the white album

Thanks to a tip from CityArts & Lectures' newest illustrator, I snagged us tickets to Joan Didion and Annie Leibovitz. If you move fast, they're still available.

Photo: Annie Leibovitz by John Keatley

filly designs

I love everything about these clothes. From Emily: I dropped out of law school when I was twenty-four and returned to my hometown of Santa Cruz, California. I did not have a plan but I did have a promise: no more “shoulds”. I was determined to follow my heart wherever it wanted to go. In the following years I worked as a bicycle messenger, learned to garden, fell in love, sold my car and for the first time felt truly competent and at home in my own skin. I began to notice and be taken with my own physicality: the crook of my arm holding the shovel, my thighs tightening as I pedaled, my hands strong and stained by the day. These were common moments when function was unexpectedly beautiful. This, I determined, was a form of beauty I needed to capture and express. So I began to make things, with metal, with wood, and eventually with fabric. And here, where the practical and the precious come together, was where my heart led me. I enrolled at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco for clothing design. Two years later I started Filly.

Photo from Apartment Therapy Re-Nest

but of geography

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

From "We are Many," Pablo Neruda via Aubrey Road

Photo via Horse Hunting

if you like

Wendy Macnaughton, you might like Longshot Magazine.

Illustration: Dinnner Discussion by Wendy MacNaughton

Introducing: interviews with writers

Starting in July I'll be running a series of interviews with writers, including author Francesca Lia Block, Kat from No Good for Me, NEA recipient Ben Jahn, and Caroline Paul, author of Fighting Fire and East Wind, Rain.

Photo: Mya Henry and Eric Werner at Hartwood from The Selby

then poetry happened

People sometimes ask me, did you always want to be a poet, is that what you really wanted? And I reply, as truthfully as I can: first of all I wanted to be a circus performer, not just any performer but a tightrope artiste. And I knew the word `artiste' and felt it was very grand and that was precisely what I wanted to be. Meena Alexander, Poetry: the Question of Home

Photo: unidentified youth in a Tokyo jazz coffee shop

by Michael Rougier, 1964 via Tomboy Style

that doesn't happen much, though

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

Photo: Old Standby's Main Ride

in the blue

My gmail automatically marked the APC sale as very important.

Photo: Sartorialist via Scout the Store

that sort of gesture

I was just reminded that Ratio3 has a Margaret Kilgallen exhibit going up on June 23. M-W, 11-6. Rewatching/reading her Art21 feature.

Photo: production still from PBS Art21

if less is more

My work is all about living vicariously. I'm very easily embarrassed, and I think there's a lot of me that has a difficult time with people, period. All this angst, about myself, and about things I have no control over, is somehow in the work. I didn't really get English, and I lost my Russian. As far as expressing myself, I feel like I have bones in my tongue. Language is so crucial, but I think my pictures really do come from this kind of muted stance that I took. When you draw something, the drawing speaks for itself. Dasha Shishkin in an interview with Tina Barney, Vogue, June 2011.

Dasha Shishkin by Keith Bedford for The New York Times

scratching away

The better I can completely cut myself from the outside world, cloistering myself monastically. Only coming out of my studio for food, sun and supplies, I immerse myself completely in my work, not leaving the studio. I turn off my phone and internet, I work on ten pictures at once, moving from piece to piece landing in the middle of each one like a housefly. Scratching away with a humble ballpoint, chopping at canvases with a brush, the less I interact with the outside the more productive I become. Nicholas Forker from from the desk of...

the idea

Being a somewhat dark person myself, I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. Laurie Anderson on her love for Moby Dick. Via Maud Newton

Photo: Bettina Krieg's Studio on Freunde von Freunden

love looks not with the eyes

"The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and New Photographs"

at Matthew Marks Gallery in 1995

bikini, moscow

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. Susan Sontag vis SwissMiss

Photo: William Klein - Bikini, Moscow, 1959 via bonito blog

gone, gone, gone

Another cover I love. By Hannah Moscowitz, coming in 2012.

fabs

"What sexual preference do you hope she has?”

"Happiness."

Francesca Lia Block

Painting: Fabs, Joël Penkman via Design*Sponge

nothing happened. and everything did.

My favorite cover from Francesca Lia Block.

you leave out all the right things

Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white space, which is not empty. There’s nothing new here, but what you don’t say can be as important as what you do say. I think my favorite compliment that I got from a writer early on was someone saying to me, You leave out all the right things. That was wonderful to hear. To know you’ve given your reader credit for being able to understand without you having to say it. In “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” when the narrator heads for the gift shop to buy her dying friend a gift, the sick girl says to get her anything, anything but a magazine subscription. No need to explain why.

Amy Hempel, The Art of Fiction No. 176

Photo: The Bonnie Bracelet

clara

in the Salty Dirty Water Dress Tent by Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao. They'll be at artMKT this weekend.

you.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible. Jonathan Safran Foer

Photo: "Untitled" by Soledad Burgos via crankreport

competitive swinging

Paolo Salvagione's "Competitive Swinging" via The Rumpus

uses for boys

In 2008 I started writing a young adult novel called USES FOR BOYS and at the same time I started blogging. Often about my favorite writers, Grace Paley or Deborah Eisenberg. It helped keep me in the chair. But I had no idea when I started that I would meet such amazing people. Early on I met No Good for Me, Forty-Sixth at Grace, Woolgathering & Miscellany, Maud Newton, 2 or 3 Things I Know, A Cup of Jo, Sleep Deprivation and Stories of My Bullshit Youth, Porter Hovey, and Hollister Hovey, Shiny Squirrel, Hila, STNF, and of course, my beloved Ugly Earring. And then more recently, Nearness of Distance, Now Voyager, Victoria Thorne, mackin ink, M Dash, Look Mom, 16 House, Une Envie de Sel, Marvelous Kiddo, Le Temps Perdu, and Even Cleveland.

Today I sold my novel to St. Martin's Press and I keep thinking: I'm so crazy happy to have spent the last three years with you.

Photo by Larry Bercow

if you want to be crazy romantic

tie the ring to a string and propose to her on TOP of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Photos and proposal: my friend Drew of Improv Society

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 via Killing Skills via Aubrey Road

and there was an oak tree

Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. Marilynne Robinson, Home

Photo: Kansas City School Board Meeting, Mike Sinclair

via From the Desk of

let's dance

put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Photo: Hadnet Tesfai, Freunde von Freunden

the past

is always conversing with the future. Siddartha Mukherjee

like comedy, like sex, like anything

“Don’t you think like most things, like comedy, like sex, like anything, it’s about timing? I think we collided with each other,” she adds, referring to her husband. Cate Blanchett

Painting: Administrative Building, 1964 Gerhard Richter

reprise: the kiss

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing." Sylvia Plath

Photo from The Selby.

the changes we want

"It's never the changes we want that change everything." The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

Photo from the ue

i could do ten sometimes

Interviewer: You said you were writing eight hours a day.

Franzen: I could do ten sometimes.

Interviewer: Even when things weren't working?

Franzen: I didn't have the experience of things not working. I didn't know enough to know when something wasn't all that good. The chapters just came clattering out.

Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207, Paris Review

Painting: Eric Fischl, Barbecue, 1982

i lost the ability to imagine

loving anyone but you.

Photo by Foster Huntington from Restless Transplant

wild and constant

Sometimes at night
when I can’t sleep

because of the wind
I go and stand
in the library of glaciers.

I stand in another world.
Not the past not the future.
Not paradise not reality not

a dream.
An other competence.
Wild and constant.

From "Wildly Constant," Anne Carson via Books vs. Cigarettes

Painting: I.G., Gerhard Richter, 1993

me too

I swooned.

Anja in Honey Dress, Filly Designs
Thanks to Darling Dexter

changing light, colour and cloud

Riley had great freedom as a child and spent a lot of her time playing on the cliffs and beaches near Padstow where she lived. She spent hours watching the changing light, colour and cloud formations and stored away what she saw in memory. She has later said that these early memories have had a big impact on her visual awareness throughout her life. WRT Bridget Riley in Op-Art.co.uk via Tomboy Style

Kathryn Bentley bracelets and a shirt I want at Beklina

it is the beginning of everything

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Photo: The Sartorialist

SELF-PORTRAITS 72-73

"Curious about the problem of identity, I decided to photograph myself every day for a year. I was interested in when I would forget. The obsession with forgetting has been central. Having forgotten my mother, what she looked like, what she was like, how she treated me before she died when I was twelve, is still an abiding concern, though I have a much stronger sense of self now. But in 1972, not remembering meant, to some extent, not having existed, having to create a self without a foundation and trying to raise a daughter without remembering having been a child." Melissa Shook via even cleveland

Photograph: SELF-PORTRAITS 72-73 by Melissa Shook

extremely loud and incredibly close

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. Jonathon Safran Foer from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Photo by Chris Glass via swissmiss

keep a low overhead

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information. Grace Paley

Photo by James Nord via per temeritas

bread

Bread, Jasper Johns, 1969

if it is accurate there is always form

When I write, my only concern is always accuracy. I try to write accurately from the poise of mind which lets us see that things are exactly what they seem. I never worry about beauty, if it is accurate there is always beauty. I never worry about form. If it is accurate there is always form. Lew Welch via Aubrey Road

Photo: Xenia Hausner on Freunde von Freunden

bridge to terabithia

"I love revision." Katherine Paterson

Photo of Les Puces de Saint-Quen

by Jordan Ferney of Oh Happy Day

an apple a plum and apricot too

For the Berkeley playlist.

Photo via ChomoLight via Justin Massa

it is worth noting what anders did not remember

This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat.

From "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolf

Photo by Feaverish on Etsy

i'm not a starfish or pepper tree

What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Photo by Garance Doré

it's official

I'm moving to Berkeley.

Illustration by Chalk Chalk via seesaw

you are my saturday poem

The Selby: Albert Maysles and Gillian Walker in their home

The Saturday Poem at The Guardian

patience

"Take the meat out of the pan and let it rest for about 5 minutes before serving to let the residual heat finish the cooking, and to allow the juices to stabilize. This is essential." The Art of Simple Food

good, i said, that's what i want too

Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.

Hell, I said, I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?

Yes. I want to ruin you.

Good, I said. That’s what I want too.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

via books vs cigarettes

Photo from the Geology Teaching Slides of Dr. Arthur Gibbs Sylvester

via an ambitious project collapsing

all art is autobiographical

You exist only in what you do. Frederico Fellini

Photo: Frederico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren
via the ugly earring

swoon

via The Purple Me.