4th Anniversary of his death
The former president of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun has committed suicide. on Flickr.
2009 It was. May 23rd. only 4th it’s been. A few months later, I met a guy and I still remember the walk we had along the Gyungbok Palace road. It was late night.
I went to the palace alone last night. It was opened till quite late and just packed with couples and lonely adult photographers. I was one of them, a single woman photographer but not with proper gears, walking like a ghost. It’s only been 4 years for god’s sake. A lot of things have changed mr. Roh, a lot of things. I’m feeling pretty useless today.
Plus, looking at this photo I took on that day, the live breaking news, I can’t believe I have passed the time through and we all have…
When it comes to matters of love, it’s often platonic devotion that proves the most intimate and carries the most weight in one’s life. It’s the love stories of friendship, the decades-spanning, unbreakable connection to someone that stays around as lovers come and go. Yes, romantic love is an all-encompassing illness of the heart, but without a best friend to guide you, life becomes less tolerable. Cinema has long been awash in tales of romantic love, of course, but it’s rare to see a tale of love between two female best friends, especially one that genuinely shows what it is like to have that kind of soul mate, without whom everything else would be askew. But with Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, we see one woman’s journey of self-discovery, ignited by a fractured friendship.
(via awelltraveledwoman)
"I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. I think that’s the strangest thing of all now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been."
Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From (via simply-quotes)
(Source: simply-quotes, via simply-quotes)
"It’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind."
Naguib Mahfouz (via thatkindofwoman)
(Source: rabbitinthemoon, via thatkindofwoman)
Few artists have done more to reconstruct the course of contemporary culture than Patti Smith (b. December 30 1946). Celebrated as the “Godmother of Punk,” her musical influence reverberates across acclaimed artists from Garbage to Morrissey to Madonna, and Michael Stipe famously cited her as the core inspiration for founding R.E.M. As a poet and visual artist, she has explored with lyrical poignancy issues of irrepressible urgency, ranging from foreign policy to mortality.
Among Smith’s greatest feats it the systematic demolition of the the perilous and artificial divide between “high” and “low” culture. In 1978, her song “Because the Night” from the groundbreaking album Horses reached #13 on the Billboard 100 chart; in 2010, her remarkable memoir Just Kids earned her the National Book Award. William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud have inspired much of her music, which has moved generations of hearts and bodies across dance floors and mosh pits. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture; in 2006, she brought down the house at CBGB’s with an extraordinary 3½-hour masterpiece of a performance. The following year, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Allen Ginsberg once bought her a sandwich in the East Village after mistaking her for “a very pretty boy.”
In the decades between Horses (1975) and Banga (2012), Smith recorded nine other studio albums, delivered countless poetry readings, and authored a number of books, including the breathtaking The Coral Sea, which chronicles her grief over the loss of her onetime lover, lifelong friend, and comrade-in-artistic-arms Robert Mapplethorpe.
In Just Kids, which documents how Smith found her creative voice during her early life with Mapplethorpe when both were aspiring artists in New York City, she articulates the singular duality of her muse:
It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
