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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Fantastic show…Can’t wait for the next season to start :D
(Source: siximpossiblethings1865)
dancing in the street by lomokev.
Shot at Phoot Camp 2011 follow the Phoot Camp blog on Tumblr to see the other attendees work.
(via phootcamp)
I’ve been in the presence of photographic magic before, but this was the first time that I had seen a photographic miracle.
(via quesofrito)
Do Nothing, Be Nothing
Violence, idleness, and nihilism in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Clocking in at just short of a thousand pages, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is the author’s ostensible pitch for the Nobel Prize and what many expect will stand as his magnum opus. Published in Japan in three installments beginning in 2009, the novel was released in North America in a single volume this past October.
True to form, Murakami sprinkles artificial flavoring from the likes of Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler throughout, and begins the novel with a tribute to another of his great influences, Lewis Carroll. In 1Q84, Murakami’s Alice is an assassin named Aomame; a stairway off a congested Tokyo expressway takes the place of the rabbit hole; and Wonderland is not a strange and amazing place but an eminently similar-but-different universe called 1Q84. The novel is set in 1984, and after her decent down the staircase, Aomame’s world mysteriously and — at first imperceptibly — shifts.
Violence appears in much of Murakami’s prior work. It is impossible to forget, for instance, a haunting passage in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle describing the meticulous skinning of a man’s entire body. While perhaps excessively explicit, it stands alongside Dostoyevsky’s most poignant illustrations of human cruelty and vileness. However much the theme of violence may have been explored in his earlier work, in 1Q84 — and unlike in any of Murakami’s other work — violence is the constitutive element at the novel’s core. Violence manifests itself, or else lies in wait, at every turn of the page.
In 1Q84’s dystopia, the exterior world is not a complex multifaceted otherness but instead simply a bad and nasty place, the habitat of violence. Consequently, Murakami’s characters are faced with a limited set of responses. The first and most obvious is to fight back, battle with that exterior world with violence of their own to overcome it. In 1Q84, this strategy is epitomized by Aomame, who assassinates domestic abusers with the help of “the dowager,” her ethereal partner in crime. But this approach has obvious moral hazards. Doesn’t violence breed violence, even when deployed for laudable ends and in homeopathic doses?
Murakami himself seems ill at ease with this solution and proposes a second option for dealing with an inherently violent world: idleness. Like Bird, who spends days at the bottom of a dried-up well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or Kafka, who spends weeks alone in a secluded cabin in Kafka on the Shore, many of 1Q84’s characters spend a lot of time not doing much. Aomame may well be forced into hiding, but it remains that she spends nearly the entire third book following a daily regimen of exercise, looking down from her balcony, looking up into the sky, and reading (Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, no less). The novel’s other primary character, Tengo, for his part, does little more than read, write, wait for the phone to ring, go to work, and visit his comatose father — no surprise here — at a sanatorium.
(Source: thenewinquiry)
