rhyming action

White Dr. Martens for the goddaughter. APC for me.

seeing what happens

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Kiki Smith, Blue Girl, 1998

cut off

Genius cut off boots from Ascot Friday. A nod to this Golden Goose

Scout Holiday

Scout Holiday's Wish List is my wish list. 2008 too.

clamoring storm

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. Vladimir Nabokov

Syoin kajii via gotsalviento via Pour Porter

mislaid

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.

Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse

Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.

- Lorrie Moore, from "Self Help"
Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton

novels do not get easier to write

Miss Mazure's face was wildly askew. Every feature went its own way, and her nose was a large distraction

- All Souls by Christine Schutt
Image: The Ugly Earring

where art happens

The goddaughter at San Francisco Institute of Art.

you forget what you want to remember

"When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac's typewriter," Glenn Horowitz told the New York Times. "It's as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss army knife." NYT via Guardian.

if I thought you would, I'd never leave

A bit of an obsession with ERIE BASIN | tumblr
Mittens and this artist, Jazmin Berkha, at even*cleveland
Pour Porter via Karey M's (Mackin Ink & T. Ruffles) favorites
grijs always
This bear embrace
The folks at Backyard Bill
Every bag Nivaldo de Lima ever made
And something joyful about forty-sixth at grace

Solar System Quilt circa 1876 via ERIE BASIN | tumblr via Look Mom
(Now Voyager would love this quilt)

the matter

"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is." Nabokov

Photo: Larry Bercow

what writers wear

Of course clothes are more fun if you leave the house once in a while.

Charlotte Rampling, Paris 2009 by Albrecht Fuchs via Horse Hunting

Ara Peterson: Turns Into Stone

At Ratio 3 (since I missed him at MACRO).

unless you feel

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die. Robertson Davies

Lyell Fall 2006

it is not your business

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. Martha Graham via Dear Genius, The Letters of Ursala Nordstrom

Cy Twombly, Ferragosto V, 1961

we can never know

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Peggy Gugenheim in Venice

ryan mcginley

Made it to Rome before I did.

Ryan McGinley. Jonas Snow Barn Disco, 2009

perfect pairing

"As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened." Kazuo Ishiguro

Reading: A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
Viewing: The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography at MOMA

colour

Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple, 1949

and there's no cure for that

"You're on earth. There's no cure for that." Samuel Beckett

Image from Melancholia

camera crush

Alessandra.

when despair seized the author

This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask, with interest, "Does genius burn, Jo?" They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on, in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew, and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor.

From Little Women
Photo: Lyell Fall 06

l'ennui

Sylvia Plath's copy of The Great Gatsby via Melancholia

what is missing?

"I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world." Maya Lin.

Saw What is Missing? at the California Academy of Sciences. Also spending time at (and writing imaginary letters to) Ugly Earring and new to me, Wendy's blog.

thinking I was dorothy

"As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are to not have one. Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable." Wizard of Oz via Melancholia

Conroy + Wilcox ring at Erie Basin

after betty

"I've always felt the gap between words and things, the impossibility of articulating what's really out there in the world, the strangeness of naming everything, including the self, how completely arbitrary it all is, and yet, at the same time, how it determines identities."

Siri Hustvedt in conversation with Thisbe Nissen
Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Painting: Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988

I'll go on

Beckett

bibliotheque

Bibliotheque dress via unruly things

junction of amends

When she talks about meeting her birth parents, the first things Sandra McPherson mentions are the wildflowers. When the thirty-seven-year-old poet first approached her birth parents' Northern California house, she saw wildflowers and mushrooms spilling across the lawn and began staring at their whorls and shapes, naming them in her head. For her whole life, not knowing her own birth name, Sandra McPherson has been mesmerized by naming things their right names...

From "Junction of Amends; Sandra McPherson's Poetics of Adoption" by Jan VanStavern
Photo by Gareth McConnell Lyell Fall 2006

I open the window and ask

Porter and Hollister were featured in NYT today (above) and if you haven't already, vote for Porter's appearance in Mad Men by giving her 5 stars. That would really make my day.

drift

"In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment."

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Photo NYT

it needs some wild darling

Test shots of the tremendous goddaughter.

the killers

The gunman is useless.
I know it.
He knows it.
The whole bank knows it.

I am the Messenger, Markus Zusak
Photo: The Selby

any question of the moral

"But any question of the moral inevitably raises—for the artist, at least—the question of the beautiful." John Banville in conversation with Ben Ehrenreich, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Golden Goose Distressed Sneakers, La Garçonne

reading to an empty room

Paul Auster: There's a great entry in Kafka's diaries in which he describes an imaginary writer in the process of giving a public reading. So-and-so is up there onstage, and people are getting restless and bored. "Just one more story," he says, "just one more..." People start getting up and leaving. The doors keep slamming shut, and he goes on begging, "just one more, one more," until everyone is gone and he's left alone at the podium, reading to an empty room.

Paul Auster & Jonathan Lethem
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
Painting, Egon Schiele via Rooms

in the third act

At the end of the drama THE TRUTH—which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied—prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.

... We recall how each attempt (each act) seemed to offer the solution, and how raptly we explored it, and how disappointingly we (the hero) were on finding we had been wrong, until:

At the End of the Play, when we had, it seemed, exhausted all possible avenues of investigation, when we were without recourse or resource, (or so it seemed), when we were all but powerless, all was made whole. It was made whole when the truth came out.

-- Three Uses of the Knife, Mamet
Photo: Mociun via Lena Corwin

promise me you'll always remember

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

Christopher to Pooh, A.A. Milne
Painting: '61 Pontiac, 1968-69, Robert Bechtle

all desire

Lucy Corin loves Frank O’Hara’s "Morning."

Photo Sally Singer, The Selby

in a dress my mother made

"I was married ten years ago, on a brazenly warm day in January, from my father's house, in a dress my mother made, with the same blithe blindness that sends a bungee jumper off a bridge" For Better or Worse by Lynn Darling

Photo by Estelle Hanania via Montmartre's Sketchbook
(Reminiscent of a Gerhard Richter painting)

let's begin by

A sorta completely genius post from Now Voyager.

the mysterious edge

"Ninety percent of who you are is invisible." E.L. Konigsburg, The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World

Photo via Either the Drapes Go or I Do

change when it comes

"Change, when it comes, cracks everything open." Dorothy Allison

Via Lucy Corin

people will sometimes say

“. . . people will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women is politics" Grace Paley

Photo: Mociun

why am I treated so bad

I don't care if it's sunny outside, the only thing to do right now is listen to Mavis Staples on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. It may be the best 17 minutes and 27 seconds I ever spent.

Photo from mavistaples.com

men in hats

Leonard Cohen in concert tomorrow and our own Conspiracy of Beards playing a pre-show show at the Paramount. More info here.

happy is the novelist

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Vladimir Nabakov
There are awesome Lolita posts on Now Voyager and Lolita

the only rule is work

For Clara and Glenn. Sister Mary Corita's rules can never be posted enough.

meet me at the center of the earth

Nick Cave's astounding exhibit at Yerba Buena reminded me of Phyllis Galembo's West African photographs. I saw them at Skidmore's Tang a few years ago. More of her work here.

harry smith figures

From the Harry Smith Archives

big love

From today's NYT: "But where the typical...American family seems unified but is secretly divided, the group on “Big Love” seems divided but is secretly joined." And "The book [Under the Banner of Heaven] includes a quotation from DeLoy Bateman, who gave up ­polygamy and then surrendered religious faith entirely. He told Krakauer he doesn’t regret abandoning it. “Some things in life are more important than being happy,” he says, expressing the unmistakable tension at the heart of “Big Love.” "Like being free to think for yourself.""

Photo from chloësevigny.com

unauthorized

JR Art in India. Also, The Hills Have Eyes in Rio de Janiero. JR in Cambodia here.

perfect

Garance doré. It's all in how you stand.

meet me at the center of the earth

Another must see: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents a large scale exhibit of Nick Cave's soundsuits. Through July. Tremendous.

Photo by James Prinz

in the memory of the forest

[ODC/Dance's] Artistic Director Brenda Way’s new work is inspired by the experience of her late mother-in-law, Iza Erlich, who, as a teenager in 1941, walked away from Warsaw. With a girlfriend, she set out across Poland, Germany and Russia to find her future husband who had departed months earlier. Iza recorded her memories on a set of four audiotapes and always imagined that her story might be material for a dance. “Iza, a social worker by trade, believed in the power of art to communicate emotional experience,” said Ms. Way.

In the Memory of the Forest, performances all month by ODC

some days you must

"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything."

E.L. Konigsburg
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler
Photo by Jody Rogac via Simple Lovely

the kiss

"The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again."

Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
Photo Hedi Slimane

style and identity

Minirobot lets go of her Vivienne Westwood boots.

Photo: Garance doré

borrowed bikes

My grandfather on his borrowed bike and me on mine.

what follows

"Writing only leads to more writing." Colette

Photo: Totokaelo

while I slept

Emily and Jennifer went to The Living Desert (their photo).

only too damned well

I only came in here to inquire the way to the nearest cinema. I am a respectable woman, une femme convenable, on her way to the nearest cinema. Faites comme les autres -- that's been my motto all my life. Faites comme les autres, damn you.

And a lot he cares -- I could have spared myself the trouble. But this is my attitude to life. Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don't succeed, but look how hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everybody else. Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, and chained? And, mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. . . But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think -- and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.

Now the waiter has finished telling me how to get to the nearest cinema.

'Another Pernod,' I say.

Good Morning Midnight, Jean Rhys
Photo: August Shop Blog via Dank En

carson hot springs

From Either the Drapes Go or I Do:

You walk in here and tell them you're here and they tell you there are ghosts and if there's a wait you take a walk through the woods where there are mushrooms and violets and fallen trees. To get here you drive along the Columbia river and pass the waterfalls and go over the Bridge of Gods and stop at an antique store where you buy a gold ring for $1 and pick up old pens and glasses. When they say they have tubs available you walk into the water room and get naked in the sulphuric steam and choose a tub length and if you're small like me you choose a short tub. Before you step in they tell you to test the water as it's only hot water and you tentatively ease yourself into the porcelain basin and when you are finally all in you start to cook exquisite with your hair spreading on top like an anemone and you try to sleep but you can't because you are too warm so you look over at Elanor whose body is like an English stem and it feels like being in a salon bath house in the Wild West during Manifest Destiny and every few minutes you take cold swigs of water and pour them over your face. When you stand up on unsure feet they take you to a cot and wrap you tightly in sheets and wool blankets and the only exposed part is your nose and mouth so the only thing to do is breath while cocooned, sweating and sweating, a wet and dark chrysalis. There really isn't anything to think about. There really isn't anything to do but sweat and sleep. When you emerge it is like a peony, unraveling slowly and utterly pink and you need to drink water, a lot of water, and you need to eat fruit, a lot of fruit, but we ate macaroons and drank espresso instead.

read the air

Here.

Bjork and Bernhard Willhelm, Dazed & Confused (2007)

olivetti valentine

Via Pink Ponk's amazing photostream. And this one on ebay.

another pernod

"Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home."

Good Morning Midnight, Jean Rhys
Jil Sander flats on ebay

dodes'ka-den

Japanese writer Yoko Tawada read in San Francisco this week, presented by the Center for the Art of Translation. Something in her reading reminded me of the sunset at the end of Dodes'ka-den (1970), Kurasawa's first color film.

this week

Some small intimacies: ici, Discotheque Confusion, emmas designblogg, Now Voyager, the ugly earring, Simple Lovely, blueberry pancakes and fresh orange juice at ungtblod, Jessica's reading list, and the beautiful place where hoping for happy accidents spends her days.

Photo: le vestiaire de clé

when one is not yet old

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

Watt, Samuel Beckett
Electric moto from Quantya

sunday morning and it's raining

Watching Golden Door (Nuovomundo, 2006). My papa and Lidia would like this film.

Burroughs at 95

Tonight, a birthday party combining two of my favorite things: RE/Search Publications and William Burroughs.

Photo from RE/Search

double negative

There's nothing here I don't want.

Sabrina Dehoff at Creatures of Comfort

poets who write prose

I've been reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn and this remembrance of John Updike by Lucy Corin on The Rumpus, which pointed me to this For This I Believe by John Updike. Oh, and this is wonderful: "I made tea," by Joe Davis (via this is sippey.typepad.com).

overheard

The upside of the downturn.

Photo: Jim Wilson, NYT

cover to cover

Cover to cover this Saturday morning: Silent to the Bone by E.L. Konigsburg. Oh yes, the same Konigsburg who wrote From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Print from the wonderful Dallas Shaw on The Shiny Squirrel

the estrangement

Three years before my mother died, I decided not to speak to her again. And why? During a conversation over the telephone, she had once again let me know that my accomplishments—becoming a responsible and independent woman—did not amount to very much, that the life I lived was nothing more than a silly show, that she truly wished me dead. I didn’t disagree. I didn’t tell her that it would be just about the best thing in the world not to hear this from her.

The Estrangement by Jamaica Kincaid
via Maud Newton
Photo from here

a great joy

Clyfford Still via Either The Drapes Go Or I Do

ofelia

"...in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time..."

Pan's Labyrinth review in NYT

lost at sea

Georgian mourning ring.

what is not there

And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head.

Jean Rhys, Tigers are Better Looking:
With a Selection from the Left Bank

Photo: people of Pankow from Berlin guide

striped butte

In Death Valley National Park, where D. and I spent election night 2008.

Photo by Lynn Radeka

rag & bone

There's plenty to wear in my imaginary closet. Of course, if I really was buying clothes, La Garconne has far and away the best customer service.

like a bird on a wire

I almost missed Maya Lin's Systemic Landscapes. Closing today at the de Young.

amazing grace

"The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's." Marianne Faithfull

this morning fog

knows how to party.

one story

One Story is perfect. It's exactly perfect. One story and nothing else.

wait, wait, don't tell me

minirobot was tagged and I love her post. Made me rethink this tagging thing.

1. My first car was a 1966, pink Plymouth Valiant. Three on the tree.
   
2. I used to think I didn't like kids. I thought not wanting kids was the same as not liking kids. Then I met my goddaughter and I realize it's not the same at all.
3. I have terribly outmoded taste in music. I like some punk and am a sucker for a mournful female vocalist, but if lost on a desert island, I would most miss Simon & Garfunkel.
4. My boyfriend of 14 years is my closest friend and the person whose opinion I most respect in this world.
   
5. I don't see anything wrong with taking two baths in one day.
   
6. The best thing to come from this blog is a friendship with The Ugly Earring.
   
7. I've never owned a Royal Quiet Deluxe. My first typewriter was a rather humble Smith Corona.
8. I really do want Carl Kassel's voice on my home answering machine.

If they were inclined, I would want to know more about Now Voyager and Water and Wool.

Photo of my gorgeous goddaughter

you

From Maud Newton

Now, thirty years later, [Jonathan] Baumbach’s most recent publisher, like his last, has gone under, and in this case the enterprise went belly-up just months after his latest book, You, appeared. My friend Lauren Cerand was so passionate about You, she took Baumbach on as a publicity client despite the difficulties of reviving a book after the initial media window has closed. She and the author have started a site dedicated to the project.

Below Baumbach remembers the circumstances that led him and other writers to create Fiction Collective, and he compares the climate of 1974 with the dire situation publishing finds itself in today.

Read the rest here.

yohji

Y-3 Autumn 2007.

in return

I left for Japan on October 25, 1984, unsuspecting that this date would mark the beginning of a 92 day countdown to the end of a love affair. Nothing extraordinary -- but to me, at the the time, the unhappiest moment of my life, and one for which I blamed that trip itself. I got back to France on January 28, 1985. From that moment, whenever people asked me how it went, I chose to skip the Far East bit and tell them about my suffering instead. In return I started asking both friend and chance encounters: "When did you suffer most?" -- I decided to continue such exchanges until I had got over my pain by comparing it with other people's, or had worn out my own story through sheer repetition.

Exquisite Pain, Sophie Calle
Someday very soon I will have to return this to the SF library

first we believe

“The only sin is mediocrity.” Martha Graham

it feels like a new year

And we can all wear these. Or if you must get married, this.

Photo from LIFE via A Continuous Lean.

watching

Friends with Money (above), Lovely & Amazing, and Walking and Talking. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener.

a particular kind of heaven

The years, she saw, fell heavily as books...

From "Darkest of All" by Christine Schutt

A Particular Kind of Heaven, Ed Ruscha, 1983 (now a triptych at the de Young)

sturdy little volumes

Pocket books.

if you were with me

Mom and I went to Heath Ceramics, Afghanistan, and saw the Soul Children of Chicago. There were temari balls and cookies with D's mom. And chapino with Jeff and Silke, Christmas dinner with Kathleen, Slumdog Millionaire with Clara, elephant seals with Ally and Masin...

Edith Heath from Heath Ceramics: The Complexity of Simplicity

cerillos

Vintage rings.

on holiday

I haven't been here too much lately, I know. When I have a moment, I've been daydreaming over at Scout Holiday. I love her Little Gift Guide and her Holiday Wish List.

Live to Ride (E.P), Elizabeth Peyton

the lives of others

My beau and I finally rented this last night after THIS MORNING FOG's post. I cannot shake the mood of it.

women who write

“Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so.” Marguerite Duras

Bra by DOSA via petit garden

raising arizona

fifth floor

SFMOMA offers a spellbinding retrospective of Martin Puryear. Through January 25.

Photograph by Richard Barnes. ©2007 at MoMA

a fragile eyeful

"...But Miss Golightly a fragile eyeful even though attired like a tomboy in slacks and leather jacket appeared relatively unconcerned..." Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote

Photo, Jon von Pamer

if I in my north room

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

"Danse Russe" William Carlos Williams
Interior from Nightwood

first they're good

“People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.”

Dave Eggers, founder of 826 Valencia

826 Valencia Pirate Posters

inexhaustible engagement

She seemed to be at least twice as alive as most of us—to know everything, to do everything, to be inexhaustibly engaged. Her arresting appearance was familiar even to many nonreaders from the photographs that recorded it over several decades and registered the glamour and magnetism—the sheer size—of her personality, and her celebrity was all the more potent and irreversible because the place she occupied was so far outside the usual radius of the spotlight.

Deborah Eisenberg on Susan Sontag, NYRB
Photo of Susan Sontag and son David Rieff by Diane Arbus
via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger

for you for me

Headband from PIP-SQUEAK-CHAPEAU for my friend Ally, shoes for me.

no. 46

(Black, Ochre, Red over Red) 1957

spending my time

At other pretty things and duskin; dreaming about this dress and listening to This Mortal Coil.

Dress, Duskin Spring 2009

it must suggest something about me has changed

My Love,
I went to Yamamoto to choose my trousseau. For our reunion. I spent hours trying things on. In the end I chose black silk trousers and two shirts to be worn together, a gray one and a blue one. I want everything to be perfect. My outfit must travel well in the plane and suit the circumstances: a reunion in India. It must be elegant but without affectation, chic but understated, and flattering. It must suggest that something about me has changed, a subtle metamorphisis, show you how I've missed you, but that you're not totally indispensable to me and even that I have grown more beautiful, more mature, away from you...

From Exquisite Pain, by Sophie Calle (Thanks SF Library)

who shall say

The Lover, by Marguerite Duras is less than 30,000 words. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by Richard Cain, about 35,000. Fahrenheit 451 about 45,000; and The Great Gatsby, maybe, 50,000.

Photo: Denise Grünstein

maiden & moonflower

"One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your new self into life. Like your skin starts hanging off your arms and stuff, and then you have to think, well that’s really beautiful too. It just isn’t beautiful in a way that I knew it was beautiful before" Kiki Smith.

Kiki Smith Wallpaper at Studio Printworks
Per Paul Pincus' hallway

interpretation

"I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams." Susan Sontag.

Broad Shirt, Le Bouton

change sounds like this

Saw a Youth Speaks performance tonight. Mind blowing.

Photo: San Francisco Chronicle

blue valentine

My favorite imaginary couple.

Short Cuts.

from the haircut file

Facehunter and Toast

me llamen calle

I don't think Manu Chao's Radiolina or the video for Me Llamen Calle won in last night Latin Grammy's, but they should have. Me Llamen Calle, Manu Chao's tribute to s-x workers, is well worth a listen.

I never can quite say

I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife.

"Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" by Robert Olen Butler
Photo from Either The Drapes Go Or I Do

truant

Jessica is sorta wonderful. She has a delicious blog; an inspiring shop; and now, with Erin, a completely cool online travel magazine, Truant. It might be the best thing I ever got for $2.

"I am a Bird" by Mareike Auer available at The Shiny Squirrel

you were saying

"You were saying something nice about me, I can feel it." Samuel Beckett, Eleuthéria

1820s Georgian Coral Ring, Erie Basin

minor obsessions

These honeycomb necklaces from Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons, thin black t-shirts from Acne and American Vintage, anything written by J.M. Coetzee, Kill City jeans, David Byrne, Kern River Valley, Sister Mary Corita, public radio, and Kiki Smith.

Photo The Selby via Jen

so long

I've gone camping and will be back on 11/10. Try: What Possessed Me and DRINK THE NEW WINE (via Hoping for Happy Accidents). And definitely Hollister Hovey. See you soon.

Photo: Cypress Kayaks via Hollister Hovey

FJ40

The love of my life and his Land Cruiser.

maria cornejo

zero + maria cornejo

Photos by Christopher Anderson in NYMag

palm springs

I'm in Palm Springs for the week, a place I don't know all that well. Reading Th1rteen R3asons Why, Story of A Girl, and Living Dead Girl (all YA). Lots of buzz about Living Dead Girl (especially among young adult librarians), most of it positive. Also reading the W with Angelina Jolie on the cover and an amazing spread by Roni Horn inside, Paul Pincus's blog, and the SFMOMA's Nov/Dec newsletter.

Photo: Roni Horn, PBS

a slug of good whiskey

Bloggers have recipes. My friend Jenny has a recipe she promises will make kale taste good. Maybe. I have a recipe too. I got it from a blog (Maud, of course). It's writer Kate Christensen's cure for the common cold. But I find that it'll cure almost anything. The following is excerpted from Maud:

Day two home from work with a killer cold, and my only consolation is novelist Kate Christensen’s hot toddy. Since she passed it along last fall, the drink has eclipsed spicy tomato soup as the Maud household’s preferred remedy. It proves — as we always knew deep in our hearts — that Bourbon cures everything.

Add boiling water to (in the biggest cup in the house; this is no time to fuck around with anything dainty) the juice of 1 lemon, a big wad of honey, a slug of good whiskey [Ed. Note: I’ve been using Maker’s Mark], and as much cayenne pepper as you can tolerate. If it’s morning, add a tea bag.

Photo Nigel Shafran via Horse Hunting

speaking of stella

This Stella McCartney bodysuit via the lovely loveology. My goddaughter has a whole wardrobe of bodysuits she layers under everything. So cool.

watching

Bishop Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson on Iconoclasts. Stella McCartney and Edward Ruscha up next. And this NOVA on Hugh Everett (thanks Kathleen).

hanging out

Reading posts at the ugly earring and listening to Nina Simone at water and wool.

flashback

APC via CITIZEN:Citizen.

would it stand on the wall?

From Tokion, a fantastic interview with Sophie Calle by artist Jill Magid:

Most recently, she [Calle] was behind the most talked about exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Take care of yourself. Calle analyzed an ex-boyfriend’s break-up email by asking 107 women to interpret his words...

Jill Magid: You incorporate a few different methodologies in your work. One of them seems like this natural catalyst—something happens in your life, and then you set [up for] yourself what you call a ‘game.’ So, Take care of yourself was something that happened—a break-up—and then you set up a game—

Sophie Calle: And they have a therapeutic motor aspect, just as a start: ‘What can I do not to suffer?’

Jill Magid: You don’t think you start this process as a work?

Sophie Calle: No, there are different categories, as you say. The category in which it is my life, many times starts as a reaction to something. Like, I received that love letter, what can I do [to] counter it, not just to be a victim of it. Maybe the first step is therapeutic, but if it’s only therapeutic, I may as well go buy a dress at the corner of the street. So, immediately [I think], ‘Would [it] stand on the wall?’ If I think yes, I go on.

Photo: Sophie Calle: Did You See Me?

color of the wind

Face Hunter.

the misfits

The photographers of Magnum Photos were given exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the filming of The Misfits. Led by Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographers arrived on the set in pairs and alternated every two weeks. Nearly 100 photos available on PBS.

one bad sofa

"I always say - a prejudice on my part, I'm sure - you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes." Haruki Murakami. Appearing at UC Berkely this week.

Manuscript page from The Paris Review

muxtape remembers

A Continuous Lean offers up a link for your almost forgotten playlists. My favorite for dancing around the house? This, from someone named Kalpana:

1. The Virgins — Rich Girls
2. Cat Power — New York
3. Nellie McKay — Identity Theft
4. Delta Spirit — Gimme Some Motivation
5. Elizabeth & The Catapult — Waiting for the Kill
6. Mechanical Bride — Umbrella
7. Ray LaMontagne — Three More Days
8. Joe Cocker — The Letter
9. Mark Ronson Ft. Lily Allen — Oh My God
10. Ixley — Luchini (Wounded Mix) - Camp Lo
11. Hellogoodbye — Oh It Is Love
12. Vampire Weekend — A-Punk

VPL Sweater from Creature Comforts

board

General Store via Reference Library.

because boyfriend jeans

Look good on the boyfriend too. Street Walker via STNF.

the old typewriter

"I get up in the morning, that's one of the hard parts, drag myself over to the old typewriter and sit down—that ’s even harder— and then I tell the Lord, 'I ain't greedy, Lord, just give me the next 500 words.'" Harry Crews. (Car, 1st Edition)

and that's the he and the she of it

Somehow I missed Rick Moody's choices on Ubuweb last month. Worth a listen, especially William Carlos William's reading Danse Russe ("I am lonely, lonely/I was born to be lonely/I am best so!").

Dancing Legs Calipers from Erie Basin

original gesture

Lindsey Thornburg cloak via Jen at Sleep Deprivation and Stories of my Bullshit Youth.

what carrie found

Double-waisted, drop-crotch, vintage Vivienne Westwood pants.

to write

"To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write." Gertrude Stein.

Photo by Man Ray.

nope

artis3letters.

fishtail parka

Totokaelo.

where I went

LOLITA.

Photo from hello bum.

5 things

I like about Cali Dewitt: He and Jenna in their bathrobes; how they always look like they're having fun and how their friends all have the best terrible haircuts; this t-shirt; how I kinda want, but am strangely reticent, to buy the blind bargain bag.

the skins are naked

Some glasses for the ugly earring. And a quote from un fille comme moi via Google Translate, "Funny this gradual disappearance of makeup. The skins are naked, eyes less responsible..."

Photo from CaféMode.

waiting for home

Home, by Marilynne Robinson. Excerpts from an interview with The Paris Review:

On character: In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

On teaching: I try to make writers actually see what they have written, where the strength is. Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story. If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of a story lies. I don’t see any reason in fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, a discipline of language and imagination.

On writing essays: To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out—I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea—or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That’s the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own thinking. I write something and think, How do I know that that’s true? If I wrote what I thought I knew from the outset, then I wouldn’t be learning anything new.

uncommon day

Photo by Gareth McConnell for Lyell

last day of summer

Porter Hovey Polaroid Project.

making pictures

Trudy White, who did the illustrations in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, runs writing and visual art workshops for children and adults.

feeding merlin

Bona Drag is celebrating it's first year. If a boutique was a cool childhood friend, it would be Bona Drag. Photo.

a gathering

Kiki Smith at Walker Art Center.

a collaboration with the world

"I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world." Kiki Smith.

a blue quality

The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis. The Chicken Mask was supposed to hustle business. It was supposed to invite the customer to gorge him or herself within our establishment. It was supposed to be endearing and funny. It was supposed to be an accurate representation of the featured item on our menu. But, Sis, in a practical setting, in test markets -- like right out in front of the restaurant -- the Chicken Mask had a plaintive aspect, a blue quality...

From "The Mansion on the Hill" by Rick Moody.
Photo by Johanna Reed on Wheat Toast via Fortysixth at Grace.

was it for this

Tragic by Madelaine. Via Rebekah on Design Sponge.

denim

un fille comme moi.

couple in voodoo trance

"Do we mean love, when we say love?" Samuel Beckett.

Photo Weegee.

a dance to the music of time

"The pens are essentially props-they remind me that I’ve got to get back to writing, which means turning on the computer, and that’s a whole new world of distractions." David Coggins. Photo and post from A Continuous Lean.

what it is to be a human being

"Fiction's about what it is to be a human being." David Foster Wallace. AM Homes: "...it [Wallace's death] reminds us all of how fragile we are, and how close at hand the darkness is."

what possessed me

Not sure what I did with myself before I discovered this blog.

Photo from Daily Mail via What Possessed Me.

my imaginary self

Just got dressed. La Garçonne.

intelligence is relative

Burn after Reading opened yesterday. The Coen Brothers.

I love you more

Martin Military Jacket.

1969

On Craigslist today.

let us be judged by our acts

Erie Basin.

yes, I have friends

My friend Kenny came to visit last week. Check out his documentary about Bolivian women wrestlers here.

your hand in the world

Margaret Kilgallen. Beautiful Losers at the Lumiere.

four saints in three acts

The Lee Miller exhibit at SFMOMA is only up for a few more days. Photo of Lee Miller and Picasso from Art Tattler.

my criterions

I could spend all day on the Criterion site. Here are Kate and Laura Mulleavy's Top 10 Criterion picks. And Jane Campion's. Or howabout Jonathon Lethem's?

Timeline for Lethem's Fortress of Solitude from The Paris Review.