such and such

In a few hours I have a job interview at what I'm told is the most wretched hive of scum and villainy this side of the Georgia Strait. But what I really want to show you are these quotations I have recently uncovered.

Navajos count their wealth in songs they know, especially in the songs they have created. It is the acts of creation and of artistic expression that make the songs beautiful and meaningful. In the words of a Navajo singer, "If it's worthwhile, it's beautiful." --Nancy Bonvillain & Brian Schwimmer

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. --Niels Bohr

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; a succession of such days is fatal to human life. --Lewis Mumford

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value. --Isaac Asimov

I have this audiotape that I made when I was like six or seven that's just one side of a conversation with spaces for me to fill in the rest, so I could play it back and talk to myself. Don't know if that's art, but it was definitely a sort of way of taking care of myself. --Miranda July

Picture is by David Choue.

on loop - Ariel Pink and Bobby Stoan

O Lonesome April! Proceed, alleviate brackish solitude! - rewrite the post title using the first letter of each word!

Are You Going to Look After My Boys?
(the drawing in the previous post, and these, is by Ariel Pink)

Do You Really Have to Pee?

Post-Poem Plath?

This morning I was at my grandparents' house watching over my granddad. He has been in and outta the hospital since January when he had a killer stroke. I guess it wasn't really a killer stroke, on account of he's still alive, in a hollow, dictionary definition sort of way, but you catch my meaning. There's nothing left for the man to do. I moved the computer upstairs from the basement (he's hampered by stairs now) and while I did so he drifted about the house, knocked over a table, sat in the living room, then the yard. He can't read anymore and television bores him. I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be. He hates it, his helplessness. I think I do too.

It was a quiet morning, so I read. Silvia Plath struck me, in an unanticipated, dopaminergic sort-of way. I was surprised. On the pretense of her publicized depression and suicide I was expecting bleakly insightful musings, valid and thoughtful justification for her unhappiness. But "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour" was rich! The poet sounds awestruck and intrigued, if isolated. I am curious to see if her poems become as morbid as they're reputed to be. The anthology I stole (I only steal art from dead creators) presents them in chronological order and I'm only at 1959. She hasn't even had kids yet.

The Road

I finished reading The Road, in which I took great interest, and of which a film has been made, from which the above image is taken. It's about a man and his son surviving in a post apocalyptic land. There was a conspicuous focus on the dreams of these characters. It's interesting to see where the mind wanders in these ultra-bleak circumstances. Dreams are unadulterated thoughts, and the dreams if this dude and kid show their real preoccupations as they scavenge and huddle and sleep in abandoned cars. Says the man,

"the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death."

Any sort of idealism is regarded as a flaw in perception and an impediment to survival. Speaking of other mental patterns, he also thinks,

"each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

I had to double take that a few times - sextuple take? Growing further from a memory each time you recall it is terrifying, lofty, but also very true. Even if I write down a memory, or take a picture of it, every time I look back on that text or photo, I'm really only seeing the image again rather than going back to the original experience. I read a similar idea a couple weeks ago in Proust Was A Neuroscientist:

"memories do not directly represent reality. Instead, they are imperfect copies of what has actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograph. Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it."

Relax - it's time for giant bird heads (c/o Vlad Kato).

Das Pekaar

I am going to be a graveyard-shift confectioner, a pastrymancer of the Plutonian shore. Midnight to 8. I won't be missing out on anything. I must save money so I can afford to live as I develop an art portfolio that will profoundly astound the approval committee of the Design and Illustration program next year.
>year
>e-ray anagram!
>3-729 corresponding telephone dial numbers!
>draw! another word corresponding to those numbers!
>sketch! synonym!
>checks! backwards phonetical!
>les mecs French rhyme!
>phallocentric pigs feminist insult-equivalent!
>if I pull Viet-comps, I garnish client-queen ants anagram again!
>So much for working on getting that bakery job; I spent the past hour solving anagrams for you. sober interjection!

MGMT's appeal is pretty much exhausted to me from overexposure by now but Eric Wareheim's music video for "The Youth" renewed it for me.

Great Job!

on loop - Marnie Stern

This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That.

let's go Porous Walking

Today I was glad to find an artist called Porous Walker. Themes include one-liner captions in rainbow lettering under oft-disgruntled line drawings. He does other mediums too, wall paintings and balloons and carvings. And sandwiches obviously. Direct sense optional.