Sport in our own time (it's a truism) has become the opium of the people, particularly in our western nations. Forget Christian and Islamic fundamentalism and all the other devout, pious and dutiful credal varieties of belief: Sport, the new religion, the methamphetamine of the masses, is the controlling factor in the life of this land. And forget Plato's Academy, because the sports academy is the new university of learning.

Witness the recent hosting by the University of Waikato of the Female Athlete Health Symposium at the Avantidrome in Cambridge. Present were doctors, professors, psychologists, exercise scientists and nutritionists to spread the good word of, well, saving the body for the glories of athletic heaven. These new theologians were not discussing how many angels could dance on head of a pin, but how many medals a girl might pin on her virtuous logo-laden tracksuit. 
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Cups, gold medals and shiny ribbons have become the holy grails to garnish the glorious mantelpieces of the righteous saints of rugby, rowing, cycling, et el. However, before that's achieved, the dark night of body and soul must be endured in the gym, on the water, on the paddock, in the nets, etc. But all neophytes can be of good cheer because a team of worthy priests, pastors and preachers will dutifully hover, omnipresent, to guide and minister with stopwatches, massages, liniments and readings from the sacred text of good headspace and right nutrition to encourage the fearful and the unbelieving.
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It's an arduous task, as every pilgrim knows, but at the end of days, after purification through struggle, the coach will be there to wipe away all sweat and tears from the eyes. And the blameless ones will gather at the river and become possessed of the promised land, while the losers will be cast into the fiery lake of disappointment and defeat. And the rest of us watching will cry out with a loud voice and pronounce, amen.  ​

The 2012–2013 Slovenian protests were an ongoing series of protests against the Slovenian political elite members, including the mayor Franc Kangler, the leader of right-wing government Janez Janša, and the leader of opposition Zoran Janković, all three of them in 2013 officially accused of corruption by Commission for the Prevention of Corruption. They began on 2nd November 2012 as the 2012–2013 Maribor protests against the mayor Franc Kangler. The protests spread from Maribor to other cities and towns throughout the country, demanding resignations and prosecutions of politicians and other members of the elite, accused of corruption.

The cause for demonstrations has been attributed by some public intellectuals to misunderstanding of post-socialist political elite who rejected "collectivism as socialist pattern" while, according to notable Slovene anthropologist Vesna V. Godina it is in fact a "pre-socialist pattern", originating from the way the traditional Slovene rural community was functioning much longer than in other – mainly Protestant and to much lesser degree in the mainly Catholic – modern nations, who have replaced traditional political culture earlier in history by the modern representative democracy and individualism.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
–Ernest Hemingway

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
–Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
–Marcel Proust

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
–Oscar Wilde
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Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
–Ezra Pound

“MUSIC for me is an art, it produce beauty of forms, harmony and expression of emotion.”
— Jazzy H.

“Music is different to a lot of people. For me, it’s a way of venting negative emotions and calming myself down...”
— Anonymous

“Music helps me escape from the reality I live in.”
— Jacob T.

A lot of people know the quote: “Music is my life; lyrics are my story.”
Well, I have a few more: “Anyone who has a desire to SING, always finds a SONG.”
— Anonymous

“I think music in itself is healing.
It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by.
No matter what culture we’re from, everyone loves music”
— Billy Joel


“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.”
— Anonymous

Day after day, O lord of my life, 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 
With folded hands, O lord of all worlds, 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 

Under thy great sky in solitude and silence, 
with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face. 

In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil 
and with struggle, among hurrying crowds 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 

And when my work shall be done in this world, 
O King of kings, alone and speechless 
shall I stand before thee face to face. 

Rabindranath Tagore

​Gandhi did not dream of India that was rich of powerful, but of an India that was fair and just! He believed in learning from Truth – the one with the capital "T" – and from the many truths of India, the truths that made her great, the truths that keep her small – and not running away from them, papering them over or prettifying them. Peace and its offering, happiness, can only come by acknowledging what I real. He said “the way of peace is the way to truth”.

Backside

Night eats color,
Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments.
Day falls into the leaves like sparkling fish
And struggles, like the lowly mud,
The shapeless dreams and trees
Nurtured outside this shriveled, deridable despair.
And the space that was chopped down
Tickles the weeds there by its feet.
Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes
Caress the writhing darkness.
And then the people move forward.

Chika Sagawa​​

(Translated by Sawako Nakayasu)
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​Chika Sagawa was born in 1911 on Hokkaido, an island in the north of Japan. At 19 and with the encouragement of her brother, she left home for Tokyo. That transition from the outskirts of the country to its political and social center figures prominently in her poetry. In Tokyo, she was exposed to western artistic movements, like Dada and surrealism, and western writers. Her first published work was not poetry, but translation, of modernist contemporaries working in English (Woolf and Joyce). Only just beginning her writing life, she died at 25 from stomach cancer. Though largely ignored for many years after her death, she is now often cited as the first female Japanese modernist poet.

Her poetry ascribes human descriptors to inhuman things. A sky will stand, or be clutched. Figs sleep. A city opens and closes. The effect is often exquisite; her poetry contains some of the loveliest images I have read. But beauty is often a burden in her writing. The sky does not exist merely to give humans pleasure; it has a life, plagued with wanting. By endowing these things with human activity, she also curses them with human plight. To exist, in the poetry of Chika Sagawa, is to suffer.

It is unclear as to whether suffering—experienced through a common vocabulary by all things—creates any sort of kinship. Man and nature exist together in the same space, a habitat of words that is at once spectacular and awful. We see this occurring in ‘Backside.’ The poem is a small marvel, like a fist of orange and gold leaves on a tree otherwise skeletal. But its smallness belies a biblical scope. In eight lines she renders the world, her trees replete with light and images of the sea. Then, fingers appear, disembodied and blackened. The fingers are stained with tar from cigarettes—what people give off appears before they do—and her image suggests that a stain is more than a blemish, it’s a wound: a scar with coloration. Darkness writhes; night eats. Flowers wilt and are deemed ‘fake.’ The world is in a sort of unmistakable agony; one can hear the wind in the trees as a kind of wheezing, lungs made to strain.

It is when this ‘despair’ is established that the last of God’s creation comes creeping in. It is hard not to read that final line as something horrible, but then, the horror goes both ways. One can see the trees cowering, but one can also see how a world like this could cow a person. That last sentence starts to take over the poem—is it people who are enduring this world, or is it the other way around? Whose fingers are those? That cigarette might just be a sort of ballast, as Salinger once wrote, against a world as callous as branches in autumn.

​In 1952, iconic street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson published a book titled Images a la Sauvette or, as the American version is called, The Decisive Moment. The latter title is a nod to Cardinal de Retz‘s quote, blurbed at the beginning of Cartier-Bresson’s book: “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.”
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The words aptly summarize the great image-maker’s style. “In photography, you’ve got to be quick, quick, quick, quick,” Cartier-Bresson once explained. “Like an animal and a prey.” Because to him, photography was “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” Of course, a photographer could very well encounter a plurality of decisive moments in their career. Thus Cartier-Bresson would amend the title slightly, in fellow photographer Martin Parr’s personal copy of the book, so that it read: The More or Less Decisive Moments.

​More than half a century after the publication of his book, Magnum Photos — the international photography collective Cartier-Bresson founded in 1947 — is paying tribute to this idea of “decisive moments” in pictures. In honor of its 70th birthday, Magnum is hosting a five-day online sale, appropriately dubbed “The (More or Less) Decisive Moments,” consisting of a group of spectacular split-second shots chosen by 60 different photographers, past and present.

Vsakdan je lahko pisan
kot pisan pajčolan.
Včasih je vesel in nasmejan
in se obleče kot Pust
in je ves bleščeč, razgret in srečen
od oči do ust.
Včasih je žalosten.
Takrat je ves vijoličast v obraz.
Ves dan samo po kotih poseda
in ga nenehno trese mraz.
Največkrat ni niti žalosten niti vesel.
Takrat je ves podoben sam sebi
in si, kot za špas,
nadene svoj vsakdanji obraz.
Vsakdan je lahko tudi bolan.
Takrat se ves skesan ovije v siv pajčolan
in v hipu postane čisto navaden
vsakdanji Vsakdan.
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(Štampe Žmavc, B., 1990. Čaroznanke. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga.)

What is the difference between a picture story and a photo essay?

A lot of people say a picture story has a beginning, middle and end whereas a photo essay doesn’t necessarily. Not exactly. I’d say a picture story tends to be about one place or person or situation whereas an essay tends to be about one type or aspect of many places, things or people.

Regardless, each type of story requires the same thing: A thread that holds them together. The thread can, and should, vary widely from one story or essay to the next. You could make pictures of a thousand guys with beards but not have a cohesive body of work unless something other than beards makes the images relate to each other, for instance. Or you could follow one person’s life for years and still not have a set of pictures that tell a story if you’ve not had a narrative in mind.

A way of saying this is that you could make a bunch of threads and work very hard to do so. But that doesn’t mean those threads make a tapestry. 

Why is it important to work on both stories and essays? On the one hand, having both in your portfolio makes you a more attractive hire. On another, each requires a different set of skills and mind set. Together they push what you can achieve, they help you reach a potential you might not otherwise.

Working on picture stories tends to require immense personal skills. Being able to stay in a setting for great lengths of time isn’t easy. The subject has to want you there and getting to that point isn’t a clear path. The story changes, life gets complicated, you have to adjust and reinterpret - it’s like knitting a sweater for someone while you’re in a boxing match. And it’s not like that at all.

Essays, on the other hand, require a clarity of seeing. You define the point of view entirely, often by connecting seemingly unrelated objects, occurrences or times. They require diligence and persistence that is different from a story.

Then there are topics that require both approaches. You can do individual picture stories that combine like an essay to deal with a larger topic than one person or place might reveal. Eugene Richards' Americans We and others he has done come to mind as some of the best examples of this approach.

In the end, both forms tell a story. You’ve just gotten there by different paths. The more paths we follow in this photographic life, the richer we become.