YOKOO

I love artists.

YOKOO ON ETSY

What I've Been Looking For!

This quote I found on one of my favorites, lolita, explicates literally perfectly a sentiment that I have been struggling with for the better half of my conscious life. I didn't think it could be done.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.

And then go and do that. 

Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

- Howard Thurman

Exactly.

Black Pumps // Black Friday

By Enzo Angiolini. 

The purchase of the day! And I didn't even pay this much!

We all march to our own drums

at least according to NPR, some scientists, and an illustrator...

Useful French Phrases for the Foreign and Confused: Installment No. 1

Linen: A Living Material

HOW cool.

via reMade USA by Shannon South

Triptych

I can't believe that on October 23 I wrote that I had made a total of 16 prints for my photo class — it's less than a month later and I've now made well over 50. I don't even remember doing all of that work. Maybe in the world of a working photographer that isn't considered very much? I don't know. 

These are three photos I took down by the bay in my hometown. One of my photography assignments was to shoot a roll of my 'conceptual self portrait' — representations of me that don't involve my physical body. I shot the above with my Lomo LC-A and Tri-X 400. The top one is a double exposure of the water and a jetty that juts out into it. I really like how these function as a set. Is there a well-paying job out there for people who like to take pictures and talk about art all day? 

le sighhh.

At this point I meet Me face to face.

This is the most interesting research I've ever done.

At this point I meet Me face to face.
I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and
dearly and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with
great intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming
trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare— I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.

I am a specialized being, deeply myself.
I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other

pointes.
I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit.
I'm like a leopard and I'm like a poet and I'm like a religieuse and
I'm like an outlaw.
I have a potent weird sense of humor— a saving and a demoralizing
grace.
I have brain, cerebration— not powerful but fine and of a remarkable
quality.
I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.
I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.
I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my
truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful— I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.
I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling
genius.
And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

Mary MacLane, in her journal. Butte, Montana. Early 20th century.

Marie Bashkirtseff

I am attempting to read her journals, which are compiled into one volume titled I Am the Most Interesting Book of All. She was born in Russia, lived in France, and died at age 25 from tuberculosis. She was an artist and avid academic.

Saturday, April 24, 1875

 I had a dream in which I saw an enormous bouquet of yellow heads of wheat, as big as my bedroom, hanging from the ceiling. It was hanging above a table all covered with flowers and magnificent fruits. This dream put me in a good mood all day. I was so happy that it was a pity to be that way for nothing. I put on the white silk skirt, and, for a blouse, the top of the white Jewish dress in light wool embroidered in white. I wore not even one plain gold bracelet and no gloves. There was nothing on my head, either, except two long curls tied together. Oh, yes— two diamond earrings.


my favorite.

Some new mantras

I know one is supposed to choose a single mantra for repetition, d'habitude, but I lately I've found some longer quotes that I wish could be inscribed on the backs of my eyelids so I could be reminded of them approximately 25 times per minute. In reality, they're not mantras at all; they're long, quoted from mildly-famous-but-only-in-niches people, and not really spiritual in the least. I even took a class on Hinduism! How dare I . . .

Quotes, and how they relate to my life presently.

On these past days, weeks:

I am convinced that there are times in everybody's existence when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

Fanny Fern 

On adulthood:

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork . . . . They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

Elizabeth Bowen

On living in New York City:

Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.

George Carlin

On growing:

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

Will Rogers

On current times: 

Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning wheels are gone, and the packhorses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

George Eliot

On my love for my canine companion, Madison:

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

Milan Kundera

On yoga, both the textbook definition and the practice:

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

On smelling the roses:

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

Alan Watts

On taking it as it comes: 

What am I doing? Nothing. I am letting life rain upon me.

Rahel Varnhagen

All of the above is taken from the October issue of The Sun, my all time favorite literary publication. Ultimate goal: a photograph of mine on the cover.

Lately on my mind

 

 

• Charles Burchfield sunflower wallpaper
• Mrs. Warren's Profession on Broadway
• the new Iron & Wine (!!!!)
• Kate Winslet in Little Children 
• knitting with beautiful yarn
• Brian Ferry, photographer, and his amazing site the blue hour
• the fact that my life revolves around picking which French book/ book about France to read next
• "Racing Like a Pro", the fact that The National is a great band to listen to while in transit, and the apparent youtube trend to make videos on this theme.
• a dream I had a few nights ago. I was hiding from a sudden rain storm under a massive elephant ear/ banana leaf. I felt so safe and childish, like when you hide under the dinner table or in the rack of clothing while shopping with your mom. When I woke up, I tried to pull the sheets over my head to recreate the feeling of being under that leaf, but it didn't work. THEN I googled images of the plant, because this is what google is for, and found the most adorable picture of a dog possibly ever.
• estimating the amount of snearing glances I would get wearing this shirt in Paris.
• and updating my flickr. how I held out on having one for this long, I do not know.

A Balzacian run-on for the ages

If the artist does not throw himself into his work like Curtius into the gulf, like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock; if, in fact, he thinks about the difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one, like those mortals favored by the fairies, who, in order to win their princesses, fight a whole series of combats against successive enchantments, the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.

Cousin Bette

Supakitch + Koralie

SUPAKITCH & KORALIE - VÄRLDSKULTUR MUSEET GÖTEBORG from elr°y on Vimeo.


I admire the confidence that these artists show in creating all these lines, be it with markers, paint, or exacto knives, scissors... Would my hand be that steady? Would I color inside the lines? The last time I painted on a wall was when I assisted for Morgan O'Hara, and judging by that experience, I'm not too skilled at coloring inside the lines while my arm is suspended in mid-air. This kind of work looks very cathartic though. I'd like to have a big wall all to myself one day.

by Supakitch and Koralie

via lolita

Hanna Schygulla

I recently had to watch and write a paper on the film Effi Briest, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. We read the book too (written by Theodor Fontane), and I have to say that the film does a fantastic job of translating the words to the screen. In my eyes, Hanna Schygulla plays a pitch perfect Effi. She is utterly germanic and utterly gorgeous. The photos don't really do her justice – you have to see her in action on film. I think watching her performance makes the 2.5 hours of reading subtitles worth it.

Since I saw The White Ribbon and now this one, I'm a roll to watch more German films. Any suggestions? Fassbinder made a whole bunch of films with Hanna, maybe I'll start there . . .

Pickin' apples, makin' pies...

Best of the best: summer '10

Today, it is raining in New York. It is gray, bleak, and chilly. I am frazzled and overworked. (You know when you fill[ed] out forms and under 'Occupation' put 'Student'? I finally understand what this means... it really is a full-time occupation.) 

To try to relax and recharge during a rare period of free time today, I revisited my playlist from this past summer. Days of boredom, I pine for you and you alone!

Blue skies are coming, but I know that it's hard

Kara Walker, Artist

I must see this!

Kara Walker. Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. 1994.

I'm not looking for anything supernatural, 

it's the natural that I'm looking for — 

do you understand? 

Nothing outside of myself — 

I'm looking for something . . . within myself! 

Something natural! 

But something I still don't understand!

Robert Musil

The Confusions of Young Törless