Posted: April 29, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: people, photography, places, poetry |
Marcy Newton, left, me, top, James, bottom, LeAnn, right.
James Newton is a giant in my life. He kept me alive in the 80s & 90s. I saw his Facebook page for the first time this week, and he had posted two pictures of me. What does it bring back? Hot late nights, cooking steaks on an outside makeshift grill, poems, songs, spinning vinyl records, constant calibration of young, raw, natural energy. A knowledge it could never be repeated. I think of you always and forever, James, my brother.
Maybe the mid-80s in my study in Arlington.
On James’ Birthday
(Mid-80s)
Unwrap this, it’s for you
to take along on your search
for the perfect back beat
and still sea.
On this still-light morning
breaths draw slowly.
Sleeping bodies throughout
the house, too much drink
last night. The still cat
sits in the window sill
staring outside.
Beyond is the Great Outdoors
but what is it?
In last night’s dream
there was a man with
three hooks piercing his
chest, bound and hanging
on a swaying rope.
Is he you and me?
Now comes the first morning sound.
A bird feeling the Sun
on its tongue on another
moment of birth.
Posted: April 28, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: people, photography, writing |
My friend Daniel Otis, a writer now living in Cambodia, spent almost a month in northeastern Myanmar in February, mostly reporting on the Shan Army. He’s written an insightful, revealing story that appeared in Vice, with various other versions for different publications. Sam Jam, a photographer, took great photographs of the trip. The days were marked with military drills and parades. At night, the rebel army’s rock and roll band took to the stage for raucous booze-fuelled concerts. To get a look at Dan’s writing, see his website Exhaust and Incense here. The Vice story is here.
Daniel Otis, in Cambodia.
Posted: April 19, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: photography, places, sight seeing |
Songkran: A festival celebrating the traditional Thai New Year, held in April, and marked by the throwing and sprinkling of water on young and old. Festive banners marking the Chinese Zodiac, a scheme and systematic plan of future action that relates each year to an animal and its reputed attributes based on a 12-year cycle.
IPhone photograph
Posted: April 11, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: photography, places, sight seeing |
The Mekong River near Chiang Khong. Laos is on the far shore. Photograph by Roy Hamric
Posted: March 14, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: people, photography, poetry, states of mind, writing |
In The Woods; a photograph by Robert Crosby
Whoso walketh in solitude,
And inhabiteth the wood,
Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass
From these companions power and grace.
Emerson– Woodnotes II
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. – William James, The Variety of Religious Experience
Posted: March 12, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: people, photography |
Photograph by Robert Crosby
“Gods cool in turn,
by the sun long outlasted.”
– William Empson (1906-1984),
British critic, poet.
– A line from the poem To An Old Lady
See my link to William Empson writing about Chinese poetry here.
Posted: March 5, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: books, buddhism, people, photography |
Here’s one more picture from Bill Porter’s new book, Yellow River Odyssey, which should be released soon by Chin Music Press, a small publisher of elegant books based in Washington state. The caption reads: “After another hour among the dunes, we headed back to Shapotou, where I cooled my heels in the Yellow River mud and talked with several men who were inflating goat skins and lashing them to wooden frames to use as rafts. Sheepskins, they said, were useless. Goatskins were the only the skins that held air long enough, and they had to be coated on their insides with sesame oil to keep them from cracking and to maintain their flexibility.”
Posted: February 25, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: buddhism, photography, sight seeing, time, space |
Monday, 5:55 p.m., February 24, 2014; IPhone photograph
Ash-sprinkled head,
soil-smeared face.
– From A Zen Forest, Sayings of the Masters
Posted: February 24, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: articles, people, photography |
The man on the left has been identified as Robert Johnson, the legendary blues singer and guitarist.
Only two verified photographs of Johnson (1911-1938) existed until now. Eric Clapton once said Johnson was “the most important blues musician who ever lived.” A third, newly cleaned-up and authenticated image has been released by the Johnson estate showing him standing next to musician Johnny Shines.
Work on the photograph began in 2007, when Lois Gibson, who works with the Houston police department, analysed the features of the long-fingered figure holding the guitar. Gibson, who found the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in the Life magazine photo of Times Square on VJ day during the second World War, said forensic techniques showed a match between this photograph and Johnson’s image in two other photographs, which were previously thought to be all the photographs of Johnson that existed.
Posted: February 21, 2014 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: photography, places, sight seeing, states of mind |
Kathmandu, Thursday, February 20, 2014; photograph by Brigitte Lueke; IPhone
the roy hamric journal 