a bit more poetry:

my pops used to say this when we whined about curfew...
is it sad that I now wholeheartedly agree?!

HOWL, Ginsberg.

HOWL
For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning
their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

wanted to divide it up but I just couldn't!! forgive the marathon post.
so very worth it.

:::

Regarding the age old question, “Why me?” Stephen King says,

You make an agreement. You say to yourself ‘ok, there’s a God- why? Because I choose to believe there is a God. Believing makes my life better than not believing. Why did this happen to me? It happened to me for some good purpose. What is that good purpose? I don’t know, but I choose to believe it’s good, because to believe it’s bad would… bum out my whole day!

from: Terry Gross interviewing Stephen King on "Fresh Air" shortly after King's nearly fatal car accident.

:::

back home tomorrow!

boxing day : )

holiday card:

& happy holidays : )

new (old) place: colorado

:::

I hope you are all with your families on this very happy holiday :)

my favorite family tradition is goofy poetry (see first photo).
my mom usually heads up the creative side of this event, but we
(my sisters and I) help when we can. when she lets us : )

what are your traditions?

:::

this week my project is to design a book jacket - just wanted to share some of my inspiration with ya'll!

obama as a college freshman!

definitely would have had a crush on him.

more images here.

christmas lights?

sampson and I embarked on a neighborhood lights tour.
just down the street we found this... conversation piece?

this is a house sized mock snow globe....

the square footage alone puts my
studio to shame!

where do you all stand on christmas lights?
less is more or more is less?

in a corner collecting dust i find:

Autumn
Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

in college I wrote a term paper on Rilke and modernism - I wish I could go back and grant myself the understanding I have now... the understanding, but not the experience - if only life permitted us this luxury!

the orange circle.

downtown city of orange - antique shops, gumball machines, thrift stores, gumball machines...

yum.

cefiore.

One of my most visited places in this sleepy seaside town is CeFiore, a frozen yogurt shop twenty steps from my house. Yes, I have been here before (insert obvious joke), but I have NOT been since they christmatized the place.

The high school kid at the counter politely (and amusedly) held my change as I took photos of this darling tree! For the first time in a LONG time I am feeling the holiday spirit.

something to remember as I move into this project...

ROGER FENTON: The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Crimea, 1855.

DECLAN HAUN: Justice, 1963.

DOROTHEA LANGE: Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Town, California, 1938.

Images & text from: The Photographer's Eye, John Szarkowski.
(one of the most influential critics & curators in all of photographic history)

The Detail:

Once he left the studio, it was impossible for the photographer to copy the painters' schemata. He could not stage-manage the battle, like Uccello or Velasquez, bringing together elements which had been separate in space and time, nor could he rearrange the parts of his picture to construct a design that pleased him better.

From the reality before him he could only choose that part that seemed relevant and consistent, and that would fill his plate. If he could not show the battle, explain its purpose and its strategy, or distinguish its heroes from its villians, he could show what was too ordinary to paint: the empty road scattered with cannon balls, the mud encrusted on the caisson's wheels, the anonymous faces, the single broken figure by teh wall.

Intuitively, he sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned toward symbol.

more from venice beach.

In 1997 Mike Sager wrote an incredible piece of journalism covering the gangs of Venice. “Death in Venice” details the lives of two “homeboys,” Yogi and Big Gato.

Sager quotes from a Los Angeles Times article in 1979:

Swept by smog-free ocean breezes, bordered on the south by the affluent playground called Marina del Rey… Oakwood is a strangely incongruous center of poverty and tragedy. While crime and gang violence tear at the community from within, mounting coastal real-estate values threaten to crush it from with out.

Sager:

Lil’ Gato looks up from the floor. He’s remembering something. The neighborhood. The gang. The tradition. He and Yogi are members of V-13, the Venice Gang, among the oldest of the 400 gangs in Los Angeles. Theirs is a gang with history. For more than 30 years, Chicano homeboys have claimed this neighborhood, one square mile of palm trees and poverty in the middle of Venice, California, a little piece of barrio in the heart of California lifestyle.

But as predicted, “mounting coastal real-estate values” have crushed this culture, steeped in history and pride,from the outside in. Now I can stroll down Abbot-Kinney and spoon my Pink Berry while mining expensive thrift shops and perusing art galleries. I feel at ease with the arty street culture as I corral my designer dog onto the sidewalk, and joke with Pete about our fresh jobs and shiny lives.


Sager writes, "Today, everything is different. Gangs are no longer about turf and respect. Instead, they are about drugs and money."

He ends his article inside one of the boy's ramshackle bedrooms. Yogi and Big Gato smoke crack instead of hunting down Culver City gang members. In the old days, shirking this responsibility would have been a sin of dire disrespect & dishonor. But crack, or “rock,” has corroded the complex system of pride and turf.

A few moments pass. Big Gato stares. His mouth is pulled back in a tight grimace, and above his lip are little drops of sweat. His teeth are clenched, and you can see the strain in the muscles of his jaw. Then his eyes drift to the carpet. There are lots of little white pieces of paper and lint and cloth and cigarette ash down there. To him, each pieee ooks like a rock. Could be a rock.

‘Gimme a blast,’ says Big Gato.

‘We was just going to get a 10 from Blinky,’ says Yogi.

‘A 10?’ says Big Gato. He chews his thumb. ‘A 10?’

‘Yeah,’ says Yogi, warming. ‘We were gonna go get a 10.’

‘Well, go get it,’ says Big Gato.

‘What about Culver City?’ asks Tequila.

‘Culver City?’ asks Big Gato. ‘Oh, We’ll get them later.'

if you have time, check out Mike Sager's website. he's an interesting guy. really.

venice.

December 15th marks two years living in this sun washed, palm tree studded part of the country.

As of late thoughts of moving have entered my mind. It is no secret to anyone, friends or family, that I have a bit of a wanderlust in me, unable to be stamped out by age or employment or education or romantic interest...

a few days ago I found myself explaining this to a good friend of mine, a southern california native. "I'm done with this place," I said. He replied "But you still have so much left to see!" He began rattling off all the "must see" spots I have somehow missed.

for the next 30 or so days I want to pose a challenge (to myself) - every day I will see something new in my landscape - big or small, significant or not - be it a new city, like today, or a plant, person, dog, sign, spill, color, gas station... until january first.

the point? appreciation & gratitude & understanding the benefit of standing still and simply looking.

today I tooled around venice beach with peter & sampson.

reading.

Forgetfulness
Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

The worst: reading the same sentence ten times over, only to retain nothing.

Currently I am reading All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, and I'm as lost as a goose in a snowstorm... not because it's difficult reading material, but because I can't focus - my mind wanders to the that "love poem I used to know by heart."

Have any of you read it? I would love to hear your thoughts.

rosshalde, herman hesse.

I just completed Rosshalde, Herman Hesse’s fourth novel. Although I prefer his other work, the novel was worth reading, if only to unveil biographical facts regarding Hesse’s life. Like Siddhartha, Rosshalde explores man’s alienation, social paralysis, stagnation, and ultimately rebirth.

Vermouth, the principle character, finds himself cemented into a life of bored contentment. He views travel to India as his saving grace, and finally, at the end of the book he heads off in an orgiastic spree.

Reminds me of something an old man said to me when I first came to California – he pinched his leathery face and muttered, “So you moved to California, hmm? They should put signs on the borders of California, New York and Florida stating: this state doesn’t work either.”

speaking of which,

project # 3: on strings.
our professor had us invent a specialty shop - we could choose anything we wanted... I chose mobiles. I named my store "on strings." we had to create an logo/identity system.

“A mobile is a very modest thing.” –Alexander Calder

Graphic design weds the logical to the artistic. Designers must use reason to achieve their desired goal, but not without exercising creativity and aesthetic consideration. Mobiles echo this fragile balancing act. Hanging structures must subscribe to mathematical laws, specifically rules of weight, balance, and suspension. Despite these considerations, however, mobiles are not machines - beauty and form are of utmost importance. To create something floating yet grounded, stable yet dynamic, functional yet beautiful - is no easy feat.

I have chosen the mobile as my specialty item because I believe these hanging structures are of signal importance, both figurative and literal. Mobiles offer a sliver of stability & beauty in a chaotic, often ugly world. If this is too hopeful, too elusive, mobiles at the very least offer the idea of stability & beauty, reminding us of basic priorities (balance, beauty, stability). These whimsical, suspended forms allow us control in an uncontrollable world, the chance at reciprocity and balance among the chaos and the noise.

This project’s path reflects a mobile’s very construction. Creating “On Strings” has been a complex, convoluted process, yet surprisingly simple- even “modest”- in its result.

30 Days of Daily Design: Round Up

personalized cards.

in my imaginary "on strings" store i will hand write thank you cards to each customer!

thank you for entering my imaginary world just right of weird and down the street from crazy. my hypothetical thank you so very, very much.

:::

images from: Sarah Lee on Flickr.

graphic design.

as much as I like to uphold the idea that graphic designers are artists, delicate & sensitive & creative - who wouldn't want that special brand of celebrity?! - I am as of yet undecided.

graphic design weds itself to public opinion. this is an inherent process, the organic result of commerce - clients, work, publication, and the like. often the designer caters to his or her own aesthetic taste, and not the needs of the client, transforming graphic design from a service to a vehicle for artistic expression...

I realize this is a vast, controversial subject, but regardless I pose a question: is graphic design art or is graphic design a commercial skill? are both mutually exclusive? or interdependent?

can you have one (art) with out the other (science)?

is graphic design an art or a client dependent service?

image: logic + emotion blog.

sunday aftermath.

christopher david ryan.

i will never stop loving that man.

in las vegas for the weekend.

stress.

image by: olly moss.

tgi-fing-f!

i can't believe i am saying that.

who feels the same?

hopeful.

another photo of mum & pops.

The Discovery of Sex

We try to be discreet standing in the dark
hallway by the front door. He gets his hands
up inside the front of my shirt and I put mine
down inside the back of his jeans. We are crazy
for skin, each other's skin, warm silky skin.
Our tongues are in each other's mouths,
where they belong, home at last. At first

we hope my mother won't see us, but later we don't care,
we forget her. Suddenly she makes a noise
like a game show alarm and says Hey! Stop that!
and we put our hands out where she can see them.
Our mouths stay pressed together, though, and
when she isn't looking anymore our hands go
back inside each other's clothes. We could

go where no one can see us, but we are
good kids, from good families, trying to have
as much discreet sex as possible with my mother and father
four feet away watching strangers kiss on TV,
my mother and father who once did as we are doing,
something we can't imagine because we know

that before we put our mouths together, before
the back seat of his parents' car where our skins
finally become one-before us, these things
were unknown! Our parents look on in disbelief
as we pioneer delights they thought only they knew
before those delights gave them us.

Years later, still we try to be discreet, standing
in the kitchen now where we think she can't see us. I
slip my hands down inside the back of his jeans
and he gets up under the front of my shirt.
We open our mouths to kiss and suddenly Hey! Hey!
says our daughter glaring from the kitchen doorway.
Get a room! she says, as we put our hands
out where she can see them.

By Debra Spencer

:::

and finally...

the matron lady herself.

bonfire mix.

missing the sisters.

timing is everything.

Gold

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow roses
pressing from a clear bowl. All day
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep
gold of your thighs and your back.
We slept and woke
entering the golden room together,
lay down in it breathing
quickly, then
slowly again,
caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily
touching my hair now.

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.

Donald Hall