20 December 2008

Baby Love




I've been surrounded by babies lately, babies comin', babies growin', and little people who were babies in the not-too-distant past. Just wanted to post two pics I took of the beautiful baby girl Marin, who will be a year old on the 23rd. The other picture is by my friend Dana, of me and her little boy Luca, who sweetly fell asleep on my boob last Saturday night (my, how times have changed). And, Dana herself is about to bring another little one into the world any minute now. She has about 2 hours for him to be a Sagittarius. Will she make it?

18 December 2008

Kitchen LOOOOVE Redux

Desire, desire, desire. Part 1.



According the the Buddhists, desire brings suffering. Ah, well. Cause I be wantin' some shit, and it's making me happy to look at stuffs, especially stuffs at uncommongoods.com. Well, not especially. However. Since they're already so busy they're bringing their front office in to ship the stuff, thanks to an NPR piece this morning, I thought I'd make them even more popular with the ultimate "go ahead" in the retail world, an "I WANT THAT SHIT" from Ama's blog. And also, too. This stuff is likely available less expensively from indie shops. But whatever. Yeah.

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

--Emily Dickinson

17 December 2008

New Neko March 2009!

Person of the Year

Person of the Year (From Time Magazine):

"In one of the craziest elections in American history, he overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th President of the United States.

Jack's College Photos of Obama
Initially, before she dug the film out from her basement, Jack never thought her pictures would have much life beyond her own darkroom.

Handsome
Of her first meeting (in a campus eatery) with Obama, Jack remembers only that "He was really cute. But what else does a 20-year-old girl remember?

Styled
In the photos, Jack says, 'You can see he is just posing, initially, but as the shoot goes on, he starts to come out. He was very charismatic even then.' "

16 December 2008

Win, win, win!

There are a few ways you people are getting presents out of me this year. One is if I win these awesome gift packages on Modish! In which case, your gift will be my giddy delight! Hee, hee, hee. Oh, you can also enter to win, too! But you best do it before 11:59 p.m. today.

Art Films in OKC

Besides Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the other experience that blew my mind this weekend was watching Jean Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders. And even though I told him to hush, I loved hearing about my dad's first experience with this film, watching it at the movie house where he worked as a teenager in Oklahoma City. He saw all of Godard's films there. All of Bergman's. The world opened up for him then.

"No one had seen anything like this," he said. Describing the playing the penny opera machine, and how this movie changed everything for him, how nothing was ever the same again, my heart fluttered at those words, how I inherited a heart like my dad's, one so moved by the visible and invisible, scenes of Paris, barren trees, movement, big longing eyes, a flow of sequential steps, words spoken and unspoken, and the thrill of how a hat tipped one way, a car flying the other way, and an extreme HERE. NOW. presence can come across in a reel of images moving together to make something incredibly magical and extremely close. Check out the Madison scene.


15 December 2008

Nothing Day

{ Texas Fight Flickr Image}
{Dr. Hemmert flickr image}
{Catskills Grrl flickr image}
{Ex Magician Flickr}
{Librarians After Dark}

Ever have one of those days that could almost disappear off the map of your life? Not really awake, not really asleep, just reading reading reading and sleeping sleeping sleeping all Sunday long. No sunlight. No open doors. No fresh air. No answering the phone. I've given up almost all of my vices. So. I'm paying for the gorging on nothing today with an out-of-sorts sense of separateness and dislocation today at work. Oh well.

Heavy Boots Wow!

I often take awhile to pick up a well-hyped book, especially by a.) a guy and b.) someone younger than me. (Because I have a huge ego and googoleplex issues). However, this is the most beautiful and beloved and unforgettable book I've read since I picked up Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body when I was in high school. Oh, the heavy boots. Soveryperfect.

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive,
and I got increadibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is,
and how compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if
I existed at all. When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were
talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that
problem. "Which problem?" "The problem of how relatively
insignificant we are." He said, "Well, what would happen if a plane
dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain
of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?" I said, "I'd probably
die of dehydration." He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that
single grain of sand. What would that mean?" I said, "I dunno,
what?" He said, "Think about it." I thought about it. "I guess
I would have moved one grain of sand." "Which would mean?" "Which
would mean I moved a grain of sand?" "Which would mean you changed the
Sahara." "So?" "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And
it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!" "That's
true!" I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!" "Which
means?" he said. "What? Tell me." "Well I'm not talking
about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking
about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah?" "If you
hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?"
"But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointing one of my fingers
at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!"
"That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm
God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I feel back onto
the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.