The Capris – “There’s A Moon Out Tonight”

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“The day I arrived in Sweden – which was the day of Louise Bourgeois’ death, I was walking down by the water and had to go to the bathroom really badly (the trickling canal wasn’t helping:) – I found a construction site with a porta potty and inside taped to the roof was a news paper photograph of Louise’s spider (attached in the pdf), the sun was shining through the white roof of the porta potty so the article on the opposite side showed through as well – a photograph of a beach in Sweden with the headline Pictures From Forgotten Corners - this double image with the words summed up all of my travels thus far – later I traveled to the Island of Grinda off Stockholm and saved the life of brilliantly white spider that was struggling to stay a float in the lapping shore break by reaching out a broken branch for it to hold onto….I was certain Louise’s spirit was watching.” Text by Dustin Lynn ~ View previous post: “From the Travel Folio of Dustin Lynn.”

Very rare these days can one attain a true cinematic experience – with the light just right, the color of the walls just right, live orchestra accompaniment, and all in a theater built for the golden age of cinema. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s centerpiece presentation “Diary of a Lost Girl” at the Castro Theater was not only a true cinematic experience, but a perfect one. G.W. Pabst’s second and last film collaboration with Louise Brooks is a tale  of moral familial values set against the decadence and depravity of 1920s Weimar Republic, and the souls lost to the riptide of a gilded, debauched Berlin. Thymian Henning, played by the perennially beautiful and iconic Louise Brooks, births an illegitimate child and is sent to a tyrannical reformatory, then escapes and becomes a prostitute in a brothel – only later finding her way through a thick fog of desperation, suicide, and ultimate redemption.  This  films most powerful message, naively haunting in the penumbra of an impending world war and economic meltdown, closes the film: “A little more love and no-one would be lost in this world.” For more info visit www.silentfilm.org and www.castrotheatre.com.

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Lydia Lopokova was a star ballerina, daughter of a Russian serf, on again off again lover of Stravinsky (he got around apparently), and wife of economist John Maynard Keynes. This one goes out to Ilona….

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William Blake believed that art and the power of imagination can save the world from its ills.

Resort 2011

Artist and photographer Adarsha Benjamin channels Jean Seberg and Joan of Arc; surrounded by Daniel Johnston’s drawings in Silverlake,  California.