I'm still here

I know... it's been a while. I needed to drop off for a little while, 'specially during October. Life's just been busier than ever, but things are beginning to calm down now. And so.

I haven't yet scanned any photographs that I've made this semester, but I like what I've been doing and I think you will too. Later today I'm heading to northeastern CT for a wedding at a manor house, an old family friend. I packed three cameras.

In other internet news, here's what you should know:

- pick up this book if you haven't yet!
- lend an ear to this album if you haven't yet!
- watch this trailer if you haven't yet!
- these ceramics
- these photographs
- this [new and brilliant] literary mag
- oh, and this genius blog.

I'm still on a lady singers kick!

Pocket Dept.

If you're looking for a place to write and draw and record things, Pocket Dept. is where it's AT. It's a new line of simple and functional notebooks produced by the Art House Co-op in Brooklyn, truly keeping things local. These are the same people who brought you The Sketchbook Project and A Million Little Pictures, a disposable camera themed project. (Psst, have you seen my 2011 sketchbook project?)

But back to Pocket Dept. Since I've been carrying around a bright red backpack lately, and as I'm interested in all things French, the company's French Line (specifically The Backpack Pocket) has captured my heart. As soon as I have need for a notebook, you know where I'll be despensing my dollars. (Did I mention I bought about... 8? 11? notebooks and journals in Paris? I have a thing about blank paper.)

But I really need to sign up for the 2012 Sketchbook Project!

On being culturally well-read

and why we can't know everything. Damn I love NPR!

This article speaks to my innermost overachiever. The girl who tried to read a book a week at age 7. The girl who tried to read a book a week, for a summer, at age 15 (and succeeded this time.) The girl who can't get enough music, even if it means her computer is starting to give notifications of an almost-full hard drive. The girl who tried dancing, who tried piano lessons, who tried the saxophone, who sings in the shower. Who tried to make herself completely ambidextrous in pre-K. Who makes lists of movies to see, people to look up on wikipedia, and who learned French just because it sounds beautiful.

Sigh.

Yet, I persist. My new favorite paintings, seen at the Magritte museum in Brussels. I like his work so much more than I thought I did.

L'Empire des lumières, 1954

La Magie noire, 1935

Little Otsu this week!

Little Otsu is a truly amazing publishing company and online shop that's based in Portland, OR. (I've featured their products before, remember?) They support green publishing and independent artists– two things I care for so deeply! The Little Otsu blog has a fun little featured series where readers submit photographs according to a theme. I turned in three photos for the theme Living Things Among Us and they are officially live! Check them out here.

Big thanks to Little Otsu for featuring my work! I am so thrilled to be included among all the amazing artists featured on the blog.

In other news, here is a wonderful sculpture I saw at the Louvre today.

View the whole Messerschmidt exhibition online here. They're most amazing faces I've ever seen. And they were made in the 1700s, which surprised me because it seems like a very contemporary (though classical technique-wise) concept, sculpting screaming/grimacing people. N'est-ce pas?

Did you forget to buy a calendar, too?

 No worries! There's still time!

Invincible Summer 2011 Calendar by Nicole Georges

Alpine Songs Weekly Planner by Lart C. Berliner

2011 Anek Calendar by anek on Etsy

Jack and Lulu Calendar 2011

2011 Calendar Funny Bird by ModernPop on Etsy

 

 And my personal favorite...

The Floral Leaves Datebook by Jill Bliss

CHLOE

beautiful sunglasses on Swirl today by CHLOE. Burgundy is such a nice fall tone.

What do you collect?

I collect works of art on postcards. And posters. Here's my newest one – discovered at the NY Art Book Fair at the BOMB Magazine table. (I know what you're thinking, and yes, it was indeed strange receiving a package that says BOMB in big black letters across the front.)

It's called "Parting Shots" by David Kramer. Get your own here!

Oh, and did I mention I love NPR?

Photographer Jeff Sheng's current project, titled Don't Ask, Don't Tell, involves taking portraits of people in the U.S. military who identify themselves as LGBTQ. He does it in such a way, though, that the subjects do not give away their identities. The pictures end up communicating their frustration very clearly. It really makes you think (if you're not already thinking it), why the heck does this law exist? These are proud, free, American people. Let them live openly, damnit.
Successful political artistic ventures never cease to impress me.
NPR wrote it up.

YOKOO

I love artists.

YOKOO ON ETSY

We all march to our own drums

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

Linen: A Living Material

HOW cool.

via reMade USA by Shannon South

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.

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 . . .

Gillian Lee Smith, Artist

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