Born on this day: the truly great haunting and transgressive outsider photographer Diane Arbus (14 March 1923 – 26 July 1971). All these decades later, her photography continues to fascinate and disturb. Pictured: "Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark" by Diane Arbus, 1965.
The more I live, the more I understand abstract art.
I used to have a disdain for abstract art. But the more I live, the more I understand the human experience and the more I get what abstract art is all about.
Human emotions, especially the most complex ones, do not have forms. What is the shape of love? What is the shape of frustration? What is the shape of sadness, of loneliness, of longing for a day that has since gone but is rendered well in memory?
Abstract art is a great form to expressed shapeless and formless emotions. And it also happens to be the form of art that is most accessible to formally untrained artists like me.
My mantra and mood for life ✌️ “IDK where I’m goin but I’m on my waaaay!!” My art insta (at artbyalette) loved this, I hope y’all like it too, maybe put a smile on your face ☺️ have a groovy day y’all ✌️
Having a witchy/dungeony, but funky and endearing vibe with the two ideas for the first part - I wanted to try to have two ideas for a second part that would be the inverse - brighter and ethereal but with enough teeth to work my way back.
“Herbert Huncke was the Jean Genet of the Beat Generation. A homosexual poet-thief, he was once as familiar with Times Square dives and New York prisons as he was later to become with fashionable salons and literary landmarks.”
/ From The Independent’s obituary for Herbert Huncke by James Campbell, 1996 /
“His lifestyle was his art: the drugs, the prostitution, the homelessness, the years spent in jail - it all bled onto the page and created a new kind of poetry. He was the American Genet: a man with one foot firmly in the criminal underworld and one in literature.”
/ From “The man who set the Beats going” by Tony O’Neill, The Guardian, 2007 /
“I never met Huncke. Yet he speaks to me in a voice of gentle desperation and compassionate understanding on the complexity and fragility of the human condition, generously revealing the stamina of his tortured soul …”
/ From the book So Real It Hurts (2015) by Lydia Lunch /
Unlike Lydia Lunch, I did meet literary bad boy and proto-beatnik Herbert Huncke (9 January 1915 - 8 August 1996 – born on this day 109 years ago). Or at least I had a fleeting encounter with him. Like so many twenty-somethings, I went through a Beat literature phase. Huncke (who was on intimate terms with and a primary influence on the likes of William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) gave several readings in London in the early nineties which I worshipfully attended. (I also managed to see Ginsberg). Huncke was a spellbinding raconteur with a worldly-wise WC Fields-style delivery, and so desiccated he suggested an unwrapped, upright ancient Egyptian mummy. After one reading, he autographed my copy of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (1980). I can pinpoint exactly when because Huncke wrote the date [26 October 1994] above his signature in surprisingly pretty, swirling handwriting. Pictured: photo booth shot of Huncke, Times Square, circa 1940 via Ginsberg Collection.
Absolutely grateful for a DECADE doing this Divinely mandated work. The glory IS the story. Have it written. Humbled that my role in history is to make books for teastained women abundant with narrative.