Thursday, May 26, 2011

Hours shall pass...



(Doxa Sinistra "The Other Stranger")

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Two by Helen Sear...





Read Jason Evans' article on her in this month's Aperture...

"I am looking at a photographic image and what I see is a picture... Nowadays a lot of photographs look like photographs. Sear does not play into [this]."

(Helen Sear)

Monday, May 23, 2011

The External World...



The External World, by David O'Reily, is definitely worth watching. Sharp and provocative madness...

Film is here.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Rapture me...



I'd say this image pretty accurately captures everything that's not going on over where I just was in Santa Monica, where endless processions of physically fit, flabby-souled grotesques stagger in and out of cute boutiques and over-designed cafes hunting for bargains and sugar fixes. Please Jesus, take me with you.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Paws press play...



Oh Mychtar, while I applaud any creative gesture that keeps human civilization in check with all life on Earth, your self-portrait in snow made my morning.

("Mychtar and his Snowdog" via Ferlinka Borzoi)

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Closer to the stars...



If fame eluded you in life, you can at least be very near it in death. Worth every penny to spend eternity inches away from that sexy pile of blonde bombshell ashes.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

"I stuck!"...



"I stuck!" says nephew Jack when he can't get what he wants or where he wants to go. At 3, he's not always making well-formulated plans that pan out to spec. To his credit, when he stuck, he knows it, he announces it, and he often gets some help that returns him to wonderful unstuckness.

Thanks to our caretakers' hard work, early life is full of favorable outcomes that just happen. The child expects this kind of magic to be around forever (and suffers upon learning the truth). How we mold this original clay of magical thinking is hugely influential upon our future. Discovering a material world, many of us develop policies of pragmatism and logic, from which highly functional systems of living and planning emerge. For many it's an addicting solution to the puzzle of being alive.

At some point though, the memory of that initial magic crops up. What has matched its power? What have we seen or done that tastes better than those ecstatic fruits of our initial life impressions? The ripe memories. The good feelings. The first pain. It's Rosebud. It's music. It's all the exquisite beauty and horror of the cosmos imprinting itself on the fresh senses of a child in an instant. It's gods and monsters. And those are just the low hanging fruits. What might we find higher up in that tree if we stopped navigating in the real world and returned to our seedling consciousness? Certainly rediscovering those sublime mysteries would become a total private obsession. Of course we don't do that. We can't. But we remember. And so you find expressions on midlife faces that clearly say one thing: "I stuck!"

(Ozant Kamaci)

Monday, May 16, 2011

The gong of memory...



What is it about Mondays lately?

(Toby Coulson)

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Nature's good humor...



Thank you well wishers. After several days of sad paralysis, Chi Chi is miraculously opting for more cat-like routines. She's eating, going to the bathroom, and best yet, trying to walk, a few steps at a time - wobbly like a town drunk, and toppling over frequently. But it's real progress and a fucking joy to see her return to the living after that scare.

We're not out of the woods yet. The steroids we're giving her are definitely not good for her already compromised heart. And yet they certainly seem to be putting those herniated discs in their proper place. One day at a time. She'll do what she needs to do on her end, and we'll tap some medical modernity on ours.

Perhaps nature puts up with some of our interventions, even sees the good in them, like a grandpa who let's his granddaughter put his hair in ribbons.

("Photogram Beneath the Stencil, Fall, Aomori Prefecture" by Jane Alden Stevens)

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Good thoughts for Chi Chi...



Our little Chi Chi isn't doing so well. Compression in her spinal cord has left her back legs paralyzed. She's a fighter and a lover, but she'll be needing your good thoughts. She's not in pain, she just looks at us with her typically alert eyes that say, what's up with the bum hindquarters? I'd like to wander!

("Chi Chi in the Cone of Shame" painting by Hanna Williams)

Monday, May 09, 2011

Aesthetic camouflage...



I say uggh to Monday funks where all the games and art come across as rotting denials of something heavier, more core, more brutal. It's such a plodding moralistic lens. Move on weightiness. I don't know what to do with you today...

Sunday, May 08, 2011

Towing the line...



The provincial Don Giovannis have no talent for original sin.
Or worse, they have no original talent for sin.

Happy Mother's Day!

Saturday, May 07, 2011

Local Bubble...



I'll bottle you yet, damned elusive sublime thing that climbs inside and mocks the day with immodest eyes and molten core. Mark my worms! Your camelback knife-edge prickling skin tricks are mine. I'm chasing those blue-green jackrabbits over blowing grass ridges, under clear lakes, splicing into electric braids of nerves and root hairs, end to end, tiptoe rib vistas, black jungle vines, bolting across a red-orange thorax full of neatly combusting suns. I'm bagging your rhythms, breathing your gasses, logging your architecture, jam jars of aerial ecstasy and subterranean secrets. All of it.

("Oil Spill #13" by Ed Burtynsky)

Thursday, May 05, 2011

For something...



Bob Dylan once sang about serving somebody. Which body? The poor? The sick? The nerdy? I'll get there. For now, I'm just down with my girls, Sarah and Chi Chi. So I'll serve them... (with fava beans... mwaaahaahaaa!!)

No, as it stands, the doing has got to be for something. When so much is for nought, a falsetto impression mighty imply that nothing matters. Who can focus in a universe that keeps expanding into whimpering antimatter? But act for something and shit happens. The pieces fall into place. Alignment baby! The universe opens up with a bang!

Right. So then... Which something?

(MIchael Stevenson "Das Gift" from ‘Argonauts of the Timor Sea’)

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

A girl named Stanley...



I've been seeing (Stanley), like that, in parentheses, before Obama mama Ann Dunham's name for years. I always just assumed it was the surname she was born with. Boy was I wrong.

"After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her father joined the United States Army and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita. Named after her father because he wanted a son, as a child and teenager she was known as Stanley. Other children teased her about her name but she used it through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town. By the time Dunham began attending college, she was known by her middle name, Ann, instead."
(via Wikipedia)

Her life story is pretty extraordinary. She was tough. She was visionary.
She was Stanley.

Monday, May 02, 2011

some days it's hard to make music...