet: it aims to make the act of typing an act of remembering. That these fonts might be considered typefaces is incidental. They are an attempt to improvise a clandestine lineage, an aspatial and atemporal kind of queer kinship, through the act of writing.I began making these fonts in order to rapidly document and disseminate the work and ideas that they cite. I pack these histories, or part of them, into fonts for a couple of reasons. First, font files are durable. OpenType fonts (.OTFs) have persisted in their ubiquity since the late '90s and maintain their utility as a nimble and reliable format. Second, fonts have the capacity to contain a hefty amount of information within a tiny package. In under 100 kilobytes, an entire alphabet! In the font’s metadata, a manifesto! Fonts then function as a useful format for ferrying information from one place to another.
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| Lee Marmon, Laguna Eagle Dancers (1949) |
The book I am now going to write will be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned. ... I shall begin at the point where the earlier book ends: twenty-four-year-old Christopher's departure from England on March 14, 1929, to visit Berlin for the first time in his life.
It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan [W. H. Auden] had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.Page 2
Christopher Isherwood's first lodging was next door to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Institute of Sex Research, run by Dr Hirschfeld, where Christopher joined the staff for lunch.
Dr. Hirschfeld seldom ate with them. He was represented by Karl Giese, his secretary and long-time lover.
The Berlin police “tolerated” the bars. No customer risked arrest simply for being in them. When the bars were raided, which didn't happen often, it was only the boys who were required to show their papers. Those who hadn't any or were wanted for some crime would make a rush to escape through a back door or window as the police came in.
Most of Christopher’s Jewish friends had left Germany or were about to leave. Dr. Hirschfeld had been away on a world tour since 1930. The tour had ended in France, where he remained, knowing that it would be fatal for him to return. Karl Giese had joined him there.…During the past year, politics had increasingly divided the bar boys. They had joined one or another of the street gangs which were encouraged, though not always officially recognized, by the Nazis or the Communists or the Nationalists. Now the non-Nazis were in danger, but many of them changed sides and were accepted. If you did get beaten up, it was more likely to be because you had a private enemy; this was a great opportunity to settle old scores.
Boy bars of every sort were being raided, now, and many were shut down. Christopher had lost touch with Karl Giese's friends. No doubt the prudent ones were scared and lying low, while the silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms. He knew only one pair of homosexual lovers who declared proudly that they were Nazis. Misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta, they fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love, with all women excluded. They were aware, of course, that Christopher thought them crazy, but they dismissed him with a shrug. How could he understand? This wasn't his homeland . . . No, indeed it wasn't. Christopher had realized that for some time already. But this tragic pair of self-deceivers didn't realize — and wouldn't, until it was too late — that this wasn't their homeland, either.
Heinz's trial was held in the middle of June. Christopher's name appeared in the transcript of the proceedings, incorrectly spelled. "The English citizen Ischervood, who unfortunately cannot be brought to justice," was accused of having committed reciprocal onanism with the prisoner in fourteen foreign countries and in the German Reich. The judge observed that, since he was ignorant of the various penalties for the prisoner's crime in these other countries, he would have to punish him according to German law. This remark may or may not have been meant as a joke, but its tone does suggest that the attitude of the court was relatively unhysterical, un-Nazi. Heinz got what was in those days considered a light sentence: six months in prison, to be followed by a year of labor service for the state and two years in the Army.
During the trial, Christopher had been mercifully ignorant of the greatest danger which had threatened Heinz. Instead of being sentenced to a fixed term in a regular prison, Heinz might easily have been sentenced to an indefinite term in a concentration camp, as many homosexuals were. In camp, Heinz would have been treated as an outcast of the Reich who differed from a Jew only in having to wear a pink triangle on his clothes instead of a yellow star. Like the Jews, homosexuals were often put into "liquidation" units, in which they were given less food and more work than other prisoners. Thus, thousands of them died.After Heinz had been sentenced, all Christopher could do for him was to send him letters so discreetly worded that they were no more than tokens and to provide him, through the German lawyer, with cigarettes and with food that was better than the regulation prison fare. There was no hope, now, of the two of them being able to see each other before 1941, when Heinz finished his military service, and very little hope that he would be allowed to leave Germany, even then.
And then there was that old persisting question: Should he ever have taken Heinz out of Germany? Was Heinz now cursing him for this in his prison cell?(Fifteen years later, when Christopher next saw Heinz, in Berlin, Heinz assured him that he wouldn't, for any thing, have missed their travels together. But Heinz was then speaking with the maturity and generosity of an extraordinarily lucky survivor who had served in the German Army on both the Russian and the Western fronts and come out of the war with a whole skin. He alone had the right to blame Christopher. It had never occurred to him to do so.)
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| Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976) |