Photographer Corrine Day passed away on Friday

I am an unconditional supporter and follower of W magazine which I believe is the best fashion magazine ever. They just published this on their twitter and I thought it would maybe balance the pretty traumatic of the previous post… LOL.

She lets him describe how her ink is her blood and her body—his description sounded like religion. Tracing various lines and pictures littered around her skin, he told her stories about who he is. Vines turn into waves turn into a whale with a thought bubble. What’s on his mother’s grave, where he grew up, what gives him hope. Hope is a funny thing to feel.

She tries to avoid it.

He was cute and asked her to draw on him with a Sharpie. She placated him. She drew a dragon snaking its way up his arm with wings that conveniently spread out over his chest and back. He’s pretty sure this was just an excuse to get him to take my shirt off.

It worked.

He “hmm”ed over her suggestions and “oh yeah”ed over the pictures she showed him on her laptop.
Months passed. She persisted. “I can’t even believe how badly you need one,” she said. They continued to talk and go to lunch and do other things that would indicate a growing friendship.

It was a Thursday and an empty, nothing-filled day when he said, “I know what I want to get.” And then she said something and they went up on the rooftop.

Taken on Yata Pessino’s blog. ” You’ve never seen a fish in a barrel?”

Kitra Cahana and Chris Urquhart are currently working on a collaborative and multi-media project about modern nomads living in America entitled Welcome to Rainbowland, for which they received a first place in the World Press Photo 2010.

The Rainbow Gathering is an annual festival that takes place around the Fourth of July holiday weekend in a different American national park each year. Part of the point is to celebrate inclusiveness and pray for world peace. The festival attracts hundreds of teenage runaways and travelers who are nicknamed ‘The Dirty Kids’.

Faithful to the Postmodernist theory, one could claim that any number of styles and manners could be practised simultaneously, so that theories of art became effectively numberless, each one the philosophical equal of every other. However it seems obvious that the art world is more incoherent than pluralist. Individual subjects within art such as photography, the representation of landscape and religious issues in art and globalism are marked by differences and misunderstandings that cannot be characterized as pluralist. In that field, many people decline to argue about the index, or about Roland Barthes’ punctum, and by itself this could be a normal effect of a plurality of interests. But at least some of those people also have no position on those subjects, and have no reason why it should not matter that they have no position.
Photography criticism seems to be more than a simple plurality of viewpoints, but a heterogeneous field, past any reasonable hope of developing a coherent conversation. Amen.

I have to apologize for posting this now. The exhibition took place during fashion week at Gordon Pym & Fils, Paris, but it took all this time for me to finally process the images. Here is the work of our dear friend and contributor Odile Bernard Shroder. I just can’t get enough of it!

(for William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and some others)

Once upon a time,
these friends loved each other very much,
and they made a vow to stay together until they all attained Enlightenment,
and lifetime after lifetime,
and endless re-births,
and doing practice,
they all realized the absolute empty true nature of mind.

They were so happy and overjoyed,
they started dancing,
and dancing,
and danced and danced,
they were so happy,
in the shocked recognition of emptiness and compassion,
they kept on dancing,
dancing and dancing,
and they danced away all their flesh and skin,
until there was nothing left but their bones,
and they kept dancing in their bones,
dancing skeltons dancing skeltons.

Smooth skulls and speeding fingers,
smiling teeth and wide eyed holes,
sliding phymas and cracking shins,
spinning and sparkling spinal chords,
shouting ribs and singing jaws,
sqwirming pelvises,
shivering bones and shaking bones,
I want to jump into your heart,
I’m gonna come in your heart from here.

When it gets too hot for comfort and you can’t get ice cream cones,
taint no sin,
to take off your skin and dance around in your bones,
taint no sin,
to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.

You generated enough compassion to fill the world,
and now,
all of you,
resting in great equanimity,
have accomplished great clarity and great bliss,
and the vast empty expanse of Primordially pure Wisdom Mind.

But our friends were not totally,
not completely Englightened beings,
and sometimes a hundred thousand years in one of the fabulous god worlds or highest heavens,
is one year here or a couple of years here in ours,
so much for that.

Now,
at this very moment,
their consciousnesses are terrorized,
the bells of hell,
the bells of hell,
the bells of hell,
they have cut off your head,
and are shitting down your throat,
the worst is at this moment happening,
the very worst,
is happening now,
life goes on.

John Giorno, Demon in the details.

Moyra Davey, 32 Photographs from Paris (detail, 2009)