Exercise for the new year

Posted on January 7, 2011 by

My friend Regina Gelfo sent this to me in the first few days of 2010 as an exercise to help me establish and put clarity into the year that had passed. She found it somewhere on the internet, not sure where. It’s been helpful to me, and perhaps it might be to you, as well.

2010: COMPLETING AND REMEMBERING

  • Review the list of all completed projects
  • What was your biggest triumph in 2010?
  • What was the smartest decision you made in 2010?
  • What one word best sums up and describes your 2010 experience?
  • What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2010?
  • What was the most loving service you performed in 2010?
  • What is your biggest piece of unfinished business in 2010?
  • What are you most happy about completing in 2010?
  • Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life in 2010?
  • What was the biggest risk you took in 2010?
  • What was the biggest surprise in 2010?
  • What important relationship improved the most in 2010?
  • What compliment would you liked to have received in 2010?
  • What compliment would you liked to have given in 2010?
  • What else do you need to do or say to be complete with 2010?

2011: CREATING THE NEW YEAR

  • What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2011?
  • What advice would you like to give yourself in 2011?
  • What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2011?
  • What would you be most happy about completing in 2011?
  • What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2011?
  • What would you most like to change about yourself in 2011?
  • What are you looking forward to learning in 2011?
  • What do you think your biggest risk will be in 2011?
  • What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving in 2011?
  • What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore in 2011?
  • What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that in 2011?
  • Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving in 2011?
  • What one word would you like to have as your theme in 2011?
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Hey Pachuco!

Posted on December 6, 2010 by

Zoot-suiters in Los Angeles, and the girls who loved them.

Sources:
a. http://pic40.picturetrail.com/VOL272/8157143/15269508/231094190.jpg
b. http://www.flickr.com/photos/80643375@N00/356743212
c. http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HCcB7IDJQ6Q/0.jpg

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‘Tree of Codes’ by Jonathan Safran Foer

Posted on November 10, 2010 by

Visual Editions, started in 2009 in London,  publishes books that are very aware of their materiality. As they put it “books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell”.

On Nov 15th they will publish their second book, Tree of Codes by acclaimed author Jonathan Safran Foer. This book was generated not from the singular vision of an author in his garrett, but rather from a shared fascination with die-cutting paper. From their site:

Our early conversations with Jonathan Safran Foer about Tree of Codes started when Jonathan said he was curious to explore and experiment with the die-cut technique. With that as our mutual starting point, we spent many months of emails and phone calls, exploring the idea of the pages’ physical relationship to one another and how this could somehow be developed to work with a meaningful narrative. This led to Jonathan deciding to use an existing piece of text and cut a new story out of it. Having considered working with various texts, Jonathan decided to cut into and out of what he calls his “favourite book”: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

Pre-order it here or check out their existing publications here.

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Pete Dougherty is a more coherent e.e. cummings

Posted on October 19, 2010 by

Here’s a section of a poem Pete Dougherty wrote when he was 17:

“I knew she wasn’t English,
Because she spoke it far too well.
The grammar was goodly, the verbs as they should be,
And the slang was bang on the bell.

So as the language barrier clanged and banged,
I couldn’t hear – or see
England, London, and Bow
Crumble into the sea.”

You can watch him recite this on this BBC clip on Youtube.

 

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Cacophony Society

Posted on October 15, 2010 by

Stemming from San Francisco’s now-defunct ‘Suicide Club‘, The Cacophony Society is “a randomly gathered network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness.”

They claim to be the original impetus for Burning Man, and they also started such important urban lore as the Urban Iditarod, the Salmon Swimming Upstream at Bay to Breakers, and, my personal favorite, Clowns on a Bus (where, as you might guess, they took over a bus, dressed as clowns).

The LA Chapter was overseen by none other than The Art of Bleeding’s Reverend Al Ridenour, and in true Reverend Al style, he took things to another level altogether. Eschewing the merry and boisterous vibe that SF cultivated, they embraced slightly more subversive, politicized, and dark happenings. Examples abound, but some of my favorites include the time they protested a G.I. Joe convention (which really pissed off the convention organizers), their ‘Nihilist Shopping Excursions’ where they looked for things that represented the worst of American society, the time they went for an Easter Egg hunt in a Nazi encampment in the Santa Monica mountains, or when Reverend Al served pages of a bible up in a fricasee. For human consumption, natch.

Rev. Al more or less shut down the LA chapter in 1999, but the society lives on elsewhere in the world, in glorious messiness.

http://www.cacophony.org/


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Beautiful Bottle

Posted on October 8, 2010 by

Made for Diptyque for a limited edition concentrated version of L’Ombre Dans L’eau and Philosykos, these are made out of  Saint Louis Crystal (whatever the hell that is), and will be  packaged in a black laquer box. These new bottles are  insanely beautiful, there are only 350 made, and their suggested retail is £795.

 

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I Love Alaska

Posted on September 16, 2010 by

‘I Love Alaska’ — by Dutch directors Sander Plug and Lernert Engelberts – is 13 short episodes chronicling the life of AOL user #71139 through her search queries, which were inadvertently released on the internet when AOL mistakenly published the private search history of 650,000 of its users. It’s really a fascinating watch (or rather, listen: It’s mostly VO).

Watch the episodes here.

Synopsis: I Love Alaska tells the true and heartbreaking search history of User #711391. As the the voice-over reads out the search queries entered into AOL’s search engine over a 3 month period, an image emerges of a somewhat obese religious woman from Houston, Texas, who is looking for a way to rejuvenate her sex life. In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction, and dreams of a new life in Alaska.


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