Kismet Arts Tangent

On Photography by Susan Sontag

Summary: Sontag talks about photography, its development into the ubiquitous technology it is today. The mentality of the photographer and the photographed, the art and skill of photography documents and expands reality and our sense of what is worth looking at.

Review: This book is beautiful. The prose hits hard and true on an elusive subject. She compares styles and intents of photographers worth knowing. She expanded my vocabulary of who is important to know in photography. Each sentence is pregnant with evidence strengthening her arguments about photography, what makes it a special way to collect the world.

Rating: 9 camera obscuras

Favorite part: “…the camera cannot help but reveal faces as social masks. Each person photographed was a sign of a certain trade, class, or profession. All his subjects are representative, equally representative, a given social reality–their own.” P.55

Wine-pairing:  Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? .The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future. This is a perfect book to splice and insert into On Photography for a post-modern view on the new direction that technology is taking our perception on reality. When I have excellent experiences, I don’t think as often, how can I capture this in a painting, but how can I photograph it to document the occasion and then it has changed to:what should my Facebook status be today?

My Booky Wook by Russell Brand

Summary: Russell Brand, the British Comedian with a rock ‘n’ roll reputation spills his gutsy wutsies about drug addiction, sex addiction and adventure. He starts at the beginning in this humble memoir, memories of his mom, boarding school, peer pressure and drama class. He delves into his reasons for being an irreverent character and how support from his friends have helped him harness his chaotic energy and rise to the fame he’s always wanted.

Review: Reading this book, one feels the rascal lying within. Those moments, what if I keep doing this? Or what if I say this? Those moments where you are on a cliff or a balcony of a high-rise apartment and think, what if I just jump? Russell Brand has tapped into fearlessness as a way to entertain and this book captures his spunk, his politics and a certain kind of wit only found in Britain. I love how his voice seems to call out from the page. All the British slang and retrospective footnotes make this read the most flavored autobiographical I have ever read.

Rating: 8 pieces of tin foil left in a black zipper covered jacket

Favorite part: Regarding the Footprints in the Sand poem, you know the one: “Come on God, don’t fuck me around. That’s convenient—how come the footprints aren’t deeper then? ‘Cos you’d have been carrying my weight. And they’re not deeper, are they? How come one of those footprints has got only three toes? It’s a dinosaur footprint. And that one next to it is a cat’s paw. What’s going on on this beach? Why is God at the beach anyway? With all the chaos? And war? What the fuck is God doing on holiday at a time like this?” p. 295

Wine-pairing: Naked Lunch or anything by William S. Burroughs. His graphic homoeroticism and drug induced scenes of fantastic symbolism put you on a wild–on the border of disgusting– ride, the ups and downs of a certain self-destructive kind of creativity.

Just Kids by  Patti Smith

Summary: Patti writes so intimately the journey of artists in New York. She writes of aesthetic, personal growth and culture. She tells tales. She talks of Robert, her trusted friend, kindred soul, and how they walk through life together. Symbols rise out of the text and cast spells over the stories, making them hum with a sense of reverence for the dead and respect for life and beauty that artists breathe in and it circulates and flows out their drawing pencils.

Review: Robert and Patti make a beautiful pair, feeding off of each other’s artistic energies. This book weaves magic, the kind of beatniks, poor poets and how their lives soar because of the interesting people they meet, because of their beautiful work. Inspiring. This book revvs my own artistic heart, pining for my Robert, a moody soul looking for something. He finds it and I hope that we all do find that thing for our own life that makes it feel complete and fully alive. Smith’s words flow like a river of observation and sentiment from her eclectic heart. She gives possessions meaning. A leather jacket, a handmade tambourine. Reading about her gifts, given and received, I am reminded of my favorite gifts. The ones soaked in a person’s affections, handmade with its times taking imperfections. It took so long to make that installation, that poem, that beaded necklace with the fishing lure feathers, and yet it is unique, rough, raw, immediate, personal. That’s what I think life should be about.

Rating: 9.5 photographs infused with natural light and love

Favorite part: “The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said ‘You know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. Can you take the jacket off?’ I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow… He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. ‘This one has the magic,’ he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.” P.250-251

Wine-pairing: On Photography by Susan Sontag. She explores the relationship between photography, experiences, sentimentality and living in the moment.

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard (1987)

Summary: Dillard describes her childhood. She is an explorer, a collector, a drawer. Her feelings of living involve tales of snowball fights, sisterhood and the strange antics of her parents. She confides in the reader her most desperate moments of rage and the strange claustrophobia of being a live wire in a small town with Sunday church-goers and school uniforms.

Review: This book took some time to read because every few pages I would be stalled with a childhood revelry of my own. Her exuberance is familiar. We’ve all had those moments where we marveled at something. Was there an interesting pattern in the Cliffside? What do teenage boys sound like? How does an adult look to a child? We let our minds wander over everything as kids, taking it all in and connecting things that seem mundane to an adult, but quite right to the young new traveler of the world. Dillard is very conscious of that feeling we all have about wanting to remember the best parts in life. We all fear that on our deathbeds, we blink a hard blink and think, What was that?

Rating: 9 pencil studies of a baseball glove

Favorite part: “Later she touches one palm to another and tries for a gane to distinguish each hand’s sensation of feeling and being felt.” P.44

Wine-pairing: I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. He mourns is wife while reminding himself that the soul, the essence of a person is their hopes and dreams, their thought processes and by being involved in her hopes, her dreams, a part of her becomes a part of him. A slightly more psychological understanding of the self that puts a great deal into perspective, emphasizing the point of an enriched interior life.

The Panda’s Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould (1980)

Summary: In this series of essays, Gould talks about evolution. He covers theories about dinosaurs, encephalic quotients and Larmarckian notions of taking your evolution by the horns so to speak. Gould emphasizes that science is quintessentially a human endeavor and there will always be biases towards on theory or another depending on the cultural climate.

Review: At first, I couldn’t stand this book. His essays would initially present something that made a good fair of sense and then towards the middle, Gould would say “However, that is totally wrong.” Or something like that. I was scared to finish reading this book because I felt like I was getting a lot of incorrect theory in my head, but the point of his essays are that there is merit in being reasoned in wrongness. The connections made by the method are sometimes incorrect, but the method has merit.

Rating: 7 radial sesamoids

Favorite part: “Species are the units of nature’s morphology.” P.213 This was the end sentence of a great chapter describing that species are subjective to the time they are in because species are changing and evolving all the time. I connected this to culture. And how there is no “authentic” culture, but what we can observe in the moment, and from our worldview.

Wine-pairing: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This is an interesting book about a particular slant of evolution. One can see how our culture’s point of view can mesh well with this individualistic theory.