Its Truman Capote in 1947 and it was taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson.....

He is coming from nothing, the man and nature almost in symbiosis, and he is so young and strangely beautiful, beautiful for the fact that he had no idea what was coming, but his look somehow tells you that he does, he knows full and well....

Can be a kind of art, a quite literal one, where imagery can try to define the philosophy, pathos and emotion of a work in a singular strike, it is rare, but when it happens it can be beautiful...

"The sadness will last forever....."

-Van Gogh

Shot himself in the chest in the centre of a cornfield, crawled back to where he was staying, and took two days to die. Look at the eyes, still in the middle of everything.

From my sister, its signed by Richard Dawkins.....

Honerable mentions...

My typewriter from George

My education from my parents

My long grey coat, I stole it, I won't say where from, but it was originally a costume piece from the Abbey Theatre, its looks odd there, but its majestic, trust me.......

Androgynous is a great word.

but there are others:

Corpuscle, Tarpaulin, Exiguous, and the like...

though its not often that the most emotive effect is stirred by these expressive words, I like the use of polysyndeton, when used well, with knowing, then you can really talk about the world. It's not simplicity, but with the lack of all complication, that informs the best writing. I try to write without performance. If Jack picked up the ball, then that is the sentence. Jack picked up the ball. Its why I don't write many short stories, it seems that with enough skill almost every short story I have ever read should be able to fit on one page, and when I compress like that it just becomes a poem. The only time I feel the need to tear beyond the realms of poetry it is with something so big that it would take a book to settle it.

In this way words like hand, wall, egg, young, can become the more powerful, more beautiful...

The iceberg shows little ice.

We know.

The dog walks on.

Belleville Rendex-Vous....

by Silvain Chomet

A favourite opening to a book....

In Cold Blood by Capote

"The town of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas..."

Honerable Mentions:

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead"

Best closing to a book.....

Franny and Zooey by Salinger

I even wrote it on my wall when I was a teenager:

Honourable mentions:

Farewell to Arms - Hemingway

Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky

See part three of the bio page.....

Nina Simone - Sinnerman

"Well I run to the rock, please hide me, I run to the rock,

but the rock cried out, I can't hide you, the rock cried out,

I said rock, whats the matter with you rock?

Don't you see I need you rock?"

Bob Dylan - Ballad of a Thin Man

"Oh you've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books,

you're very well read it's well known, but something is happening here

and you don't know what it is, do you

Mister Jones?

Rolling Stones - Shine A Light

"Saw you stretched out in room ten-o-nine

with a smile on your face and a tear right in your eye"

Dick Avedon....

The easy choice, in fact, the choice of almost anyone who actually knows nothing about photography, but he is damn good....so....

William Burroughs

Ezra Pound

My ever-so-famous namesake

There are others, Bresson, Eggleston

Ricky.

Comedy has always had more potential than achievement. The true pillars are rare, Hicks and Pryor and Allen being too few and far between the others, but it's the same with most culture, the best tower and are alone. I cut comedy away from wit, which is just the bending, the tickling of language, where comedy, at its best, is a reflection of life. Comedians at times as soothsayers, introducing the world to itself. Wit belongs to Wilde, Churchill and Groucho Marx. Here are some of my favourite lines from comedians:

Dylan Moran

"You look like a horse in a man costume"

The Christoper Guest entourage

"Too much, too much fucking perspective now"

"How much more black could this be, and the answer is none, none more black"

Eddie Izzard

"Guns don't kill people, people do, and monkeys do too (if they had a gun)"

Its of old Buk, it will be worth millions in years to come, the antitheses to the mona lisa, sfumato for the grin of the modern world.....it took me the amount of time it takes a cup of tea to go from being too hot to being nice and hot for drinking......

I have a strange relationship with painting and painters....when I was young I hated them all, the dutch masters, the impressionists, abstract, cubist, modernist, post-modernist, surrealism, all of it, I couldn't stand it...

but then one got through, Vince, the old slag, I liked the story of him giving his ear to that whore, apocryphal or not, it was his Starry Night, and then his paintings of fields, how the world wasn't solid, and had the consistancy of water....then the self-portrait, those mad, searching strokes, it was such good stuff.

Then I went on to Degas, through his L'Absinthe, and then on to Caravaggio, his use of light, like the paintings were looming out of the darkness, Goya, for his black paintings, like Yeats' The Second Coming made visual, I took to some of Ernst and Dalí, 'The Christ of St. John on the Cross' and 'Forest and Dove' stand out.

But I still held off from Picasso. I had been taken to see his painting that hangs in the national gallery, the 'still-life with mandolin' a gaudy and charmless work, but he got through too, when I understood that he was not tearing the world apart in his work but trying to squeze all the energy, all the light, of the world into his work and the images had to bend and distort in order to get it in there.

I took easily to the Dutch masters, Vermeer, Pieter De Hooch, the peacefullness, the skill, making them windows on the wall that look out, clearly, on the quiet world.

I thought I would never get over on Warhol, that I would think him ridiculous and absurd forever, but then the simplicity of his idea nailed me to the damn floor and in the end was the most powerful idea I ever took from the world of painting. That nothing is art. That everything is art. That everything and nothing is art. The same message shared by Duchamps and others, but that I only seen in Warhol....

There are no favourites...just a huge rolling ball of cause and effect, inspiration and influence, a ball that is dead now...like the theatre....