in love with

murmur[ing], which is "a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people's personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze."

Grapefruit

Okay while you all are enjoying holidays I had food poisoning and haven't eaten in two days in a country where Thanksgiving is a strange word.... (I am grateful that it is not dengue, for my western style toilet, for my wonderful neighbors and friends, and for modern medicine(

Which leaves me time to find things like this...

EXCERPTS FROM GRAPEFRUIT

by Yoko Ono (as might be remembered from John's Cabin)

PAINTING TO HAMMER A NAIL
Hammer a nail in the center of a piece
of glass. Send each fragment to an
arbitrary address.
1962 Spring

PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT'S
COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED
Let People copy or photograph your
Paintings.
Destroy the originals.
1964 Spring

CLOUD PIECE
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.
1963 Spring

TRAVEL PIECE
Make a key.
Find a lock that fits.
If you find it, burn the house
that is attached to it.
1963 Spring

PRESCRIPTION PIECE
Prescribe pills for going
through the wall and have only
the hair come back.
1964 spring

HAND PIECE
Sit in the garden.
Raise one hand.
Extend it until it reaches a cloud.
Have your friend ring a symbol.
Keep extending it until it goes out
of the stratosphere.
Have your friend put a flag out.
1963 Summer

ANIMAL PIECE
Take one mannerism from one kind of
animal and make it yours for a week.
Take another mannerism from another
kind of animal and make it yours
without dropping the previously
acquired mannerism.
Go on increasing mannerisms by
taking them from different kinds
of animals.
1963 Summer

BODY PIECE
Stand in the evening light until you
become transparent or until you fall
asleep.
1961 Summer

Did someone say Yoko Ono and John Lennon Finger Puppets

reUUUnion!

i have been singing that erasure song non stop since i got into utah. and though everything has been pretty ridiculously beautiful on this trip, there are a few things that deserve standing ovations. maybe things like the Inadvertent Navy/Navy TWINS!

or, the return of the Great Action Shot Adventure (featuring new player ASHMAE! doing her one of the kind Russian folk dance/karate chop move)

or, the audition for wikipedia's new fistpump image!

or, making puppeteering dreams come true at kneaders:

or, miraculously adorable/awkward action shots:

so here is to glorious, glorious, reunions of transpacificists nationwide:

Ode to Larry Fink

One of my favorite photographers is Larry Fink. "Larry Fink's photographs are like the stage in a darkened theater. His hand-held flash splendidly illuminates the details of the drama before us and reveals the nuance of the personal moment," wrote Susan Kismaric, associate curator, Museum of Modern Art. Larry has been photographing for almost fifty-one years and teaching for forty-one. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A major retrospective of his work was on tour in Europe for almost ten years visiting more museums than it is possible to mention.

Yet as this video shows, done by Journeyman productions, is he lives an amazingly simple life out in the country, and guess what, only uses film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4izJ0_yTFBo

Here are just a few of his photos:

Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing

Below is the complete email conversation that Adelaide man David Thorne claims he had with a utility company chasing payment of an overdue bill. In an Australia new site

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Thankyou for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.32am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.42am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear David,
You emailed the drawing to me. Do you want me to email it back to you?

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.56am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Yes please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 12.14pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Attached

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 09.22am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Whose spider is that?

Dear Jane, Are you sure this drawing of a spider is the one I sent you? This spider only has seven legs and I do not feel I would have made such an elementary mistake when I drew it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.03am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, Yes it is the same drawing. I copied and pasted it from the email you sent me on the 8th. David your account is still overdue by the amount of $233.95. Please make this payment as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.05am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Automated Out of Office Response

Thankyou for contacting me. I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week.

Regards, David.

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.08am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Hello, I am back and have read through your emails and accept that despite missing a leg, that drawing of a spider may indeed be the one I sent you. I realise with hindsight that it is possible you rejected the drawing of a spider due to this obvious limb ommission but did not point it out in an effort to avoid hurting my feelings. As such, I am sending you a revised drawing with the correct number of legs as full payment for any amount outstanding. I trust this will bring the matter to a conclusion.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 2.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, As I have stated, we do not accept drawings in lei of money for accounts outstanding. We accept cheque, bank cheque, money order or cash. Please make a payment this week to avoid incurring any additional fees.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 3.17pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

I understand and will definately make a payment this week if I remember. As you have not accepted my second drawing as payment, please return the drawing to me as soon as possible. It was silly of me to assume I could provide you with something of completely no value whatsoever, waste your time and then attach such a large amount to it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Tuesday 14 Oct 2008 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Attached

my first crush

julia pott interviews people about their first crushes and makes a lovely animation:

do you remember your first crush?

david gordon green

i might be in love with david gordon green (director of the beautiful All the Real Girls). here is the opening sequence of George Washington. the pacing of it is perfect.

To a child dancing to a harmonica

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?


There is a young girl here, about the age of 3 who just came to Mae Sot with her mother from the Burma-China border. She is one of my new favorite living beings. We play this game where I play the harmonica and she dances, then she plays and I dance. She is quite likely the funniest most determined individual.

Text Message Embroidery

How does one represent a relationship? mixtapes? photographs? This makes me wish I'd saved my favorite texts and that I had time to embroider:

(via Ginger Anyhow)

Sublime Things: Emerson and Exiles

So here are two things from me;

1) This quote from Emerson I'm in love with : "to go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. the rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. seen i the streets of cities, how great they are!..."

And here are a few art works from my neighbor Nyan Soe. I frequently go over to his place where 2 other artists live and they teach me and two other young girls from Burma how to draw. Really really sublime.

just good

zooey deschanel & m. ward "you really got a hold on me"

"paths are made by walking"

by mai yamashita and naoto kobayashi, japanese artists based in berlin, who were shared with me by my own berliner.

"in order to determine whether [paths are made by walking] was actually true, yamashita and kobayashi kept running in a park for 5 days. in the time-lapse movie compiled from digital photographs, a path the shape of infinity gradually emerges as we move with high-speed."

an addendum to amanda's post,
excerpted from Rick Moody's On Celestial Music:

1. Otis Redding as Purveyor of Celestial Music

Music has soul. We operate as though it does. In fact, music is one of the few areas of human endeavor where the word soul, even among secular types, is liable to go unchallenged. All kinds of music are occasionally imputed to have soul. Even music that doesn’t have anything but volume or a tiresome double-kick drum sound. Ray Coniff, to a listener somewhere, has soul. Who am I to say otherwise? Soul in these cases perhaps indicates earnestness, rhetorical force, and/or vocal polyps. Nevertheless, there are persuasive indications that the word soul does indeed manifest itself in music, and so maybe it’s useful here at the outset to point to a recording that demonstrates why music belongs in any discussion about heaven. So, along these lines, I’m going to describe briefly the mechanics of one example of soul music, namely, a live recording by Otis Redding entitled “Try a Little Tenderness.”

Lyrically speaking, “Try a Little Tenderness” starts as an exhortation to do better at peeling away the layers of defensiveness in a lover, a woman (in this case) who is not only weary, in the general sense, but maybe particularly weary of the traditional role of woman...

Still, this is to avoid mention of the dynamically satisfying freak out at the end of the song. The big ending! If celestial music is the music of the spheres, then the big ending of “Try a Little Tenderness” proves that music here on earth can also be tuned to the interstellar realms, especially when the rhythm section kicks in, and the horns start, and Otis begins his passionate exhortation as to how, exactly, tenderness is meant to be practiced (holding, squeezing, never leaving), and the horns work their way up the scale, likewise the rhythm guitar, chromatically, while Redding commences his soul shouting, and the crowd goes wild, hoping that he’ll play through the chorus just one more time! Yes, try a little tenderness! How could we resist! We have not tried sufficiently! So many areas of our lives remain unexplored! So many virtues seem to lie dormant in us! So much is failure and half-heartedness! Tenderness as opposed to oppressing the poor and disenfranchised, tenderness as opposed to military intervention in foreign countries! Tenderness as opposed to the amassing of money, power, and real estate!

What I mean to say is that this live performance of Otis Redding enacts the attempt at tenderness he promotes, and in this way his song proves itself, proves the validity of soul in music, by exercising the soul, and if you are not convinced by my recitation of these facts, get the Monterey Pop DVD and watch it, because I swear just as you can be absolved of your malfeasances by watching the pope on television, you can be made a better person by watching Otis Redding deliver this song; you will go into the next room, and you will look at your husband, or your wife, or your child, you will look at the people whom you have treated less well than you might have, and you will kneel in front of these people and you will beg for the chance to try a little harder and to make their burdens a little less burdensome. If those five minutes of grace are not an example of what lies out there, beyond what we daily understand, if those five minutes are not like unto a candle that glimmers in the unending darkness of life on earth, then I have no idea what paradise is.

yes! tenderness! i am trying it! what is paradise, really, but this soul, this soul. (not to mention the image of ducky singing this on pretty in pink.)

fish, like birds

i had a dream the other day (with my head perched on chapter 26 of my developmental biology text book) that i was exploring a densely wooded country. it was dark, maybe there was a city, maybe i was with friends, maybe i was alone. i came upon a lake, and there were people everywhere, diving in, and they were all crying out that i should follow suite.
so i did, fully clothed: i dove, and the water didn't shock me, it cradled me, and as i fell deeper and deeper into the water it grew brighter and brighter until i came upon an under water city, and as i was walking about, i nearly forgot i was in a lake but for the little fish swimming about me, like birds or butterflies.

i came upon these floating fish on the design boom website this afternoon - a group of korean designers presented the fish, representative of dutch herring, for experimentdesign amsterdam 2008.
lovely, lovely to see a dream incarnate.

Soaking

it all in. The rain, this still-new place, and this music. (Georges Lammam + violin = magic.)

yes yes!

Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

xarissa sent me this yesterday too!!! oh my goodness. oh my goodness.