Tagged — Jamie Lyons
These aren't your grandmother's Hallmark sunsets. These are the real thing: wounded light bleeding out over the Pacific.
No soft-focus bullshit, no airbrushed romance. Just the pure, uncut moment when day surrenders to night and I'm standing there like some idiot witness to the whole gorgeous catastrophe. The Robinson Jeffers photo especially, that stone tower at Tor House against the failing light, it's basically saying fuck you to prettiness while being devastatingly beautiful anyway... imo.
There's something a little fucked up about watching the sun die every single day and still bothering to document it. It's repetitive as as an 80s pop song but never boring because light, man, light is the ultimate improviser. One night it's orange napalm, the next it's purple bruise, then pink scar tissue. The Bolinas shot catches that French melancholy (j'aime bien les couchers de soleil) which is basically admitting I'm sentimental but too cool to apologize for it.
The theater rehearsal photos understand something crucial: sunsets don't respect my narrative. They happen whether I'm ready or not, whether I'm performing Bottom in MND or just standing there with my mouth open. That Rodeo Beach image is all teeth and beauty, the kind of moment that makes me remember everything that was going wrong at that point in my life, and that I am temporary, just as the light is temporary, while everything worth a damn is running out even as it's happening.
These aren't escapes. They're confrontations.
Adventure 2024
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man. Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a […]
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Individualism 2016
That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941 The stone holds everything, every failed marriage, every dead child, every […]
ReadIndustries 2016
My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5 We’re all so fucking scared of being earnest that we’ve turned every production into a knowing wink, a deconstructed […]
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Collusion 2016
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of […]
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Wanderlust 2015
WANDERLUST: Bolinas sunset… This raggedy edge of the continent, where the Mesa drops into the Pacific like God’s own ashtray has the kind of beautiful decay that makes you understand why people become insufferable about places. The light here doesn’t apologize. It just bleeds out across tide pools and driftwood and the barnacled pier pilings, […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2015
Accepting no doctrine in the Santa Cruz Mountains No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those […]
ReadWanderlust 2014
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering, I love you, before long I die, I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you. Now […]
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Wanderlust 2012
You stand here long enough, looking out at that impossible blue stretching to forever, and you start to understand why Henry Miller said fuck it to Paris and ended up here, clinging to this ridiculous edge of America. Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa […]
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