Apricot season

things bought or thought about buying recently:
























(has apricot nectar)

cover what?

The whole Mondadori Poetry Series by Italian designer Cristina Bazzoni is really quite exquisite.

brothers

Saskatchewan, Canada by John Morstad --> third picture

brilliant.

Portland International Film Festival by The Heads of State

An adroit combination of some my favorite things on paper--loose, loopy handwriting, isolation of everyday objects, and simple color blocks--that makes me marvel for longer than might be warranted, my eyes floating back and forth between seeing the lightbulb's coil and the textual information it's giving me. I'm pretty sure the reason this poster arrests me so is a facination with the path of taking a subject out of its context (in this case the Portland Film Festival), into an unrelated but somehow aesthetically connected one (a lightbulb), then bringing it back, smiling and cozy, into a new home, stylish, cunning, and comfortable.

Why weren't we given better memories?

21 coming so soon

sweet wine bottle action

Of all the hints that i am grow(i)n(g) up--i don't enjoy playing tag anymore or like watching cartoons, i have a self-censorship and a self-consciousness that silence my fidgety inquisitiveness--being able to drink is among the more tangible indicators. alchohol was largely (to completely) absent from my life for my 19 pre-college years; my parents never poured themselves a drink on holidays, the coolers at family gatherings were never stocked with beer. . . except for the couple of wine bottles that sat on the built-in wine rack in our kitchen--as if just to prevent the space from being empty--and the couple of beers in the refridgerator in the garage (neither of which i have ever seen my parents drink) alcohol did not make a mark on my childhood other than its mystery as an off-in-the-distance entity. when it did cross my mind, i suppose i thought about alcohol was a thing reserved for adults--adults even more adult than my parents, apparently. in essence, a very far away thing that would never actually experience. that i would never actually grow up.

wiley, wondrous, defying insistence

MOLLY YOUNG, with whose needly observations and french-infused vocabulary i often empathize:

On kid hair

"One of the least attractive phrases in the English language is “virgin hair”––meaning, in stylist’s parlance, hair that has never been dyed or processed. Virgin hair is difficult to find in Manhattan.

Unless you broaden your horizons to include a demographic with hair that is ALWAYS virgin: 3-5 year-olds.

Kids have the best hair. Any kind of kid. This is because a kid’s hair is uncontrollable and self-willed. No matter how tightly-braided or curled, a child’s hair will quickly escape its confines and revert to chaos.

The same thing happens to adults, too, but it is less charming for two reasons. One, an adult is usually aware of it and self-conscious. Two, an adult has dominion over his own hair, so an unsuccessful hairstyle communicates a failure of some kind. An adult’s hair is a reflection of his abilities and intentions. It is charged.

A kid’s hair, on the other hand, is not. It does not reflect the child’s self but is a force independent of both kid and whichever adult is responsible for dealing with it. A kid’s hair is like the weather: wild, unpredictable, fluctuating in temperament and not infrequently awsome."

grow up so fast

the prettiest wedding picture i've seen to date

polyvore: almost as bad

où est ma vie ? by jonquille jolie

. . . as being a carnivore. i finally allowed myself to take some time and sit down with a site that my roommate isabelle showed me sometime during the school year. it's basically like doing digital collage with items that you could purchase by clicking on them.

doing this made me realize part of the reason for this blog: to locate and present what i like and question why i like it. what are the forces, societal, aesthetic, ethical, that drive me to say, "i like this." making these collages is time consuming--with access to sites such as etsy and fffound.com--and, i will admit, fun. but hey, at least i'm not spending money. . . right?

a little bit of the process once you decide to "publish" your "set" (collage):

"Title: où est ma vie ?

Category (please pick one):
[all three] Fashion/Interior Design/Art & Expression

Trend/Ocasion (e.g., plaid, Rihanna, bohemian, work):
materialism

Groups:
[both] Colorado, Jul 11th 09

Post to Twitter:
NO."

bring in the animals

Bands with animals in their name (in the order they came to mind):

-Fleet Foxes
-Grizzly Bear

-Band of Horses

-New Buffalo

-Animal Collective

-The Bird and the Bee

-Andrew Bird

-The Beatles

-Breathe Owl Breathe

-Cat Power

-Edith Piaf ('sparrow' in French)

-The Unicorns

-Paper Bird

-Horse Feathers

literary and/or musical allegories:

-Noah and the Whale

-Peter and the Wolf

is renaming ourselves with animal pseudonyms resorting to childhood, when we would whimsically and without reservation pretend we were animals?

personification is when we give human characteristics to in(perceptively)animate objects. (we do it to trees, and they grow and breathe, just at a sub-human pace.) but what is it called when we give humans animal characteristics?

Daytrotter tells me there are several more bands. after reviewing these in addition to my list, (see complete list below, added as a comment to keep this post from being any longer), here's are the most common animals that appear (in some form or another) in band names:

Bird: 11

Horse: 7

Tiger: 5

Bear: 4

Deer: 3

Dog: 3

Bug: 3

Fish: 2

Wolf: 2

Fish: 2

Rabbit: 2

Coyote: 2

Wolf: 2

Fox: 1

Cat: 1

Elephant: 1

Monkee: 1

Dinosaur, Unicorn, Monster, Dragon: 4

Buffalo, Octupus, Frog, Goat: 4

[can you think of more animal bands?]

an act or a feeling?

Poppytalk by Rebecca Puig

tugging at a secret

and falling in love with longer poetry (thanks to Mr. Updike).
scroll down to hear "Seagulls" and wait for it. (yes, this is long for me.)

there is something so different about hearing the author's voice. here's "Testing the Limits of What I Know and Feel," Updike's essay for NPR's 'This I Believe' series. i was surprised by it's shortness, thinking it would take me pages of somewhat directionless rambling to stumble upon an articulate way to encapsulate everything that i believe. but his powerful conciseness stamps me with clarity.

a breath in between

my grandma eleanor would call these oil drills 'grasshoppers.'
leeanne willilams's watercolor animation has such a restless peace about it.

all around in my home town

so good! by tom gabor

from buenos aires, with love

my friend jacki is back from spending a year in chile and argentina. she shows me things like this. for some reason it's a little intimidating to me, uncomfortable at times because of its newness, or maybe makes me at once scared and restlessness to do something like it. but second to intimidating, it's completely awe-inspiring. (note the use of enya.)

type trapped

type in "trapped" on flickr, and stumble upon brooke shaden's photos. my favorites are the less-manipulated ones, dealing with the ordinary body. that one also has sinks.

this stopped me in my tracks.

reminiscent of a dolled-down, less explicit Cindy Sherman, she uses herself as subject to depict victimization, both by the self and by external forces.

self-victimization often feels like it's impelled by external forces. . . is this a lie?

a lesson in doing

after not visiting Miranda July’s Learning To Love You More since winter, i find that assignments can no longer appear on the website. this is slightly sad, because my ideas for the ones i wanted to do remained lodged in the contemptably hot and sticky lava of potential. of course, i can still do the assignments, but somehow am less inclined to. this makes me question my motivation for doing them in the first place; the purpose of the project is to do the things, not to increase my own fame by having other people know i did them.