Happy New Year

"For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning"

— T. S. Eliot

Awakened at midnight
by the sound of the water jar
cracking from the ice”

― Bashō

SWAT

Idealism is what precedes experience;
cynicism is what follows.

David T. Wolf

Lee Miller

Suicide of Leipzig burgomaster’s family (…) body of burgomaster’s daughter was almost a fashion shoot of a wax mannequin — her Nazi armband immaculately displayed, her lips parted as if waiting for a true love’s kiss that would revive her

"In the Realm of the Senses"

In among a group of about 250 people in the ballroom of the New York Hilton in 1976-first weekend of est when the "trainer" said the exact same thing... it felt like I had been slapped! I immediately raised my hand and as the microphone was being brought to me he turned to the crowd and said-"isn't it great when your intent is what you want...he knew he would get called on"! I haltingly repeated what he said-actually physically getting it and when I sat down I was hyperventilating. From then on the next few days were irrelevant - I had "got it".

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.”

Mother Teresa

“No one sees me changing. But who sees me? I am my own hiding place.” Joë Bousquet

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”

Luis Buñuel

“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.”

Louise Bourgeois

Jerry Saltz: On Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011

• By Jerry Saltz

Helen Frankenthaler at work, 1969.

For a long time — probably too long — not enough people have thought about the far-reaching accomplishments of Helen Frankenthaler, foremost inventor in the fifties of what is variously called American Color Field painting and post-painterly abstraction. Whatever you call this short-lived movement, Frankenthaler used it to throw up an artistic bridge allowing artists to cross the blood-and-thunder-encumbered cosmos of Abstract Expressionism into a new world of Minimalism. Painter Morris Louis called her “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” Minimalist painter Kenneth Noland wrote, “We were interested in Pollock but could gain no lead from him. He was too personal. Frankenthaler showed us a way … to think about, and use color.” She did something else too, although it’s even less obvious now. Frankenthaler may have been the first artist not regularly referred to, demeaned, neutralized, and made safe with the label “woman artist.” Before her, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, and Louise Nevelson regularly were relegated to the ghetto. Georgia O’Keeffe was said to feel "through the womb;" her paintings were a "revelation of the very essence of woman as Life Giver;" her "outpouring of sexual juices," "loamy hungers of the flesh" were evidence of "one long, loud blast of sex, sex in youth, sex in adolescence, sex in maturity. . . sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated."

The sailing wasn’t easy. Frankenthaler was often belittled, her work called merely decorative. Critics said she made pretty wallpaper. Her marriage to A-list artist Robert Motherwell was often sniggered about, as was her five-year relationship with the critic Clement Greenberg. Charges of being a privileged rich girl were common, as were the laughably literal readings of her work, which said she was “about menstruation and the liquid world of the feminine.” Frankenthaler had to read dismissals of her work, often contrasting it with Pollock’s, like this: “Her work excites without quite satisfying…she can make a paint-mass spurt like a dike and yet control it till it laps the canvas like a spent wave." Others fretted over the differences between ejaculation and menstruation. (Oy.) Yet Frankenthaler’s formal accomplishments somehow broke free of all of this.

She blurred the borders between geometry, order, chaos, the body, atmosphere, and ground. She shunned the overemotional hysteria of Abstract Expressionism, pouring thinned, watered down, and turpentine-laden mixes of color directly onto raw canvas. Her structures and shapes were open, controlled by natural forces while also describing them. Her paint and canvass became one surface. This was a big deal back in the day. Edges evaporated; accident was visible; so were her means and intentions. Pooling paint created varying viscosities of thickness and thinness; paint dried into imagistic river beds, isolated islands, clouds, continental masses that all evoked landscape without depicting it or engaging any abstract sublime. There was no paint-flinging or implied dance around the canvas. There was picture-making, pure and simple. And beauty. Lots of it. Which of course made people run back to labels like feminine.

It’s easy to forget how radical it was for an artist to let go of structure, forsake known geometries, stop using the sides of the painting to define the image, move away from enclosed forms, and meld background and image, all while enthralling the eye, enticing the mind, and allowing others to use the work as a passage to a not-quite known imaginary place. I think of artists as varied as Pipilotti Rist, Lynda Benglis, Albert Oehlen, Sigmar Polke, and Laura Owens catching glimpses of the possibilities in all this. I don’t think about Frankenthaler’s work often, but whenever I do, these things come rushing back into me.

Helen Frankenthaler died today-met her through a professor at SU- even shared an elevator and a walk to his show in NYC -Kind, friendly and of course a brilliant painter. She came to prominence at a time when women were considered a sidelight to "real" painters... she didn't give a shit about any of that-she spoke eloquently through her work. We should all be so.

Mark Strand, “Lines for Winter”

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am the space where I am.” Noël Arnaud

“I’ve stolen the yellow bird
Living in the devil’s sex.
It will teach me how to seduce
Men, deer, angels with double wings.
It will take away my thirst, my clothing, my illusions
It will sleep
But my sleep runs across roofs
Murmuring, gesturing, violently making love
With cats.”

“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” Margaret Mead

Ансамбль "Берёзка" - "Прялица"

The Ross Sisters - Solid Potato Salad (DVD Quality) Full Video

you’re warm, but melancholy. there’s a sad fleetingness to you. you’re like christmas.

Sense is this wonderful word which is used in two opposite meanings. On the one hand it means the organ of immediate apprehension, but on the other hand we mean by it the sense, the significance, the thought, the universal underlying the thing. And so sense is connected on the one hand with the immediate external aspect of existence, and on the other hand with its inner essence.

— Christian Kerslake, The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence (via hollovv)

If someone told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine of them would be blank. On the last page I would write, “I recognize only one duty and that is to love.” And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.

Albert Camus

People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

HELP-REBLOG

skullkidtookmyocarina:

This is my friend Chelsi. She’s one of the sweetest girls you’ll ever meet, and she’s got family, loads of friends, and a boyfriend who are all worried for her. She went missing yesterday, and she’s now classified as a runaway.. Which is insane because she’s definitely not that type of person..
I’m not going to guilt you into reblogging this. I’m going to ask. If you could take 4 seconds and hit reblog, it could cause the right person to see this and bring her home. You’d want this to spread too, if this was your friend, or your sister, or your daughter.
Please just reblog this. I promise it won’t hurt your blog’s reputation. We just want her home. Thank you.

(via black-culture)

Source: skullkidtookmyocarina

word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.

The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (John bore witness to him, and cried, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.’”) And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

- John 1:1-19

wonderful

December 25, 2011 | +

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, “BC: AD”

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

Magi

Stephen Dobyns, “Getting Used to It”

He walks his arc from dark to dark
and now the time has come to consider
his maturity, what others might call
his old age, even his declining years.

It rests beside him on a park bench
and others might think it’s a gorilla suit
with wooden teeth and the fur falling out
in clumps. But of course he knows better.

This is wisdom in disguise, he thinks,
this is my accumulated credibility.
Nice gorilla suit, people call out as they
dash toward the park’s many pleasures.

Maturity comes in a billion shapes
and his looks like a great ape. It’s not
sexy, he thinks, it won’t keep me warm
at night. But being a good sport, he wrestles it

over his head and chest, wiggles his hips,
pulls up the feet. It’s an older model
and tight around the middle. Whatever
the case, it’s soon locked in place. I can

get used to this, he thinks, it’s only a rental:
a costume I’ve accepted on a bet,
a temporary aggravation. He wants
to explain this to the passerby, but

in their rush to seize the most from life,
all are dying to escape. As they sprint toward
the park’s promised pleasures, he notices
an indistinct shape slithering across the grass

behind each: a riffle of wind or bit of litter,
maybe a snake or frisky rat. It’s only
a shadow, they insist. But didn’t he read
as a little boy one summer long ago,

as the barber shop in a magazine called True
or Real Tales that carved into the stone gates
to the Unknown it said: Today’s Shadow
Is Tomorrow’s Gorilla Suit Getting Ready?

Akhenaten and Nefertiti

Eric again,always

Returning students today.And escape of sorts.
Seems it's expected of me to absolutely hate it.
You know show that curmudgeonly valor. Old Sod stuff. Scrooge and a favorite cult mixed up in a shitty old great coat.
Truth to tell I really was overwhelmed.
My emotions.
Really missed some. Needed to give and get sloppy hugs. Nope. Can't.
...........................................................................................................................................................

Not having committed to a family.The kids,the wife, the mortgage "working towards the future"shit- seeing them shows me where, with a tip in my direction I could have been expecting to come "home" to family, love today. NO. Never a possibility. I always leave-emotionally then physically.Why do I joke about this?
Christ I hate the fact- AFTER the fact that I cried some driving back.It's the same litany of loneliness, self loathing that I couldn't keep a love in my life again. Of course.That always seems to be there lately. .
..........................................................................................................................................................

Thinking about you Eric- so very much now. You expect, at least I did, the pain and anger to ease up after so long.
Its just gotten heavier.
I wish to God I had been able to do something. Something.

I could have helped you.It's my job.A gift. You came to me to find understanding and care.
I could have saved you.Got you to experts.
I failed you Eric. I really did.
Seeing you today would have been so very wonderful.
Should have hugged you today

I got a lot of candy this Christmas,,,Butt I didn't get this

Cats and I are going to FEAST

another year...

Bowie seems to be toasting something