"The typical Bless shopper," reports Unlike Berlin, "is usually from Japan, subtly dressed in avant-garde from top to bottom and thrilled to spend about 500 Euros for a handbag that can also be turned into a sweater." I've been looking into the Bless store on Berlin's Mulackstrasse for six years and, yes, usually with a Japanese person. I even know Japanese Berliners (like jeweler Naoko Ogawa) who've interned with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag's conceptual clothes company.
What I've never done -- not until yesterday, anyway -- is bought an item of clothing at Bless. As the Unlike text suggests, it's absurdly expensive. You tend to go in there as you'd go to an art gallery, to admire the ideas. Bless is a master of eccentricity. Here you'll find outrageous combinations of things: a graph-paper shirt with a hood tucked into a little packet under the collar, another one with a sari-like scarf sewn onto the back, an enormously heavy chunky-knit sweater, a sort of toddler's garment with a huge middle-section that you have to scrunch up, accordion-style, by lacing braces around tabs. They also do decorated USB cables (a big influence on Hisae's Mizutani Cable Knit Company cottage industry, now discontinued because it was taking her a month to produce each cover), stools made of hollowed-out wood, and other curiosities. It's basically all stuff you've never seen anywhere else, though once you glom onto the ideas, you could probably go and do your own knock-off for a fraction of the price.
Yesterday, six years after starting to visit Bless regularly, I actually bought my first garment from them, the... well, the thing you can see in the photo (not the shaggy hood, which would have doubled the price). It's a pair of very wide felt trousers which dangle at the bottom of a tight woolen boob tube thing. Instead of being held up by a belt of some kind, the trousers are kept in place by the boob tube clinging to your chest.
I was only able to purchase this weird garment with the justification that I'll wear it on stage when I play my first-ever gig in Warsaw next weekend at the Song Is You Festival (my gig is on Sunday evening). And because it was in the Bless Workshop sale, where prices are deeply slashed. The sale is held in a different location, up in a wilderness of housing estates at the top end of Ackerstrasse, a place usually used to construct the clothes.
It was lots of fun trying improbable outfits on there yesterday with Emma and Joe and various strangers (we all shared one big dressing room). The thing about Bless clothes is that they're so bloody peculiar that putting them on is also dressing yourself in the permission to look that odd -- Bless' blessing, if you like. It's this legitimation of complete visual eccentricity, this implicit license to deviate, that interests me. It suggests a parallel world in which we're all allowed to look like kindly monsters on the street, like characters from Maurice Sendak.
I have been having so much fun reading all your family traditions for the holidays, they are are so wonderful to read and really have me getting all excited. I promise that after my update Sunday I’ll post a bunch of Thanksgiving stuff, and will lay off the December holidays until Thanksgiving is over ;) Not all all that I want to rush it. I almost wish the whole season was longer.
The Ebelskiver above was totally inspired by HappyDoodleLand’s blog. When I saw that I just knew the kids and I had to give it a try. She has a link to a wonderful Youtube video that is really helpful too. For the first try I just used Light Bisquik mix and soy milk, mixed to a good consistency. They turned out soo good, and now I can’t wait to make a filled batch.
Oh and here are some photos of the studio. I tried to take pictures of all of it, but it was so overcast today. If it is sunny tomorrow I will try again.
i've been painting. something i haven't been able to do for myself in months...aside from my mural work. i've been working on a little project of silly children's prints which has been brewing for almost a year now. the craziness of my life got me off track a little... but i feel, with a little push from friends, that i'm back in the right direction to grow professionally. fingers crossed. regardless though, half the fun is getting to paint from my bed...the place where i feel the most creative and inspired. crafting/knitting/painting in bed is my favorite.
in other news, last night my friend and extremely talented tattoo artist, josh wilson, began to finish up my mucha peonies we started last month. swoon and ouch.
things are starting to get a little festive around here! tonight we see a christmas carol and tomorrow all the little shops in my old town open up for christmas. every year i leave wanting to dive head first into the season. let the itch begin.
last night was only the second time i've ever slept in my new apartment that i've been living in now for 2 months.
this is because , i suppose, i'm in love. and the way our relationship got started was based on an innocent consent to want the presence of another warm earthly body near us while we slumber.
i had to sleep home last night because i have a foreign guest. but i wasn't able to sleep at all..
instead i wandered the streets looking for a phantom car crash.
and now i know that the mornings here at home are filled with the smell of cooked animals. and i will have to try to trick my way around thinking that there is something romantic about this, because it is immediately appalling.
there is nothing wrong with sleeping in someone else's bed.
A coworker and I were discussing the whole shorts and tights look recently. I like this style and I basically consider it to be a classic even though it’s having a bit of a moment right now. I remember the preppy version quite well from my childhood (corduroy shorts, penny loafers, and fair isle crewneck anyone? Ha!). So how does one pull off the combo now? I don’t like any combination that includes denim cut offs or denim cut offs with dippy 80s lace tights, so I went in search of something more mature and less fashion-victimy. In fact, I put together two versions, one being a little more casual than the other, and after the jump. This really has gotten addictive
Simple, timeless leather goods produced by brothers Chris and Kirk Bray. Their passion for craftsmanship and hard work has resulted in beautiful accessories that can span the generations. Thanks to Grain Edit’s twitter for the tip on Billykirk. The video after the cut gives a nice overview of the brothers’ philosophy and a look at their workspace
The Noughties Were Shit, proclaims one British blog, looking back with a jaundiced eye on the decade just gone. Personally, I paid zero attention to the celebrity chefs and crappy inventions the blog marshals as evidence of the decade's inherent excrementality. Any decade is going to look like rubbish if you pay attention to celeb chefs, let's face it. And complaining about things you nevertheless fail to switch off -- and even, in fact, switch on specifically to hate and slate -- is a key symptom of The British Disease, much more likely to perpetuate crap than end it.
I want, over a series of Click Opera posts, as we approach the end of the year and the end of the decade, to look back at my noughties, and specifically the five or six albums I released. If I had to conjure a single metaphor for how the decade felt to me, back in 2000, I'd liken it to a blank piece of paper. I felt as if there were no rules, no commercial expectations. Just as I was free to travel (I spent the decade in New York, in Tokyo, then, mostly, in Berlin), I was also free to "experiment", to make things up as I went along, to improvise, to develop a sonic grammar that was mine alone; an electronic folk-lieder aimed as much at the "salons" of Chelsea art galleries as the rock circuit.
Although some of my more conservative fans -- notably Swede John Thelin, once (as "Count V") the mainstay of the alt.fan.momus newsgroup -- characterised the noughties as a time in which "Momus forgot how to write proper songs", others -- notably the Web 2.0 generation, who ranked Nervous Heartbeat and Frilly Military at least as high, in terms of YouTube views, as my old hit Hairstyle of the Devil -- liked my noughties stuff better than what had gone before. With 154,000 views this -- my 2001 collaboration with Montréal group Bran Van 3000, reggaeton vocalist Eek-a-Mouse and actress Liane Balaban -- is the most-viewed Momus-related track on YouTube:
So how did things stand with me, musically and stylistically, at the lead-in of this "fresh reel of blank tape", the decade we learned to represent with two zeroes? I think a key track -- and one I still like a lot -- is my 2000 collaboration with Dusseldorf band Kreidler, entitled Mnemorex. It's key to what comes later because, for a start, it proposes a new sort of electronic folk song:
As in the Bran Van 3000 song, I'm only responsible for the topline melody and the words and singing here, but this points the way forward -- my 2008 collaboration with Joe Howe is still very much on the same page:
Mnemorex also points forward in the sense that it's German, and references Japan (the Osaka World's Fair, also known as Expo '70), and I'll spend most of the 00s with a predominantly German-Japanese frame of reference. Even living in New York between 2000 and 2002, the records I was listening to were mostly made by Berliners like Tarwater, F.S. Blumm, Pole and Rechenzentrum. In 2000 I returned to Europe to tour Germany with Kreidler, who really deserve their own Click Opera entry; after a long absence they released a new album last month called Mosaik 2014:
I don't want to snow the blank sheet with too much data, so I'll close this scene-setting entry. Next in this series I'll cover the first proper Momus album of the new decade, my, ahem, folktronica album, Folktronic. In that entry, and the ones that follow, I'll be re-listening to my noughties albums, tracing their influences, intentions and themes, and recalling the times and places they were made in. And one reason I'll be doing this is that it's pretty safe to hazard the guess that nobody else will, though there'll no doubt be endless artistic explorations of, for instance, the UK's Top 10 bestselling albums of the decade. Here they are, just to set the scene:
James Blunt Back To Bedlam Dido No Angel Amy Winehouse Back To Black David Gray Wide Ladder Dido Life For Rent The Beatles 1 Leona Lewis Spirit Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head Keane Hopes And Fears Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters
Ayer por la noche al volver del trabajo hice....panellets! sí! deliciosos panellets que no pude hacer en su momento ya que el 31 aún estaba en otra casa (sí he vuelto a cambiar de casa) y ahora estoy en una casa que tiene una cocina enoooorme y siempre la puedo usar sin hacer cola con los demás. Hoy traje los panellets en el trabajo y les han encantado bieeeeeen. Por suerte, aún viviendo en Londres, encontré alendras españolas asi que el sabor es igual que si lo hubiera hecho en casa. Y mañana tenemos una fiesta de presentación del nuevo número de la revista de la empresa. Asi que en el trabajo hay un poco de estrés ya que hemos de terminar la decoración y todo. Y el sábado noche ya vuelvo a CASA!tengo ganas y no ganas, pero en estos últimos días están pesando más las ganas que las no ganas.
Os dejo un par de fotos de mis panellets y una foto de la calle donde vivo ahora.
p.d. conocí a tu hermana Tamara :) Fuimos a cenar!jajajajajajaja me reí mucho.
MunnyWorld
Custom Toy Exhibit
3 days only
Nov 13th-15th 12-7pm Eloquent Delinquents Gallery
41 Wooster St. New York, NY
Kidrobot hosts MUNNYWORLD, the year’s largest custom vinyl extravaganza, showcasing talents of over 60 artists, including FIVE winners of the MUNNYWORLD Custom Contest and Kidrobot artists including 64 Colors, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, Bukubuku, Chuckboy, Coolvader, Frank Kozik, Huck Gee, KRONK, MAD, SEEN, and more.
I know its hard to tell from the photos, but this is the big Mega Munny–which is 18 inches tall, the size of a small child. It took forever and so many layers of shellac for me to do the sprinkles. In some respects I wish I left it all sprinkles only because I liked the simple look of it, you can see photos of it in that stage here. Alas, I wish I took better finished photos, but it was so big and I was trying to get it out by the deadline :)
I am super proud to announce a giveaway of my new woodland kits. I cannot even describe how fun it was for me to make these, design all the packaging, and then assemble them. I am going to be adding them to the shop on the Nov 15th update, and will also be bringing them with me to the two holidays shows I am doing.
Each kit contains almost everything you need to make four hand sewn plush. You’ll just need scissors, glue, and needles/pins. They are small enough to turn into ornaments for the tree, but non-Christmas-y enough to use for all sorts of other things. Plus all the felt included is eco-spun recycled polyester which means this kit is great for vegan too-no animal fibers.
The pattern pieces are on a separate sheet of paper and ready to be cut out and used. No photocopying or enlarging needed. Plus even once you run out of materials you can your felt you have on hand to make more. I’m kind of thinking a whole mini tree filled with the cheery gnomes would be pretty fun.
I am going to giveaway two of the kits on Saturday the day before my big update. All you need to do to enter is: Just leave me a comment on this blog entry telling me one of your favorite holiday traditions.. Just please remember to leave the comment on the blog, not any blog feeds (like Livejournal) because I do not get those comments. All comments must be posted by Saturday 10am EST.
On Saturday I will use the random number generator to pick two winners, and you will each receive one kit.
The designers of ffixxed found Pour Porter through a google search for Fabrics Interseason, and correctly assumed I’d be interested in their pieces. I usually ignore marketing emails as they rarely line up with my personal taste, but this pair piqued my interest with their pieces and the fact that they’ve collaborated with Bless and have been featured alongside Fabrics Interseason and Slow and Steady Wins the Race.
The duo behind the label are Australians who have worked out of Hong Kong, Berlin, and New York and just released their second collection. While I wish their items were easier to browse (designers, it is possible to make an arty website that is well designed and easy to navigate!), they’ve plenty of interesting projects to peruse, and I’m excited to watch them develop. Thanks for the email! Remember to click the images to enlarge</strong>
I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that allows you to turn any webpage into a slideshow.
Now, turning a website into a slideshow is a bit like turning a bicycle into a record player; it's perverse, against the grain. People put images onto their websites in a certain context. When you pull them up and turn them into a full-screen sequence of three-second images, you de- and re-contextualize them. The intended narrative gets stripped away, replaced by a new narrative which can be surreal, dreamlike, or psychologically revealing. That's the theory, anyway.
It doesn't always work. News sites like the BBC, The Guardian and Google News have done something to their html to make slideshowing impossible. Stil in Berlin works, Face Hunter doesn't. But those street fashion blogs are predominantly visual already, packaged as sequences of images. So is stripes-crazy Stanley Lieber's LiveJournal.
Some blogs frustrate the desire to escape text by bringing it into their images. Hipster Runoff sprinkles its jpegs with bitmapped lettering: "ELECTROMA = POOP", the images say, or "I deserve a better life / career / job". What emerges here is the extent to which American hipsterism simply recycles American strip malls and office cubicles with a tiny justifying sparkle of irony.
Letters of Note shows images of... letters, naturally. That doesn't preclude visual interest, of course; some of them, like the Lucasfilms recruitment ad up the page, are visually pretty arresting.
The slideshow thing works better with Awful Library Books, although, like the blog itself, the interestingness of the books depicted (rooted in their otherness) contradicts the blog's whole premise, which is to encourage librarians to weed out, name and shame inappropriate, absurd or boring books from their libraries. Leave them there, I say! We need those glimpses of otherness more than we need appropriateness.
The slideshow software works well with Japanese sites like Sajiblo (which documents the refurbishment of an old building as an organic cafe) because they tend to publish quite high resolution photos at absurdly small sizes. For non-Japanese-readers the slideshow doesn't change the essential experience of these websites (they're already image sequences), it merely strips out the clutter of text.
It's worth saying that full-screening images, while it does take away the clutter of nested windows most of us have on our screen, doesn't remove the windows metaphor entirely: what, after all, is a computer screen but a proposed "window on the world"? What it does do, though, is replace an ugly, complex collision of frames with a single, apparently-authoritative one. It replaces a messy space-sequence (lots of complicated relationships between frames and text and images) with a single, simple, tidy time-sequence. The fact that that big authoritative time sequence is actually fairly random and decontextualised is what makes it so fascinating: the big images become a sort of oracle, telling us unexpected things.
Click Opera, slideshow-ified, for instance, looks like a trailer for a sexy, didactic, utopian horror film.
Finally, they gave me an answer, they say it will take 24hrs to make my domain name work again. Today is one of my best friend's birthday, felicidades Iliana! I'll build a web page for a crafted tamales restaurant. money money!
"Learning from Japan" is a theme I keep coming back to, a sermon I keep preaching. Opposed to the crude view I call "Japan Original Sin" (people who harp on about research whaling, war criminal shrines and textbook lacunae, and with whom one eventually, inevitably, ends up playing a futile game of Atrocity Snap), the "Learning from Japan" meme simply suggests that Japan's difference from Western practice is valuable, precisely, to the West. We can't learn anything from people who think as we do. For the same reason, men can learn more from women than they can from other men.
The architecture world will get a chance to learn from Japan -- and from a woman -- in 2010; SANAA's Kazuo Sejima has been chosen as the curator of The Venice Architecture Biennial. I'm pretty sure she's the first Japanese to get this job; she's certainly the first woman to do so. A clue to her focus comes in a brief statement she's released saying that "a significant point of departure could be the concept of boundaries and the adaptation of space... it could be argued that contemporary architecture is an afterthought and perhaps an easing of borders themselves." That's a fresh thought already; architecture as an easing of borders in a time when they're generally stiffening.
I blogged last week about a new book from Lars Müller, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Learning from Japan: Single-Story Urbanism. My title today comes from there. The blurb explains: "During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan...
"As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA?" Browsing the book at Pro-qm, I got the strong impression that what we can learn from SANAA is something to do with a relaxing, elegant lightness and understatement, something to do with minimalism and gentleness, and something to do with a feeling of calm that permeates Japan very noticeably whenever you spend time there. Iwan Baan's photographs of SANAA buildings filled with schoolchildren or middle-aged culture tourists made me think of Alasdair Gray's excellent maxim: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
Thanks so much for all the great feedback on the photos! Here is a peek at the Christmas cards. They will come in sets of 9, with 3 of each design. They are flat cards, printed on front and back. The fronts are glossy and the backs are matte so you can write a little note in the space provided. And of course they come with creamy white envelopes for mailing.
Just a reminder that the card sets will be a part of the Holiday Update on November 15th :)
I am still working on the Chanukah (or Hanukkah? I am not sure on the preferred spelling so any input on that would be fantastic!) cards, so photos of those soon! Now I am off to gather supplies for a top secret project after a trip to the post office.
Hengst seems to be a label with a fondness for the past given the retro vibe evident in each collection. There are plenty of easy pieces that, while not earth-shatteringly innovative, would make nice additions to anyone’s closet. I’ve posted pictures from the S/S 09 and Fall 2009 collections.
Let's say -- just hypothetically -- that I'd been pondering for several months what a new novel should be about, because I want to keep writing these things, now I've started. And let's say -- entirely speculatively -- that I'd actually refined and defined a slew of "signature specifications" to the extent that I was able to start writing the new book, suddenly, last week. Let's call it The Book of Pim, but let's say absolutely nothing about it at this stage, because it's not my business to tell or yours to know, at this point, what this notional book will say or do. Let's just say one thing, though: that although the book is set in a far-off People's Republic whose real world cognate I've never been to, Manchester (a city I've only been to once) figures in it. Not the real Manchester, but the city I built in my imagination while listening to the records of Joy Division, Magazine, The Fall and The Passage. Let's watch an information film:
The man delivering this lecture about Manchester, The Fall and Mark E. Smith at an academic conference at the University of Salford is Dick Witts, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. He begins his lecture with a brilliant deconstruction of a BBC4 documentary about Manchester -- a film good in its way, but also typical of the reductive, revisionist and tediously "iconic" way such history gets reduced to successes, soundbites and the same old talking heads. Witts lists the 35 individual shots the documentary uses to establish its vision of Manchester in 1977, sourcing them in documentaries from 1946, 1955, 1967 and 1978, often as much about Salford and Ordsall as Manchester itself, and as much about urban regeneration as the urban decay it's intended to convey. Only 10% of the visual material intended to evoke the seventies, Witts shows, actually comes from the decade.
Witts then goes on to set the scene much better than the Factory documentary, showing a transition in 70s Manchester from Modernist glass-concrete-and-steel redevelopment to Postmodernist restoration, pedestrianisation and heritage-orientation. He also displaces the cliché about the Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall sparking Manchester post-punk, pointing out that the experimentation of Van der Graaf Generator, the "basic" rock of The Worst, and the radical localism of the folk scene also played their part.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
The Manchester landscape of Passage songs is one of personal scenarios of love, hope and lust played out against a backdrop of politics noir, an environment poised between Blade Runner and The Threepenny Opera. This Manchester is presided over by "Mr Terror, Chief of Police", a Methodist police chief called Anderton whose motivations are religio-fascistic. Anderton is real, a policeman-puritan who claimed to take counsel directly from God and believed AIDS to be a punishment for the immorality of homosexuals. Anything that didn't contribute to Anderton's definition of "a good and useful life" was within his remit to quash. He may sound like the sacrificial Christian copper in The Wicker Man, but woe betide artists trying to pillory him in fiction: when David Britton portrayed Anderton as "Lord Horror" in a 1989 satirical graphic novel, the book was banned and Britton sent to prison for several months.
Anderton in Passage songs is described in Old Testament terms as a layer of "snares" and "traps". He plays a similar role -- authoritarian hate figure -- as The Dictator Hall plays in my own first album, The Happy Family's The Man on Your Street. Over music sinister, twinkling, thunderous, complex, modular and modern -- music which, like an operetta, keeps sweeping the same motifs into new combinations and contexts -- a series of schematic terms define life: FEAR POWER LOVE, the transition from midnight to a new dawn, fire and ice, bodies and minds, drugs illegal-forbidden and legal-compulsory, seconds, hours and days, the provinces and, beyond them, the chilly, distant capital LON DON, almost Chinese in its distant, imperial brutality.
The Passage website and above all the LTM re-releases might give you a glimpse of why this band, this man, wunderbar, ich glaube, n'est-ce pas? continue to mean so much to me. They took subversion and avant garde experimentation further than anyone else in the early 80s, and Dick Witts was simply more intelligent than any other British songwriter at the time, his wordplay more serious and more witty, his politics more radical and advanced. It's not particularly surprising that BBC documentaries (even BBC4 documentaries) gloss over The Passage, and not particularly surprising that Witts himself tends to as well. But important parts of my imagination got lit up by Witts' vision the way other people (including Witts himself) were illuminated by Morrissey or Mark E Smith, and I have a feeling that those parts are now flexing and stretching and, one day soon, will see the dawn.
ARGHHHH, my website is down! to be specific, my domain name is down! the stupid company did not registered my payment for it and apparently my domain appears as expired!!!sdgkjgsdkgd I sent an email four days ago about it and I still don't have a reply yet. Angry, angry. Tomorrow I shall make some telephone calls x_____x
Here are some sneak peeks from the photo shoot yesterday. My sister Heather came over, helped me set up the scenes and then photographed my plush…which will be turned into holiday cards.
It was so much fun, and although these are not the exact photos that will become the cards, it gives you an idea what to expect. I think Heather did a beautiful job! :)
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
Forget the places you've been going on holiday, and go on holiday instead to Beirut.
Do not expect to learn about the world through journalists.
Any Obama backlash will simply help usher in someone worse. Skip it.
Your mother holds a key piece of information, essential to your happiness. All you have to do is ask her the right question.
Blogs you check habitually are the wrong ones because they tell you nothing new. Try switching to Letters of Note, correspondence deserving of a wider audience. Certainly, the letters collected here are from the past. But they very readily suggest parallel futures -- for instance, a future in which Andy Warhol isn't famous.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
The everyday contains everything you need for a religion.
Stop expecting new musician Y to be "the new musician X". And stop expecting old musician X to be the new musician X.
You have been underestimating the colour yellow.
Conspiracy theories waste your time. It's all a big conspiracy.
Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.
The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
Drums are finished. Except for kettledrums and gongs.
You know too much about LA and not enough about Laos. On the internet and in "the real world" you're consistently looking in the wrong places for inspiration. Why is that? Partly it's because the things that could really change you make you scared.
This is the decade in which you will finally make the switch from quantity to value. One ramification: you will move from an expensive place where you have to do a lot of meaningless work just to exist to a cheap place where you can exist easily and can therefore afford to dedicate yourself to work that really means something to you.
The penny finally drops: people who drive cars just end up seeing a lot of roads.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but they might be located on the other side of the world.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do. They are hidden next door, but to befriend them you will have to learn a new language.
You will probably be happier amongst people who do not think as you do.
Nothing could be better than a market at 5am, but to experience it you will have to get up earlier and brave the cold.
Learn to make things with wood.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
Everything you know is right, but that was then and this is now.
I met someone who felt the same way, but I remember him more for being strong enough to change. From him I learned that people are more than their mistakes.
-----Email Message-----
Many years ago, an older man that I trusted had inappropriate sexual contact with me. Twelve years of therapy and a suicide attempt later, and I still live with it every day.
A big part of me will forever be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to me.
i had a tendency to over-share in the past, and with that, i also had the tendency to over-say, overdo, over-think, over-feel, etc. with time gone by, i realise that --apart from pure, undeniable and unabashed narcissism-- the cause of it had to do with being lonely and having lots to say, to show. and you probably know people like me: monosyllabic & shy at the beginning, raw & expressive in the end. i hated that. i felt i needed a better sense of self-control, because i always felt i ended up vulnerable in every single social situation or relationship i found myself in. and it was so. i couldn't be selective because i didn't have much to choose from anyway, and i obviously didn't have the experience that i have now to deal with those sort of cages. but the more i fought the urge to shut my mouth and close off my mind, the worse it got. because over-sharing (or perhaps over-doing) really is an essential part of me.
i guess that what i've learned so far is that over-sharing isn't terrible when you're willing to see your past as your past, as something that is part of you, but that doesn't define you completely and forever.
when i look back into my past, i can see everything so clearly, and because i can see everything so clearly, i am able to find a decent amount of peace within myself. because my past isn't only me; it's family and friends and strangers and assholes. we all have our very own set of circumstances, and i guess that, as i have to deal with mine, everyone else has their own share to deal with, too.
i haven't quite nailed down what my current voice sounds like, but that's always been a sign of positive evolution in my life. i'll just have to wait and see.
why people leave, why they stay, why they come back, why they don't: i don't know. it's not something i should understand, or so my gut tells me. why i leave, why i stay, why i come back, why i don't -- that's what i want to know, and only sometimes, because over-reading is always a bloody mess, because we're always tied to another, to millions of truths and millions of lies -- it's impossible to have a grip on each one at the same time that we're trying to live out immediacy.
i also like silence. i like not having the need to elaborate. many times, i am a blaze, but many others, i want to be a secret, too, for my sake alone. my heart is relatively clean -- i don't think i have much to fear, and i don't want to worry about that anyway. as i said to someone recently, "it's not my duty to beat myself down with my own limitations." there will always be someone that can do that for me, and i can't be responsible for their doings. it's up to them to have a heart or not. i can only keep going.
I am very happy to introduce one of the latest girls at simplyKir's.
She arrived a while ago but I didn't have time to upload all the pics I took of her. These are the first photos of Marie, taken the same day of her arrival.
You might know her already, ;). Sorry her first pics are not as good as the lovely makers took but I will do my best to show you her soul ;).
Marie is a little french girl who lived in Paris in the 18th century. Thanks to Ravendolls and Marblehands, she is now with us again and she can tell us in her perfect french all kind of interesting stories.
I hope you enjoy all the pics.
Doll: OOAK DollsTown Mari in a 7year body
Faceup and Blushing: RavenDolls 2oo9'
Outfit: OOAK Marblehands outfit made specially for this doll
Wig in the photos: TinyBear
Eyes: Brown
[More photos of her with her awesome outfit will be posted very soon ^^]
Here are three videos of Carousel rehearsals last month at Music Bank in the Tower Bridge Business Complex in which I sang through -- for the first time with real musicians -- three Jacques Brel songs arranged by David Coulter and Mike Smith, and translated by me (you can read my translations, two of which were made specially for this performance, beside the videos as they appear on YouTube). The band of twenty musicians (including Roger Eno on piano, Seb Rochford on drums, Leo Abrahams on guitar, Kate St Clair on oboe and Thomas Bloch on onde martinot) performed these songs with me at The Barbican on October 22nd and the Warwick Arts Centre the next day.
Finally, Jacky, filmed onstage at The Barbican at the end of the first concert.
I was particularly taken with Aberdonian drummer Seb Rochford (of Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland) and his extraordinary afro. Seb exudes a 70s countercultural cool as well as incredible percussive flair, and it was easy to believe Leo's tales of Brian Eno attending recording sessions with Seb, watching all his takes. Here he is doing his stuff:
As for Roger Eno (he crosses the picture at the beginning of the video for The Town Tumbled), the man does this footstomping thing while playing the piano, and grins like Elton John, and loves to laugh, joke and do crosswords. On the tour bus to Warwick I noticed that a lot of the stories he was telling sounded familiar: there was one about the Pepsi campaign that promised "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", one about Picasso undermining representational image-making by asking a man who showed a photo of his wife "But is she really so small and flat?", one about art being a plane you can crash and walk away from, and one (at my request) about his dad the postman. Eventually the coin dropped. I'd heard some or all these tales from the same source he had: his big brother Brian. But Roger had heard them firsthand.
I don’t know if it is too soon to keep bombarding you with photos of holiday cheer, but I just cannot help myself!
Up there is some egg nog plush with nutmeg and a bit of whipped cream. I’m still going over the whipped cream. Not sure if it is just right or not.
I love egg nog but mostly prefer the Silk version. We saw some last night and we were going to buy it, but we were going out to eat and worried it would get warm in the car meanwhile…but soon soon we will be drinking some!
One of my favorite things about right after Halloween is all the vintage Christmas goodies that start popping up in the thrift shops. I stopped by one shop today and the Christmas section was jam packed with people. I still managed to get the goodies above, but wow-it was crowded!
So I guess I’m getting pretty good at this weekly feature thing. Today is a surprisingly nice fall day, given our two feet of snow last week, and it got me thinking about cozy, earth toned outfits (along with yesterday’s post). All this outfit needs now is a cup of spiced hot apple cider. Unfortunately, nothing too reasonably priced, but it’s a nice inspiration springboard for me
tired
I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that 
cold
blah
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group 
good
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
No previous decades are to be revived this decade. Make a little more effort with the shapes of things, please.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
pensive
sleepy
