Zwei mal Zwei Nichts

Scans from old negatives bought on the fleamerket in Udel’Naya, near St. Petersburg; nothing is known about the persons on the image, nor of the time when the pictures were taken
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St. Petersbury,, found September 2019

zwei mal zwei nichts

— from the experiments of Konstantīns Raudive

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On Memory

Udel Naya, found footage, date unknown

But if memory shows us the past, how does it show us that it is the past?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Lack of Conviction

Bobby Timmons, who has once been in Art Blakey’s Messenger and wrote songs like Moanin’, died at 38 years, without getting anywhere near the fame the people he worked for, like Cannonball Adderly or Art Blakey. He briefly touched fame when he wrote Moanin’ while playing with Art Blakey. He was one of the people that almost got famous, but never quite made it due to a lack of effort or stamina or desire. His liver gave way after he had treated her poorly with drugs and alcohol.

These non-famous people and their disdain for fame at all. Why bother? And still, there was this nagging feeling of having underachieved, of being cheated out of the fame you deserve: By bad luck, by bad timing, by a lack of devotion – when the real reason has only been a lack of conviction in the idea of achieving something.

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We Must Build A Boat

Dave,
Trinidad, California, July 2016; from: The Summer Before Trump

I possess a dignity and a power founded on ignorance and credulity; I walk on the heads of men who lie prostrate at my feet; if they should rise and look me in the face, I am lost; I must bind them to the ground, therefore, with iron chains. Thus have reasoned the men whom centuries of bigotry have made powerful. They have other powerful men beneath them, and these have still others, who all enrich themselves with the spoils of the poor, grow fat on their blood, and laugh at their stupidity. They all detest tolerance, as partisans grown rich at the public expense fear to render their accounts, and as tyrants dread the word liberty. And then, to crown everything, they hire fanatics to cry at the top of their voices: “Repeat my master’s absurdities, tremble, pay, and keep your mouths shut.”

–Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary. 1764

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Sleep some more

Here I live with a small black-and-white tv that proves: Not the image is the truth, but the noise obfuscating it. 

On the wall is sink with a small, almost blind mirror above it. In the night, when I am too tired to go out to the toilet, I stand there, dick in hand, watching my face peeled out of shadows watching me from the speckled mirror. 

This part of the town was almost forgotten, people came here because there were no other places to go. I come here to sleep and wake up, watch tv and then sleep some more. 

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