Tuesday, November 30, 2010

the way we were

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_la5jdbwB1t1qzyw2xo1_500.jpg

…This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom…Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures… 
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) Garden of Forking Paths, Ficciones. From the Tao of Photography.
via:

Monday, November 29, 2010

Maurice Blanchot on Orpheus and Eurydice


 But not to turn toward Eurydice would be no less untrue. Not to look would be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his [Orpheus’] movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, her distance, with her closed body and sealed face—wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of an familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of her death…
 

text: invisiblestories:
image: memorybook

Friday, November 26, 2010

intrusions of beauty

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_las3k86zPR1qbsy7ko1_500.jpg
Ballet Dancers, California
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
Saul Bellow, Herzog   (via aperfectcommotion)crashinglybeautiful 




Photograph by James L. Amos, National Geographic:

Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.
text— Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)



image: colettesaintyves:
La fille de l’eau, Jean Renoir, 1924.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

speak, memory


witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
_ Vladimir Nabokov
In the depths of the forest your image follows me.
_ Racine
via: Louis Boudreault
title: nabokov
image:

Sunday, November 21, 2010

“it is wrong to speak of ‘situations,’ implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension, there were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there"

http://www.designboom.com/cms/images/erica/---jim/jim12.jpg  
 There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena. It was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless, or at least less purposeful than the activities of those who, for example, hung green and blue paper lanterns from the warm gray underside, in certain streets, or seized the occasion to write messages on the surface, announcing their availability for the performance of unnatural acts, or the availability of acquaintances.

the balloon, donald barthelme
image jim-kazanjian

Saturday, November 20, 2010

remember what you wore

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REPORTS:
Remember exactly what you were wearing during a recent significant moment. Maybe it was the day that your boyfriend broke up with you, or the day your nephew was born, or the day you decided to become a vegetarian. It should be something that happened in the last six months. Lay out what you were wearing on the floor, as if you are dressing an invisible, flat person. Tuck the shirt in to the pants, the socks in to the shoes, etc. Don't forget the other things that complete your outfit such as jewelry, purse, hat, etc. Do not add anything extra, like a wig or a mask - just the clothes you were wearing. Stand on a chair or table and photograph the clothes from directly above. Not from above at a slight angle, but so that the camera is pointing straight down. Send us the photo, along with the importance of the day, for example, "What I Was Wearing When I Got The Phone Call About Grandma Marris Dying." Please try and keep your title/description as short as possible. Do not write on the actual photograph, and make sure your photo is in focus. Note: avoid moments that you knew would be significant and so dressed accordingly - such as graduation or Halloween. The outfit itself does not need to be significant, it is just what you happened to be wearing when something of emotional significance happened.

Project:learning to love you more
:the drifter and the gypsy

DOCUMENTATION:

"This is the outfit I wore when I realized I didn't need you anymore."
Susan Ann
Dallas, Pennsylvania USA




Sam Winston: birthday

  • By the time you’ve read this sentence three people have been born into the world.
    By the time you’ve read this sentence two will have passed away.
    By the time you’ve lived through this twelve-hour day there will be 100,000 more children on the planet. And in the same twelve hours 70,000 people will have died.
    Birthday is a new work by artist Sam Winston. In it he records every individual birth and death over a twelve-hour period. Initially he imagined working in real time, marking the beat of each life with a small circle. But he immediately realised it was impossible to keep up with events and it would take many months to graphically capture the rhythm of life and death. The result is a set of images, of haunting intensity, that capture the ebb and flow of the planet’s population.
    Alongside these drawings he will be presenting his new artist book, Orphan, and further studies around text and image. The artist will also be in residence throughout the duration of the exhibition creating a new work.
  • “His methods of production are certainly of our time: statistics, data collection and analysis, computer programming. Yet he is dependent on craft as well: drawing, doodling, cutting and folding. Concepts are revealed and emerge through his interrogation, until they are utterly logical and clear. They are also inspiring, leading the viewer to a fresh understanding of an art that can be constructed from typography, opening onto a beautiful aesthetic composed of text as image.”
    Esther Dudley, Lecturer in Design History, School of Art & Media Plymouth University
  •  
  • all from:  SAM WINSTON

Friday, November 19, 2010

falling


Damiel;
It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say "Now." Now and now" and no longer "forever" and "for eternity." To sit at an empty place at a card table and be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretense. Wrestling with one, allowing a hip to be put out in pretense, catching a fish in pretense, in pretense sitting at tables, drinking and eating in pretense. Having lambs roasted and wine served in the tents out there in the desert, only in pretense. No, I don't have to beget a child or plant a tree but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackended fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one's teeth. As you're walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say "ah" and "oh" and "hey" instead of "yea" and "amen."  


Catherine Hessling, La fille de l’eau, Jean Renoir, 1924.
text:  Wings of Desire
image via: shinyslingback reblogged ratak-monodosico

Thursday, November 18, 2010

re-tweet

“Charge, angry youth”

“A woman in China has been sentenced to a year in a labour camp” for a tweet.
We encourage those of you who use Twitter to re-tweet her statement (“Charge, angry youth”) in protest.

Reposted from The Rumpus via: evencleveland

so fully lived

 

“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.”
— Marcel Proust

 Source: theboatlullabies
 liquidnight:
 reblogged thomerama

Monday, November 15, 2010

words in air


... Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice boards, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase —
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?


Almost 20 years after they met, Lowell wrote to Bishop: "How wonderful you are, dear, and how wonderful that you write me letters. What a block of life has passed since we met."
When Lowell died, Bishop wrote an elegiac poem called "North Haven," referring to the island in the Penobscot Bay where both had spent time:

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue ... And now — you've left
for good. You can't derange, or re-arrange,
poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

Words in Air, correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
http://media.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2008/dec/words_200.jpg?t=1248631382 

 via: here

Saturday, November 13, 2010

rilke

 http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3038/3033584541_6a09d31f32_z.jpg?zz=1 


  Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs-

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
  :image

Sunset,  Rainer Maria Rilke
 

  

Friday, November 12, 2010

free

http://www.newmuseum.org/free/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/b_Fitch.jpg
from the catalog:
“Free” will propose an expansive conversation around how the internet has affected our landscape of information and notion of public space. [].  The title and featured works present a complex picture of the new freedoms and constraints that underlie our expanded cultural space.

** “Free” is inspired in part by “Dispersion” (2001–), an essay by the artist Seth Price that is available as a free online booklet and will be featured within the exhibition as a large-scale sculptural installation composed of nine panels each imprinted with a page from the original booklet.                                     


 new museum, nyc



                                                                                        
                                                                    

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

workworkworkworkwork

http://img-ak.verticalresponse.com/media/5/d/e/5de9edb125/901fce66c0/0f09a8ce2b/library/ledray_email.jpg?__nocache__=1http://whitney.org/image_columns/0026/1503/shoes_179.jpg

 Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork

November 18, 2010–February 13, 2011

http://img-ak.verticalresponse.com/media/5/d/e/5de9edb125/901fce66c0/0f09a8ce2b/library/whitney.gif?__nocache__=1
"Over the past twenty years, New York-based sculptor Charles LeDray (b. 1960, Seattle) has created a highly distinctive and powerful body of work using such materials as sewn cloth, carved human bone, and glazed ceramics. This major survey, which includes works from the 1980s to the present, celebrates both the artist’s virtuosity with materials and his uncanny manipulation of scale to create seemingly familiar objects that engage the collective memory. His techniques of sewing, carving bone, and throwing clay pots find precedents in the traditions of folk art and visionary art, yet rise to a level of unprecedented virtuosity and artistic invention. The exhibition is curated by Randi Hopkins for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Its Whitney installation will be overseen by curator Carter Foster."
via: whitney

Sunday, November 7, 2010

writing

willow-whispers:
“I borrow weighty words /Then labor heavily so that they might seem light.”

Wislawa Szymborska
via giulageranium
image reblogged: willowwhispers

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames?



Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames? Female chastity violated? Then by all means, vote for Thomas Jefferson. 

 

(via Reason) All of the claims in these attack ads are from the original sources. 

Friday, November 5, 2010

book on rocks

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lays7e9zLE1qzx3w3o1_500.jpg

Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.
Graham Greene reblogged willow-whispers: (via kari-shma)
image via booklover

Thursday, November 4, 2010

The Baldessari Variations

DESCRIPTION 
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica © John Baldessari “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell,” 1966–1968.
 
Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Prada An installation view of John Baldessari’s “The Giacometti Variations,”2010.

Tally

This is a place for art, literature, poetry....so this will be my last thought on WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
http://www.michelebachmannsaidwhat.com/images/banner_300_said.png
"The human brain is a "cognitive miser"- it can employ several approaches to solving a given problem, but almost always chooses the one that requires the least computational power: 
"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution. Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? A) Yes B) No C) Cannot be determined "More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence. "Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick. "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? "Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems."  Image: blog link
Text: delancy place -Author: Keith E. Stanovich
Title: "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss"
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: November/December 2009
Pages: 35-36

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

VOTE

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxBOso3ykMP-m0766s5NqI9UgfCnhhvTHrdCYoMchIUeXXyowJ4LjFmr0J2GbsoXWcLfD8cvEbOu8rMMFBKtmgKvtsF_s_V0gLCDDqxFJ6yKMM8n9ZbMoym3sOHcPIBrz1Ht_EEvXIR1Cm/s400/vote2010-small.jpg 
 "...if you still do not know where your polling place is, please go here & find out. (scan of sign we proudly display)"
via: bricolage