things I like this week, vol. 38

Faux sherling-lined velvet mouse slippers, which I would find a way to wear everywhere.

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Hell yes, Amanda Palmer. Hell yes.

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Could be useful.

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A NY Times article entitled "Battle of the Somm," which explained a good deal of jargon as well as some interesting tidbits, my favorite of which was:

Although the cheapest wines ANCHOR prices on a list, Somms are anxious to offer good wines at every PRICE POINT and often take pride in finding excellent wines for the shallow end of the list. However, many diners are embarrassed to order the cheapest wine on offer and erroneously suppose there is some magic inherent in the second-cheapest bottle.

The bolded, capped vocab words got a bit obnoxious, though.

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Found it while looking for a good stock photo of blues dancers.

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Ode to Broken Things

Things get broken 
at home 
like they were pushed 
by an invisible, deliberate smasher. 
It's not my hands 
or yours 
It wasn't the girls 
with their hard fingernails 
or the motion of the planet. 
It wasn't anything or anybody 
It wasn't the wind 
It wasn't the orange-colored noontime 
Or night over the earth 
It wasn't even the nose or the elbow 
Or the hips getting bigger 
or the ankle 
or the air. 
The plate broke, the lamp fell 
All the flower pots tumbled over 
one by one. That pot 
which overflowed with scarlet 
in the middle of October, 
it got tired from all the violets 
and another empty one 
rolled round and round and round 
all through winter 
until it was only the powder 
of a flowerpot, 
a broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock 
whose sound 
was 
the voice of our lives, 
the secret 
thread of our weeks, 
which released 
one by one, so many hours 
for honey and silence 
for so many births and jobs, 
that clock also 
fell 
and its delicate blue guts 
vibrated 
among the broken glass 
its wide heart 
unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up 
glass, wearing out clothes 
making fragments 
breaking down 
forms 
and what lasts through time 
is like an island on a ship in the sea, 
perishable 
surrounded by dangerous fragility 
by merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together 
-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold -- 
into a sack and carry them 
to the sea 
and let our possessions sink 
into one alarming breaker 
that sounds like a river. 
May whatever breaks 
be reconstructed by the sea 
with the long labor of its tides. 
So many useless things 
which nobody broke 
but which got broken anyway.

 - Pablo Neruda (of course), trans. Jodey Bateman

. . .

 

It's not so much to ask for a huge library with vaulted ceilings, is it?

vonnegut on the blues

 . . . Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today - jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop and on and on - is derived from the blues. 

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country - an atrocity from which we can never fully recover - the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves. 

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.

- Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country

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

. . .

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. 

. . .

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.

. . .

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

. . .

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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things I like this week, vol. 33

It's called "Fireflies on the Water," by Yayoi Kusama. If you look carefully you can see the platform leading from the door of the room so that you can stand in the middle of it.

. . . 

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

 - Anaïs Nin

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I love you, Daddy.

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You have to cut the grass by hand to maintain it, but you can plant anything you want in it - even flowers.

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Love.

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"Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky . . ."

. . .

A list of fifty awful lines from literary sex scenes. They're mostly hilarious, though I question the inclusion of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

. . . 

Shakespeare's grammar does awesome things to your brain. Also, it makes me really happy that the accompanying jpg references Hamlet: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams . . . "

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McCurry the Master and the Yugoslavian Ballet.

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This piercer, J Colby Smith, works at a shop called New York Adorned. Some of the jewelry he makes himself. I love his aesthetic - if I ever make it out there, I'll get something from him.

I usually list septum piercings as my least favorite by far, but these are so pretty and delicate that I'd be almost tempted to get one.

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A fascinating blend of smoulderingly sexy and absurd.

blues house party

wee hours of the morning.

the song that kept the dancing going into the wee hours of the morning.