Thinking About

...Le Smoking. Not sure why. I think it's because
I have been trying to think about what to get
the classy gentle(wo)man in my life for Christmas.


I've always thought of these images as part of a narrative.
Not sure which comes first.


I guess the one with two figures seems like the first to me.
A little bit lonely...

Shiner

I cannot get over how much I love this photograph of Dana Perino with her new black eye. Obviously, DP is a beautiful woman, but she always looks so plastic-y. I think the wind and the bruise suit her. She looks much more natural. Not that I advocate bruising as aesthetic enhancement in general. But here, it is really working for me.

Jazzy

Watching this video made me think of how far we have come from the obsession with machines of the mid-20th century. The avant-garde used to see the machine as a beautiful alternative to the messy, flawed, and often sinister work of human beings, but now machinery has come to seem almost sinister itself. The "handmade" is such a fetish object now, and handmade has a very particular aesthetic meaning: raw, imprecise, unique. But I think we forget that there is a range of machines, many very simple and requiring human oversight or operation. And even the most complex machine is still the product of the human mind and hand. I feel a little nostalgic for that Modern appreciation of the machine. There is a sort of rhythm and purity to machine-produced items, and a repudiation of our fixation on individuality, that I still find very appealing.



(via AT)

Who Wants to Buy Me a $4,000 Christmas Present?

I am a little bit obsessed with this print by Bryan Nash Gill

It's "39 by "52, so it is actually tree-sized. You can get it from Ashes and Milk. And then you can give it to me.

Nick & PJ

They don't make 'em like they used to.

Where I Want to Live Now: November Digest

Phony Express

Joel's new project



Maiden voyage this week.

Corn, and the End of Corn

"It is almost over. You can feel it in the cold air: twelve degrees on Wednesday. Hard winter descended on South Dakota this week, froze the prairie potholes, and pulled a steel gray curtain over the sky. Farmers reached into the back of their closets and pulled out their insulated Carhartt overalls..."

I Don't Know How I Got Here

But I somehow found myself watching some of the many, many amateur "Deceptacon" videos on youtube tonight. This song really inspired people. There are many versions, but I think that I will herein collect only those made by teenage girls. It seems in keeping with the spirit of the music:



My favorite thing about those girls is that in another one of their videos they have a dance-off over a Jones soda. They dance to DDR music, even though they are not doing DDR. It's just that that music is so fucking great.





This one might be my favorite:



I want to make it very clear that I am not making fun of these girls. You know how in all the videos it kind of seems like one of the girls is really into the song and the other(s) are just going along with her weird little project? I was definitely that girl.

Shit gets weird when you write a really catchy song, huh Kathleen Hanna?

It Calls to Me...

Hans Wegner peacock chair

Comics Day

Emily posted a comic. I'm going to too.

Kate Beaton does a series of "History Comics" that I like. Emily M. and I were just talking about the Battle of Hastings, so I thought I'd put that one up.

Why is the date of the Battle of Hastings so easy to remember (1066! 1066!)? It just is...

Woman Posed as a Sphinx

Woman Posed as a Sphinx

From the George Eastman House Flickr photostream, via Shoot! The Blog.

This photograph has the same colors as my living room.

Also, she totally looks like Little Edie, no?

The Relic

This was definitely on my test (the formatting should be different, e.g. there should be stanzas, but blogger is thwarting me):

When my grave is broke up again

Some second guest to entertain,

—For graves have learn'd that woman-head,

To be to more than one a bed—

And he that digs it, spies

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,

Will he not let us alone,

And think that there a loving couple lies,

Who thought that this device might be some way

To make their souls at the last busy day

Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mass-devotion doth command,
Then he that digs us up will bring
Us to the bishop or the king,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we loved, nor why;
Difference of sex we never knew,
No more than guardian angels do;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

Reading Donne, whom I had never really read before, was one of the great unexpected pleasures of all the studying I did. The line, "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" is impossible for me to forget. It reminds me of Old English verse: It is alliterative, for one. But it also makes poetry out of these weird, but very concrete, images. It isn't fantastic, but it's imaginative. It's sort of pedestrian, and very physical, but also almost ghoulish and really beautiful. Donne also wrote these pretty famous lines:

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string"

John Donne, that is kind of GROSS. Also kind of sexy. It's like, I love my girlfriend so much, I think I'll pop my eyes out. I don't think that last sentence will make much sense to people other than Emily and Katie M. , but trust me, it is very funny.

This is a portrait of Donne he had commissioned a few months before his death, while he was ill:

It is how he expected he would look when he rose from the grave. I'm not sure how exactly he decided what that would look like. I can only hope that when I rise from the grave I will have such fetching head-gear. But I will probably be wearing kale. Donne had this hung on his wall so he could look at it while he was dying and be reminded of the transient nature of life. John Donne was not fucking around.

Only someone so totally unafraid of dying could have written the way that he did about death. The writing about death in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (which title I am totally stealing from him) might actually turn you religious-- it just sounds like the truth:

"...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness."

And now you believe in God. You can thank me later.

I want to go see this

Luck to Me

In honor of the GREs (I hope this is on the test. When I am practicing and I see a poem or story I like, it's like, "Hello old friend here to help me! I didn't know anyone at this party and I am so glad you are here now."):

W.H. Auden

"Musee des Beaux Arts"

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Halloween + Shoes

I haven't posted in a long time. But I am putting up:

1) My Halloween headgear

2) A picture of someone's old shoes that are going to be my new shoes (from The Selby).

Lines & Shapes

The new volume of this is out:



I just ordered it. I love port2port, and have some of Mav's photographs in my house:

It's not just because I secretly want to live in Maine, either. Though I do spend time at work using the googlemaps satellite function to look at various towns in Maine. I pretend I am a gull on my way from Nova Scotia....

You Can Never Be Too Young or Too Dead

When I started this blog (such an ugly word, that. Can I call it something else? When I started this ripple? this elderberry? this donnybrook? I don’t know, those are just some words I like...) I imagined that it would be a place for me to explore my more enlightened, high-minded interests. This is not only because I am a little bit of a snob, but also because it seemed like it would be more interesting to read and write about the geological history of Eastern Parkway, or the great tradition of pet biographies (POST TO COME) than, say, "Magazines I Like to Read". I notice that I just called pet biographies high-minded. So be it.

But life is not all glaciers and marmosets. Life is also diet Dr. Pepper and lawn ornaments. And I embrace it all! Yes, life is about so very many things, but above all, perhaps, it is about this simple fact: We are all going to die someday.

A little morbid, yes, but true nonetheless. And if there is one woman who has made it her mission to constantly remind us of this fact, and who yet gives us the same kind of pleasure provided by the aforementioned diet Dr. Pepper, that woman is Lurlene McDaniel.

Either you were just drowned by a warm, wonderful flood of childhood memories, or you have no idea what I am talking about.

Ms. McDaniel is the author of many young-adult fiction books, almost all of which feature a terminally ill teenager (usually a girl). Sometimes they have cancer (they in fact often have cancer, for cancer, as we know, bespeaks innocence, pathos and wasted beauty), sometimes they need a heart transplant, sometimes they have cystic fibrosis. Occasionally it is the boyfriend of the female protagonist who is tragically ill. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The point is they are young, they are very, very sick and they are not getting better.

I loved these books when I was a kid. Particular favorites included Don’t Die, My Love; Sixteen and Dying and Baby Alicia is Dying. I could write an entire post about that last one, the cover image and jacket copy of which can, I think, speak for themselves:

"Desi thinks it's totally unfair that innocent baby Alicia was born HIV positive. Now the eight-month-old Alicia lives at Childcare because she was given away by her sick teenage mother. Desi can relate to feeling unloved. Her parents give her all the material things she needs, but there seems to be a wall between her mother and herself."

Something to chew on, hm?

BAID aside, I mostly enjoyed stories about young, white, relatively privileged kids-- kids like myself-- slowly dying. I hoped feverishly that the characters would recover, while in my heart of hearts I felt a deep, sick satisfaction in knowing that they would not. McDaniel doesn’t really write books with happy endings. In response to a question in the "Ask Lurlene" section of her website, she writes,

‘I know sad stories aren't for every reader, but it's the kind of story that most of my readers like from me. When I write "happy" books, many readers complain. So I focus on what I do best---stories that might bring a tear, but that focus on real life (where happily ever after rarely occurs). And while the books may not have "happy" endings, I try to give readers a satisfying ending---life is full of trouble and matters out of our control. How we deal with troubles determines our own character.’

So true. I think the key here, aside from the universal human fascination with death, is that all the characters in McDaniel's books are just a little older than I was when I read them. They are TEENAGERS, which is all I dreamt of being before I became one. And not only are they teenagers, they are teenagers who are made old before their time. And there is a certain type of child, of which I was one, who really wants to be old before her time. She wants death thrust upon her, if only imaginatively, because it seems a small price to pay to gain the wisdom, glamor and prestige of the dying.

I also have a chronic illness myself, but let's not discuss that here! (I will only say, in relation to that, that McDaniel started writing about dying children when her own son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which seems to be just a little bit twisted and melodramatic. But who am I to judge?)

I had completely forgotten about these books until recently. I remembered individual titles, but not that they were all written by the same person. I think this is really a testament to the fact that these books loomed large in my youthful mind, each one its own distinct world of graceful misery. Lord, I just can't wait to have kids, so Lurlene can teach them what this life is all about.

I leave you with a sampling of Lurlene McDaniel titles:

She Died Too Young

Mother, Help Me Live

Please Don't Die

Mourning Song

The Girl Death Left Behind

Someone Dies, Someone Lives

When Happily Ever After Ends

The first of many re-starts to come

I didn't really want to make this a blog about writing, or about me, or about--heaven forbid--blogging. But it was been about six weeks since I last posted, so I will write:

Why This Is Difficult


This is difficult because it is immediate.
This is difficult because it is short.
This is difficult because I've already asked people to look at it.
This is difficult because it is new.
This is difficult because I am careful.
This is difficult because it is, improbably, local. By which I mean that it exists primarily for an already-established community, that is, my friends and loved-ones.

To put something small and decent onto the earth, and to do it frequently, is a good kind of work. It is a plodding, modest kind of work that can eventually make something bigger. Or not. It need not add up to anything to have a value.

So I suppose: A small thing, of its own modest value, can be decently placed in the world, frequently.

mail art

I haven't seen this yet:



but I'm betting it's good....

A House Possibly Not Meant to Stand

A friend of mine sent out an email to a bunch of people, possibly for further use in a project:

"what does the phrase "feminist haunted house" mean to you? what do you want it to mean? what are you afraid it might mean? etc."

I said: "everything? everywhere? you know how it seems, both in movies and sometimes in reality, like everything is built on a slave/indian/colonial burial ground or potter's yard? like if you could just dig under any building, you'd find all this ignored/forgotten-about death it was built on? and possibly in digging would release, for good or ill, a lot of rage/sadness about that death? well, i suppose most theoretical digging eventually leads you to the body of some feminist idea or person. i'm not sure if that's the point at which the haunting starts or stops. but i'm pretty sure Susan B. Anthony is lurking in your house, scaring your cats.*"

Anyone else?

*Because, as everyone knows, animals are highly sensitive to paranormal activities of all kinds. Especially feminist ones.

Eastern Parkway Tour, part 1

A few days ago I was walking along Eastern Parkway at a time when I would usually be at work, and everything seemed especially vivid. Maybe I was just happy to be out roaming the streets when I'm usually behind a desk, or maybe I'm just more used to seeing everything at 7:00 am/pm, when there's less light. In any case, everything seemed brighter, more detailed, and worthier of examination. Emerson (yes that's right, Emerson. What?) said a change in perspective "gives the whole world a pictorial air." I suppose that goes for time-based perspective too.

Gratitude doesn't always find the same object twice, but I am perpetually grateful for Eastern Parkway. Most of the places I have to be each day are not necessarily the places I want to be—that is, they are not physical spaces to which I would be drawn if they didn’t contain something else of interest. But I walk along Eastern Parkway almost daily, and I’m happy to do it. I think it deserves an ode, or at least an introduction. Eastern Parkway is one of the greenest places in Brooklyn outside of parks and gardens; it preserves public space for unspecified uses (i.e. it is not a concert venue, playground, memorial, etc., but just a place with benches and plants) and in a city that seems to grow only in one direction—up—it has a wonderful and rare horizontal expansiveness.

One of my favorite things about Eastern Parkway is that it follows a glacial path. It was built along the Jamaica Pass, a valley resting between two moraines that the Wisconsin Glacier left behind as it moved across the Northern United States 2 million years ago.

Many of the trees on Eastern Parkway are surrounded by a network of bare roots that have pushed up through the shallow dirt and become hard and knotted. I think they look sort of like an aerial view of a huge, glacially-formed mountain range.

The Jamaica Pass is also the route British troops took during the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major conflict in the Revolutionary War. They marched towards Grand Army Plaza, demolishing an American outpost at Bedford Avenue, and eventually killing thousands of American soldiers. Now it's the route of the West Indian Day Parade, which I think is a tidy little piece of poetic justice. Eastern Parkway lends itself to marching of all kinds.

There isn’t all that much to visibly connect Eastern Parkway to the Revolutionary War at this point, although one of the apartment buildings near Franklin Ave. is called “Nathan Hale Court”:


There is lots of Nathan Hale to be seen in New York. A spy for the Continental Army, Hale is probably most famous for the line he spoke before he was hanged by the British in 1776: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." He was 21 at the time. It seems 21 year-olds have a tendency to proclaim. Several different sites are claimed to be the site of the hanging-- both City Hall Park and the Yale Club are in the running. Everybody wants a piece of Nathan these days.

This seems a little long to be read on a computer screen, so I'm going to stop there for now. I suppose we're moving West on Eastern Parkway, along the path of British troops and also me, on my way to work. To be continued....

#1

Is it an architecture blog? Occasionally. Is it a blog about vernacular(s)? In a manner of speaking. It’s a blog about things that are made with the things we have, so: anything.

I would have called it just "Vernacular Architecture" but that blog already exists. It has one entry, dated 4/24/2007 that runs as follows:

"Contents: Study of Hot and Dry climate in context with vernacular architecture.

examples:citing examples from all over the globe using efficient vernacular techniques like rajasthan"

As good a way as any to begin.