songs to reunite to

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)

if the seas catch fire

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)

honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at the wedding)

never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girl
and tomorrow and the earth)

- EE Cummings

albums to break up to

Apparently I've been drowning myself in music, lately. Representative songs included.

Tidal.




Sea Change.

in memorandum

how to survive a breakup

1. Waterproof eye makeup. Facing the world with a teary face is demeaning. Use waterproof eyeliner to waterline (covers up the tell-tale red) and then smudge thickly around the outside to disguise puffiness. Waterproof mascara on upper lashes only. When you cry, don't touch your eyes at all, and everything will stay put just fine.

2. Go dancing. Specifically tango. It's physical exercise, so the endorphins will improve your mood. The embrace is essentially a nine to twelve minute hug. It is a happy distraction.

3. Read Emotional Intelligence. Learn the science behind why you feel like shit. Feel slightly better.

4. Tell small numbers of people at a time. Avoid telling work colleagues if you can. Choose small pockets of friends. That way you can retreat to people who know - or people who don't know - depending on your mood. Also, providing even the briefest of explanations several times over in a short amount of time is extremely draining, so it's much better to avoid it if you can.

5. Dress up. Often. Even for going to bed. This is in line with the waterproof makeup trick: if you look like shit, you're going to feel even worse. Looking good on the outside calms some of the storm on the inside.

6. Use your blog for cathartic but very obscure references to the situation. The whole point of having a blog - even if it's a less personal one like mine - is to be able to provide your commentary on the world. Don't embarrass yourself, don't violate anonymity, don't try to offend anyone, and shrug it off if people decide to get offended anyway.

7. Apply for a promotion. Get it. Be grateful that you made good decisions and have a job you love.

8. Retreat into the arms of people who love you. Lean on them. Love your kid, love the cat, love your friends, and lean on the ones who can support you. Discover that you have more people to lean on than you thought. Be grateful.

9. Go dancing more.

10. Keep boxes of tissues in every corner of the house. And in your purse. And your car. This avoids the frustration that comes with having to hunt for several minutes to find something to get the snot off your face.

11. Be empathetic. You don't have it as bad as other people. Your world feels like it is ending; someone else's does, too. Listen carefully to those problems and yours will recede into the background, at least temporarily. This works, surprisingly, even if the problems being described are part of the situation that is making you miserable too.

12. Learn from other people's experiences; commiserate with those going through the same thing at the same time. Tiny Hands and toot's tree pose, for example, have been fantastic inspiration. It is comforting to know that you are not the only one going through a horrific breakup, and good to see that life can, in fact, continue and improve once the breakup is over.

13. Keep a few pregnancy tests handy. You don't need to add to your stress by worrying that your missed period is due to something other than grief.

14. Don't refill your contact prescription. Tears have a tendency to float your contacts out of your eyes, and they make already irritated eyes more irritated. And sometimes even just the slight distance provided by seeing the world through glass is comforting.

15. Find out the truth, whatever it is, at whatever cost. The most destructive thing on this planet is a lie, whether it's one you tell yourself or one someone is telling you. It clouds your judgement. It keeps you from healing. It makes you behave in ways that are not appropriate for the actuality of the situation. The truth, no matter how much it hurts, is the only thing worth having. Find it.

things I like this week, vol. 29

Artemis (one of my favorites of the Greek goddesses). I love what the painter said in an interview: 

That atmosphere is really important for me and especially for my work. I am not interested in what will happen, but only about what’s going on directly before that—before the moment when everything is revealed, because once the audience knows, there is no need for them to think or imagine anymore. If you can capture that moment before the scene’s main event, the story can go off in any direction… From there, it’s up to the viewer’s imagination. It would be different for everyone.

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On repeat.

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Ballerina project in Hawaii. The fragility of her pose and that dress against the mist sort of breaks my heart.  

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These pictures of WW2 workers and servicemen are incredible. I have only ever seen black and whites from this period - the color and the detail is so crisp that they look fake.(Her freckles!)

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The other song I've been playing on repeat the last week. She's a performance artist, and I appreciate that. And the interview she and Neil gave is awesome.  

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Some guy does tons of these. In snow. With snowshoes. Like crop circles, but cooler. (hrhr)

for Colin

 Walking Around

I happen to be tired of being a man.
I happen to enter tailorshops and moviehouses
withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating in a water of sources and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me wail.
I want only a respite of stones or wool,
I want only not to see establishments or gardens,
or merchandise, or eyeglasses, or elevators.

I happen to be tired of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
I happen to be tired of being a man.

Nevertheless it would be delightful
to startle a notary with a cut lily
or slay a nun by striking her on the ear.
It would be lovely
to go through the streets with a sexy knife
and shouting until I froze to death.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

I do not want for myself so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as root and tomb,
subterranean only, a vault with corpses,
stiff with cold, dying of distress.

That is why Monday day burns like petroleum
when it sees me coming with my prison face,
and it howls in its transit like a wounded wheel,
and it takes hot-blooded steps toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into certain moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones stick out the windows,
into certain shoestores with a smell of vinegar,
into streets as frightening as chasms.

There are brimstone-colored birds and horrible intestines
hanging from the doors of the houses that I hate,
there are dentures left forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and fright,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and poisons, and navels.

I walk around with calm, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetfulness,
I pass, I cross by offices and orthopedic shoestores,
and courtyards where clothes are hanging from a wire:
underdrawers, towels and shirts that weep
slow, dirty tears.

- Pablo Neruda (trans. Donald D. Walsh)