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ég elska þig
Oh, Iceland. It’s truly a magical place. I’ve long dreamt about living there, but that won’t be a reality anytime too soon! Of course, vacations can go a long ways to salve such long-term desires, and this recent trip more than fit the bill. Ben and I spent a couple of weeks circumnavigating the island counter-clockwise, continually being blown away by the changing landscape. Somewhere around Mývatn, we were informed that we were driving the wrong way around, clockwise being the general rule, but that trajectory now seems quite difficult to imagine. Now that Ben has the photos up, check out our journey via the complete set on his Flickr… or merely take a quick gander at the edited set, put to music, on Vimeo.
from lake superior
We spent some time last weekend in the Upper Peninsula. Cell signals, traffic (foot and automobile), billboards, and general commotion were nearly non-existent. Here are an assortment of rocks – chromatically arranged by yours truly – that we plucked from the shores of Grand Marais during a slow, lazy morning of meandering.
við fórum til íslands
We were in Iceland and took our tiny wooden effigies along for the ride. Originally serving as our wedding cake toppers, Ben got the brilliant idea (inspired by his friend Anisa, who, incidentally, makes awesome clothes) to take them on our travels and garden gnome-style, documenting them in photographs. Visit the slideshow for the whole deal!
matrimony
Well, I got hitched last month! Ben and I held a great little shindig at Jane’s in Wicker Park – chill and intimate, complete with a late-March snowstorm. Above is niece Ella, holding up the wedding guest dossier I designed.
pocket sandwich math
So I was recently recalling an old ’80s infomercial for a fabulous little kitchen appliance dubbed the SNAKMASTER. It was essentially a small electric sandwich grill that presses your creation into little triangular pockets.
I think they’re fairly commonplace now, but whoo boy, it seemed like a real innovation to me at the time. Somehow my brother and I must have convinced our mom to buy one. At least for a few years there it seemed like we were always sitting around after school, cookin’ up some sort of glorious (read: disgusting) pocket creation.
In memoriam, I present a Choose Your Own Sandwich sketch, featuring some of the ingredients that most dazzled my ten-year old tastebuds.
My fave combo probably would have been The Breakfast Pocket: 4 + 5 + 6 + 9 +2
Aside: I can’t even believe it, but the original infomercial is actually on youtube. Thank you, Internet!
and then, tonight
The future is flat, or so I thought… noting wryly that it sounded like a slogan for tricked-out televisions. Staring at my laptop, my eyes crossed slightly – lapsing from the
I then glanced away from the cool glow of the display, back to the stacks of
At that point I think I will redefine need-to-know.
Because in simple moments, free of cynicism and so-called irony (free of so-called anything), I think the future may just be outside again. Outside is where it’s at, tuning into the broadcast of autumn leaves and cold air smell. My lover’s unwitting sigh is where it’s at, the moments when he doesn’t know he’s being listened to. I like the image of my post-post-modern house. It will be clean and windowed and linked to the world. Everything in its right place. And my headspace will be free, a post where intellect and emotion are their rightful equals and I take in and am taken as naturally as an inward-outward breath.
simultaneity
To continue on this previous line of thinking:
…These highways are hundreds of arteries, impartially channeling us from point A to B. And the roadside motels are anonymous. I always look in the mirror across from the musty bed, trying to imagine the reflection of each person who has stood in front of it.
And then there are the motel beds. I can never sleep in them. I get dizzy trying to comprehend everything that has happened on top of the dingy bedspread, under the covers, and on the carpet. For a moment I pull the scratchy white sheet up to my nose and close my eyes. That chemical smell of cheap detergent gives way to the smell of them, all of them all at once – the cold, the hot, the raunchy, the perfunctory.
It’s the same way when I’m in a museum. I stand in front of that huge Klein canvas, and yes it’s all blue, but don’t you see, his hands were all over it. It’s so easy to treat the work as static, to walk past with little more than a cursory glance. But the paintings don’t capture singular moments any more than a song encompasses one note. They capture series of moments, some sequential (he touched this corner then that corner then that one), some circular (he touched this corner then rubbed it out then layered on top of it). There is no beginning or end. The viewer provides the trajectory – sometimes it’s challenging, often alienating, but perhaps such is the viewer’s price for being treated with reverence as to his or her will.
So I’m usually more interested in the process than the result, and as such, vastly prefer to watch the world through a timeless space. Here I’m still allowed to write long letters to M.D. and mail them to random addresses in Paris. I’m allowed to look at anything a boy has ever written me and feel faint, simply because, well, I can see his hands simultaneously hovering above every square millimeter of the paper, all at once, and it’s too much.
Dynamism. Look.
Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash
Look again.
Eadweard Muybridge, Headspring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering
See? The movement, it never stopped. You look at it, then walk away. You come back one minute, ten years later, and it is still moving. The function is continuous, at all points understood.
