benhästen
I am a photographer.
I like lurchers.
horseofbone.com
maudkristina at gmail dot com
Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?
A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.
Photo by Jean-Baptiste Mondino
Charcoal on buff paper
Odilon Redon via Musée d’Orsay
“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Act 3, Scene 2
Thank you membrane
Elvis Presley kisses a fan at the Oakland Auditorium 6/3/56
Photo: Bob Campbell/The San Francisco Chronicle
Found thanks to thisrecording
(photographer unknown)
Via Beniah Brawn - Paul Frecker
Thank you to wings and fins for the reminder
Photo: Courtesy of Sally Quinn, photographer unknown
“The bedroom used by Little Edie after her mother died. A single light bulb hangs in a bird cage above the bed.”
Grey Gardens - The Beautiful Decay
Big thanks to the excellent Selvedge Yard
Inside Grey Gardens: NY Times Slide Show
Photo by Jim from Sweet Juniper
“I often take the dog for hikes in the woods on Belle Isle. Inside of him a wild hunter sits dormant, and it is necessary to occasionally make him feel useful. Earlier this year a pack of wild dogs were harassing us, keeping their distance. They were smaller dogs than the ones that attacked us at the playground years ago, and once we started chasing them they led us right into the abandoned zoo. Inside the zoo, we followed their tracks through a maze of fences and walls. I could see that everything remained much as it had been left. The felid cages still had trees nailed to the walls for the scratching of giant claws. The monkey house sat silent, still smelling slightly of its occupation.
The dog loved the smells of the old zoo, rooting around every corner of the cages or the big cat enclosure. He was the Teddy Roosevelt of German Shorthaired Pointers, the Hemingway of birddogs: a big game hunter, sniffing at ghosts.
It was strange to stand inside the enclosures and look up to where countless people would have watched whatever animal dwelt there. Even stranger were the plants growing inside each enclosure, non-native species probably chosen carefully long ago to resemble the flora of wherever the animal was from but not to tempt them into nibbling. Even a simulacrum of wildness, abandoned, will become truly wild given enough time.
Every building and every enclosure chokes with overgrown plants in the summer. Dead trees have fallen to crush the boardwalk in places. The buildings are mostly intact, filled with snake and spider exhibits, educational displays. Scrapping damage seems light, though I do think the copper is gone. Signs inside the once-heated felid cages still warn KEEPER IN THE YARD.
From their earliest days, we teach our children about wild things. Even as more and more of them grow up in cities or suburbs, seemingly isolated from anything truly wild, we tell them stories and read them books about elephants and bears, monkeys and tigers. When you’re a kid, almost all the good books are about these wild things, most anthropomorphized and friendly. To those of us reading these stories, this obsession with the wild might seem pointless or silly. But to a kid these pages are an introduction to our world and its amazing capacity for strangeness and beauty. We take our kids to the zoo - even ignore the unnerving vacant glaze in the eyes of penned polar bears - because we know there is nothing quite so magical to those tiny minds as seeing what was fiction become suddenly so real.
But in time, of course, every child will see a zoo for what it is: a place where nothing is real, a place where wild animals cannot be wild, where every instinct is curbed by confinement or scheduled feedings.
This place will never be a zoo again. It is home to a pack of wild dogs now. A reclusive badger or two. Red foxes and red squirrels. A bluejay and a cardinal. A mile away, the fallow deer sit in their million-dollar home, but within the zoo I still find a broad-tined antler shed by a buck during his temporary stay. Half buried in the ground, it is already starting to rot.
We take our kids to the zoo and think we’re teaching them about wildness, but really we’re teaching them about dominion. A lesson in the power of fences. While all the time, along our highways, outside our very windows, wild things are there. Waiting.”
Via Where The Wild Things Aren’t
Return to the Abandoned Zoo
Found thanks to Wings and Fins’ post on Feral Houses
McCall’s Magazine, Kids in Linen Closet
Photo by Nickolas Muray
Color print, assembly (Carbro) process, ca 1941
Via George Eastman House Collection
