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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home

"Tell me more about your valley," she said to Moomintroll. 

"It's the most wonderful valley in the world," he answered. "There are blue-trees with pears growing on them, and chatterfinches sing from morning till night, and there are plenty of silver poplars, which are wonderful for climbing--I thought of building a house for myself in one of them. Then, at night, the moon is reflected in the river, which tinkles over the rocks with a sound like broken glass, and pappa has built a bridge that is wide enough for a wheelbarrow."

"Must you be so poetic?" said Sniff. "When we were in the valley you only talked about how wonderful other places were." 

"That was different," said Moomintroll.

"But it's true," said Snufkin. "We're all like that. You must go on a long journey before you can really find out how wonderful home is."

- from Comet in Moominland, by Tove Jansson