Bertrom.

Bertrom.

@bertrom.bsky.social

In a past life, I was a film teacher, photographer, theatre director and film editor. Now a psychogeographer and Jungian explorer searching for my Anima, and some purpose.

3.1K followers682 following7.6K posts

David Lynch. The Factory Photographs. These black-and-white photographs exude Lynch‘s fascination with factories, his obsession with smokestacks, chimneys, machinery, darkness and mystery. Derelict monuments of industrialisation.

Leon Levinstein. Such graphic virtuosity and candid unsentimental black-and-white figure studies made in New York City neighbourhoods. 1960s-70s.

Walter Benjamin. ‘Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.’ He was at the heart of my dissertation and much of my approach to literature, photography and philosophy. A terrible loss at such a horrendous point in history.

Victor Hugo wrote poetry, novels, and drama, but he also made some four thousand drawings over the course of his life. Some of his work has a look of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel. A masterpiece. An adaptation premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester in 1986, directed by Braham Murray. One of the most remarkable theatrical experiences I have ever had.

Have I menTIONed that I was prime MINister, once? That it was the bank of England and other MaRXIsts who undDERMined my economic plan of recovery. Well, let me tell U I was once PRIMe minister. Yes. Of course you were ? apple.news/AxYeCzxGHTUe...

apple.news‘I, The TrUssTER, will NeveR die’ – Liz Truss’s Bank Job, digested by John Crace — The GuardianShe’s back with another book – and it’s a lot like the last one. Our sketchwriter spares you the 100 pages

‘Where are we?' the mouse child asked his father. His voice was tiny in the stillness of the night. ‘I don't know' the father replied. ‘What are we Papa?' ‘I don't know. We must wait and see'. Russell Hoban. The Mouse and His Child. Goodnight.

Robin Weaver studied photography at Newport College of Art in the 1970s. Aside from his day job covering hard news and local events, for The South Wales Argus his main interest was documenting the everyday lives of the people in and around the valleys of South Wales.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Simone Weil.

In an essay in 1984 at the dawn of the personal computer era, the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite?” A reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives.

There was a time my bit of ground Made freeman of the slave, The ass no pounder'd dare to pound When I his supper gave. The gipsy's camp was not afraid, I made his dwelling free, Till vile enclosure came, and made A parish slave of me. The Lament of Swordy Well. John Clare.

Sally Mann. Mann frames the image with the washed-out sky, a signifier not of absence but indeed of too much presence, of an image-world so replete with light and darkness that it cannot be captured all at once.

Anna Dorothea Therbusch. Self-portrait. c. 1776-7. She frequently included a monocle in her later self-portraits as her eyesight began to fail.

Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. THE classic film of the New Hollywood era. David Newman and Robert Benton, François Truffaut and Arthur Penn brought us an enduring work of art. To say I loved teaching a film that stunned me in my youth is an understatement!

“And there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? Everything, more gold. He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Barack Obama.

Ming Smith. “You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create — and that has helped me to survive” Smith favours photographing with a slow shutter speed. She plays with light and movement to emulate the life running through her subjects.

Jesse Marlow discovered wounded people who go unnoticed among the sea of commuters in his native Australia. The result, a series called Wounded. His photographs show citizens enduring the daily struggles of coping to live normal lives amid broken bones and nursing other wounds.

RIP Brian Robinson. As an archivist, queer historian, collector, and a curator in the truest sense, devoting his life to connecting people and deepening his own and others’ knowledge and appreciation of cinema history and queer culture. www.bfi.org.uk/features/bri...

bfi.org.ukBrian Robinson obituary: BFI press officer and programmer with incomparable flairThe much-loved BFI press officer and long-serving programmer of BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival had an irrepressible passion for cinema history and queer culture.

Federico García Lorca. I want to sleep for half a second, a second, a minute, a century, but I want everyone to know that I am still alive, that I have a golden manger inside my lips, that I am the little friend of the west wind, that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.