Maelstrom

yelyahwilliams:

shauncey:

prettygrlsmakegraves:

businessofmisery-:

At Ryan’s memorial Wednesday night in West Chester, people were invited up to the microphone to say a few words about his life, whatever they were feeling at that moment. I walked to the podium and tried to share memories of my dear friend, but the words were just spinning in my head. What came out were the mumblings of a man trying his best not to cry, and I wasn’t even successful at that. I didn’t break down, because I knew Angie or his family didn’t need to see that, but I also didn’t get to properly convey what Ryan meant to me. I won’t be able to do that here either, but I will try. Here is what I wished I could have told everyone then.

I felt 34-percent funnier when I was with Ryan, but I guess everyone did. He had such a hair trigger laugh reflex. He lived his life wanting to laugh and wanting you to laugh with him. He would cackle really fucking loud, too, and it wasn’t uncommon that he would fall over from it. Sometimes I would fall with him because his spirit was very contagious.

He wasn’t incapable of seriousness, though. Ryan was a great listener. If you were having troubles, he was always someone you could go sit down and talk to. Granted, most of our sitting down was actually standing up playing pool together, but he was always there if you were sad about something. That’s why all this is even harder because right now I really need to talk to him but I can’t.

Ryan also had an enormous capacity to love. His friends and family got a lot, but a lion’s share of that went to his sweet and beautiful Angie. If he wasn’t with her he would be talking about her. More times than not he would smile wide through that filthy ass beard of his and say something along the lines of, “How did I ever luck up and land her?” Well, it sure wasn’t because of the way he smelled that’s for sure. (Dunn despised water and rarely bathed.) It was because he had a pure, open heart, and many other qualities of which I am writing about now.

He was very loyal, too, and sometimes that bit him in the ass. We were filming a bit for number two where someone was going to stand in front of the Stingmore mine as it exploded. After we did the test, nobody wanted to do it except me. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I knew we needed footage. As I was doing my usual pre-stunt ritual of sitting in someone’s car listening to Roger Alan Wade very loudly, Dunn climbed in the backseat. He asked me if I was doing it and I said, “Yeah.” He told me he was going to sit this one out and I said, “That’s fine, buddy, I got it.” We went back to listening to Roger and ten minutes later someone knocked on the window and said it’s time. I got out of the car and Dunn fell in behind me grouchily saying, “Ah hell, I’ll do it with you.” Actually, I don’t know if he said that or anything, but I could tell how he was walking beside me that he was doing it. Bam decided he would as well and we all went in and got our asses shot real good. Whether it was a bit for jackass, a friend in need, or his beloved Angie, Dunn was as loyal as they come.

I’m becoming upset now because this isn’t right, goddamnit. Ryan, I had to go wake up Madison and tell her you were gone. Do you know how hard that was?!! She loved you so much and I know you loved her, so why, buddy? Rocko will never get to know you like she did, nor will my daughter that is coming in October. I cry a lot about that.

Roger wrote a pretty song for you, but you’re not here to listen to it. And I’m hurting!! We all are because we loved you so much and now you’re gone. I know your spirit lives on in me, Angie, Bam and everyone you touched, but that’s pretty tough to see right now through the tears. I’m starting to ramble now, just like I did at the memorial, so I’ll stop. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m just very sad because I lost my brother and my world got about 134-percent less funny. I don’t know what else to say right now, so I will close with I love you, Ryan. I have a lot of emotions swirling, but I want you to know I love you so very much.

Sincerely and always,

Knoxville

Fuck.

holy shit. this is…this is just fucked up. fuck. kinda wish I didn’t read this.

This is such a bummer. I don’t even know any of these people, but I have been watching them do umb shit for a good 15 years easy, and this sucks.

This hurts my heart so bad. Reblogging for all my friends who make me laugh, talk to me for long periods of time, put up with my terrible driving skills, and love me all the time. I love y’all. 

asifhisheartwouldbreak:

Mr. Harry Potter,
Thank you for remaining strong when we couldn’t be.

Mr. Ronald Weasley,
Thank you for always coming back.

Miss Hermione Granger,
Thank you for having a good heart.

Mr. George Weasley,
Thank you for finding humor when we could barely smile.

Mr. Percy Weasley,
Thank you for believing in the power of family.

Mr. Albus Dumbledore,
Thank you for lighting the way.

Mr. Dudley Dursley,
Thank you for seeing kindness.

Mr. & Mrs. Weasley,
Thank you for all you sacrificed.

Mr. Sirius Black and Mr. Remus Lupin,
Thank you for your loyalty. 

Mr. Rubeus Hagrid,
Thank you for your undying compassion. 

Mr. Neville Longbottom,
Thank you for your bravery.

Miss Luna Lovegood,
Thank you for your wise words.

Dobby- free elf,
Thank you for showing us the value of friendship.

Mr. Fred Weasley,
Thank you for the memories.

And to Mr. Severus Snape,
Thank you for your love.

And to Mrs. Joanne Kathleen Rowling,

Thank you for my childhood.

(Source: dearmrpotter, via everythingharrypotter)

From the beginning of May when I finally got a DS. Love me some Pokemon.

(via cavesoflilith)

BOOYAH

cavesoflilith:

Miroslav Tichý

NEW YORK, NY.- The first North American museum exhibition of the photography of the mysterious and reclusive Czech artist Miroslav Tichý will be on view at the International Center of Photography from January 29 through May 9, 2010. Now in his eighties, Tichý is a stubbornly eccentric artist, noted as much for his makeshift cardboard cameras as for his haunting and distorted images of women and landscapes, many of them taken surreptitiously. The ICP exhibition, organized by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, includes a number of Tichý’s homemade cameras as well as approximately 100 of his photographs. Buxbaum’s 2004 documentary film, Miroslav Tichý: Tarzan Retired, will run continuously in the gallery.

Born in Moravia in 1926, Tichý studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts (SVU) in Prague in the years immediately following the Second World War. After Czechoslovakia’s adoption of communism in 1948, he left the Academy and turned his back on the official art world, withdrawing from mainstream society, in part as a political response to the social and cultural repressions of the regime. Regarded as a talented painter and draftsman influenced by Picasso and the German Expressionists, Tichý did not agree with the prevailing socialist realism of the day, instead forming an artist collective known as the Brnenská Petka (Brno Five) with other likeminded SVU alumni. Constantly threatened and watched by the regime, the group took great risk in producing their work, even holding a clandestine exhibition in the Kyjov hospital in 1956. Tichý benefitted from the small, yet vibrant, cultural scene of Kyjov, taking in dance performances, plays, and beginning his first photographic experimentations with the artist Ladislav Víšek. Prone to mental breakdowns since his youth, Tichý worked alongside his peers until an apparent psychotic breakdown just before a planned exhibition in 1957 from which he withdrew his work. His work was not exhibited again until nearly four decades later. Over the years, his deliberately nonconformist lifestyle—as well as his mental illness—landed him in trouble with the authorities and led to periods of confinement in psychiatric institutions and the loss of his studio in 1972.

Living in near-isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Tichý conceived a world populated by images of the local women, taking thousands of photographs from the 1960s through the late 1980s. Though he never stopped producing paintings and drawings, Tichý focused the majority of his attention on the photographic medium, practically reinventing it to suit his artistic vision of capturing the feminine essence with light. Save for the film, chemicals, and photographic paper he bought from a nearby drugstore, all his photographic equipment was self-made. Using cameras inventively constructed from found materials—shoeboxes, tin cans, clothing elastic, toilet paper rolls, even cigarette boxes—Tichý obsessively returns to the subject of the female form, whether viewed from afar with his makeshift telephoto lenses, or captured from the television screen. His intuitive method of photographing during daily walks about town might appear amateur in ambition, but the intensity, frequency, and regularity with which he creates, reveal a unique and distinctly personal style of photography.

Despite his camera’s crude optics—the lenses were cut from Plexiglas polished with sandpaper, toothpaste, and ashes—and skewed framing, the resulting images are formally complex, reflective of Tichý’s early art training, and vaguely reminiscent of the early works of the classical pictorial tradition. His images of women—often in bathing suits, bare-legged, or simply walking about town—are subtly erotic, taken from afar, often without the knowledge of the subjects. Tichý often embellished the surfaces and borders of these scratched, blurred, torn, and spotted images by drawing directly on them in pen or pencil, heightening the expressive quality created by his imperfect equipment. Sometimes framed or mounted on newspaper or cardboard, these highly personal objects were created for his own viewing pleasure, each negative printed only once with a homemade enlarger.

In 1981, Tichý’s prolific body of work was brought to light by his longtime neighbor, psychiatrist Roman Buxbaum, who began efforts to document the artist and preserve the deteriorating photographs. Tichý’s work has received public attention only in the last five years, first going on view in an exhibition by Harald Szeemann at the 2004 Seville Biennale, where Tichý’s work won the “New Discovery Award.” After this exhibition, the Tichý Ocean Foundation was founded on the artist’s behalf by a group of trustees to preserve and exhibit Tichý’s work, which has been shown at major museums including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kunsthaus Zürich. 

Miroslav Tichý will be accompanied by a catalogue published by ICP/Steidl, with essays by Brian Wallis, Roman Buxbaum, Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, Richard Prince, and Nick Cave. Visit International Center of Photography (ICP) at : http://www.icp.org/

Photo & Text Via

Thanks for sending me this, Dani!