Welcome to The Restless Lens, where you’ll find my personal interests, inspirations, ideas, and work, hosted outside the walls of social media; independent and strange, eclectic and completely un-monetizable, the way the internet should be.
Expression, curation, and exploration. Check out specific categories in the menu above, or the full stream below.
It's like this means something, but we've forgotten what it is.
This LAND/COUNTRY/STATE/CITY/FARM/HOUSE/STOOP/HOOD/FIELD/PINEFOREST/DESERT/JUNGLE/SWAMP/COAST/RIVER/OCEAN/SKY/LIGHT/WATER/RAIL/ROAD/CAR/RIDE/TRUCK/BOAT/BIKE/BANKNOTE/PHONE/TV/SHOW/MOVIE/GAME/COMPUTER/GUN/CONSTITUTIONALRIGHT/GODGIVENRIGHT/HUMANRIGHT/SAFETY/SECURITY/FAMILY/MONEY/JEWELRY/ANIMAL/STORAGEUNIT/BUDLIGHT/OLDEENGLISH/JACKDANIELS/PINO/DOPE/DRUG/WOMAN/MAN/MCDONALDS/CLUB/MARTINI/ADDICTION/HABIT/WAY/ROUTINE/LIFESTYLE/ART/AESTHETIC/LOOK/WEBSITE/INSTAGRAMACCOUNT/FACEBOOK/TWITTER/COMMUNITY/CAUSE/SCENE/CLUB/BAR/STARBUCKS/DOLLARGENERAL/DEERHEAD/POETRY/OFFICETROPHY/EXPENSEACCOUNT/CREDITCARD/DEPARTMENTSTORE/TIEDIE/BRAND/DESIGNER/MUSIC/OPINION/INTELLIGENCE/IGNORANCE/PRIDE/FACT/LIE/FAITH/STORY/FOOD/TRADITION/LANGUAGE/JOB/PAIN/VICTORY/STRUGGLE/PUNISHMENT/PURPOSE/HERITAGE/DREAM/FATE/DAY/PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE is mine.
New York City. I emerge from underground, look up for the sun and find the skyscrapers instead, then mutter, apparently aloud, something about assorted temples to various American gods. Then they’re your gods too, a man says. Me? You’re American, ain’t you? Well, it’s not that easy: way I see …
Life is not a contest of strength, but a function of grace.
It seems that the most sensitive souls are able to find the most beautiful things about the world, but that sensitivity is a tremendous vulnerability that many great writers have been unable to live with. Breece D’J Pancake was one of them. This story of his life from The Millions is both a sad and beautiful reminder of the terrible price of open eyes and an open heart. I can assure you, Pancake’s only book, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, pictured above, is worth a lifetime of re-readings.
It’s a turn-around jump shot
it’s everybody jump start
it’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
medicine is magical and magical is art
think of the Boy in the Bubble
and the baby with the baboon heart.
– Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble” Graceland
These days it seems like the whole world is a highway lined with tourist traps: word got out that we’re all yokels on a long and confusing journey, ready to jump at the chance to purchase anything that reminds us why we’re so far away from home.
Can the cryptic, strange, and disparate contents of government agency photography archives be art? Of course they can! At least when assembled by artists with the vision to think beyond the more conventional forms of art to realize that everything human beings create carries with it some kind of inherent artistic statement. The book that Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel assembled in the 1970’s, Evidence, did something like this:
All the wealth of information the photographs in Evidence provide, disrupted from their original context and placed into an intuitive visual essay about the ridiculousness of vanity and the pathetic loss of power, makes the pictures themselves essentially unknowable and inscrutable, and more strange and potent for it.
The article does a great job of explaining this. Check it out.
Is is any wonder that art is the only thing that makes any sense to me any more?
– via The Paris Review
I just finished Frontier after reading about it and Can Xue in this article, which I can say is very accurate when it comes to the book. This is some of the most mysterious, difficult fiction I’ve ever read, and I adore it. Writing like this is a welcome reminder that not all books need to be nascent little movies, some books can be much better: they can be half-remembered, fading fast like the infuriating whisper of a dream just passed.
– via Numero Cinq
