Tom Synder


Just what is a "colortini" anyway?

07.31.07 @ 19:16PDT Monday, July 30th

Tranny bar


Went here for my birthday this evening....SO much fun....

07.30.07 @ 02:02PDT Wednesday, July 25th

remember:


A determined minority can often overwhelm
an indifferent majority.

07.25.07 @ 02:05PDT Tuesday, July 24th

Martha Graham radio essay 1953

Martha Graham
This essay aired circa 1953.

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing
or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance
of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement,
a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision,
of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol
of the performance of living. Many times I hear the phrase "the dance of life." It is close to me for a
very simple and understandable reason. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the
instrument through which life is lived: the human body. It is the instrument by which all the primaries
of experience are made manifest. It holds in its memory all matters of life and death and love.

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement
is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.
There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths. Then I need all the comfort
that practice has stored in my memory and a tenacity of faith. But it must be the kind of faith that
Abraham had, wherein he "staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief."

It takes about 10 years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. There is the study
and practice of the craft in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body
is shaped, disciplined, honored and in time, trusted. The movement becomes clean, precise,
eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather
to all who can read it. This might be called the law of the dancer's life -- the law which governs
its outer aspects.

Then there is the cultivation of the being. It is through this that the legends of the soul's journey
are re-told with all their gaiety and their tragedy and the bitterness and sweetness of living.
It is at this point that the sweep of life catches up the mere personality of the performer and
while the individual (the undivided one), becomes greater, the personal becomes less personal.
And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and
in the act of dancing. All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic,
powerful, rich in meaning.

In a dancer there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful
bones and their delicate strength. In a thinker there is a reverence for the beauty of the alert
and directed and lucid mind. In all of us who perform there is an awareness of the smile which
is part of the equipment, or gift, of the acrobat. We have all walked the high wire of circumstance
at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as he does. The smile is there because he is
practicing living at that instant of danger. He does not choose to fall.

07.24.07 @ 04:04PDT Monday, July 23rd

funny and sad, all at the same time.

07.23.07 @ 02:00PDT Sunday, July 22nd

bitchin new art pic

07.22.07 @ 03:19PDT Friday, July 20th

my confession


It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then --
just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon
I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone -- "to relax,"
I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true.

Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking
all the time. That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I
turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life.

She spent that night at her mother's. I began to think on the job. I knew that
thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't help myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau, Muir, Confucius
nd Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it
exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to
say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking
on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with
the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors
and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't
have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and
frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to
the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking
lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors. They didn't open. The
library was closed. To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for
me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster
caught my eye: "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous
poster. This is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA
meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's."
Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.
I still have my job and things are a lot better at home. We pray together and praise
God for giving us the Bible so we don't have to think about what's right and wrong.
Life just seemed easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to
recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today I took the final step. I joined the Republican Party.

07.20.07 @ 08:56PDT Wednesday, July 18th

Realty

07.18.07 @ 01:17PDT Tuesday, July 17th

.
.

07.17.07 @ 03:48PDT Sunday, July 15th

tough to argue with


Simplicity = Sanity

07.15.07 @ 03:28PDT Saturday, July 14th

Voltaire


If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
- Voltaire -

07.14.07 @ 02:51PDT Friday, July 13th

The truth



Truth is great and will prevail. Or to quote the tougher formulation of
the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, "The truth is cruel,
but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it".

07.13.07 @ 00:28PDT Tuesday, July 10th

John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81


John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81
By PHILIP GEFTER

John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated
photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art,
making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in
Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81.

In the early 1960’s, when Mr. Szarkowski began his curatorial career,
photography was commonly perceived as a utilitarian medium, a
means to document the world. Perhaps more than anyone, Mr. Szarkowski
changed that perception. For him, the photograph was a form of expression
as potent and meaningful as any work of art, and as director of
photography at the Modern for almost three decades, beginning in 1962,
he was perhaps its most impassioned advocate.

Mr. Szarkowski was first to confer importance on the work of Diane Arbus,
Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in his influential exhibition “New Documents”
at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. That show, considered radical at the time,
identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual,
snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard
to categorize.

In the wall text for the show, Mr. Szarkowski suggested that until then the aim
of documentary photography had been to show what was wrong with the world,
as a way to generate interest in rectifying it. But this show signaled a change.

“In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary
approach toward more personal ends,” he wrote. “Their aim has been not to reform
life, but to know it.”

Another exhibition Mr. Szarkowski organized at the Modern, in 1976, introduced
the work of William Eggleston, whose saturated color photographs of cars, signs
and individuals ran counter to the black-and-white orthodoxy of fine-art photography
at the time. The show, “William Eggleston’s Guide,” was widely considered the
worst of the year in photography.

“Mr. Szarkowski throws all caution to the winds and speaks of Mr. Eggleston’s
pictures as ‘perfect,’ ” Hilton Kramer wrote in The Times. “Perfect? Perfectly banal,
perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.” Mr. Eggleston would come to be considered a
pioneer of color photography.

By championing the work of these artists early on, Mr. Szarkowski was helping to
change the course of photography. “One might compare the art of photography to
the act of pointing,” Mr. Szarkowski wrote. “It must be true that some of us point to
more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.”

He added, “The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a
special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not
merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work
of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour,
how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed
to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.”

07.10.07 @ 02:19PDT Monday, July 9th

It is official:


There is NOTHING of any interest
or originality about "Pinkberry".

07.09.07 @ 00:59PDT Sunday, July 8th

Harry G Frankfurt


As conscious beings, we exist only in response
to other things, and we cannot know ourselves
at all without knowing them. Moreover, there
is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in
experience, to support the extraordinary judgment
that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest
for a person to know.
Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid
and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures
are, indeed, elusively insubstantial - notoriously less
stable and less inherent than the natures of other things.

07.08.07 @ 00:44PDT Sunday, July 1st

beverly hills

07.01.07 @ 11:03PDT