Friday, February 27, 2009
The Paris Hilton Effect
..just what is it?
Daphne Merkin explains..
(i'm glad i'm not growing up in the digital age!)
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/n_10346/
yay for michelle
100 days of style!
thanks to instyle
http://www.instyle.com/instyle/package/general/photos/0,,20253745_20253744_adSlide5_20582878,00.html
God is Playing Tricks of Me - A Short Story (COPYRIGHTED)
One night a rush of cold air blew over a thin layer of blanket that only actually covered forty-five percent of his small body. A frost settled and the bed shivered as two tiny feet tip-toed gently onto the floor. The cat followed his lead as he got up. He would stand and rub his eyes for a moment before opening his eyelids to the familiar sight of his life. The photographs stacked in the corner making friends with the dust. The miniature Christmas tree from his ex-girlfriend blinking by the front door. The couch, the reading glasses, the desk, the drawers. There was just then a knock at the door. He was awakened as he jumped into his robe, tightening the red satchel above his hips, past the Christmas tree his eye peeped out of the peep hole to see who was there. Pacing carefully for a moment, there was no time to waste. Five seconds, ten seconds, thirty seconds passed, he wondered if she was still on the other side. A young ladies voice called out, like a fair maiden or goddess of the night, Othello’s only love - merciless against his tired soul. Weak immediately, “who is there?, to himself he whispered.
The sun was down for six hours before he answered the door but it would be days before either would come or go again. The pound of the door, the pounding of their bodies; old lovers reconvene.
Her shoes fell five stories down when she threatened to leave and he threw them out. “You musn’t go, you just arrived.” he’d said to her. Her lips were turning blue she was so cold. The heat was busted, they sat on the mustard colored couch, scratching their heads and unable to sleep.
Again, they fucked but still, they couldn’t sleep. They’d smoke cigarette after cigarette until they felt light on their teeth and Miranda wanted to fly. Brutus pulled her down, held her tight, pulled the satchel off her hips - the robe that had exchange onto her body slipped to the floor revealing her body.
Garbage littered the apartment. Memories of last weeks dinner scattered across the kitchen table. She was disgusted but she didn’t say a word to him. She really let it go, pushed it aside. It mattered little to her how he kept his home. It was how he treated her that mattered.
They’d of fallen asleep if it wasn’t for the hookers outside of their window. They’d sing a song about spotting the hookers and Miranda lost when she couldn’t find anymore after about five a.m. They didn’t feel like old lovers. They didn’t feel particularly old. Brutus suggested they put on music. What he meant was “Can I put on music?” She obliged - they listened.
“Where do you go when you leave here?,” he asked.
“I go somewhere else, with other people.”
“But where? Where do you go when you leave me?”
“Don’t be retarded, I just go on living.”
“You musn’t,” and he held her tightly as the sun rose over the blind revealing the morning story of the largest star. Together they’d tell the story, tell of its colors, tell of its patterns and changes. Always the same subject but an ever evolving story of light.
When it was fully daytime they put their clothes on. He, blue jeans, blue shirt. Her, long dress, blue sweater. They almost matched, but really, they didn’t. They ate cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream and opened the windows up. The air rushed in and it was cold, but feel a thing they did not. They carried on with their conversation, unaffected by the weather, their atmosphere or even the company of each other.
Mid-day approached and hunger set in. Brutus went to the refrigerator and pulled out turkey, cheese, mustard, lettuce and a tomato.
“You shouldn’t keep your tomatoes in the fridge. Put them on the window sill.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”
“No really,” she pressed.
He moved the tomatoes.
“Oh, I can’t have that.”
“Can’t have what?,” he asked.
“The turkey. I’m a vegetarian.”
“Since when?,” he asked.
“I started dating this guy who…”
“Okay, that’s enough,” he opened the refrigerator and pulled out some left over spaghetti then he made his way to the microwave. Pressing the buttons harder and harder, all he was thinking of was her naked body from earlier. He didn’t care what she wanted to eat. He didn’t care if she ate. But, he didn’t need to know who she was seeing. He didn’t want to know a thing.
They decided to close the windows. It was getting chilly in the room and Miranda was not in the habit of covering up, let alone today, on a day like this, with him. They ate and laughed, as time disappeared, hours past, the earth slowly shifted, but they didn’t seem to move. Stuck to the ground, leaning against the bed, it seemed all secrets were fair game, all jokes personal, all truth told. Recounting the times they’d last seen each other before, “in the park,” “in your car,” “at my house,” “in the park again.” It seemed there was always some secret attached to them. They constantly hid from everyone else. They hid from each other.
What they didn’t tell each other they let the other feel.
Wasted time – it is possible they wasted time but always did they enjoy the company of one another. Two glasses, one with a tree and the other his grandmothers, filled with brandy warmed in the microwave clasped in their hands made them honest. They closed their eyes and recounted their first meeting. You were this tall, this age, this beautiful. I was her, you were him, “are you still?,” Miranda asked to herself.
Intently they listened to each other though it was hard to look the other in the eye.
“Do you want to stay?,” he asked.
“How long?,” she wondered.
“Dinner, stay for dinner. I could make you something. Tell me what you eat.”
“I could help you. I can stay.”
The words brought a jolt to Miranda as she felt a thousand instances smack her in the heart every single time measured in lies. Every event marked by deceit. The room seemed smaller than when she first arrived and only now did all of his belongings, stacked in piles, thrown to the side, covered in dust, become obvious. Her eyes made a trail as they marched along the room, panning up and down, left and right, faster and faster. Cards, pictures, gifts she assumed, stuff, things, his things all over the place. Faster did her heart beat and slower did she speak when realizing this was the room of her old lover.
The tone of his voice implied sex. He wanted to fuck again, she knew it. But, she couldn’t, not now. Not after realizing what she had done. She felt sick, nauseous, I must go. But, she was stuck, tarred to the ground and feathered with fear as his smile paralyzed her legs, her back. The body tense knows no other way and so she stood oddly strait, uncomfortably and awkward looking away from his face.
Five years had passed. Accomplishments, new memories formed, pain released, yet still she could not shake him from her current self. Over and again she tried. With all of her existence did she yearn to release him. Yet, at that moment stood closer to him than any other human on Earth.
He hadn’t wanted this either. He didn’t want to fall in love. No one does. He wanted his sanity back. He wanted more than anything to have the ability to love again back. If she wasn’t going to love him, he wanted to love another woman. He wants to hold the woman he loves, he wants to feel her close to him when they are out. He doesn’t want to hide, he wants to be brave with his love.
But, she closes him out. Like, two people on an endless track, the dust just kicks up behind them and the car rolls on. I heard that cars can drive for an eternity like this, sometimes blindly.
Dinner was to be served prompt at 6. It would be a date. She would go to her corner of the room, him to his and back they would return to meet again, freshened up, smelling of daffodils or polo players. She enjoyed the aroma when he cooked, liked watching him from behind as his body moved about the kitchen, his shadow chasing him around the room. Her eyes followed his every move.
He could seduce her by doing nothing. His breathing turned her on; he turned her out only two hours ago again. It was constantly on their minds as if it was the biggest thing in common in both of their lives.
Should she go, should she stay. If she stayed, how long would she stay? Could she stay, forever?
The sun was down for six hours before he answered the door but it would be days before either would come or go again. The pound of the door, the pounding of their bodies; old lovers reconvene.
Her shoes fell five stories down when she threatened to leave and he threw them out. “You musn’t go, you just arrived.” he’d said to her. Her lips were turning blue she was so cold. The heat was busted, they sat on the mustard colored couch, scratching their heads and unable to sleep.
Again, they fucked but still, they couldn’t sleep. They’d smoke cigarette after cigarette until they felt light on their teeth and Miranda wanted to fly. Brutus pulled her down, held her tight, pulled the satchel off her hips - the robe that had exchange onto her body slipped to the floor revealing her body.
Garbage littered the apartment. Memories of last weeks dinner scattered across the kitchen table. She was disgusted but she didn’t say a word to him. She really let it go, pushed it aside. It mattered little to her how he kept his home. It was how he treated her that mattered.
They’d of fallen asleep if it wasn’t for the hookers outside of their window. They’d sing a song about spotting the hookers and Miranda lost when she couldn’t find anymore after about five a.m. They didn’t feel like old lovers. They didn’t feel particularly old. Brutus suggested they put on music. What he meant was “Can I put on music?” She obliged - they listened.
“Where do you go when you leave here?,” he asked.
“I go somewhere else, with other people.”
“But where? Where do you go when you leave me?”
“Don’t be retarded, I just go on living.”
“You musn’t,” and he held her tightly as the sun rose over the blind revealing the morning story of the largest star. Together they’d tell the story, tell of its colors, tell of its patterns and changes. Always the same subject but an ever evolving story of light.
When it was fully daytime they put their clothes on. He, blue jeans, blue shirt. Her, long dress, blue sweater. They almost matched, but really, they didn’t. They ate cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream and opened the windows up. The air rushed in and it was cold, but feel a thing they did not. They carried on with their conversation, unaffected by the weather, their atmosphere or even the company of each other.
Mid-day approached and hunger set in. Brutus went to the refrigerator and pulled out turkey, cheese, mustard, lettuce and a tomato.
“You shouldn’t keep your tomatoes in the fridge. Put them on the window sill.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”
“No really,” she pressed.
He moved the tomatoes.
“Oh, I can’t have that.”
“Can’t have what?,” he asked.
“The turkey. I’m a vegetarian.”
“Since when?,” he asked.
“I started dating this guy who…”
“Okay, that’s enough,” he opened the refrigerator and pulled out some left over spaghetti then he made his way to the microwave. Pressing the buttons harder and harder, all he was thinking of was her naked body from earlier. He didn’t care what she wanted to eat. He didn’t care if she ate. But, he didn’t need to know who she was seeing. He didn’t want to know a thing.
They decided to close the windows. It was getting chilly in the room and Miranda was not in the habit of covering up, let alone today, on a day like this, with him. They ate and laughed, as time disappeared, hours past, the earth slowly shifted, but they didn’t seem to move. Stuck to the ground, leaning against the bed, it seemed all secrets were fair game, all jokes personal, all truth told. Recounting the times they’d last seen each other before, “in the park,” “in your car,” “at my house,” “in the park again.” It seemed there was always some secret attached to them. They constantly hid from everyone else. They hid from each other.
What they didn’t tell each other they let the other feel.
Wasted time – it is possible they wasted time but always did they enjoy the company of one another. Two glasses, one with a tree and the other his grandmothers, filled with brandy warmed in the microwave clasped in their hands made them honest. They closed their eyes and recounted their first meeting. You were this tall, this age, this beautiful. I was her, you were him, “are you still?,” Miranda asked to herself.
Intently they listened to each other though it was hard to look the other in the eye.
“Do you want to stay?,” he asked.
“How long?,” she wondered.
“Dinner, stay for dinner. I could make you something. Tell me what you eat.”
“I could help you. I can stay.”
The words brought a jolt to Miranda as she felt a thousand instances smack her in the heart every single time measured in lies. Every event marked by deceit. The room seemed smaller than when she first arrived and only now did all of his belongings, stacked in piles, thrown to the side, covered in dust, become obvious. Her eyes made a trail as they marched along the room, panning up and down, left and right, faster and faster. Cards, pictures, gifts she assumed, stuff, things, his things all over the place. Faster did her heart beat and slower did she speak when realizing this was the room of her old lover.
The tone of his voice implied sex. He wanted to fuck again, she knew it. But, she couldn’t, not now. Not after realizing what she had done. She felt sick, nauseous, I must go. But, she was stuck, tarred to the ground and feathered with fear as his smile paralyzed her legs, her back. The body tense knows no other way and so she stood oddly strait, uncomfortably and awkward looking away from his face.
Five years had passed. Accomplishments, new memories formed, pain released, yet still she could not shake him from her current self. Over and again she tried. With all of her existence did she yearn to release him. Yet, at that moment stood closer to him than any other human on Earth.
He hadn’t wanted this either. He didn’t want to fall in love. No one does. He wanted his sanity back. He wanted more than anything to have the ability to love again back. If she wasn’t going to love him, he wanted to love another woman. He wants to hold the woman he loves, he wants to feel her close to him when they are out. He doesn’t want to hide, he wants to be brave with his love.
But, she closes him out. Like, two people on an endless track, the dust just kicks up behind them and the car rolls on. I heard that cars can drive for an eternity like this, sometimes blindly.
Dinner was to be served prompt at 6. It would be a date. She would go to her corner of the room, him to his and back they would return to meet again, freshened up, smelling of daffodils or polo players. She enjoyed the aroma when he cooked, liked watching him from behind as his body moved about the kitchen, his shadow chasing him around the room. Her eyes followed his every move.
He could seduce her by doing nothing. His breathing turned her on; he turned her out only two hours ago again. It was constantly on their minds as if it was the biggest thing in common in both of their lives.
Should she go, should she stay. If she stayed, how long would she stay? Could she stay, forever?
if confidence is sexy what am i - my 100th post
I used to think I was pretty, but I’m not sure what happened.
I don’t feel that way anymore.
For a moment I think maybe it is just the winter blues; the pale skin and chapped lips do do me in during these winter months.
But that thought passes too and I stare into the mirror, into my closet, into the pages of magazines and I find myself cringing at the thought of myself.
It is a lonely feeling which makes me feel separate than the rest of the world. My lack of confidence seems unlike other girls around me.
I sweat out of my nervousness. I clench up because I am not pretty enough.
I’m not competing against anyone but myself so the winner and the loser are always me.
My clothes plot a mutiny against me but I am at a war with myself.
Don’t know what I have to offer the opposite sex except what is really underneath. I like it best when no one is looking and I’m not looking either. But, I live in the world, I am a human being - how would is it possible to ignore the others?
Surely I’d never succeed so I don’t even try.
I’m tired of these magazines but I’m exhausted by the photographs on facebook. I’m always starring, comparing, feeling bad about me.
Silently I put my head down, embarrassed by my belly weight, my hair, my skin, myself.
I’m embarrassed by my lack of fashion, I don’t fit in.
I used to be cool but now I don’t know.
I always felt awkward.
I remember in 8th grade when I was asked to do a speech at graduation, I was initially excited. Then they told me it’d be next to “Michelle” - the prettiest girl in 8th grade who already had boobs, already got her period, already had sex. And I thought this is terrible. How horrible that they are going to place me, this awkward child, next to her, this beautiful woman. And no doubt that graduation day I stood there with my head up but inside I was melting, my guts spilled on the floor covered in shame. I was embarrassed to be next to her, my awkward flat chest, my lack of hips, my scraggly hair..
I look for inspiration, I focus on the positive, I fling my closet door open with an umph and scout out a fantastic outfit.
But, the longer I stand there the more desperate I feel. I begin to melt into my closet, my shame spilled on the floor.
I’m not like other girls. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t feel comfortable with me.
I don’t feel that way anymore.
For a moment I think maybe it is just the winter blues; the pale skin and chapped lips do do me in during these winter months.
But that thought passes too and I stare into the mirror, into my closet, into the pages of magazines and I find myself cringing at the thought of myself.
It is a lonely feeling which makes me feel separate than the rest of the world. My lack of confidence seems unlike other girls around me.
I sweat out of my nervousness. I clench up because I am not pretty enough.
I’m not competing against anyone but myself so the winner and the loser are always me.
My clothes plot a mutiny against me but I am at a war with myself.
Don’t know what I have to offer the opposite sex except what is really underneath. I like it best when no one is looking and I’m not looking either. But, I live in the world, I am a human being - how would is it possible to ignore the others?
Surely I’d never succeed so I don’t even try.
I’m tired of these magazines but I’m exhausted by the photographs on facebook. I’m always starring, comparing, feeling bad about me.
Silently I put my head down, embarrassed by my belly weight, my hair, my skin, myself.
I’m embarrassed by my lack of fashion, I don’t fit in.
I used to be cool but now I don’t know.
I always felt awkward.
I remember in 8th grade when I was asked to do a speech at graduation, I was initially excited. Then they told me it’d be next to “Michelle” - the prettiest girl in 8th grade who already had boobs, already got her period, already had sex. And I thought this is terrible. How horrible that they are going to place me, this awkward child, next to her, this beautiful woman. And no doubt that graduation day I stood there with my head up but inside I was melting, my guts spilled on the floor covered in shame. I was embarrassed to be next to her, my awkward flat chest, my lack of hips, my scraggly hair..
I look for inspiration, I focus on the positive, I fling my closet door open with an umph and scout out a fantastic outfit.
But, the longer I stand there the more desperate I feel. I begin to melt into my closet, my shame spilled on the floor.
I’m not like other girls. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t feel comfortable with me.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Erase Your Bad Memories - for $49.99 from CVS
BBC reports Dutch Investigators believe a common beta-blocker drug could be used to help those suffering from long, traumatic memories of fear or anxiety. But, has the pharmaceutical world gone to far? Biomedical ethicists react. I believe the idea might have a bad effect on how people interpret the world around them since so much of our own conscious is based on our past experiences. How will we learn lessons? How will we understand ourselves if we can't remember? Dr Daniel Sokol, lecturer in Medical Ethics at St George's, University of London:
decide for yourself: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7892272.stm
"Removing bad memories is not like removing a wart or a mole. It will change our personal identity since who we are is linked to our memories. It may perhaps be beneficial in some cases, but before eradicating memories, we must reflect on the knock-on effects that this will have on individuals, society and our sense of humanity."
decide for yourself: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7892272.stm
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
¡¡¡¡DONDE VIVEN LOS MONSTRUOS!!!!
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.
Where does this magical land exist?
..max = too wild? wants to go home
Paul Gauguin
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE FULL SIZE
Painted in 1897 and 1898, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" addresses Paul Gauguin's struggle with the meaning of existence. In 1891, Gauguin emigrated to Tahiti in search of a society more unspoiled than his native France. This piece, part of a series of introspective paintings inspired by his new country, was considered by Gauguin "to be his masterpiece and the summation of his ideas" (see Boston Museum of Fine Arts web site).
The piece should be viewed as a text from right to left--a suggestion imparted by the artist's own letters--with the various figures representative of questions relating to human existence. In this light, the babe at the far right signifies newborn life. The figure of questionable sex whose back is turned to the viewer and who appears to inspect his or her underarm could be understood as the beginning of an individual's realization of gender. The apple-picking male and the girl to his left who sits eating an apple reenact the fable of Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge.
The old lady at the far left of the frame sits on the verge of death, unclothed as a parallel perhaps to the babe on the painting's far right. As one examines the painting, the questions that make up the artwork's title-"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"--invite the viewer to contemplate the meaning of life with regard to the symbols Gauguin has left for us. (Bertman, Sandra L, NYU)
CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE FULL SIZE
Painted in 1897 and 1898, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" addresses Paul Gauguin's struggle with the meaning of existence. In 1891, Gauguin emigrated to Tahiti in search of a society more unspoiled than his native France. This piece, part of a series of introspective paintings inspired by his new country, was considered by Gauguin "to be his masterpiece and the summation of his ideas" (see Boston Museum of Fine Arts web site).
The piece should be viewed as a text from right to left--a suggestion imparted by the artist's own letters--with the various figures representative of questions relating to human existence. In this light, the babe at the far right signifies newborn life. The figure of questionable sex whose back is turned to the viewer and who appears to inspect his or her underarm could be understood as the beginning of an individual's realization of gender. The apple-picking male and the girl to his left who sits eating an apple reenact the fable of Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge.
The old lady at the far left of the frame sits on the verge of death, unclothed as a parallel perhaps to the babe on the painting's far right. As one examines the painting, the questions that make up the artwork's title-"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"--invite the viewer to contemplate the meaning of life with regard to the symbols Gauguin has left for us. (Bertman, Sandra L, NYU)
sick of perez. sick of facebook. sick of the internet. i want real life.
The Internet is just like the Universe.
HUBBLE
This image was assembled from images taken in January thru February 2006. It is an image of a galactic cluster in the constellation Centaurus, inspiringly known as Abell S0740.
The big blob in the middle is a elliptical galaxy called ESO 325-G004
(PIC N TEXT TAKEN FROM: http://www.astronomy-pictures.net/hubble_telescope_images.html)
this looks like dreams i've had.
wiki says hubble is
curious article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm?lss
where in the universe are we?
what are we doing here?
can books give us answers? do we already know the answers?
are there answers to our questions, or
are we floating adrift?
HUBBLE
This image was assembled from images taken in January thru February 2006. It is an image of a galactic cluster in the constellation Centaurus, inspiringly known as Abell S0740.
The big blob in the middle is a elliptical galaxy called ESO 325-G004
(PIC N TEXT TAKEN FROM: http://www.astronomy-pictures.net/hubble_telescope_images.html)
this looks like dreams i've had.
wiki says hubble is
a space telescope that was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1990. It is named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. Although not the first space telescope, the Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well-known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and is one of NASA's Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
curious article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm?lss
where in the universe are we?
what are we doing here?
can books give us answers? do we already know the answers?
are there answers to our questions, or
are we floating adrift?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
postsecret.
postsecret makes me think about love. i am inexhaustibly in love with you johnny. happy st. valentine's day.
wanna contemplate slavery in luxury?
One of pop superstar Michael Jackson's brothers, Marlon, is involved in a controversial plan to develop a $3.4bn (£2.4bn) slavery memorial and luxury resort in Badagry, Nigeria.
The historic slave port is to be transformed through the bizarre combination of a slave history theme park and a museum dedicated to double Grammy-winning pop-soul group the Jackson Five.
The idea is that the band will help attract African-American tourists keen to trace their roots back to Nigeria.
The men behind the plan say it will honour the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and provide employment opportunities for Nigerians.
But the plan has been condemned by Nigerian commentators.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7858010.stm?ls
Friday, February 13, 2009
where do all the people we used to know go?
forget about our friendship, i say. what one did we have to begin with?
where did all the people go? the friends. who did they turn into? what has happened to these people. why do their goings-on bother me so much? it used to be you stopped talking to someone and they disappeared. now, they reappear everytime i go on facebook with updates and pictures and i can't really escape them..
i want to tell them no you won't when they say they will call.
i want to tell them how much i disliked them anyway.
i want to them i miss you, who you used to be.
these are the friends i knew, i loved and i lost. i guess i miss the action, the excitement, the fun. i miss going out, i miss parties, i miss getting wasted. i'm not lonely but sometimes i am.
but where are all the people?
where did my friendships go?
what is a valid way to spend your time? it would be fun to move to ny, work in fashion..have a fabulous job with fabulous money or not a lot of money but fabulous style..ah but it is all just an illusion, right? those things don't bring happiness and if they do it is a blind sense of satisfaction, a fleetin bit of a pleasure.
i stay home and make strawberry salads while i enjoy box wine and sleep with my sweetheart. that is what makes me happy.
so why do i long for the comfort of friends i once knew?
i want to be cool again.
where did all the people go? the friends. who did they turn into? what has happened to these people. why do their goings-on bother me so much? it used to be you stopped talking to someone and they disappeared. now, they reappear everytime i go on facebook with updates and pictures and i can't really escape them..
i want to tell them no you won't when they say they will call.
i want to tell them how much i disliked them anyway.
i want to them i miss you, who you used to be.
these are the friends i knew, i loved and i lost. i guess i miss the action, the excitement, the fun. i miss going out, i miss parties, i miss getting wasted. i'm not lonely but sometimes i am.
but where are all the people?
where did my friendships go?
what is a valid way to spend your time? it would be fun to move to ny, work in fashion..have a fabulous job with fabulous money or not a lot of money but fabulous style..ah but it is all just an illusion, right? those things don't bring happiness and if they do it is a blind sense of satisfaction, a fleetin bit of a pleasure.
i stay home and make strawberry salads while i enjoy box wine and sleep with my sweetheart. that is what makes me happy.
so why do i long for the comfort of friends i once knew?
i want to be cool again.
designed by balmain
i absolutely love this look. the jacket, the jeans, the belt, the shoes, the hair - perfect.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
i hate to put this next to pene!!
this will probably be the strangest story of 2009! just released, a picture of octomon a week before the tragic birth
i refuse to post the picture on here because it is really disgusting and makes me uncomfortable but go to this site and check it out for yourself:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1142566/The-mother-baby-bumps-Octuplets-mum-bares-ENORMOUS-stomach-just-days-giving-birth.html
i refuse to post the picture on here because it is really disgusting and makes me uncomfortable but go to this site and check it out for yourself:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1142566/The-mother-baby-bumps-Octuplets-mum-bares-ENORMOUS-stomach-just-days-giving-birth.html
shop mango
yes!! pene cruz and her beautiful sister monica are still designing for one of my favorite stores - mango! spain makes the most wonderful clothes, zara is another of my favorite stores.
well, they just released their ad's for the new spring 09 line and the sisters look amazing!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
true love?
with valentines day coming up i can't help but think about love
i came across this picture of the president and his wife and couldn't out but let out an "awwwww"
this must be what it's all about.
Artic Unicorns
It's like a childhood fantasy come to life - woo hoo!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7869257.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7869257.stm
Japanese Robots
So I'm not really sure what this means or what to make of it, but I have a feeling the world has just begun to go crazy.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20090205/165197/
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20090205/165197/
oh god
did i mention i'm addicted to sushi?
i know this isn't too interesting.
but most of the time my mind is split thinking between, eh, one of five things:
sex, my boyfriend, money, "the state of the world," and sushi.
that makes sense right??
i mean, one is pleasure
one is love
one is necessary
one is unavoidable
and the other, well, it keeps me healthy, happy and content.
here are some cool sushi pictures for your enjoyment John - since you seem to be the only one here in outercyberspace who reads this. speaking of which, if we had a circle and the circle zoomed in 10x, where would the circle be if it was trying to zoom in on the internet from a computer screen? is that possible? would the circle remain the same size? can you measure the intangible? i would put these thoughts in the "state of the world" category.
but back to sushi, if you weren't hungry for it before
you sure are after looking at these:
yes please, more more!
i know this isn't too interesting.
but most of the time my mind is split thinking between, eh, one of five things:
sex, my boyfriend, money, "the state of the world," and sushi.
that makes sense right??
i mean, one is pleasure
one is love
one is necessary
one is unavoidable
and the other, well, it keeps me healthy, happy and content.
here are some cool sushi pictures for your enjoyment John - since you seem to be the only one here in outercyberspace who reads this. speaking of which, if we had a circle and the circle zoomed in 10x, where would the circle be if it was trying to zoom in on the internet from a computer screen? is that possible? would the circle remain the same size? can you measure the intangible? i would put these thoughts in the "state of the world" category.
but back to sushi, if you weren't hungry for it before
you sure are after looking at these:
yes please, more more!
Monday, February 9, 2009
did i mention she's the best?
yes, yes i did
she performs. 9 months preggers.
isn't she awesome?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThDwFWDSJl8
FASHION THAT I LIKE (how I'd dress if I had $$ and time)
forget the ball gowns and heels - my sense of style tells me these outfits are hot.
this year i am getting those glasses!
lagerfeld & kravitz (lenny+lisa=zoe)
did i mention i need a baret?
dude - mini madonna is the cutest.
a lil more lourdes
this year i am getting those glasses!
lagerfeld & kravitz (lenny+lisa=zoe)
did i mention i need a baret?
dude - mini madonna is the cutest.
a lil more lourdes
Frida, Me, Myself and I - Why I see Myself in Frida
The New York Times Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 8 · May 15, 2008
The Nerve of Frida Kahlo
By Sanford Schwartz
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo was an ironic and devilish person, and so she might be intrigued by the thought that, for this writer, at least, her finest single work is in an outward respect her least typical. Kahlo is known, of course, for her many unsparing self-portraits, images where she can confront us with tears on her cheeks or exhibit herself as a bedridden patient or victim. They present a woman who, facing us as well with her distinctive and unforgettable dark, unbroken, single eyebrow and clear suggestion of a mustache, and often wearing clothes or accompanied by details that are redolent of her native Mexico, exudes a smoldering fury—an expressionist tension that, until recent decades, was rarely encountered in the work of women artists.
The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, however, a painting dated 1939 which shows exactly that, a woman killing herself, has a New York City setting and has as its protagonist a formally and elegantly dressed woman who is not remotely like any other figure in the painter's work. At the traveling Kahlo retrospective currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an exhibition geared to the centennial of her birth, in 1907 (she died in 1954), no other picture had the degree of experimentation, the luminosity, or the graphic clarity of this painting, either. Dorothy Hale was a socialite and something of a friend of Kahlo's who had lost her husband and become psychologically adrift and financially desperate. She committed suicide by jumping from her apartment in the Hampshire House, on Central Park South, and from the incident Kahlo made a picture that is as witty and ingenious as it is mordant and disturbing.
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In the painting, which, like most of her work, is fairly small, the white skyscraper appears like a mirage emanating from the kind of deadpan perfect blue sky, covered with deadpan perfect cottony clouds, one would find in a contemporaneous work by Magritte. Near the top of the building, in part of the painting that recalls images of people jumping from the World Trade Center, we see a tiny, dark, plummeting figure. In the center of the picture a more clearly visible person falls twistedly before us, while at the bottom, on a ledge which could be a sidewalk, Hale lies dead, her eyes open and staring at us. Her body seems unscathed although blood seeps out from under her onto the frame, which has been painted so as to be a continuation of the scene. Blood also seems to form the words in the strip at the bottom of the picture that tell us, in Spanish, what we are looking at and who painted it.
Brilliantly conceived as a design and as a way to present, in a single image, a number of events taking place over a passage of time, Kahlo's picture keeps our eyes continually moving over its entire surface. Even better is its pulsating, wonderfully tricky sense of space. With the "story" of the scene continued onto the frame and with Dorothy Hale's foot realistically jutting out, and even casting a shadow, over the strip at the bottom of the picture, where the writing is, the painting keeps toying with different kinds of flatness and with ways of projecting itself into the "real life" realm of the viewer.
In its psychology, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale is little different from Kahlo's better-known pictures of herself. Like them, it demands that we attend to a person who is (or just was) in a state of physical pain and crisis. Yet there is an adventurousness about picture-making itself in this work, a sense that painting is a language Kahlo is reinventing for her own needs, that is absent from her art in general. At the Philadelphia show one encountered an artist who, after a lively if uneven stretch in the 1930s, when she was getting her bearings, settled thereafter, in the dozen or so years that remained of her career, into a kind of impersonal, utilitarian representational approach—a spirit that leaves many of her pictures feeling thin and illustrational.
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The irony of the situation is that Kahlo's need to make art was unusually personal. Most of her pictures were about experiences she had, or were commissions from, or conceived as gifts for, specific people. Her rising importance in the last quarter-century or so, when she has gone from being an artist chiefly of interest to fellow Mexicans to being "the most famous female artist in history," as she is described in the catalog of the Tate Modern's 2005 Kahlo exhibition[1]—the first retrospective that museum has given to a Latin American artist—is due to the overwhelming nature of her life story and to the way she seemingly made her art and her life, with its round of physical crises and her decidedly individual way of dealing with them, inseparable.
And even if her work leaves a viewer hungry for a more commanding or inventive use of the materials of painting, the way Kahlo's biography and her pictures come together is undeniably mesmerizing. Kahlo wasn't an "outsider" artist in the sense that her pictures were not made during a period when she was institutionalized, nor were they the product of a person who suffered severe emotional or social incapacities. But she is kin to outsider artists in that art-making for her was, as Hayden Herrera has noted in her groundbreaking and authoritative Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983), a solace. It was a way to say to herself and to her world, in the face of literally crushing blows, "I am still here."
She was visited by bad news already at age six, when she was attacked by polio, leaving her with a withered right leg. The main catastrophe arrived when she was eighteen, in 1925, and riding on a bus in Mexico City with her boyfriend. When a tram slammed into the bus, the wreckage resulted in damage to her spinal column and right leg that, although initially she had many years of relative freedom of movement, never healed. In time she would endure over thirty surgical operations, in Mexico and the States. She would undergo lengthy periods in traction, become dependent on painkillers and alcohol, need to be outfitted in large plaster corsets, and eventually lose her right leg below the knee. Perhaps the most devastating effect of the crash was that it left her unable to bear children. The early years of her marriage were gruesomely marked by miscarriages and abortions.
Yet the particular spirit of Kahlo the person—and to a lesser extent of her art—derived from the vivacity with which she resisted her fate. The daughter of a Mexican mother and a German father, an immigrant to Mexico who became a photographer to support his family, Kahlo was, as every writer about her eventually points out, a bundle of contradictions. She played them out dramatically, beginning with her very appearance. If her face had unsettling traces of masculinity, her complexly twined, often ribbon-bedecked hair, her goodly amount of jewelry, and her floor-length, sweeping skirts and shawls, based on the traditional clothing style of the women of the Tehuana region of Mexico, were almost militantly feminine.
According to legend, Tehuana women were the real figures of authority in their society, and Kahlo's wearing of such outfits was a demonstration of strength and will. Appearing this way in Mexico meant that she was continuously announcing her leftist identification with the underclass (she was in fact an ardent Communist at times), while the same clothes, when she was abroad, might be more purely a hassle or an embarrassment. (In New York, kids ran up to her on the street and asked where the circus was.) Yet Kahlo took to wearing long skirts in the first place to hide her withered leg; and her wearing clothes that symbolized women being in control was belied by her slavish and often bruised relationship with her husband, Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist painter who was twenty years older and almost comically taller and heavier than his wife.
Rivera's love for Kahlo was unquestioned, as was his admiration for her work. But his refusal to be monogamous was flattening. (His low point was the affair he conducted with Frida's youngest sister, Cristina, around 1934, causing one of the Riveras' bigger dustups.) Kahlo seemingly thought of her husband as her mainstay no matter what, yet she herself had many lovers, of both sexes, including women who had slept with Rivera. She had affairs with Isamu Noguchi and the art dealer Heinz Berggruen when both were young and even, during the spring of 1937, with Leon Trotsky, who had been given asylum in Mexico not long before, in part through the intercession of Rivera, a member of the Mexican Trotskyite Party.
Reading Kahlo's flowingly opinionated, cajoling, sarcastic, and slangy letters (they form a highlight of Herrera's biography), one can see how she made an enormous number of people, of many ages and backgrounds, believe they had a special—a lover's—relationship with her. Self-obsessed as she may be, she often makes us see and feel the person she writes to, and she can train her wiseacre's style on herself, as when she wrote from the States to a friend back home, "Some of the gringachas even imitate me and want to dress as 'Mexicans,' but the poor things look like turnips and the honest truth [is] they just look absolutely dreadful, which doesn't mean I look good myself, but at least I get by."
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In the early 1930s, when she was in her mid-twenties, Kahlo began making paintings about her own experiences using the small sizes and miniaturist detailing of Mexican retablos, or ex-voto images. Often painted on tin, these pictures show saints, say, performing miracles or the Virgin Mary answering a prayer. Retablos, which go back in date to the eighteenth century, generally present the tiny actors of the scene in rather bare places, and the pleasingly awkward and abstract nature of the pieces is enhanced by the written commentary that is often part of the images, words that describe what is happening in the scene.
Kahlo's insight was to see that she could take this folk art form in any direction. In the crisp and lovely My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) (1936), where she is a chubby child towering over a toy version of the house she grew up in, and her forebears float in the sky, painted as they would appear in stiff studio photographs, her subject is both memory in itself and the jumbled process by which we create a past for ourselves. In A Few Small Nips (1935), she used the crude, stageset-like properties of ex-voto images to present a shocking news story of the moment about the murder of a prostitute. The way the same images can show an event in progress enabled her to dramatize the death of Dorothy Hale.
Kahlo's feeling for retablos had a lot to do with a larger quest during the 1930s by Mexican artists and writers to identify with their country's pre-Columbian and colonial past. In her affinity for miniaturism and her desire to make an art about her own past or her fears, she was also on the same track, although not moving at the same speed, as a number of artists associated with Dada or Surrealism, including Dalì, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. Kahlo generally maintained that she wasn't a Surrealist and that her pictures were about her experiences, not her fantasies or dreams. She said that when André Breton, Surrealism's chief priest, arrived in Mexico in 1938 and pronounced her a Surrealist it was all news to her. Yet Rivera was writing about Surrealism by 1932, when she was making her first mature paintings.
More importantly, Kahlo's small pictures of the time could be called less brilliantly inventive versions—country cousins—of works that Dalì, in particular, had been making for a few years already (a relationship repeated, one can think, in the two artists' respective mustaches). When, in Henry Ford Hospital (1932), Kahlo presents herself on a blood-stained bed and alludes to a miscarriage, or when, in A Few Small Nips, we see a naked, slashed-up woman on a bed and a thug with a knife standing beside her, or even when, in the elegantly designed and cool-toned Itzcuintli Dog with Me (circa 1938), Kahlo sits sedately before us with a joint attached to a roach clip on one of her fingers, we are not all that far from Dalì's equally tiny dreamscape-type paintings in which, peering in, we might see one figure who has soiled himself, another with an erection, and a woman with a vagina for a face.
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Working with the retablo form, Kahlo was, in one sense, creating her own homemade Surrealism. But the larger point is that her work was formally and temperamentally in sync with that of some of the liveliest young artists of the late 1920s and 1930s, artists who, though connected with Surrealism, were essentially looking for ways, in the wake of Cubism and more purely abstract styles, to continue to make a vital representational art. That she was ready to be stimulated by a more experimental art milieu than any she knew in Mexico is suggested by the fact that The Suicide of Dorothy Hale was begun when Kahlo was in New York for her 1938 show at the Julien Levy Gallery, her first solo exhibition anywhere. Making a work that is almost as much an object as a painting, she happened to be in tune with Joseph Cornell, who was fashioning some of his first mature boxed-in dioramas around this time and even made a box about her.
Kahlo would always be at home with small sizes and fine detailing. But from the late 1930s on she stopped pushing forward with what retablos gave her: a sense that a painting could call attention to itself as a constructed, artificial entity. She turned increasingly to a sort of all-purpose realistic manner, and much of her energy in the 1940s went into conventionally scaled self-portraits where she is seen from roughly the chest up. In images where she is frequently accompanied by one or more of her many pets and vegetation presses in behind her, she looks out with a grim wariness. In one 1940 example she wears a thorn necklace which has punctured her skin and drawn blood.
These self-portraits are her signature pieces, the works that give most people their idea of Frida Kahlo. There is a kind of literary tension in them in that the monkeys and other creatures around her aren't a friendly-looking crew, and a viewer can wonder whether these animals are the exotic woman's security detail, asking us to keep our distance, or are demonic beings who are keeping her, as it were, under house arrest. Aside from this storytelling ambiguity, little is going on in these pictures. The paint application is dry, docile, and the same all over. Our eyes aren't made to jump—to readjust to changes in scale, texture, or space—as we take in the works, and Kahlo's expression from one painting to the next is remarkably unvaried.
Altogether there is a sense of fuzziness and banality, and an obviousness of color, to her later work. Much of this must have been due to Kahlo's health, which was always an issue from the time of her accident and had alarming downturns in the mid-1940s. The increasing pain she lived with, as well as her long stays in hospitals and the effects of medications and other substances taken to alleviate her distress, cannot have helped her artistic drive. She continued to make paintings about her wracked condition and about a sort of sexualized Mexican cosmos, a realm of suns, moons, toy skeletons, lactating or ejaculating plants, faces discernible in clouds. Among her last efforts were still lifes of fruit done in bright, tropical colors, works that aren't a lot different from a kind of generic folk art.
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For most of her admirers, however, descriptions of where Kahlo the artist stands in relation to her contemporaries, let alone criticism of the formal properties or shortcomings of her pictures, are probably beside the point. In the handsomely designed catalog of the present show—as well as in the Tate's catalog and in that for the Kahlo retrospective held last year at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City[2]—the relationship between, say, Surrealism and the purely Mexican sensibility of her work is often commented upon. But precise ways in which she resembles this or that Surrealist are left unsaid. Nor is it noted that, in her concern with specifically Mexican themes, she might be called a regional or provincial artist—whereas Marsden Hartley, for example, a much more powerful painter, who was working in the same years with specifically American imagery (such as Maine coastal life and Abraham Lincoln's face), is routinely classed as regional.
On the other hand, there are good reasons why, when Kahlo was first becoming widely known beyond her homeland in the 1970s, she struck many people as being a different order of artist. One reason was certainly feminism. In an era when women were thinking and acting with a militant intensity about the roles society had long assigned them, Kahlo's pictures, with their basis in a stoic, unflinching account of one woman's battles with physical pain (and by implication psychic distress), had the effect of a newly unearthed treasure. It was as if no artist before her had been as candid about a woman's body or about specifically female experiences.
Kahlo's growing new renown was fed, too, by an upheaval in thinking about art in general. In the 1970s, many artists (and not just feminist ones) saw the whole edifice of modernism, with its sense of one generation extending the achievement of the preceding generation, and with artworks in the process becoming ever more attenuated, as badly in need of a rethinking. At a moment when making a painting could seem like merely making one more product, the thought that an artwork might be, rather, a many-sided and open-ended investigation into a subject had a profound allure. And here in addition Kahlo was pertinent, not only because her pictures were like so many documents charting a medical condition but because the symbolical, even regimented, way she clothed herself, which answered a psychological need and also identified her political loyalties, could be taken as an element of her artistic process. She seemed to say that everything to do with one's body is a suitable subject for art—a notion that has been stimulating artists for decades now.
But the veneration of Kahlo has become far-fetched. Although Herrera is alert to the sensuous properties of an artwork, the effect of most of the writing in the American, English, and Mexican catalogs is that Kahlo's pictures seem like little more than illustrations, there to support a range of interpretations. For one commentator, she even appears to be less significant as "an artist chiefly of women's experience" than as "a committed Third World cultural nationalist and revolutionary." Her self-portraits are routinely likened to those of van Gogh and Rembrandt. Carlos Fuentes, in the Bellas Artes catalog, sees her, along with Cervantes, Borges, and Velázquez, as a pillar of the "Hispanic spirit." The many photographs of Kahlo and of her life with Rivera, in turn, are treated as if they were one more crucial component of her contribution. (There are about a hundred in the present show, where, engagingly, they occupy its first two rooms.)
What one takes away from Kahlo's art, however, is a less wide-ranging or exalted experience. She found a way to show a certain emotion, at once accusatory, nervy, furious, a little adolescent, and, as Fuentes says, funny. She is giving the world the finger, whether in The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, where she does it with a masterful complexity, in some of her folk art– like self-portraits of the 1930s, where she can be raw or charming about it, or even in her less spirited self-portraits of the following decade, when illness was getting the better of her. It was an emotion, in any event, that she never quite lost, as it is there in the last words of her diary when she wrote, "I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back."
Notes
[1] "Frida Kahlo," June 9–October 9, 2005; catalog of the exhibition edited by Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson (London: Tate Publishing/Abrams, 2005).
[2] "Frida Kahlo: National Homage 1907– 2007," June 13–August 19, 2007; catalog of the exhibition with texts by Salomon Grimberg, James Oles, and Raquel Tibol, and an introduction by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico City: Editorial RM/DAP, 2007).
friendship
"Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache: do be my enemy for friendship's sake."
- William Blake
- William Blake
Thursday, February 5, 2009
chinese migrant workers advertise their skills.
this is so, so sad. i try not to be scared for this world - i try to be strong.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
shes got so much things to say right now
ah, so much has happened yet so little has changed me but here i am, back again, in front of the screen, in this little room in the back of this office. oh how i hate it here. i wish i could quit, wish i could find a new job. no call backs, no replies, hell, i wonder if they even recieve my e-mails? i've sent out dozens with no response. i pray this time someone replies because i can't take it here yet i've got no where else to go. i just need a new, good job. something where i can save money. something where i can be happy, talk to people, dress and do my hair. here, it is depressing, bland, smells like ciggarettes. my boss is a bitch and i miss my job from 12th grade at the pastry shop - that was happiness. this is depressing but thank god i'm not depressed anymore. i really had to push myself out of that. thank god he was there for me and believed i could get better. i think i was really low at that point. i think that many things i don't do are the result of my own insecurities. i'd like to feel prettier. i'd like to feel smarter. but those are feelings, feelings you can control right? maybe if i just started to believe in myself i'd feel both of those ways all of the time.
alot has happened in the news, a lot of it scary but i'm not scared. more just annoyed. annoyed that this world is so fucked and i had to be born into it. damnit. i mean why couldn't i be of my parents generation? my grandparents? now the world is overpopulated, the ice is about to melt and people just realized money isn't real after all the assholes on wall street "lost" it all. question, computers, good or bad? answer, bad???
but here i am again. wondering what i should be doing. and there is good stuck in my teeth again and i need to take a shower and i wonder how will the bills get paid? will i ever get a full-time job? no wonder people stay in one place for so long! once u finally get a job you must not want to give it up.
well nothing more to say. goodbye.
alot has happened in the news, a lot of it scary but i'm not scared. more just annoyed. annoyed that this world is so fucked and i had to be born into it. damnit. i mean why couldn't i be of my parents generation? my grandparents? now the world is overpopulated, the ice is about to melt and people just realized money isn't real after all the assholes on wall street "lost" it all. question, computers, good or bad? answer, bad???
but here i am again. wondering what i should be doing. and there is good stuck in my teeth again and i need to take a shower and i wonder how will the bills get paid? will i ever get a full-time job? no wonder people stay in one place for so long! once u finally get a job you must not want to give it up.
well nothing more to say. goodbye.
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