Saturday, May 16, 2009

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

original

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."
- Chuck Palahnuik (Invisible Monsters)

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

fortunate son

new absolute favorite cover.

still movement


from some required

.. ...... .. . ... . . .. . . .




I've recently rediscovered my inexplicable obsession with the benday dot. I don't know where this comes from, but I can't get over it! Maybe it's the influence of all the flamenco (that I STILL haven't seen, but am dying to...). Though, the truth is that I think I've always been attracted to dots. What is it that makes them so satisfying? I wonder if it's like me and red shoes. When I was little I loved the Wizard of Oz, and went through many a pair of ruby slippers. I wore them so much, it seems like my mom was always taking me with her to get them repaired. I think we started getting discounts at the shoe repair. I still love red shoes. I don't know how I've managed to resist the little red flamenco heels covered in bold, black polka-dots...

a lost poem in a stranger's coat pocket

thanks, ezvt
"I want to be a lost poem in a stranger's coat pocket, that conveys the importance of you.
To assure you of my desire, to assure you of dreams. I want all the possibilities of you in writing.
I want to give you your reflection, I want your eyes on me, I want to travel to the lightness with you and stay there, and I want everything before you...
...everything before you to follow us like a trail behind me.
I want never to say goodbye to you, even on the street corner or the phone.
I want, I want so much... I'm breathless.
I want to put my power into a poem to burn a hole in your pocket so I can sew it.
I want my words to scream through you. I want the poem not to mean that much.
And I want to contradict myself by accident, and for you to know what I mean.
I want you to be distant and for me to feel you close, I want endless days when it's day and... nighttime never to end when it's night.
I want all the seasons in one day. I want the sun to set before us and come up in front of us.
I want water up to our waists and to be drenched by the rain, up to our ankles with holes in our shoes.
...with holes in our shoes. I want to think your thoughts because they're mine.
I want only what's urgent with you.
I want to get in the way of the barriers and I want you to be a tough guy when you're supposed to,
like you do already.
...when you're supposed to. And I want you to be tender, like you do already.
And I want us to have met for a reason and I want that reason to be important.
And I want it to be bigger than us, I want it to take over us.
I want to forget. I want to remember us.
And when you say you love me I don't want to think you really mean New York City, and all the fun
we have in it.
And I want your smile always, and your grimaces too.
I want your scar on my lips, and I want your disappointments in my heart.
I want your strength in my soul and I want your soul in my eyes.
I want to believe everything you say, and I do.
And I want you to tell me what's best when I don't know.
And when you're lost I want to find you.
And when you're weary I want to give you steeples and cathedral thoughts and coliseum dreams.
I want to drag you from the darkness and kneel with you exhausted with the blinding light blaring on us... and..."
-chelsea walls

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Rainy day. Listening to Bon Iver's slide guitar and the fragile voice of Cat Power singing Wild Is the Wind only fills me with an immense desire to be home, in Portland. I love this kind of day, when all I want to do is curl up on my mother's couch, overlooking the grey garden, punctuated only by the ever-brilliant Japanese Maple. I want to sit there and "read." It's not real reading; it's the reading where you don't, except for a sentence here and there. Mostly you just gaze out the window. It's the kind of day where I could sit in an empty café all day long, sipping a warm, sweet coffee, watching the occasional passer-by. Just watching. I don't want to talk to anyone. It's the kind of day that somehow inspires me with its emptiness.

There's a woman here, a sort of Spanish Audrey Hepburn street-walker. She has the most incredible face. I so admire those who have the courage to take a stranger's photograph.

I just can't ask.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥


i like the idea here (not the commercial part, the rest of it) and i love audrey tautou. a lot.
today is bizarre.

yesterday it was 90 degrees out.

today is dark. today is rainy.

today is hot (?)

today it feels like the clouds are trying to suffocate me.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

we must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
- joseph campbell

you'll never untangle the
circumstances that brought you
to this moment
- leonard cohen

images by david kimm

sad sweet violent

found here

excerpt from truman capote's local color - i love the images...

An abandoned church, a For Rent sign defacing its baroque façade, towers black and broken at the corner of this lost square; sparrows nest among the stone flowers carved above its chalked up door (Kilroy was here, Seymour loves Betty, You Stink!); inside, where sunlight falls on shattered pews, all manner of stray beasts have found a home: one sees misty cats watching from its windows, hears queer animal cries, and neighborhood children, who dare each other to enter there, come forth toting bones they claim as human (yeah, they is so! I'm tellin' yuh; the guy was kilt). Definitive in its ugliness, the church for me symbolizes some elements of Brooklyn: if a similar structure were destroyed, I have the uneasy premonition that another, equally old and monstrous, would swiftly be erected, for Brooklyn, or the chain of cities so-called, has, unlike Manhattan, no interest in architectural change. Nor is it lenient toward the individual: in despair one views the quite endless stretches of look-alike bungalows, gingerbread and brownstones, the inevitable empty, ashy lot where the sad, sweet, violent children, gathering leaves and tenement-wood, make October bonfires, the sad, sweet children chasing down these glassy August streets to Kill the Kike! Kill the Wop! Kill the Dinge! - a custom of this country where the mental architecture, like houses, is changeless.

Manhattan friends, unwilling to cope with the elaborately dismal subway trip (Oh B, do come, I swear to you it takes only forty minutes, and honest you don't have to change trains but three times) say so-sorry to any invitation. For this reason I've often day-dreamed of leasing and renovating the church: who could resist visiting so curious a residence? As matters stand, I have two rooms in a brown-stone duplicated by twenty others on the square; the interior of the house is a grimy jungle of Victoriana: lily-pale, plump-faced ladies garbed in rotting Grecian veils prance tribally on wallpaper; in the hall an empty, tarnished bowl for calling cards, and a hat-tree, gnarled like a spruce glimpsed on the coast of Brittany, are elegant mementos from Brooklyn's less blighted days; the parlor bulges with dusty fringed furniture, a family history in daguerreotype parades across an old untuned piano, everywhere antimacassars are like little crocheted flags declaring a state of Respectability, and when a drought goes through this room beaded lamps tinkle Oriental tunes.

here




more

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

shirin neshat


My trip to Morocco reminded me of a video installation I saw at a gallery or museum a few years back - I can't even remember where, but I remember the impression it left. I've been searching for this video, but to no avail. However during my search I stumbled upon the work of Shirin Neshat, which I first encountered in my sad attempt at a Research Workbook for my high school art history class. Though many of the portraits seem so strong and there is an unavoidably masculine hardness to them, I love contrasting softness and femininity.

Monday, May 4, 2009

up up and ...stuck?

Lately I've been feeling really frustrated for a variety of reasons. For one, I've been studying abroad in Spain since January, and I'm trying to figure out what the appeal is. I mean, there's definitely an appeal - I love being abroad (if only my loved one could be here with me - and of course I miss my family, too), but what's the difference between living in southern Spain, and living (for example) in the south of the US Obviously there's a difference, but people always say that "this part or that part of the US is like a foreign country." Hans says that you should know were you come from first, and the truth is, I really agree, and having said that, I don't really know why I don't know it well at all. But think I can say that (and I know it sounds cheesy) I've definitely learned a lot about my home by leaving it. And why is it that when I am home, I rarely take any photographs, despite my intense love of photography, but when I'm abroad my camera rarely lasts longer than a day from (over?) use. My dad's talked about this before, and I really like this idea of photographing where you're from and trying to see it through other eyes.1. 30, 2. Djemaa el Fna, 3. art street, 4. Maersk, 5. si supuestamente esto era para siempre, 6. Chefchaouen, Morocco, 7. Fes, Morocco, 8. Untitled

off the high board

I just got back from a weekend in Morocco (mixed feelings there: a) how amazing is it to be able to go to Morocco for the weekend?? b) only a weekend? really?) and I am absolutely dying to go back. Spain isn't exactly known for it's cuisine (though it has it's specialties), so I was in heaven in Morocco. We arrived really late on Thursday to our riad and were welcomed with a "half dinner," which in reality was an incredible authentic feast with Moroccan fava bean salad, bread, tajine, and for desert fresh orange slices covered in cinnamon.
But the very best was a dinner at a restaraunt just by the Blue Gate, called La Kasbah, which had various terraces that overlooked the entrance to the medina. There, for next to nothing, I was served a delicious Moroccan soup (kind of like gazpacho, only hot and with different spices) and the most amazing chicken tajine I have ever tasted, with plumbs, almonds, caramelized onions, cinnamon, and I don't know what else (but I'm determined to figure it out and reproduce it somehow). Followed of course by sweet mint tea, pastries, and, once again, the fresh oranges and cinnamon. Now, back in Spain, I am dreaming of those meals...The trip (well, not so much the trip as the journey to and from) was a long one, but by no means lacking in poetry and scenery. On the six hour train ride between Tangier and Fes, we passed groups of men by the side of the road, sitting in the shade below trees, selling beautiful oranges from crates. A blue van passed once that was completely filled almost to the roof with oranges. We passed enormous trucks carrying loads of bamboo, followed closely by groups of boys running behind to pull sticks out to play with. There was a couple standing by their broken motorbike on the side of the road, the woman covered completely, except for her eyes. The countryside was also striking, covered in fields with cattle, goats, sheep...

l'inizio

I've decided to start this blog as a way to (theoretically) collect and organize my thoughts. In the past it's always been a struggle for me to keep a notebook regularly and my thoughts seem to pass through my mind only to disappear into...emptiness, I guess, or wherever it is that forgotten thoughts go. Writing for me always turns out to be something more spasmodic - kind of like a lot of things in my life. With a sudden burst of drive and inspiration, I find myself buying a new moleskin (after all, aren't they the most tasteful, little mass-produced notebooks?), and I will write and draw and collect little scraps to (someday) paste in... I really have hte very best intentions. But within a few days, or if I'm lucky a week, that wind of inspiration turns out to have been just a gust and I am left with (yet another) mostly blank notebook, staring at me dejectedly from beneath some pile of clippings that I had originally meant to paste in. I wish I could say this weren't all true, but unfortunately it is. I'm also not going to even try to pretend that I think this is a "better alternative," because I really don't. But maybe for now it will work...

I really only just discovered this impressive world of blogs when I came to the south of Spain and needed a more efficient and practical way of keeping my friends and my family updated (not only am I still alive, but here are some photographs to prove it). In starting my travel blog, I fell upon several others that seemed to have inspired me once again (thank you, thank you!). But the travel blog did not seem like necessarily the appropriate place for my "other," travel-unrelated thoughts. So here we are... and though it seems strange to me to just jump right in, I suppose that's what I will do.