the future's here
but it feels like the past


Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960

- From the show “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” at the Met. To create this image, Klein combined two negatives shot by Harry Shunk and János Kender of Klein jumping from atop a high wall: In combining the two images, he erased the people who were waiting below to catch Klein in an outstretched tarp, and thus made it seem as if he could, in fact, fly.

* Excerpts from one of my favorite books, Stoner, by John Williams:

"He had come to that moment in his age when there occured to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter."
...

"In his forty-third year, William Stoner learned what others much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."
...

"In his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

* Fun read: For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade.

* “I think the names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful.” -- A. S. Byatt