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  • Tyler
    Junior Member
    • Aug 2009
    • 24



    An accident cost professional photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg the use of his right arm for a year. Forced to work with a tripod and the larger format of 4-by-5-inch film, he was providentially assigned to photograph a neurosurgeon as she worked. This ultimately gave birth to The Sacred Heart, a magnificent and utterly disturbing collection of photographs of the human body seen through invasive surgery.
    There is nothing like this collection either in the annals of medical photography or the arts. Almost 50 surgical procedures--a liver transplant, a mastectomy, the harvesting of organs after death, a cesarean birth, and others--cause us to look away and immediately look back. Surgeons' hands hover gracefully over gaping wounds, and lighting on gloves, instruments, and bare flesh is both theatrical and holy.

    Aguilera-Hellweg's essay integrates the photographs and historic information about early surgical procedures with his own philosophic musings. The Sacred Heart inspires terror, pity, and awe as our gaze lingers on these horrific images.


    I just read/looked at this recently. Chilling... I don't think I'll look at a vagina the same way again.

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    • Atom
      Senior Member
      • Sep 2009
      • 310

      Originally posted by Fade to Black View Post
      Patti Smith's Just Kids. Am not very acquainted with her music and other creative work, but enjoying this wistful memoir. There is a current of sadness running through these recollections...the romance and inspiration of artists' lives and communities captured within seems to be on a kind of edge, as if their lives are inevitably bound to some tragedy and suffering that has to come around the corner no matter what.
      I just finished reading Just kids. It really was a great book, but I didn't find it that tragic after all. There was sadness and loss in their lives, but still they weren't losers in any sense. Patti Smith rarely used hard drugs or drank, neither did Robert Mapplethorpe. And in the end, they both became stars and regognized artists on their own.

      Compared to many other artists from that era, Patti Smith seems to be really down to earth. Just read Please kill me, there is a book filled with tragedy and suffering.

      But yes, a highly recommended book to fans of Patti Smith (or Ann D. or Jun Takahashi ).

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      • Fade to Black
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2008
        • 5340

        Yeah I'm just about done with it, things aren't that bad you're right. Man! Imagine that, just hanging out at the local band spot and a night includes mingling with Burroughs, Ginsberg and Television. Patti indeed seems very cool, would love to meet her and discuss poetry.
        www.matthewhk.net

        let me show you a few thangs

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        • Real Real
          Senior Member
          • Feb 2007
          • 619

          I finished In Search of Lost Time last weekend - still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

          Proust spends a lot of the final section of the novel talking about the way memories layer experiences of your life on top of one another, creating wormholes that connect different moments of your life, and how that feeling allows you to briefly exist outside of time. The examples he used to illustrate this were all moments in the book. Because it took me a good year to read the book, and because the book was almost constantly in my thoughts throughout the year, the moments in the book were directly connected to memories of mine from throughout the year - the places I was, the things that I was thinking while I was reading the novel. My life was layered in with the life in In Search of Lost Time, and this sort of interconnectedness hit me on a level unlike any thing I've ever experienced.

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          • Faust
            kitsch killer
            • Sep 2006
            • 37852

            /\ Respect. One year I will do this.
            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

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            • CDG Diffusion Line
              Member
              • Dec 2008
              • 66

              I re-read Swann's Way just about every year.

              Originally posted by viv1984viv
              The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal
              Convinced me. Will pick this up soon.

              Originally posted by MoFiya View Post
              Maybe you guys can recommend me some good books, I am recently trying to approach some philosophical work, yet I still find it very hard to follow the thoughts of the "classics". Some advice to what to start with would be appreciated
              History of Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss

              Comment

              • Liquid
                Member
                • Jul 2009
                • 77

                Originally posted by MoFiya View Post
                Maybe you guys can recommend me some good books, I am recently trying to approach some philosophical work, yet I still find it very hard to follow the thoughts of the "classics". Some advice to what to start with would be appreciated
                Well, start at the end. Ludwid Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations. It's not easy to follow, but it's the only thing worth following. More-so than the entire history of philosophy before it.
                Clothes make the man. Naked people have little to no influence on society. -MT

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                • galia
                  Senior Member
                  • Jun 2009
                  • 1719

                  well that's very arid reading for someone who isn't familiar with the whole genre

                  I'd say, if you have trouble stomaching philosophy, Nietzsche is quite entertaining (although the ideas are mostly crap of course), 18th century French philosophy is useless but quite funny and Plato is probably a good introduction to mostly everything.

                  this is probably the easiest philosophy to read, not necessarily the most interesting

                  Comment

                  • Fade to Black
                    Senior Member
                    • Sep 2008
                    • 5340

                    what would you say's the most interesting?

                    my beef with some higher philosophy is that it is expressing things in very highfalutin tone that could be as effectively communicated in a straighter manner. Of course that probably dilutes some of the artistry and aestheticism of it, but still...
                    www.matthewhk.net

                    let me show you a few thangs

                    Comment

                    • galia
                      Senior Member
                      • Jun 2009
                      • 1719

                      oh no, I believe in most cases the complicated expression is necessary to convey the complexity of the thought. if you say it in a simpler way, you almost always end up watering it down or deforming it.

                      I don't really like philosophy, it's like mindgames for the smart. but then I don't really like analytical thinking for the sake of it too much

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                      • Fade to Black
                        Senior Member
                        • Sep 2008
                        • 5340

                        yeah I kinda see what you mean now. definitely agreed with the 2nd point, I already think too much about junk as it is, don't need to complicate that grey matter shit any further.
                        www.matthewhk.net

                        let me show you a few thangs

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                        • galia
                          Senior Member
                          • Jun 2009
                          • 1719

                          oh that's not why I don't like it. I just think it isn't very real, I don't feel it tells me anything of real value about what I care about in life, usually. It's interesting to me on the same level as crosswords or riddles are, just in a more complicated version, and reading abstract intellectual shit will definately make you smarter. I'm just more interested in the idiosyncratic and the bizarre (probably because I'm intellectually lazy)

                          Comment

                          • Fade to Black
                            Senior Member
                            • Sep 2008
                            • 5340

                            Originally posted by galia View Post
                            I'm just more interested in the idiosyncratic and the bizarre (probably because I'm intellectually lazy)
                            same here.

                            but yes, i didn't communicate my previous point of view well, i was trying to say that it is a whole lot of thinking about hypothetical vacuums that just aren't. i think it is much more interesting to take parts of what is actually out there and presenting it as an alien thing rather than simply doing so with what-if worlds only existing in text, although that has its appeal as well i can see.
                            www.matthewhk.net

                            let me show you a few thangs

                            Comment

                            • Faust
                              kitsch killer
                              • Sep 2006
                              • 37852

                              Originally posted by Fade to Black View Post
                              what would you say's the most interesting?

                              my beef with some higher philosophy is that it is expressing things in very highfalutin tone that could be as effectively communicated in a straighter manner. Of course that probably dilutes some of the artistry and aestheticism of it, but still...
                              That's why there is literature.
                              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                              Comment

                              • Faust
                                kitsch killer
                                • Sep 2006
                                • 37852

                                Amazing how many people are reading that book...
                                Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                                StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                                Comment

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