Travel, recalled

The morning we arrived, pepper exploded in scrambled eggs
made, by Dad, with butter, pipe-smoke and an absence
of everyone else.   

Prescriptive

If happiness is honey, tickly-thick
enough to make you choke,
if happiness is wine, a smooth swallow
and a short-lived high,
if you're defended against joy,    

Prepping for NaNoWriMo

Not forgetting to do it like this: Creative Writing with cartoonist Lynda Barry

Not forgetting to not do it like this: Stealing Beauty

Tere liye, life goes on...

Present moments: listening to this still - it came in via Outlandish's Facebook feed. I'm still a little open-mouthed at how ebrahim / @eebsofresh wraps his voice in, out and around the lyrics to make something totally new of the song - a cover of Frank Ocean's Swim Good.



I do wonder about ebrahim's pronunciation of Swayze, though.

And I'm still loving Sam Sifton's food review writing for the NYTimes:  

No words

Please, don't speak when I'm making art or thinking about palettes with no greens, pigment granulation or studio space. I won't hear you. I'll deflect your conversation. Don't wait for me, I have no words.

After having been away from art for years, I'm back to it. And I'm finding that it unmoors me from directionality, taking me into myriad-threaded deltas of possibilities, from which a wildness spills over, even into talking or writing.

Heaven

Kieślowski's Heaven, cinematographer Frank Griebe: the way his shots define the architecture of a person, as well as of a building. Light, masses, volumes, voids, angles and implied motion - the traces of time, the presence of the observer and the consumer, a gentle feaster. Brilliant editing by Mathilde Bonnefoy, too.

My review of Heaven?

Maybe the most beautiful cinematography I've ever seen. Frank Griebe, who also shot such films as Run Lola Run, can make anything look exquisitely beautiful. Innate beauty, and the freedom inside all of us that beauty delineates, is central to the story here. It's what lets love happen, it's what lets life continue even when death is all around. Masterful acting, excellent writing, a tender score... what more do you need? Not your average movie. But quite an experience. A slow chase movie, a quiet thriller, a gentle love story.

jan-hendrik andersen

jan-hendrik andersen - at U Michigan School of Art & Design.

High summer, mid-afternoon

Then thank you, oh food delivery service, for running out of local peaches and cornish hens last night, so I ordered Finger Lakes plums, curried chicken salad and chocolate cookies. Then thank you again, for running out of chocolate cookies, so I ordered white-chocolate-and-dried-cherries cookies. And thank you again, for offering summer juices from the upstate orchard that grows the plums, and yes I ordered some. 

Hera: from India?

The Wiki entry for Hera says that peacocks and cattle are the animals that were most closely associated with her, in ancient Greece. The usual milch animal in Greece was the goat; peacocks did not exist in Greece. Was Hera from India originally?

Questions, answered

For me, movies are a fantastical experience, and when the moviemaker doesn't honor his or her participation in the world of fantasy, I get bored. On the other hand, movies always raise realistic questions for me, like: Who cleans up the mess when after a fight? What happens to the bodies? If a hero's a great marksman, why shoot twenty rounds when one or two would do? If a hero's a great man, why can't he do a little more by way of being noble? Act from good, in the moment, always? 

What my hands made once

Early school days: A dirndl skirt of unbleached muslin printed with a floral pattern in indigo dye, my first hand-made creation, made from cloth given to me by a textile factory manager when my father took me on a factory-visiting trip when I was seven. A reddish corduroy sleeveless jumper dress. Both garments surprised me in how a piece of flat cloth is transformed into something dimensional, beautiful, resilient and useful. 

arre, check this out in more detail!

http://awp.diaart.org/km/

a VD&C-er

Haven't forgotten the forgotten forum.

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/in_depth/features/the_phttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifower_of_the_creative_blog

from which

http://www.itsnicethat.com/

Confusion

Cr — t and cr — t both have wickets. One's boring, the other's chess on the run.

Croquet's wickets I confused with cricket's, as a kid, so gave cricket a miss for too long. Love it now, though I don't know it very well.

Croquet is varnished wooden pieces peeled, worn, greyed and split by summer rains, wire and wood pieces lost in overgrown grasses, toes cut or stubbed when the pieces are found by oblivious bare feet in shadowed, still-uncut lawns at summers' ends.

Cricket is something else.

Sketches

I think of plans as promises. Since, all too often, life's crazinesses interfere with promises, my solution is compromise - I don't plan tightly. Instead, I sketch ideas and allow life to interfere.

Yesterday, the sketched-in day had included treks to the top and bottom of Manhattan island, for note-taking for a novel that's been in-work for a while. But life had slapped me with a strong reaction to a toxic environment at work, so, feeling stiff and feverish, home and bed became my substitute mode du jour, and instead of trekking and working, a mix of sleep with streamed films via Netflix, Amazon and Hulu filled the day and night. 

Telling a story

Uninflected, well-paced, textured.

Inflection, via Mamet on film direction.

tulous

a tulou is: protective housing for extended families, offering safety, warmth, community. an ancient form of clan-based housing that developed in China's Fujian province.

Walking meditations

Kinhin...

• the doll in the corner
  
• recognizing the hero's enemy
• who do we tell stories for?
  

For me and VD&C

Pierre Paulin's f-598 chair - at Hive...

Heaven for me: a home furnished entirely with Pierre Paulin pieces.

For VD&C

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/30453381/the-shape-of-design

and

http://www.artonomy.co/book-shop/

Where to go: Haiga

Haiga

Tanka

31 morae, 5-7-5-7-7, or, roughly, short-long-short-long-long

and this by Chen-ou Liu

Writing poems

haikai

haibun

tanka prose

• haiku - 3 lines, 10 to 17 morae as roughly 5-7-5, about nature, with kireji and kigo
• senryū - 3 lines, 17 or fewer morae, about human foibles, cynical or darkly humorous, with no kireji (cutting word) or kigo (season word)
• monoku - 1-line haiku

• tanka - 5 lines, roughly 5-7-5-7-7
  
• jo-ha-kyu as a dramatic arc underlying these forms

good ad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfaFmv9GdjY

from http://www.youtube.com/foodbank4nyc

from http://www.foodbanknyc.org

words and art and design

My words come from my heart. I find it hard to write words when I'm analytical. Yet my daily, paid word is often very analytical.

I have an even deeper problem when it comes to visual art. I have to do it with feeling and hands... and it requires me to disconnect from others, which is lonely, yet it requires me to open my heart up all the way and experience and make things sensually. It is, thus, a too-vulnerable place to be.

sweet inspiration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDdUxdxVTH0

broad vision, determined focus, amazing process.

a crazy few days

too much work work, including statistical analyses, for which I'm not trained and which I dislike, even though I do a good job.

wanna make a list of words I'm tired of but I'm too tired to make lists of anything.

more VD&C

DesignObserver DesignObserver

1,420-square-foot hydroponic farm grown on the roof of a NYC public school, can produce 8,000 pounds of food annuallyhttp://bit.ly/eMuWxc

crowdSPRING crowdSPRING

Interesting logo redesign by Starbucks. I like it, but removing the name seems risky - http://bit.ly/gSkRqB

another design link

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/

for VD&C

this, too: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/arts/03iht-design3.html

gray day

nothin but sleep and an interrupted viewing of The Parallax View, which was very good, though I don't like films from that time, and reading new QueryShark updates and pffa comments.

to do: long walk, buy some juice, change my working area, sleep again.

first of the new

so tired from being up almost all night. work to do:
org workspace.
answer D, whose unpredictability is a weapon and I don't want to be in her wars
walk in the slushy snow.
call family.
see how much time, energy and light are left for regular chores.

what's in me that gives my love to others?

- - -

so here's what I actually did: answered D, said HNY on SandC, wrote 3 crits on the EveryAuthor fiction forum.

the day's not done, as yet.