based on a true story

this is the hottest story of the summer...

staircase

staircase to nowhere

found

i love...

i love one piece bathing suits.

from W

nuthin' but a...

when you're having a bad, busy, long day like me, you gotta jus chiiiilll and watch this video:

boo!

a ghost with arms! is that a pirate ship in the background? silly librarianist.

insomnia

i am an insomniac right now. after tossing and turning for nearly 2 hours, i've given up.

they lay in bed together that night, and they did not know when they slept, the intervals of exhausted unconsciousness as intense an act of union as the convulsed meetings of their bodies.

- the fountainhead

something on your mind

back at home. tedious, long night at work. drunk. listening to this song on repeat. for the fourth time, i think. listen to it and you'll understand why.

karen dalton - something on your mind

another found photo of karen with dylan:

tracing a song...

stumbled upon this and then i felt i had to listen to multiple different traces of this song... i'm missing a mid-70s version done by pink lady that was a big hit in the u.s. if you're only going to listen to one, then choose the first one--it's the original japanese version.


kyu sakamoto - sukiyaki


slick rick & doug e. fresh - la di da di


snoop dogg - lodi dodi

words to suzanne

i love these lyrics for leonard cohen's song, suzanne:

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.

c;est adorable!

francoise hardy sings the [boy] from ipanema

PELICAN EATS PIGEON!!!!

gross.

black kids and miles

sad that i'm missing this...i'll be working at bacaro instead.

black kids and, even cooler, miles benjamin anthony robinson play at santos this friday night.

who's gonna save my soul

gnarls barkley - who's gonna save my soul

this is awesome. it kind of grossed me out, too, and i liked that.

this reminds me of a short film i shot for my friend katie in her TV class sophomore year. she based it on a story from giovanni boccaccio's the decameron--the fourth day, ninth tale. in it, a cuckolded husband cuts out the heart of his wife's lover (his former best friend), and feeds it to her for supper.

heebie jeebies

i'm scared!

snot-nosed kid

Priscilla, Joseph Szabo

i've just returned home from a couple of much needed hours of basking in the sun in central park and progressing faithfully in the monstrous book i'm reading. for some reason, i got to thinking about my hair--about how long it is, longer than it's ever been so far as i can remember. maybe i have hair on the brain (the rock musical that i absolutely adore) because it opens tomorrow night at the delacorte in central park! anyway, my thought process about hair got me thinking about how i used to cut my own hair for the longest time. i was a snotty nosed teenager. this got me to think about my silly senior portrait, one day that i actually remember getting my hair done. i don't remember what they did to it--cut it? blow it out? either way, my hair is the least memorable aspect of my senior portrait. what is memorable is that i am wearing a green army jacket (yep, a la freaks and geeks), my mouth is agape (i was laughing instead of posing), and i am definitely not looking at the camera. if that's not snotty enough, then the senior quote i have stamped right below my name is. i chose a pretty perfect jack kerouac quote that, of course, was butchered by the yearbook editors. well, not butchered per se, but they cut out the last line, which turned my purely optimistic and sincere senior quote into a snotty-faced goodbye to go hand in hand with my photo. here it is.

what they printed:

What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?--it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye.

and what they left off:

But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

read this

So, I know I just recently (like, a week ago) posted Patti Smith's Birdland, my favorite song of her. But, I just took a long bath and listened to all of Horses, and could not stop thinking about Birdland. Something about it--the feeling it gives me, reminds me of this passage I just recently re-read in one of my favorite books, House of Leaves. Here it is, from the book's introduction:

This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the erson you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

Old shelters--television, magazines, movies--won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad, you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.

seizing the day in tel aviv

this morning, when i instinctively felt that the cover story of the travel section was about israel (based on a quick glance at the accompanying photo), i was filled with the automatic pride one feels for a place they once called home. i did not, however, expect to feel recurring surges of pride as i proceeded to read the article (which, by the way, is a stand-up example of good travel writing by henry alford.) i love this explanation of israel:

"this is a country that on the one hand is so conservative that we don't have public transportation on saturdays, but on the other hand is so open that we sent a transsexual to the eurovision song contest," says mr. keret. "israel is full of contradiction. in jerusalem, this contradiction means separation. but it doesn't in tel aviv."

the article goes on to live up to it's title, "seizing the day in tel aviv," by expounding on tel aviv's sensuality and vibrance. i liked this, as well:

"people always say, 'live every day as if it's your last,' and in tel aviv it might actually be true," says mr. keret. "the fear of the future makes the present more vibrant. but you cannot ignore that your existence is fragile."

the clincher for me, however, who was born in tel aviv, was this:

"most people don't realize that [tel aviv] is a city that many people just pass through. very few people are born and die here."

not to be a walking, israeli advertisement or anything, but...seriously, visit israel.

the good life

while looking for a photo on an old post, i accidentally ended up on the website of the yancey richardson gallery, where i spent an hour on my birthday last year. the show advertised on the homepage is called "the good life", which seems so satisfyingly appropriate right now as i am feeling spontaneous and elated. better still are the photos i found.



Slim Aarons, Sea Drive, 1967, Kevin McClory and his wife Bobo Segrist in the "Amphicar" at Nassau


Lars Tunbjörk, Ransäter, 1991


Alex Prager, Susie and Friends, 2008


Massimo Vitali, Benicassim 2, Spain, 2007


Tod Papageorge, New York Nights, Studio 54, 1977-78


Larry Sultan, Untitled, from the series, Pictures from Home, 1985

from the press release:

The exhibition explores the concept of the good life from a myriad of perspectives, including work that looks at pleasure-seekers from up and down the socio-economic ladder, ranging from Tina Barney's scion of an aristocratic European family surrounded by old-world symbols of wealth and entitlement to Bill Owens photographs of self-satisfied suburbanites to David Hilliard's tableau of his blue collar kin enjoying an afternoon of donuts, coffee and televised soft porn. Sun and water feature frequently as ingredients in the good life for Aarons, Siquier, Tunbjörk, and Vitali, while Martin Parr, well known for his affectionate satires of the English, focuses on the role of libations high and low.

For Julius Shulman, Alex Prager, and Eve Sussman, the good life is embodied by images of 1960s California cool. While Shulman proposes modernist architecture as a vehicle for the ideal life, Sussman!s video The Aquarium presents the glass box as the stultifying container for a cast of characters caged by the trappings of style. Children at play, like those in images by Diane Arbus and Karine Laval, often seem to epitomize the good life with their freedom from responsibilities and time constraints. Childhood, however, is generally followed by decades spent working and sacrificing to prepare for that last elevated plateau of life – retirement. As represented by Peter Granser, Mitch Epstein and Larry Sultan, this might be spent floating belly-up in the pool, perfecting a golf swing or relaxing side-by-side in the familiar domesticity of the perfectly appointed bedroom.

Taking delight in life!s small pleasures and follies, comfort in suburban domesticity, or satisfaction in having arrived at a certain echelon of society, the pursuit of the good life takes on a variety of meanings as seen through the lens of style, era and age. The Good Life is as simple as the perfect burger, as polished as life in a glass box, as decadent as Santa in summer. It seduces with red nails and Budweiser, it leaps from the dock into the golden last light of summer, rests in the familiar glow of a bedside reading lamp, floats in sun city, dozes on a lawn chair, and sets sail in an amphibious car.

let's go see this show.

heaven

cinque terra, italy

this is what heaven looks like to me right now...

by the cherry blossom girl

suzanne en français

this is surreal... two of my favorites combined: watch as françoise hardy sings leonard cohen's suzanne. and you get an awesome peek at the 60s french folk as the camera scans over the audience several times.

angel face

i just found these adorable old, old photos of my kid brother on my computer. doesn't he have the face of an absolute angel?

counting to four...

...what?!!

replicas

i woke up one day and everything in the apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. i said to my roommate, "can you believe this? everything in the apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica." he said, "do i know you?"

- steven wright

found here.

what i'm listening to

as i sit by my computer and excel the hell out of two months worth of accounting, i'm listening to this song: i'm not gonna teach your boyfriend how to dance with you by black kids. sweet video, too.

i love whales

maybe my favorite?

the librarianist.

plus: youtube footage of the most awesome animal ever!

interview with a...

i'm always eager to see who is featured in the deborah solomon interview in the new york times' sunday magazine and the subject couldn't have been any better this week: check it. i absolutely adore patti smith. i've seen her perform live twice and she is a powerhouse.


this is my favorite song of hers, birdland. it's epic. you may have to smoke a joint to fully experience the song--i recommend it.

ms. mortimer

just read this profile on emily mortimer from the weekend's times. she's sweet.

“We used to sit in [Ben Kingsley's] compartment on that freezing train for hours and hours and talk about acting,” she said. “What he kept saying was you don’t have to tell the story with your face. The audience will impose it. You don’t have to act out the story every second. It’s the sort of thing a guru would say, but that’s the way he is, very calm and gurulike. One night we went to an Indian restaurant in Lithuania, and they thought it was Gandhi.”

unusual circumstances

holy shit! this movie looks incredible. click here to view the trailer for the curious case of benjamin button, starring brad pitt and cate blanchett. and click here to read the fitzgerald story on which it is based.

stuck in my head...

as i'm trying to go to sleep after a long night at work, this old diddy is stuck in my head...

androgynous

haven't listened to this song since high school. click here to listen to a nice recording of androgynous by the replacements.

happy summer

happiness is the feeling this video gives me, plus a warm summer evening, and a new dress in the mail that i'm already wearing.

spend my days

gypsy with an accordian boarding train in berlin

i could spend whole days riding the subway with a book in my lap. even better--riding the train above ground through brooklyn or queens, so the subway cars are flooded with light, and you can feel the trees breezing past while you leaf through pages of an enrapturing book.

a reading discovery:

"then what are you going to do? you're not worried?"
"no. i expected it. i'm waiting."
"for what?"
"my kind of people."
"what kind is that?"
"i don't know. yes, i do know, but i can't explain it. i've often wished i could. there must be some one principle to cover it, but i don't know what it is."

- the fountainhead

i know this next passage is long, but i couldn't help but post it--it's so great.

dominique had spent so many summers and winters, surrounding herself with people in order to feel alone, that the experiment of actual solitude was an echantment to her and a betrayal into a weakness she had never allowed herself: the weakness of enjoying it. she stretched her arms and let them drop lazily, feeling a sweet, drowsy heaviness above her elbows, as after a first drink. she was conscious of her summer dresses, she felt her knees, her thighs encountering the faint resistance of cloth when she moved, and it made her conscious not of the cloth, but of her knees and thighs.

the house stood alone amidst vast grounds, and the woods stretched beyond; there were no neighbors for miles. she rode on horseback down long, deserted roads, down hidden paths leading nowhere. leaves glittered in the sun and twigs snapped in the wind of her flying passage. she caught her breath at times from the sudden feeling that something magnificent and deadly would meet her beyond the next turn of the road; she could give no identity to what she expected, she could not say whether it was a sight, a person or an event; she knew only its quality--the sensation of a defiling pleasure.

sometimes she started on foot from the house and walked for miles, setting herself no goal and no hour of return. cars passed her on the road; the people of the quarry town knew her and bowed to her; she was considered the chatelaine of the countryside, as her mother had been long ago. she turned off the road into the woods and walked on, her arms swinging loosely, her head thrown back, watching the tree tops. she saw clouds swimming behind the leaves; it looks as if a giant tree before her were moving, slanting, ready to fall and crush her; she stopped; she waited, her head thrown back, her throat pulled tight; she felt as if she wanted to be crushed. then she shrugged and went on. she flung thick branches impatiently out of her way and let them scratch her bare arms. she walked on long after she was exhausted, she drove herself forward against the weariness of her muscles. then she fell down on her back and lay still, her arms and legs flung out like a cross on the ground, breathing in release, feeling empty and flattened, feeling the weight of the air like a pressure against her breasts.

- the fountainhead

the truth

the truth is not alive or dead/the truth is struggling to be said.

from the yiddish proverb:
Der Emess lebt nit, der emess shtarbt nit. Der emess, atert zich.

found here

your script, mr. kubrick

via 15 minutes to live

listening to...

three silly little piggies

this is what i'm listening to right now, as i clean my apartment after having returned from two lazy days in bridgehampton...

mogwai - the sun smells too loud ... listen to this! its subtle, fun, and prog-rock-y

lil wayne - a milli' (dj skeet skeet remix)

happy 4th of july

this is what woke me up on friday morning...happy 4th of july, right?

killer mike featuring ice cube - pressure

deep-holes

wow. i've just read alice munro's short story deep-holes, which was published in last week's new yorker. it was incredible. it made me think a lot of the film away from her, which was based on an alice munro story and has some thematic similarities. but--even better, it reminded me of philip roth's american pastoral , one of my favorite books. both revolve around a similar central incident--the disappearance of a child from a family circle, and how this moment spins around the life of the parent. both are incredible.

two times

i know i already posted about this guy, but he's just so awesome. so he merits two posts.

click to enlarge

girl talk

my friend ro really likes this song, shut the club down by girl talk. what do you think?

come softly to me

this takes you to the fifties--having a cigarette, rolling the window down. - albert hammond, jr.

the realms of the unreal

at battle of drosabellamaximillan. seeing glandelinians retreating vivian girls grasp christian banners, and lead charge against foe by henry darger


spontaneously saw the dargerism: contemporary artists and henry darger exhibit at the folk art museum because i was in the neighborhood. i first learned about darger through documentary made about him by jessica yu, in the realms of the unreal. seeing the immense detail of henry darger's watercolor collages in person is awesome. also exhibited are some old newspaper and magazine cutouts--advertisements that inspired darger's drawings of little girls.

a few other artists also stood out to me:

amy cutler

plot line

robyn o'neil

these finals hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past.

justine kurland

the orchard

read the nytimes review or take a peek at the exhibit yourself, on view through september 21st.