Today

If you can't be there, it is on Comedy Central starting at noon- est.

the only thing

“Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.”

—	Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)  image:booklover via : carli kirstin

catch 22

 "All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"



— Kurt Vonnegut
:image

“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.”

 
"...behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are part of the work of art.”

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
image :kandinsky_

CRaZy stuff

Crazed Violent Stick Figures (PHOTOS)

The 15 Greatest 'South Park' Movie Parodies (VIDEOS)

The Nerdiest Wedding Cake Toppers Of All Time (PHOTOS)

Unnecessary & Disturbing Celebrity Perfumes (PHOTOS)

The Most Ridiculous Senior Yearbook Quotes Ever (PHOTOS)

Hello Kitty, Teen Wolf & More: The Funniest Halloween Costumes For Pets! (PHOTOS)

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains." -
Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor, 2007

:more

 Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.

Bertrand Russell : here
:image

Mud Love

     
We each of us brothers each take into each one of our hands a hammer and a handful of rusty, bent-back nails, and we run around town one night nailing and hammering all of the unnailed things that we see around town: boots and buckets, baseball gloves and fishing rods, bikes and kites and rowboats that no longer float, sandboxes, fish nets, little girl dolls without any clothes on, garden hoses, swimming pools, lawnchairs and barstools, baseballs, basketballs, horseshoes and stacks of magazines, books, typewriters, boxes filled with birth certificates, baby pictures, postcards and poems, love notes scrap-paper-scribbled by the hands of faceless names, baby strollers, rollerskates, knapsacks and sleds, dusting brooms, spare tires, chairs that rock in the wind: one by one we each of us each take these things into the hands of us brothers, and we nail these things, and other things too—dog houses, barbecues, sleeping bags and tents (have we yet mentioned fish? fish heads? fish eyes that never stop staring?), milk crates, wooden ladders, mud-crusted shovels, frayed pieces of rope. Get the picture? And last but not least, us brothers, we take hammer and we take nail to the each of us brothers. We take each other by the hand. We take our hammers and nails and we hammer and nail all of these things, one by one at a time, we hammer all of these things into trees and into fencing posts, into backyard telephone poles and into the shingled sides of houses. But first, before we do the hammering in, we cover up all of these things with mud—this, to protect them, this, so that when somebody else comes into our town all that they see is mud. Us brothers, what we see, what we know, is everything that is under the mud: any thing and every thing in and of and from our dirty river town that might be up and picked up or taken away to some other place to be got rid of—some other place without all this mud and smoke and rust, a town, a world, without a muddy river running through it. And so, because of this, up against this, us brothers, we do what we can to stop this from happening. So this is what us brothers do. What we do is, we raise back our hammers. We line up those rusted nails.

:Peter Markus. 
:image

have a look

LACHLAN TURCZAN

Underground

 New York 1981

 
"In that station" "grow white flowers" "large blossoms" "that are faces," "with eyes closed." The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley

more:
i-phone sketchbook: blog
:city room
:subwayartblog
 :images through the ages
 all via NY Times

the sense of wonder

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"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world."  Marc Chagall

"IN THE END THEY ARE ONLY ONE"

"IN THE END THEY ARE ONLY ONE"

 "There have been many cities in my life. Huge towering glass and steel places rising up from an endlessly flat-faced horizon. Green marble and golden art deco monuments bursting up to the endless above. Black foreboding architecture lurking from the sidewalks behind me. Creeping bungalows. Crouching walk-ups. Cobblestone streets and gray sandstone facades. Yellow Jura-stone arches and Romanesque blocks rising up and up to spires and steeples thrusting forever skyward. Grids and circles. Grillwork and swollen balconies. Steps and terraces. Wide Plazas and marketplaces. The cities are vast and numberless and I will never see them all. Never go back to them all. Some are empty on a late winter night. Others are bustling with humanity on a bright summer day. All are crystal clusters hugging terribly to the dark edge of the world. They are built and rebuilt, and they are dismantled and they are built again. Named and renamed. The cities are endless but in the end they are only one." INVISIBLE CITIES

In 2008 J R pasted giant portraits of women on houses in a dangerous area of Rio de Janeiro. He has created similar guerrilla art in Cambodia and Kenya and is at work on a project in Shanghai.
:NY Times 

:more photos 
;image 1.

"Pictures must be miraculous." Rothko

"an elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer."

Lee Krasner
Gaea
1966

No. 5/No. 22
1950 (dated on reverse 1949)

Mark Rothko
No. 1 (Untitled)
1948

No. 1 (Untitled)
1948

Jackson Pollock
Easter and the Totem
1953

Barnett Newman
Vir Heroicus Sublimis
1950-51

"Pictures must be miraculous."

pollock at moma

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.
Jackson Pollock

a writing desk

Jane Austen's desk

:image 

"You fold the dish towel. You remind me of someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen?" excerpt: Great House

Illustration by André Da Loba

 Great House 

Dov had wished to become a writer, but the father, in an outraged protest against literature’s elective affinity with suffering, squashed the ambition. “Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence?” 

"To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its allotted space with humility. ... This desk was something else entirely. An enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a venus fly trap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers. Perhaps you think I'm making a caricature of it. I don't blame you. You'd have to have seen the desk with your own eyes to understand that what I'm telling you is perfectly accurate."  Nicole Krauss

:NY Times, : npr 

Blacksmith Institute

 

Blacksmith Institute works in some of the world's worst polluted places, sharing resources and expertise with local groups and agencies to solve pollution problems, clean up polluted sites, and save lives.

Blacksmith President Richard Fuller Profiled in Time Magazine

Blacksmith In the News

• WATCH VIDEO: CNN reports on Blacksmith's emergency toxic lead cleanup in Nigeria, CNN, June 14, 2010
  
• Nigeria tries to end "gold rush"after child deaths , Reuters Jun 9th, 2010
• Gold, and lead, bring illness and death in Nigeria, Associated Press, June 10th, 2010
• Lead Poisoning From Mining Kills 163 in Nigeria , Reuters Jun 4th, 2010
• Nigeria Lead Poisoning: "Hundreds" Could Die , BBC Jun 7th, 2010
• 163 people die from lead poisoning in northern Nigerian state , Irish Times Jun 8th, 2010

Alliction: from Latin afflictus, past participle of affligere to cast down, from ad- + fligere to strike

Whitney

Always this is a good thing

TROUBADOUR: AN AUTIOBIOGRAPHY, by Alfred Kreymborg. New York. Boni & Liveright. 1925. 415 pages.

There are many histories of us then and now and they are written now and they are often written now. Many histories of us are often written now. Sometimes in the histories of us each one of us is different from the others of us and the one writing the history of himself and us is different in his history of himself and from us. In this history of us of himself and us Kreymborg makes us makes himself and each one of us different enough so that some one can know us. That is very nice for him and for us and very pleasant for him and for us and very satisfying to him and to us. We are all pleased with him and with us and so we say that he has made a very good description of himself and of each one of us. A history of himself and of each one of us and connections of more than one of us is a very sensitive thing a sensitive history of himself and of each one of us and of some who are ones and one. Always this is a good thing.

Gertrude Stein, review of Alfred Kreymborg's Troubador (1925) [This review appeared in the literary magazine Ex Libris (published in Paris by the "American Library in Paris"), issue of June 1925, p. 278. For an image (290k) of the Ex Libris page on which the Stein review appeared, click here.] 

All: Al Filreis 

arrivals/departures

 "Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning."
— Cormac McCarthy

image: arrivals - departures

daily dose of imagery

Bigger version on flickr.

the climate of sighs flung across our world

"Mere forgetfullness cannot remove it

Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains

The white precipitate of its dream

In the climate of sighs flung across our world,

A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that

What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific

Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form

Steeped in the nostalgia of a collected past."

 
from: SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR

John Ashbery

sarah hermans

The huge summer has gone by.

          Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.

Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,

and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;

grant them a few more warm transparent days,

urge them on to fulfillment then, and press

the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

Whoever is alone will stay alone,

will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,

and wander the boulevards, up and down,

restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

: image: Sebastian Waters via  s w o o n d (née diana:muse) 

Economics 101

John Reed: Profits.

John Reed: All right, Miss Bryant, do you want an interview? Write this down. Are you naïve enough to think containing German militarism has anything to do with this war? Don't you understand that England and France own the world economy and Germany just wants a piece of it? Keep writing, Miss Bryant. Miss Bryant, can't you grasp that J. P. Morgan has loaned England and France a billion dollars? And if Germany wins, he won't get it back! More coffee? America'd be entering the war to protect J. P. Morgan's money. If he loses, we'll have a depression. So the real question is, why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won't lose money?

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via: REDS

Economics 101

John Reed: Profits.

John Reed: All right, Miss Bryant, do you want an interview? Write this down. Are you naïve enough to think containing German militarism has anything to do with this war? Don't you understand that England and France own the world economy and Germany just wants a piece of it? Keep writing, Miss Bryant. Miss Bryant, can't you grasp that J. P. Morgan has loaned England and France a billion dollars? And if Germany wins, he won't get it back! More coffee? America'd be entering the war to protect J. P. Morgan's money. If he loses, we'll have a depression. So the real question is, why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won't lose money?

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via: REDS

Just read

 "As a result of this strategy for passing unnoticed, within a few minutes I was lost.  To make things worse, there were no signs to guide visitors and the rooms were not numbered consecutively, which made it extremely difficult to orient oneself; similarly, the combined effect of the erratic stairways, each unlike the others but all burdened with superfluous landings, and the circular and semi-circular corridors, was such that the canniest visitor would sooner or later have been unable to say what floor he was on.  And my predicament was exacerbated by a determination not to ask questions"

- Roberto Bolaño  Monsieur Pain.

'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.'  
It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing."

- Roberto Bolaño (2666)