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.

Photo by Michael Weschler for NYT

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