9.20.2012

endeavour flyover

The shuttle Endeavour did a low flyover of Tucson this morning on its way to museum status in LA. They did it to honor Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark, who was the shuttle's last pilot. 

With a friend's reminder text and a stroke of luck, I ran outside just in time to see it go past my school.

I had no idea how low 1,500 feet actually is (absurdly low!) and how exciting it would be to see it so close.

I didn't get my camera functioning in time to capture it, but one of my students did: 



And this much better quality shot was taken from just over the mountain you see in the picture above, by a friend of a friend whose name I don't know:


It's nice, when I so often feel fed up with the way our country functions, to see something so awe-inspiring and so positive.

9.18.2012

things I like this week (month), vol. 35, pt.2

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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A really lovely example of musicality.

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 From a friend's facebook.

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An art joke, a pop culture reference, and a social commentary all in one. I'd wear it. 

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For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
 - Ernest Hemingway, Nobel speech

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 Currently my favorite blues video.

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Spain, 1950, from the Sart's vintage reader submissions.

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Found via my friend Elise's new blog. Her commentary is good, so I won't elaborate, but I do love me some Otis Redding. And songs you can blues to.

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I love the look on her face. Tango, at its best, is something like a twelve minute long vertical cuddle to music. 

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I am fascinated by this picture. I didn't like it at first, but the more I look at it, the more details I find that I enjoy - the iPhones face down on the blanket; six figures but no faces, which feels almost like what she's taking a picture of is not the people but the space between them; the incongruous stuffed animals beside the reclining girl who looks so relaxed as to be sleeping.

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I love Like the Vodka for her humor, but she's a beautiful writer, too, and this post about the beach really resonates:

. . . like the distant roar deep within a conch shell pressed to your ear, my need to be near the ocean is muffled but omnipresent. I developed a fantasy around the age of nine or so that involved me as a grown-up, living alone by the sea.  Whenever I had trouble sleeping, I’d conjur a very specific image of where I lived and what I was doing to help me drift off. There was a cottage on stilts right on the beach, shelves and shelves of books, usually a dog but interestingly — no husband or kids. Very Gift from the Sea, years before I had actually read it. In my fantasy it was always cold and dark but I was tucked snugly away in the little house, wrapped in a white fisherman’s sweater at a desk by a window overlooking the moonlit beach. In my fantasy I was an accomplished writer and I’d be composing something brilliant on a typewriter. A manual typewriter. This was a mid-’70s fantasy, after all.

I still summon that image on nights when I can’t fall asleep, although some important details have changed. There’s room now for a husband and son, and I’ve traded up to a laptop. But outside the window of the little cottage the moon still shines bright and cold on the infinite water.

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I have always loved this description, accurate or no. (Scans from here). 

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Laura does not only make pictures, she makes good pictures.

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The instrumental before and after the main part of the song is wonderful.

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9.13.2012

things I like this week (month), vol. 35, pt. 1


I'm not normally a fan of this woman's work, but something about this keeps drawing me back in. Perhaps I'm just in a water color mood.


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Slim Paley did an entire post on watercolor, but these wallpapers were my favorite.


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Zombie nouns. Ew. 


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An essay about death and my lovely city (how strange to hear about it from an outsider's perspective):
After a few days of searching, I found an explanation in the words of an articulate Mexican woman when I asked her what was with all the comical skeleton drawings. “We do that on purpose,” she said, “dress them up like the rich. Look at you now. Who cares about your clothes? You’re still dead, aren’t you?”


Appropriate, considering that the Day of the Dead parade is just around the corner. I can't wait.


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This guy did 30 portraits of himself on 30 different days doing 30 different drugs (or combos). The results are fascinating.


This is absinthe, and the one below is crystal meth.





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An essay about the idiocy of the locks symbolizing love on Paris' bridges:

“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?” was the conclusion recently of a 23-year-old waiter at Panis, a cafe on the Left Bank with a view over Notre-Dame. At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about possession or property. Love is no prison where two people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness. 

To understand love in the French style, you need to go back to the 16th century and the emergence of the libertines. If today the word means “dissolute person,” in France it has also retained its 16th-century flavor, carrying with it an air of much-envied audacity and liberty. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term, they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and banal. 

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Neil Gaiman, as a child, climbing a drainpipe. From his facebook.

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Here, here, and here.


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11 songs inspired by literature.

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Real working tents (so the site boasts [I know nothing about tents]), but in awesome designs. This one is the best. I want it desperately.

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Maynard, in a Playboy interview, about Arizona wine being awesome:
I have a blend that’s basically a Cab/Syrah/Petite Syrah blend with a dash of Mavasia in it — Anubis — that’s pretty solid; it just won a silver medal in the San Francisco International Wine Competition. This is the first year that an Arizona wine won not only a gold medal but a double gold medal. Three different A.Z. winemakers got medals this year: I got two medals, Tim White from Arizona Stronghold won a double gold for their Cabernet, and Page Springs Cellars got two silvers and a bronze. In a situation like that when you have three completely separate winemakers from different places in Arizona, for them to medal at all in a blind competition certainly speaks volumes.
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(more to come)

9.04.2012

ode to babyhood

So many of my friends are either pregnant or toting around squirmy, adorable bundles that I got nostalgic and went back through videos of J when she was tiny.

Below is the never-before-published footage of my one year old kid babbling away, and my absurd mommy-voice responses. You know, you say you'll talk to your kid in a grown-up voice, but the mimic reflex kicks in . . .

Anyway. I suppose one can get away with one chubby-cheeked, round-eyed, look-how-cute-my-kid-is post occasionally, right?





My favorite part is that she is somehow still just like herself in this video, even though now she uses multi-syllabic words and chooses her own clothes.