"All the words that I use are just a vehicle like radio waves, a message from my unconscious to the unconscious of the listener. I don't know what I have communicated, and the listener doesn't know what is being communicated, but I am constantly being told by people 'I don't understand what you have just said, but I do feel I have been communicated with." ~ivor cutler
at the end of this link lies a little story of ivor's that you are sure to love.
colors that depict the past in photographs have always had time to soften, and in turn give the impression that the past was much softer and more beautiful than the present. i would like to climb into each of these separately and inhale its fragrance. i would like a city which had a mural of the 'brown bird singing' sheet music painted on an entire side of a building. i would have liked for max ernst to play chess with me, to photograph and paint me in a striped bathing suit reclined, twirling a compass from the time of copernicus.
1. traveling troupe, 2. Sign: Fermé, 3. Public Domain - Vintage Postcard Images, 4. max_ernst_schach.jpg, 5. emmy hennings, 6. Music Sheet, Copyright 1922, A Brown Bird Singing
i must admit. as soon as it is safely february, i begin thinking that spring is really right around the corner. the result of this yearly delusion is that i often leave the house quite underdressed, with bare toes and shoulders gathering frost, teeth chattering like a toy clacker, seed packets in my thin cotton pockets. i know i should also treasure winter's gifts, but the truth is that they leave me cold. i can never achieve a homeostasis in winter, in which i am not aware of the outside temperature being wildly afar from my interior one. as i spent my youth in hawaii, where the temperature always hovers somewhere around 75 degrees, the feeling of being cold or hot drives me to distraction. by february 1st i'm already longing to leave the windows open and sleep in my sundress. states of undress without goosebumps, and warm air teasing out the trees' summer frocks.
1. Bored with the Weather, 2. the afterthought, 3. birthday-shades, 4. ventana, 5. Untitled, 6. Hades
"Some eggers' mania for collecting extends to drawers of seashells or boxes of toy soldiers. Most of those jailed have speeded their own journey to the cells thanks to the evidence of their own index cards or coded computer files carefully detailing every clutch and theft. An obsessive-compulsive attention to detail can obscure reality. On one police raid, officers were amazed to find an egger reminding them to wipe their feet and not spoil his carpet.
Others seem addicted, gripped by an obsession they can no longer master. When the knock finally comes on some collectors' doors "there's this dawning realisation of what they've been doing for 20 years or more," says Thomas. "We've had some break down and cry and say, 'I'm so glad you've finally come, this has been controlling me for years. The breeding season comes and I can't stop going out and collecting eggs.'"
excerpt from here.
via the kircher society.
"tendentially, the book you want is never there, while another book is offered to you...the library is the space of substitutes for desire..." ~roland barthes
i was just thinking this the other day (though not in so many words, it was a thought that hovered over this idea but never landed into this articulate of a statement), walking home from the library with sophie. neither of the books we had gone looking for were there. at first, sophie wasn't interested in looking any further, but i coaxed her a little to just browse the shelves to see if she could find something interesting. some part of me has always been grateful not to find what i was looking for, for in this position i am most open to suggestion. what may start out as the substitute for something i wanted may become, mysteriously, the book i most needed to read. in it i might find the lost mate to a sock or the church key to a forgotten memory.
taking it from the shelf i see into it like a house lit up. i can peer through the living room window and glimpse the life that is lived there. i don't even have to knock to be allowed in. all of the possessions and combinations of objects come as pure surprise. the book is a place i may yearn to go to, yet i am its destination, according to barthes. without me its world stays folded and quiet. i have come across many of these books in the library which have not been opened in years. some not even once, the pages still uncut. desire to acquire a certain book is driven by the potential pleasure we sense that it will be capable of giving. it has promised something, some possible deep and intimate knowledge or else a validation of something you have long held dear. but without the possibility of having the object that holds so much promise, you find after all that you are here, in the veritable cathedral of promising objects, the library.
in my search i found a book i just had a sense that sophie would like. i noted its position and kept looking. when she joined me, i pointed it out to her. she read the jacket and decided to check it out. after we got home, while we were eating lunch, she said 'i really like stories that take place on ships.' she also likes vampires, had gone to the library in search of a vampire book they didn't have. later, after she's read some of the book, she said 'i love this book. and it takes place on a ship and it has vampires in it..'
i cannot shake the riotous perfume of this movie. the chords it played in me are still ringing high and low. it is the most beautiful movie about a serial killer as i think there could ever be. it makes me think of a line from another movie, one from the thirties or forties but i can't remember its name, in which someone says "crime is just a left handed form of human endeavor."
the main character's single-minded desire to preserve scent is really only his quest to capture the fleetingness of beauty in life. born into a loveless existence of squalor, his sense of smell is the only part of him that seems capable of developing to maturity. in other aspects he remains stunted; his movements and expressions take on a feral quality. scent for him is the only form of higher beauty to which he can aspire, as it is given without any exchange of consent. in all other ways he is locked out of the world of exchange between human beings. his uncanny ability to identify and orchestrate scents into inebriating harmonies is precluded by the fact that he has no identifying smell of his own, no sense of a familiar origin. the source of his primary strength lies in his most profound lack, which his strength cannot correct.
isn't it within this tension, between what we have and what we are missing, that all of us must make our alchemy?
some pleasing memory triggers from the cereal box archive. forget that this stuff was pretty much absent of any nutritional value. besides, they say all nostalgia is is the desire for desire.
i forget, who was it who said: "objects are frozen thoughts"?
chandelier by delusions of grandeur via
labour of heart.
poppy bobby pins by foundling at poppytalk handmade.
egg throne, wire feeder and shoe tree by bailey's home and garden. via a cup of jo.
i've been so busy with work i haven't had time for my favorite flickr pastime of photo pairing. so tonight i made these small assemblages of loved and unloved chairs.
you can see them on my photostream with the proper links to the photographers.
is for it to be known that
even light seems to burn as a form of pressure
night insects lust after
a brightness external to the soul which both reflects its splendid reputation
and dominates it entirely
and exactly as that is what the soul wants--
to be pressed submissive between sheets
of glassine for posterity
--it also wants known the fight it puts up all that time inside the mollusc
the fixed irritation of meanings altered in different mouths
as self-cancelling
a careening list of private contraries
all rhythm-slash-talk and no plot-slash-action.
whenever we witness the river’s liftbridge unlacing for boats to pass
my dog just comes unhinged.
a half of a bridge, in her mind, as ominous and freakish as any godzilla.
what i perceive as her wanting what she knows to bridge what she doesn’t
makes her seem almost human
almost as solitary and desirous as i am no different from an oar striving toward an island.
fine rare print of a pearl oyster image from here.
