Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

It happens like this. He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown to him and soon he leaves the little town behind. In an hour or so he is among low hills covered by olive trees and grey stones, from which there is a view out over a plain that gradually descends to the sea. He is intensely happy, which is possible for him when he is walking and alone.

As the road rises and falls there are moments when he can see far ahead and other moments when he can see nothing at all. He keeps looking out for other people, but the huge landscape seems to be completely deserted. The only sign of human beings is the occasional house, tiny, distant, and the fact of the road itself.

Then at some point, as he comes to the crest of a hill, he becomes aware of another figure far away. It could be male or female, it could be any age, it could be traveling in either direction, towards him or away. He watches until the road dips out of sight, and when he comes to the top of the next rise the figure is clearer, coming towards him. Now they are watching each other, while they are pretending they are not.

Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room

I love this song.

Naive Melody










source: yours truly, Talking Heads

gallery: Spruce Mountain

You can't buy the worn-look, unless it's vintage.
You only get worn jeans from wearing them every day and never washing them.
In some people's books that's gross, in mine, that's normal.

Are those cigarette pack marks on his pockets? or cell (i)phone marks?
Maybe both??


source: The Sartorialist
gallery: fashion

Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separates us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death; hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when "I", under another form, continues the task of existence. Little by little a vague underground cavern grows lighter and the pale gravely immobile shapes that live in limbo detach themselves from the shadows and the night. Then the picture takes form, a new brightness illumines these strange apparitions and gives them movement. The spirit world opens before us. Gérard de Nerval – Selected Writings: Aurélia

gallery: film stills

I love Paul Newman.
And I mean... looove, luuurve, luffff him.
And his cookies...

Stack O' Lee Blues







source: The Selvedge Yard: Cool Hand Luke, Mississippi John Hurt 1928 Sessions
gallery: film stills

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
– Dorothea Lange on Migrant Mother

Tribulations

Sidenote:
If this post (or other posts with music in them,) happen to appear twice in your feeds, it's because I'm an idiot and I forget to add the MP3 link for RSS readers. Adding that link allows you to listen through your RSS-reader. When I don't include it, I have to essentially re-post.
Just know, I'm frustrated and beyond annoyed with myself with the number of times I've forgotten to include the MP3 link.












source: The Selvedge Yard: Dorothea Lange, Boomkat: Alan Lomax / Various: I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die
gallery: found photography

New song from Neon Indian, covering T. Rex.

Children of the Revolution (T. Rex Cover)


source: Pitchfork
gallery: music

Lucid diary
My life: a tragedy broken to pieces under whistling and foot-stomping angels, and only the first act of it performed.
Friends: none. Just a few acquaintances who suppose they sympathize with me and maybe would be disturbed if a streetcar ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.
The natural reward for my estrangement from life was the inability I believed present in others to have any feelings for me. All around me was an aura of frost, a halo of ice that repelled others. Still I was unable to escape suffering in solitude. It is so difficult to achieve that distinction of spirit permitting one to be isolated in repose without anxiety . . .

Pigsties of the Soul
Aside from such common dreams . . . are the shameful sluices of the pigsties of the soul that nobody will dare admit and that oppress insomniacs like filthy phantasms, viscosities, and greasy bubbles of the repressed sensibility, the ridiculous, the terrifying and unspeakable that the soul with some effort can still recognize in its crannies . . .
The human soul is a madhouse of caricatures. If one could reveal itself in truth, without feeling a shame more profound than all the known and defined shames, it would be, as they say of the truth, a well, but a sinister well full of vague echoes, peopled by ignoble lives, inert sliminess, slugs without being, snot of subjectivity.

Fernando Pessoa - Always Astonished

I was listening to my iPhone on shuffle while driving home from the pool and this song by Spiritualized came on. It was such a pleasant surprise. Of course, it fits with this shoegaze music phase I'm in.
You should get used to music posts of this kind. I anticipate the next music trend to be heavily influenced by shoegaze/ space rock.
If you hate it…
first off, shame on you.
second, brace yourself.

Spread Your Wings



source: soulfluff photos
gallery: music

Last year's wishlist was absurd. I had too many wants and they were completely unaffordable. This year, I chose 10 items all under $200. They're listed from least to most expensive.
I realize $200 in this economy is still a tad pricey, but trust me, if you take a peek at the things I fall in love with (my Svpply) you will see this is the economical-Emily-wishlist.



1. Terrain Fir and Berries soap - $9.00
I have a super-sniffer-nose and love clean soapy smells.

2. Simple Home: Calm Spaces for Comfortable Living - $19.06
If you know me, this one is a little obvious.

3. Brook Farm Vegetable Brush - $20.00
I don't clean my veggies nearly as well as should. This might induce me to clean a little better.

4. Brook Farm Stoneware Bud Vases - $28.00
I had a separate post on Judy Jackson's vases here. Found these shortly after that post. I like the subtle colors. Any of the colors or shapes would do.

5. Kindling Shelf from Poppytalk - $45.00
I collect knickknacks. A shelf to put my small finds on would be great.

6. Madewell Rail Straight Jeans in Coyote Wash, Size: 28/34 - $95.00
I like skinny jeans, but not the ones that look like they are cutting off circulation. I always say… slim, not tight. I've lost a little weight on my hips and bum from all the swimming. I'm down two sizes from what I would normally wear (30/31). That's a little exciting.

7. Scotch and Soda sweatshirt with novelty collar, medium - $126.85
Really digging this unique sweatshirt. I'm always wearing sweaters or sweatshirts on the weekends. I could see this one becoming my weekend favorite.

8. LL Bean Irish Fisherman's Sweater in Red, large - $129.00
So here it is. I found a red cabled sweater. Not quite the red I was hoping for, still it's the only one I could find.

9. Tivoli radio in Walnut - $149
I've wanted a wood-trimmed radio for some time now. The best part is the auxiliary port. You can connect an iPod or iPhone (or any MP3 player). Now if I could just have someone install an auxillary port in the Volvo wagon, my life would be complete.

10. Frye Rogan Boot - $298.00
Okay I lied. This one's over $200. I couldn't help myself. I love the style and the contrasty-blue laces.

source: All source links are listed above
galleries: wishlist

I'm currently planning small interior home improvements, just painting at the moment.
I probably have close to a hundred variations of white swatches.
I love whites. They're heavenly. Perfectly clean.
And these vases look stunning against crisp clean whites. They are elegant and I'm happy to say, very affordable. I already have three of her vases (mauve, purple and seaspray) sitting on the fireplace mantle and still... I've been eyeing the beige set over at Lost and Found.
If you're interested in purchasing different colors, Anthropologie carries them too.
I highly recommend gifting to any interior minimalist you happen to know.
Yes... that could be a hint and a nudge.





source: Anthropologie, Lost and Found
galleries: home accessories, interior design

Found these minimal rings from Conroy & Wilcox over at Stuart & Wright.
I adore simple bezel settings. It's not a perfect bezel rim either, it's rough, I like that.
That's how it should be done. Handmade always makes it more appealing and unique. However, if you take a peek at the price… yikes. I think I'll settle for something similar on Etsy or…
make my own.
I took a few jewelry making classes at Pratt with Patricia Madeja.
I still love the rings and chains I made under her. I wish I had taken pictures of them before giving them away. My sister has two of the four rings I made. One is a simple silver thumb ring the other, a large oval silver bezel, set with a chrysoprase stone.
I love that ring. I got so many compliments on it.
I still have all the necessary tools minus things like a soldering torch and pickle pot. But since I have both a spacious garage and basement… I'm thinking I might give it a go.




source: Stuart & Wright
galleries: fashion

. . . Myth is the term for everything which exists and subsists only on the basis of language. There is no speech so obscure, no gossip so fantastic, no remark so incoherent that we cannot give it meaning. One can always assume a meaning for the strangest language.

Something that is destroyed by a little precision is a myth. Under rigorous inspection and the multiple convergent attacks of queries and categorical interrogations with which the awkward mind is completely armed, you see myths die, and the buds of indeterminate things and ideas fading indefinitely away . . . Myths vanish under the light in us which is generated by the combined presence of our bodies and of our highest perceptions.

See how a nightmare unites into one overpowering drama every variety of independent sensation which troubles our sleep. A hand gets caught beneath our bodies; a foot which is uncovered, and has escaped the blankets, gets cold independently of the sleeper; early morning passers-by cry out at dawn in the street; the empty stomach relaxes, and the intestines ferment; rays from the rising sun vaguely disturb the retina through the closed lids . . . so many separate and incoherent ingredients, and no one to reduce them to themselves and to bring them into the world we know, to retain some and discard others, to evaluate them and allow us to draw conclusions. But all these things are of equal value, and have to be equally satisfied. The result is a creation which is original, absurd, incompatible with the course of life, overwhelming, completely terrifying, and which has in itself no finality, no limit and no outcome . . . So it is with the circumstances of our waking hours, but with even less coherence. The entire history of thought is nothing but the interplay of an infinity of little nightmares of great consequence, while sleep is composed of long nightmares of short duration and little consequence.

Our entire language is made up of short little dreams; and the delightful thing about it is that we sometimes fashion from them thoughts that are strangely exact and wonderfully reasonable.

Indeed there are so many myths in us, and such commonplace ones, that it is almost impossible to segregate completely in our minds anything that is not a myth. One cannot even talk about it without creating a myth, and am I not at the moment making a myth of the myth in order to satisfy the whim of a myth??

Yes, dear friends, I do not know what to do in order to escape from what does not exist! To such an extent does the spoken word govern us, and everything around us, that one cannot see how to set about foregoing the imaginary which cannot be dispensed with.

Consider the fact tomorrow is a myth, and the universe as well; that numbers, love, reality as well as infinity, that justice, people, poetry . . . and the earth itself are myths. And that even the Pole is a myth, for those who claim to have gone there, only thought that they had for reasons inseparable from the spoken word . . . .

I am forgetting the entire past . . . All history is nothing but myth, and is only composed of thoughts to which we give the essentially mythical value representing what once was. Each moment fades each moment into the realm of the imaginary, and hardly are you dead before you are off, with the speed of light, to join the centaurs and the angels . . . . What am I saying? Hardly is our back turned, hardly are we out of sight, before opinion makes of us what it will.

I return to history. How imperceptibly it changes into a dream as it recedes from the present! Near us myths are still quite temperate, held in check by written words which are not entirely incredible, by material remains which curb our fantasies a little. But three of four thousand years before our birth, we are absolutely free. At least in the mystical void of a time, pure and unsullied by anything whatsoever which is similar to the constrained only by the fundamental necessity of imagining precedents, 'causes,' evidence to support what is and what the mind is–creates times, states, events, persons, principles, increasingly ingenuous pictures and stories which make one think of, or are easily reduced to, that very sincere cosmology of Hindus in which they place earth on the back of an enormous elephant in order to hold it up in space; the elephant supported by a tortoise which in turn is floating in a sea contained in some sort of a vessel . . . .

The most profound philosopher the most learned physicist, the geometrician best equipped with those means which Laplace calls "the resources of the most sublime form of analysis" –cannot and do not know how to give a better explanation.

That is why it happened that one day I wrote: in the beginning was a Fable! Which means that any derivation and any beginning of things is of the same substance as the songs and stories which surround us in the cradle.

It is a kind of absolute law that everywhere, in every place, in every period of civilization, in every form of belief, by means of no matter what form of discipline, and in every respect–the false supports the true; truth has falsehoods for an ancestor, as its cause, as its author, and its point of origin, without exception and without recourse–and the truth engenders this very falsehood by which utmost be engendered itself. All antiquity, all causality, every human principle, are fabulous inventions and obey the simple laws of invention.

What would we be without the help of what does not exist? Not very much, and our very unoccupied minds would pine away if myths, fables, misunderstandings, abstractions, beliefs and monsters, hypotheses and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people the darkness and the depths of our natures with abstract creations and images.

Myths are the very soul of our actions and our loves. We can act only in pursuit of a phantom. We can love only what we create.

Paul Valéry – On Myths and Mythology