don't ever say i never gave you anything

Free: 12 bags packing peanuts mixed with leaves and dirt

ladies in the public domain

1. free to use in your artwork, 2. free to use in your artwork, 3. free to use in your artwork, 4. free to use in your artwork, 5. free to use in your artwork, 6. free to use in your artwork, 7. free to use in your artwork, 8. free to use in your artwork, 9. free to use in your artwork

fishcage

i also really love bb. birdcage in a fishtank goes here.

diy

i love airform archives.

something for the feuillateurs

this wonderful flipbook website is in french, but with google tools you can translate it for yourself in a snap. only a few of the flipbooks have accompanying animations- be sure to watch the "haik" one, but it's also fun just to see the covers of some of the flipbooks in their extensive collection. for instance:














also be sure to visit the "historique," "typologie," and "feuilleteurs" pages, which have separate animations of their own. this link will take you to a translated page showing pictures and descriptions of all the old time optical instruments that incorporated flipbook technology.



when you click on the links a little film loads and shows you the machine in action.

the definition of feuilleteur: one who leafs through or skims, also can be someone who rolls out pastry.

quotes about home

“When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home”
Thornton Wilder

“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.”
Charles Dickens

“Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest”
Robert Montgomery

“Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserved; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind...cast-off and everyday clothing.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Home is wherever my books are." ~Unknown


autumn always makes me more of a homebody. jorge my trusty rug cleaner came for a visit this morning and already the carpets are dry. i've not just been cleaning the tops and sides of things but also the under and behind. so much dust! tumbleweeds of fur! most household dust is dead skin, they say. we've been shedding like mad, like vertical snakes.






shifting the position of the furniture, washing the curtains with borax, reaquainting myself with the things i possess, half-read books slipped between the bed and the wall in the night, listening to the browning and yellowing going on in the backyard. fanny is practically naked since she finished molting and looks conspicuously like a fryer.


as a reward for all my hardwork, there was a perfect shiny black Royal typewriter just waiting for me to buy it for ten dollars at sacks' thrift avenue.

the fall

"there was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.

to which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living room as your roots may ruin the carpet.

he said i was fooling i am not a tree and he dropped the leaves.

but his parents said look it is fall." ~russell edson








photo by fallout75 on flickr.

clamour

clamour: (julie's definition) the love of grouping.
go here to see the original images 1. spoon river, 2. Taxidermied Birds, 3. untitled, 4. Red Like Your Mother's Eyes

look both ways

today i slammed my finger in the cash register drawer after putting in a stack of ones. a customer was waiting for me to take his order when i did it. i put the stack of ones in, and looked up at him as i closed the drawer, accidentally on my finger. it hurt quite a lot and i let out a yelp and a grimace. he ignored my pain and went forward with his order. while i tried to overcome my wave of pain he ordered several drinks and food items, a list that went on and on to my utter surprise. tears sprang to my eyes, not from the pain, but from the unbelievable lack of sympathy on this man's part.

:

please visit the original images of this little flickr favorite pairing here: 1. nite life, 2. giant bunny

lady (as is)

today at my favorite thrift store (sacks thrift avenue) i found this lady. as soon as i saw her i knew i wanted her to be one of my found relatives. as a bonus, the frame the picture came in was cracked, and so the ladies at sacks had affixed one of their cautionary "as is" stickers. in the past i have bought objects there just for the 'as is' stickers, the most famous being the ceramic orange i bought there years ago which bore a sticker that read "apple as is, $.50. i loved that orange so much because it had been labeled to suggest it was some kind of inferior apple. i brought it to a poetry reading i did so i could tell the story as a kind of preface to something i was reading. the woman emceeing that night was really boisterous and obnoxious and when i was finished reading she was trying to hurry me off the stage, and as i was gathering up my stuff she said "don't forget your orange" and rolled it off the chair it had been sitting in onstage. it rolled across the stage and over the edge and then shattered on the floor. i will never forget the collective gasp that the audience let out. after all i had only told them ten minutes before that it was one of my most beloved and cherished objects. but even though i lost the orange that night, in another way i think it really found kind of value it could have never achieved if i had not brought it that night.

maybe when i go to new york i'll bring lady asis.

it's only a lyrical paper moon

sean sent me the link to this paper moon photo flickr set. and he wrote:

"A paper moon as a picture prop is so random and lyrical. We don't have
anything like that anymore. We live in a very unlyrical time."

maybe so. but maybe it's just that now we have to look a little harder for it. but i found it very lyrical, him saying "we live in a very unlyrical time."





next time i have a party i think i'm going to set up a paper moon photo booth.

the machines of leonardo da vinci

one delicious flickr set of many made by curious expeditions.

something lovely da vinci said: "Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else."

for the librophiliac in you

a sample from the compendium of beautiful libraries from curious expeditions.

courtesy of czeltic girl.

the distressed look

"A textile worker takes a break at dawn after sanding jeans all night at a clothing factory in Guangdong Province, China. The blue dust from the jeans is a heavy irritant to the lungs. The factory where this worker is employed uses a wear-and-tear process to achieve the fashionable distressed look for the approximately 10,000 pairs of jeans it produces every day. Thousands of workers labor around the clock scrubbing, spraying, and tearing jeans in order to meet the production demand. China is one of the world's largest producers of jeans."

from this fascinating article at ehp, "waste couture: environmental impact of the clothing industry."

makes me think somehow of monet's haystacks

with their circular life you can visit five places in italy for 24 hours at a time as quickly or as slowly as you please. its rather mesmerizing.

thanks to tiny gigantic.

jellyfish

happiness is not a monopoly of the gifted, the beautiful, the wealthy, or the famous

good to know.
via retrolife,

courtesy of bb the great.

thank the stars for the public domain

remember 'mixies'?
i think i had this exact set when i was a kid.
i can remember mixing up the policeman's head with the kangaroo's little juggling joey, and taking away his mean shelayley.
































thanks to takeabreak
on flickr.

self-packing cat

by boodely on flickr. just had to share it.

battle hill poetry festival

guess who's reading next month at the battle hill poetry festival at the green wood cemetary in brooklyn?

you guessed it.

the picture makes it look spookier than it is. green wood is a grand and beautiful cemetary placed at the highest point in all of new york, and it is where we will all converge on the night of october the 13th, thanks to our battle hill heroine tracey mctague:



follow the link to see the impressive list of readers and find out the specifics so and if so and do everything you can so you can manage to attend.

happy birthday, blog!

the very first picture i posted on my blog one year ago was this one. the idea of building up a daily (or mostly daily) stratum of materials, inspirations, ideas, and observations has turned into something that really does work for me as a kind of rich and crumbly humus for my life. it's so satisfying and lovely, all the connections it's helped me make to other distant bloggers who have supplied me with so many eggshells and orange rinds and bits of straw and torn petals and soft fragrant grasses. here's to another year, and another and another!

from the annandale dream gazette:

"I'm at the farm where I pick up organic vegetables every week. It's winter (odd), and the veggie room is lit with electric lights (odd), and an acquaintance who is a homeless-looking meadmaker is waiting around (for what?). Before I choose which vegetables I'll bring home, I look through every bin to see what's available. I'm stunned to find that the last bin is packed tightly with small pastel tote containers of Dunkin Donuts Munchkins (how do they grow these?). I'm ecstatic to slowly realize that Gertrude Stein was wrong: sugar IS a vegetable. At last... I wake up content."

poets publishing dreams.
via dumbfoundry.

but my face has character

from the boat lullabies, a fantastic blog of rescued photos culled into the bittersweetest collections.

via linkbunnies.

laws of attraction

"UPON WAKING

at the far edge of earth, night
is going away. another
poem begins. slumped over

the typewriter i must get this
exactly, i want to make it
clear this morning that your

face, as it opens
from its shadow, is more
perfect than yesterday; and

that the light, as it
hesitates over the approach
of your smile, has given this

aching bed more than warmth,
more than poems; someway

a generous rose, or a very
delicate arrangement of sounds,
has come to peace in this new room."

~denis johnson










a mosaic of flickr favorites. original images here: 1. the bee, 2. She said, take me away, 3. -, 4. Sunflowers

the day-to-day life of albert hastings

it's all about his handwriting.




























































this beautiful project has been done by kay deveney, who took photographs of bert in his home. she writes:

"This work is sited where Bert’s autobiographical vision, based in life experience and feeling, meets the new eye of a stranger. Together our visions and versions of his day-to-day experience sit side by side to create a new tale. At the end of this project Bert and I, of course, maintain our individual perspectives, but I think we are richer, too, for being informed by one another. I know I am."

thanks simply photo.