TwoShoes at the Mike Boros Cafe, in the Buckeye neighborhood, once the largest Hungariam settlement outside of Hungary, itself. The shot was taken in 1989, nine years before The Bar finallly closed after about a hundred years of serving cheap drinks in an ethnic dive bar. Begnning in the late 1970s, the neighborhood became Black, slowly,then picked up speed after 1980. In a city of tremendous racial divisions, the transition in the bar was smooth, realtively speaking, one big drinking family, and, if there were divisions, we would immediatly get in your face and squash them or be kick you out for life.
Although The Bar closed in 1998, the ethnics remained until the Last Hungarian, Joe Jambor, the neighborhood locksmith, passed away in 2022, and his shop shut down.
Mr. TwoShoes, understanding the plight of Tom Joad, into his seventies now, still shooting real stills, wants you to know.
The mutterings continue, about the dangers of flipping reality for personal, economic and political ends, which is certainly what’s happened, as feelings overpower any truth, sending us into the subjective toilet of wasted emotion. Feelings, unchecked, not sublimated and not used to fuel contact with the source or search and capture of what’s real and, maybe, some truth is a danger.
Think about it. All the flipped out things beginning with 9/11 then blowing up since 2016 with the Orange Jesus Flamethrower. One million covid deaths in America was staggering, as well as, averaging, now, 100,000 overdose drug deaths per year. And more, too big to actaully process by a human, nevertheless, having a huge impact on our physical, mental and social health. We don’t dwell on stress, we weather it. It’s irritation makes us only want to get away and/or attack it. It’s an interesting subject because what we sublimate, just to get with life, is there, and is having affects like the spike in crime of all types including the return of murder, that, with the exception of places like Cleveland, is now finally going down.
Covid is global, killing yourself with drugs is local but nothing is distant enough to not affect us anymore. Pure communication is needed as our entire system and institutions of communication are being questioned, even in the art world for years now. IP and PC strategies progress in a limited, partial divisive way, whether you like it it or not. it’s all about green, pitting all the colors against one another. I don’t know, i could say i don’t want to live in the past, or history, just be there, participate in it, as well as, shoot it.
The Street Boss, in the Junkyards of NYC, 2023
Just the political, medical and social events since 2020, have flipped us so much, without asking, it’s overwhelming, so we weather it. But it still takes us down. The clearest fact related to all this is the huge fall in survival rates for this country.
In its most fundamental interptation, art is communication, and i completely understand art is primarily about what’s in an artist’s mind, and not out the studio window. That’s why they also have so many photography galleries, that, more and more, ironically, show photography as the pure art of the doubting mind. That’s pictures without a basis in reality. At 71, looks like it’s all just cycles, ebbs and flows, made worse with this penchant for reinvention added. Sequels prequels, reamakes and reproductions comprise our cinema, and many people’s lives.
Returning to that idea of great stress and how we sublimate it, try to forget about it and enjoy life. It always leaves marks and the best marker in America is the precipitous fall in survival rates, that have, generally always climbed, along with Sweden, that is the highest. Now we are like Ecuador, instead of Sweden, in our survival rates. Communication, at a time when needed the most, while being actively undermined for a long time, including art, injected it with so much academia and study, that i wonder if they want to overthink themselves out of existence. In the the path taken for RealStill, expression is really something, but so is clarity.
Can a website, itself, be art? I don’t know, but RealStill is free, no ads, no careering, and no name, meant to house an archive drawn from at least one thing that’s better than art. Life, and, also, the world. If art, it’s the art of experience, that, at a minimum, captures the physical presence of truth by the actual experience of it.
A camera is equally capable of lies, truth, fantasy, or reality, directed by an operator, in my case, to capture the physical truth of things. After the internet, D. T., and now with, a.i., if we can no longer agree on the most basic modes of language, communication, and methods of proof, than how can we ever expect to…it’s nothing new to make art from what’s real, but it’s rarer than ever in the era of disruption, concepts and conspiracies. Of course, if we limited our ideas to things (reality) we all agree are there, it’s a start, but it’s gone too far. Pictures are no proof to conceptualists and conspiracists. A picture today is up for grabs stripped of its own intentions.
Veracious culture stems from genuine things and people, something’s at stake. It’s unconcerned by the nature of representation, or, someone’s relation to this thing or that. A source artist is outside overvalued IP, PC, conceptual or appropriation schemes, by its own definition. The source is novel reality, not unique selfhood. The source is not me, it’s where I live, and begins with the sun and moon illuminating the world of actual people, places and things, and, pictures, done by action, not introspect, that does not occur before the facts of existence.
Any way we do it, we end up in the same place. It’s just a preference and profession, where my ideas and appraisals are relative, taming overvaluations that skewer actual values by the reality of things, done with soul, not turning a solid into gas by desublimation.
Soul and truth connect through different channels, that are magnetically tied. No name, schools, slogans, concepts, but things searched for, and experienced. Pictures and any ideas, remain post-facto, postquam actum est sublatus, by working an open range with an unfiltered mind. Gradually we lost sight of the source. Want some? See what’s gone and still remains. For too real reality, go to – realstill.com. And, always Think and Read.
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.” – Reverend Casey
Damn good philosohy to capture life, where it works absolutely. As far as life itself, and not its capture, there is everything in abundance – virtue and sin – so be careful. You might find that by staying inside with your devices on a largely scheduled life, that most of the isms and social evils exist there than outside when you’re in the mix and not the only human on earth, or limiting all experience to your own kind.
As far as the Tom Joad metaphor, although, without exposure, RealStill might be more folkloric than art, the comparison would work with the Palidin character from Have Gun Will Travel. The cultured well-read ethical hired gun, some say, was based on the life and work of TwoShoes. Regardles, the point is, irony, appropriation, conceptual thought doesn’t work here.
Sarcasm, authenticity works here.
Can a website be art, or, for that matter, could a hired gun be an artist? Those days are gone.
