Emma
KatyslanyJeanette Winterson answers the question How do we fall in love?
in Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds,
You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)
And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.
PS You have to be brave.
explaining how we fall in love to children
West of the Moon
Written, Directed, & Animated by Brent Bonacorso
brentbonacorso.com
Loosely based on several hundred interviews with children about their dreams, ‘West of the Moon’ is the story of one man’s lost love and his strange path to redemption, aided along the way by a gambling robot, a wayward monkey, and a healthy dose of determination.
What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
Frank Lloyd Wright. This manifesto, written as a series of “fellowship assets” meant to guide the apprentices who worked with him at his school, Taliesin.
1. An honest ego in a healthy body.
2. An eye to see nature.
3. A heart to feel nature.
4. Courage to follow nature.
5. The sense of proportion (humor).
6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work.
7. Fertility of imagination.
8. Capacity for faith and rebellion.
9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance.
10. Instinctive cooperation.
THE ILLUMINATED SKETCHBOOK OF STEPHAN SCHRIBER (1494)
more images at publicdomainreview.org
Selected pages from the Spätgotisches Musterbuch des Stephan Schriber, a manuscript which appears to be some kind of sketchbook, belonging to a 15th century monk working in South-West Germany, where ideas and layouts for illuminated manuscripts were tried out and skills developed.
This Exquisite Forest
This Exquisite Forest is an online collaborative art project that lets users create short animations that build off one another as they explore a specific theme. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling trees.
http://www.exquisiteforest.com/ Watch animations at The Endless Theatre
kids from around the world photographed with their favourite posessions.
Botlhe – Maun, Botswana
Arafa & Aisha – Bububu, Zanzibar
Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi
Julia – Tirana, Albania
Stella – Montecchio, Italy
Tangawizi – Keekorok, Kenya
more pictures from the series here: http://www.gabrielegalimberti.com/
“If Riverboom’s photographer Gabriele Galimberti had happened to shoot me, aged 6 and surrounded by my favorite toys, he would have seen the following: plastic medieval weaponry; assorted Lego (Space, Castle and Pirate); an inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex (punctured slowly into extinction); a Superman action figure (I lost it and hyperventilated with grief); a pair of cuddly rabbits (Sally and Billy); toy cars; a tiny guitar; a plane you launched with an elastic catapult; a replica pistol I thought my mum didn’t know about.
Everyone remembers their childhood toys. The fact that I can recall how most of mine tasted better than I can remember the names of my primary school teachers says everything you need to know about the universe kids inhabit. Indeed, when Galimberti hit upon the idea of photographing children from
around the world with their toys, he was not expecting to uncover much we did not already know: kids love dolls and dinosaurs and trucks and cuddly monkeys, and will construct worlds around them before eventually, inevitably, disregarding them for ever. “At their age, they are pretty all much the same,” is his conclusion after 18 months working on the project. “They just want to play.”
But how they play can reveal a lot. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian, who would often join in with a child’s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”
Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day.
Ultimately, the toys on display reveal the hopes and ambitions of the people who bought them in the first place. “Doing this, I learnt more about the parents than I did about the kids,” says Galimberti. There was the Latvian mother who drove a taxi for a living, and who showered her son with miniature cars; the Italian farmer whose daughter proudly displayed her plastic rakes, hoes and spades. Parents from the Middle East and Asia, he found, would push their children to be photographed even if they were initially nervous or upset, while South American parents were “really relaxed, and said I could do whatever I wanted as long as their child didn’t mind”.
With the exception of computer games, he noticed that toys haven’t really changed over the past three decades or so. And there is something reassuring about that. “I’d often find the kind of toys I used to have,” he says. “It was nice to go back to my childhood somehow.”
Ben Machell – The Times Magazine
Wangechi Mutu
“Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.”
Tiny Magic Everyday: 29. Of night and light and the half light.
Emma. Nostalgia Mashup #2.
Braids of Braids
From The blog Braids of Braids which is a collaborative space prior to a residency at Access Gallery: http://accessgallery.ca/all/events/braids/
Gold Leaf Glomerulus
Greg Dunn, a former neuroscientist, was inspired by the beauty of brain cells seen under the microscope when treated with certain stains. Now he paints. More at http://www.gregadunn.com
Land Mermaid
Neon Hitch, cavavan-dwelling land mermaid queen, is addicted to headpieces. ❤
“Don’t give it to any girl but me.”
robert mapplethorpe and the jewelry he made. x.
“We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet free.” -Patti Smith, Just Kids
SWOON: Miss Rockaway Armada, the Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea and Serenissima, and The Clutchess of Cuckoo
Fairy tale about a girl who became a tree in order to lay to rest the birds inside her.
laura makabresku
Monette & Mady
I first saw them on the streets of Paris and I was instantly fascinated by their identical outfits and synchronized corporal language. Quirky and beautiful, they stood out from any crowd. As I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, I remember thinking that they might not be real.
When I approached them I was not surprised to discover that they often finish each other’s sentences and that they refer to themselves as « I » instead of « we ».
Neither Mady nor Monette have married or had children and they always eat the same kind of food in identical portions.
They do not just share a close relationship as sisters; as a couple they act, model and dance together and the city of Paris is their main stage.
If they ever go out dressed in different outfits, people stop and ask why they argue.
When I first spotted the sisters, I wasn’t quite sure that they were real… the dreamy atmosphere is a bit like a mirage that reflects my initial impression of them.
Sometimes Monette and Mady don’t quite understand why I want to document their everyday life. It is an interesting challenge for me to make them see how fascinated I am by this symbiotic existence that is so natural to them.
Mady and Monette are indifferent to the many stereotypes that are related to aging. They have in fact long stopped celebrating their birthdays and they defy any preconceived notions related to growing old.
This series is an intimate journal of their togetherness…”
BANG
I love your silences, they are like mine
Anaïs reads Under a Glass Bell
so amazing to hear her words in her voice.
http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/anaisreadsuagb.mp3
Only do not forget, if I wake up crying it’s only because in my dream I’m a lost child hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands
I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.
Prom Night – Celia Rowlson-Hall
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
Gahhhh!
“You are beautiful like demolition. Just the thought of you draws my knuckles white. I don’t need a god. I have you and your beautiful mouth, your hands holding onto me, the nails leaving unfelt wounds, your hot breath on my neck. The taste of your saliva. The darkness is ours. The nights belong to us. Everything we do is secret. Nothing we do will ever be understood; we will be feared and kept well away from. It will be the stuff of legend, endless discussion and limitless inspiration for the brave of heart. It’s you and me in this room, on this floor. Beyond life, beyond morality. We are gleaming animals painted in moonlit sweat glow. Our eyes turn to jewels and everything we do is an example of spontaneous perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch. The time I annihilated while I waited like a man doing a life sentence. Now you’re here and everything we touch explodes, bursts into bloom or burns to ash. History atomizes and negates itself with our every shared breath. I need you like life needs life. I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.” ~Henry Rollins
Salastia 