Runcible Blog

From my hero, Don McCullin:

Every time I went to war, I came back a little more damaged. I'm quite a resilient person, and I've got a lot of hardness in me when called upon. But there's another side of me — not actually soft, but as if my nerve ends are hanging out. I met the photographer Eugene Smith once. When someone asked me what he was like, I replied that he was a man whose nerve ends were hanging out. I discovered later that I had become the same.

There are times when I wish my nerve ends were not hanging out. I realize it's a blessing and a curse, but lately I've felt only the curse.

Is it odd that hearing Aleck Karis play Philip Glass brings me close to tears? Or is it universally moving?

I am alone in my head. As I always am. As we all are.

When people assess a past experience, they pay attention above all to two things: how it felt at the peak and whether it got better or worse at the end. A mild improvement—even if it's an improvement from "intolerable" to "pretty bad"—makes the whole experience seem better, and a bad ending makes everything seem worse.

From a recent New Yorker article on the economy.

I processed the photos from yesterday's New York jaunt. I was a little disappointed at first because I felt that I didn't capture enough of what I wanted to see; I barely even saw the subway, for instance. It would've been nice to get more night shots, and I hoped to find more interesting people to shoot. I guess I'll have to return soon.

Gary Winogrand shot 10 rolls of Tri-X every day for years and left behind thousands of undeveloped rolls and thousands of unedited negatives when he died. I wonder how many of those frames were keepers, and I wonder what exactly he found so fascinating to shoot. Considering I shot only about 100 frames in New York and edited those down to 36 that I like, with perhaps half of those actually "good", I'd say that's not a bad percentage of keepers. But what if I had the time to shoot 200 or 300 shots at the same rate? Considering I spent 7 hours yesterday, I'd need another day or two to reach that goal. And judging by the way my legs and shoulders feel today, I'd need to work out to prepare for that feat.

On another note, one major thought came to me in New York — with so many people living there, how can you meet anyone?
A related thought: what does it take to live in that city? What kind of person thrives there?

It's all very alien to me.

Anyway, here are the photos from the day:

I just got back from New York, and man, do I stink! two days of the same clothes, including 7 hours of walking around the island lugging probably 20lbs. of photo gear.

pictures forthcoming...

No wonder society has a flawed perception of what it means to be beautiful.