After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Interpretation
The quote captures a vivid image of a rainy scene and the interplay of light and color in urban landscapes.
Denis Johnson's quote evokes a sensory experience of a rainy night where the reflective neon lights create a surreal atmosphere. The use of 'busted candy' to describe the neon suggests a mix of beauty and decay, highlighting the contrast between the vibrant colors and the grim reality of a wet street, thus inviting deeper reflections on urban life and its complexities.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about urban photography to illustrate the impact of weather on visual storytelling.
This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.
Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.
If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?
The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.
I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.
First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.
I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.
Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.
My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. Heβs convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
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