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le ballon rouge
Ahhh, this. It’s beautiful and you should watch it. It’s about childhood and balloons and Paris and colors and more. Directed by Albert Lamorisse in 1965. According to imdb, the only short film to win a non-short film Oscar, ever (it won Best Original Screenplay).
svefn-g-englar
This is something beautiful, and if you haven’t seen it before I would like to share it with you.
From fat cat’s site:
Director : Agust Jacobsson and Sigur Ros
Date : January 2001This unforgettable and award-winning clip, conceived by and supervised by the band with direction by Agust Jacobsson features the Perlan special-needs theatre group acting out a simple but beautiful play about the elements.
springtime in austin
Things have felt especially sensory-spiked the past week — could be that it’s finally started raining again. That loamy, damp spring smell is always a bit of a high in and of itself. Incidentally, Demeter has1 a fragrance called “Wet Garden” that almost kinda approximates it (unfortunately the scent evaporates way too quickly, as is the case with most of their stuff).
You know, at some point way back I remember hearing that they had this full-on fragrance laboratory in Manhattan, filled with all sorts of the really obscure scents (like Funeral Home, Bacon, Condensed Milk, and Chalk), but I have an idea I’ve conjured this resplendent mental image of it that’s way out of line with reality. Like you have to utter a secret password to be granted access and then it’s a whole subterranean maze of foggy corridors and floor-to-ceiling shelves full of colored glass bottles, scents of every description all in alphabetical order.
Spent the morning holed up in the upper echelons of the UT library with a smuggled mega-cup of JP’s ultra-octane latté. Looking for pix/info on the Limbourg Brothers’ illuminated calendars as I’ve been kinda sorta noodling with the idea of taking a stab at a modern take on them.
hot pink, an ode
Inside closed eyes lies the canvas for day & night dreams: pools of milky black offset by the ghosting of blood vessels, nerves, and other assorted arithmetic patterns that point to a greater natural language. Faintly purple bursts fade to strawberry whorls.
A fingerprint, a blot, a parade of sunspots.
Even entrenched in the neon faux-glory of the ’80s, I felt a slight nausea toward the never-ending parade of fluorescents, the wide chartreuse shoelaces, Hypercolor t-shirts and neon feathered keychains. Then one weekend we went to the Crayola factory and I saw a vat of molten day-glo pink up close, all fat, fat bubbles and the thick scent of hot wax.
As a kid I’d always been fascinated by color wheels and the different models used to create them (Munsell, CIELAB, Swedish NCS, etc.), and in this moment, staring into the steaming psychedelic impudence, I wondered where this color could possibly fit into the spectrum. So aberrant, it seemed, so manmade and impossible to belong to a natural order.
It wasn’t until the drive home that evening that it suddenly made so much sense. You know those certain dusks, when the sun’s just begun to graze the horizon line, making a perfect red disk with no visible corona? Nose pressed to the backseat window glass, I stared directly at it, that perfectly hot slice of round neon red. Roy G. Biv, you’re out there somewhere, I said. Twenty years later I marvel at the many shapes the colors take. Undefinable, somehow, yet ever-present in fluorescent bursts.
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.
everything you do is a balloon
Life shifts in small handfuls of time. From north to south, the point of origination feels so different from the destination. I like the in-betweens. I like the ride, the feeling of being nowhere in particular. From the Holland Tunnel to the farm-to-market roads, inside the bookends rests a childlike state. I am bound to nothing except a trajectory.
i t ’ s a l m o s t l i k e c u l t u r e s h o c k , i c a n s m e l l t h e t r e e s a g a i n
Last night I left the sheets in the wash and fell asleep on the mattress. My dreams were stripped bare. I awoke at 3:37am and wandered outside; the air was actually cool. That smell! It was back, that particular seasonal smell perched on the cusp of summer and autumn. I would bottle it if I could (along with its winter-to-spring analogue).
I’ve been spending far too much time on playgrounds lately. For some reason, returning to painting demands that I act like a five year old again, at least within the confines of my own imagination. I want to run with fistfuls of dripping paintbrushes, trailing them across everything in sight. I drop the brushes and keep running and running and running and running. Then stop. A crack, a pop, and just like that I’m gone again. A never-ending game of tag. The notion of anywhere but here rears its head yet again. It’s not 2001. I’m not getting older. I don’t live here, I don’t live anywhere.
the pink train
Today I boarded the B train only to find it transformed into a pink confectioner’s delight of public transport. My eyes then fixed upon the smiling passengers.
This must be a dream, I thought, as the sweet scent of nitrous oxide filled the air.
