Chasing Light

Beijing | Peking Duck

doug — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:51:05 +0000

Peking Duck, Beijing © Doug Kim, Nikon F5, 35-70mm Nikkor, Agfa APX 400

Hanoi | Chess

doug — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:43:48 +0000

Chess, Hanoi, Vietnam; Nikon N90, 28-70mm Nikkor, Agfa APX 400, printed on Agfa 111

Hollywood | Happy & Bret

doug — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:15:32 +0000

Happy & Bret, Hollywood © Doug Kim, Leica MP 0.58, 35mm Summicron, Kodak Tri-X

SoHo | Stüssy

doug — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:20:30 +0000

Stüssy, SoHo © Doug Kim, Leica MP 0.58, 35mm Summicron, Kodak Tri-X

Brooklyn | Fulton Street

doug — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:19:40 +0000

Fulton Street, Brooklyn © Doug Kim, Leica MP 0.58, 35mm Summicron, Kodak Tri-X

Melancholia | Opening Sequence

doug — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:08:27 +0000

Images from the majestic opening sequence to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the rich texture of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde prelude, a sweeping backdrop to the slow, ambling march towards apocalypse.

It is all lovely terror, lush CGI, studio-lit nature as artifice, slow and heavy symbolism.

Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

Los Angeles | Venice Beach

doug — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:07:50 +0000

Venice Beach, Los Angeles © Doug Kim, Leica MP 0.58, 35mm Summicron, Kodak Tri-X

Phil Stern | John Wayne

doug — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:28:43 +0000

Wayne and I were poster boys for the Odd Couple. Politically and socially, he was 140 degrees to the right of Genghis Khan. I was oppositely inclined. He’d call me a bomb-throwing Bolshevik. It was a love-hate thing. We’d get in big arguments, especially with a little booze in us.

- Phil Stern

John Wayne © Phil Stern

I was in the USSR on my first visit in 1959 doing general coverage for my agency. While there I went to the main post office in Moscow and found the most graphic stamps with the largest images of Stalin and Lenin that I could find. I put them on postcards and addressed them to Wayne at his Newport Beach home. About a year later in a meeting he said to me, “I did get those postcards from Russia, you son of a bitch!” That was his catchphrase, he used it all the time. Like the time I pointed out his son Jonathan Ethan Wayne’s monogrammed initials on his luggage (“You son of a bitch!”).

- Phil Stern

John Wayne © Phil Stern

We were once in Durango, Mexico – the middle of nowhere (I digress – but he shot there a lot because of the lack of telephone and telegraph poles, as his pictures were set in the 1800s. Mexico gave him the wide vistas he needed.) He had a turbo jet airplane that he used like most people used like station wagons to transport his family to locations. They’d never come out to the actual location – it was too remote. It was Pilar and Ethan (I think it was the trip with the luggage, actually.) Anyway, Wayne was getting made up and Ethan said to him, “Daddy, why do you make these movies in the ‘middle of nowhere’ as Mommy says?” and Wayne said, “To keep Mommy supplied in tennis balls!”

- Phil Stern

He was a mixed bag, like all of us. He had his tender, warm, loving moments, but he was also an S.O.B.

- Phil Stern

He was very tenacious about protecting his identity as a western, macho he-man. He would not allow anyone to make fun of that except himself.

- Phil Stern

Los Feliz | Dave Leamon, House of Pies

doug — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:43:57 +0000

Paul Fussell | Chickenshit

doug — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:04:31 +0000

A wonderful breakdown and etymology of the word chickenshit by the author Paul Fussell, a second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division in WWII, from the book Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose.

The guys who were permanent jerks were the usual suspects — officers with too much authority and too few brains, sergeants who had more than a touch of sadist in their characters, far too many quartermasters, some MPs. The types were many in number and widely varied in how they acted out their role, but the GIs had a single word that applied to every one of them: chickenshit.

Fussell defines the term precisely. “Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige… insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called — instead of horse — or bull — or elephant shit — because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.”

- Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany