emily blakely

Majical Cloudz - Mountain Eyes

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:25:41 MST

When I'm restless, but I don't want to write or say anything, I post music.
I really like this song.

source: from Grimes on Gorilla vs. Bear

oddness and mundane

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:18:30 MST

I enjoy organizing, appending, and annexing. It's inspiration and a form of appropriation. It's the same with photography. I collect what piques curiosity, prompts questions, what scares me and then I try to organize and append it.

For a while, I was scared of capturing myself. Scared of my appearance. I suppose I still am in many ways. The vulnerability of the self, or at least my approach to it, is unnerving.

I've tried to embrace the idea of hesitation, the act or gesture of pausing. Highlighting lonely, awkward, but overall, very quiet moments. Sometimes they are staged, to expose the strangeness within. At times, this works, and at other times, it does not. My creative process is a work in progress. It has gaps in its redundancy, in its lack of movement, it nonetheless posits an effort of understanding that every viewer is free to exercise.

Below are inspiring images from Laurie Franck. It's a wonderful moment when I find someone who is working towards a similar visual end.

source: images by Laurie Franck

Lower Dens - Brains

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:45:13 MST

Twin-Hand Movement is such a great album. Jana Hunter continues to impress me. I'm eager for Nootropics (pronounced No-eh-tro-pics).
According to press for the album, the title is a reference to the band’s “interest in transhumanism–the use of technology to extend human capabilities.” This theme also extends into the album’s actual content, as evident by the track titled “Brains,” which examines our relationship to technology, specifically, artificial intelligence.

Sundrips - Dream Studies

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:13:52 MST

Sundrips - 07:00 from Daniel O'Connell on Vimeo.

Cats, Paws, and Poofy Pants II

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:29:27 MST

It's been, ohhh, I don't know, four months since I followed up with the first Cats, Paws and Poofy Pants series post. So to make up for it, I've added more images of Atlas and Enzo at the end.

The last eleven images:
Enzo as a kitten. He's laying on an electric blanket. Since then he has claimed that blanket as his.
Enzo "hiding," under the french doors curtains.
Enzo catching a sunbeam in the kitchen.
Enzo's dainty paws.
Enzo the acrobat. He likes to climb on the rails that hold the dirty laundry bags.
Atlas as a kitten. He looked like a little dust-ball-ewok.
Atlas lounging and giving me a look that says, " I will lounge whereever I damn well please."
Atlas (and Enzo) bedroom-bed playtime.
Atlas catching a sunbeam.
Atlas curious about something in the trees outside the bedroom window.
Atlas and Enzo sitting looking out of the office window into the backyward.

sources: my ffffound, my favorites on flickr
gallery: cats, paws, and poofy-pants

Equinox Yoga

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:38:38 MST

This yoga video has been making the rounds in a lot of places. Just watch it, and you'll see why.
(I like to think when I do yoga I look this good.)

Everything is a Remix

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:07:59 MST

I firmly believe information and education should be at everyone's fingertips. It's why I love Open Culture so much. The site's mission is to...

bring together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community... centralize content, curate it, and give access to high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content...

Below are videos that, essentially, reaffirm one of my favorite quotes by Jim Jarmusch, (from his Golden Rules):

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

First video I've listed is Part 4 and gives an overview of Technology, but if you have the time, all are worth it.

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

source: Open Culture

La Plume

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:55:18 MST

We are living in a storm where a hundred contradictory elements collide; debris from the past, scraps of the present, seeds of the future, swirling, combining, separating under imperious wind of destiny.

–Adolphe Retté, La Plume, March 1, 1898

source: Old Chum's Flickr

cupid

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:29:41 MST

Betty Grable as cupid.

sources: The Thinking Tank, Smoke and Ochre

habitats

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:16:35 MST

Pictures of me, taken by boffo (of a laugh).

The Nothingness of Personality

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:27:00 MST

You may have noticed a Jorge Luis Borges trend in What I'm Reading. I checked out around 10 of his books from Tutt Library, they're all very very good. It's so difficult to settle on certain excerpts and passages, too many good ones to pass up.

At the moment, this one feels very fitting. For someone who believes their personality is a good portion of their being, their sense of identity... this particular essay speaks greatly to me.

* * *

There is no whole self. Any of life's present situation is seamless and sufficient. Are you, as you ponder these disquietudes, anything more than an indifference gliding over the argument I make, or an appraisal of the opinions I expound?

I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. The proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I.

It would be vanity to suppose that in order to enjoy absolute validity the psychic aggregate must seize on a self, that conjectural Jorge Luis Borges on whose tongue sophistries are always at the ready and in whose solitary strolls the evenings on the fringes of the city are pleasant.

There is no whole self. He who defines personal identity as the private possession of some depository of memories is mistaken. Whoever affirms such a thing is abusing the symbol that solidifies memory in the form of an enduring and tangible granary or warehouse, when memory is no more than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way. Moreover, if I root personality in remembrance, what claim of ownership can be made on elapsed instants that, because they were quotidian or stale, did not stamp us with a lasting mark? Heaped up over years, they lie buried, inaccessible to our avid longing. And that much-vaunted memory to whose ruling you made appeal, does it ever manifest all its past plenitude? Does it truly live? The sensualists and their ilk, who conceive of your personality as the sum of your successive states of mind, are similarly deceiving themselves. On closer scrutiny, their formula is no more than an ignominious circumlocution that undermines the very foundation it constructs, an acid that eats away at itself, a prattling fraud and a belabored contradiction.

. . .

There is no whole self. It suffices to walk any distance along the inexorable rigidity that the mirrors of the past open to us in order to feel like outsiders, naively flustered by our own bygone days. There is no community of intention in them, nor are they propelled by the same breeze. This has been declared by those men who have truly scrutinized the calendars from which time was discarding them. Some, extravagant as fireworks, make a boast of so muddled a confusion and sat that disparity is wealth; others, far from glorifying disorder, deplore the inequality of their days and yearn for the popular uniformity.

. . .

There is no whole self. Beyond all possibility of bombastic gamesmanship, I have touched this hard truth with my own emotions as I was separating from a companion. I was returning from Buenos Aires and leaving him behind in Mallorca. We both understood that, except in the perfidious or altered proximity of letters, we would not meet again. What happens at such moments happened. We knew this good-bye would jut out in our memories, and there was even a period when we tired to enhance its flavor with a vehement show of opinions for the yearnings to come. The present moment was acquiring all the prestige and indeterminacy of the past . . .

But beyond any egotistical display, what clamored in my chest was the will to show my soul in its entirety to my friend. I would have wanted to strip myself of it and leave it there, palpitating. We went on talking and debating, on the brink of good-bye, until all at once, with an unsuspected strength of conviction, I understood that this personality, which we usually appraise at such an incompatibly exorbitant value, is nothing. The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. And I despised all mysterizing.

. . .

There is no whole self. I, for example, am not the visual reality that my eyes encompass, for if I were, darkness would kill me and nothing would remain in me to desire the spectacle of the world, or even to forget it. Nor am I the audible world that I hear, for in that case silence would erase me and I would pass from sound to sound without memory of the previous one. Subsequent identical lines of argument can be directed toward the senses of smell, taste, and touch, proving not only that I am not the world of appearances--a thing generally known and undisputed-- but that the apperceptions that indicate that world are not myself either. That is, I am not my own activity of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Nor am I my body, which is a phenomenon among others. Up to this point, this argument is banal; its distinction lies in its application to spiritual matters. Are desire, thought, happiness, and distress my true self? The answer, in accordance with the precept, is clearly in the negative, since those conditions expire without annulling me with them. Consciousness--the final hideout where we might track down the self--also proves unqualified. Once the emotions, the extraneous perceptions, and even ever-shifting thought are dismissed, consciousness is a barren thing, without any appearance reflected in it to make it exist.

. . .

Reality has no need of other realities to bolster it. There are no divinities hidden in the trees, nor any elusive thing-in-itself behind appearance. The senses do not deceive, it is the mind that deceives.

Jorge Luis Borges - Selected Non-Fictions: The Nothingness of Personality

Whats a Matter Baby

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:01:25 MST

Here are two different versions of the same song. Both are fantastic. I really want to learn to play this on my ukulele.
Not that this matters, but a certain someone has mentioned he likes to read into some of the posts I make. I don't often make disclaimers on my site (although, if you know me in real life, I do it all the time). Sometimes I feel I don't need to on here, but for the record, it's the style of the song I love. It's the melody and the way Timi Yuro sings some of the lyrics. I love her voice. I love how you can hear the emotion.

Just some more music-reminders that I was born in the wrong time period.

lapse

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:00:00 MST

I'm good at hiding.

cat nonsense

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:03:00 MST

This is a pretty good reason why I love the internet.
Go ahead and call me a crazy cat-lady. I just don't care.
With all the mindless drivel, with all the crap that can easily make me depressed, it's things like this that make me stop, smile, and just puts me in a really good mood. I need more animated gifs like this. I haven't made a cats, paws and poofy-pants post in a while. Very behind. Hopefully, sometime this week, with pictures of Atlas and Enzo.

soul-making

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:34:23 MST

Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time insofar as we are involved in soul-making.

James Hillman — Re-visioning Psychology, 1975

source: UrbanNautica

When I Wake Up

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:51:11 MST

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself.

–– Jorge Luis Borges

BARNSTONE: I have some questions. Maybe wordy, but your answers won't be.

BORGES: They will be laconic, yes?

BARNSTONE: We know that conciousness resides in every other human being, yet we possess an awareness of only our own mind. At times we wake, as it were, to a puzzling knowledge of the mind's separate existence.

BORGES: Well, but this is a question on the nature of solipsism, no? Now, I don't believe in solipsism, because if I did I'd go mad. But of course it is a curious fact that we exist.

At the same time, I feel I am not dreaming you, or, let's put it the other way, that you are not dreaming me. But this fact of wondering at life may stand for the essence of poetry. All poetry consists in feeling things as being strange, while all rhetoric consists in thinking of them as quite common, as obvious. Of course I am puzzled by the fact of my existing, of my existing in a human body, of my looking through eyes, hearing through ears, and so on. And maybe everything I have written is a mere metaphor, a mere variation on that central theme of being puzzled by things. In that case, I suppose, there's no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphor. If you use language, you have to use metaphors all the time. Since you know my works (well, let the word go at that I don't think of them as works, really), since you know my exercises, I suppose you have felt that I was being puzzled all the time, and I was trying to find a foundation for my puzzlement.

BARNSTONE: In Cincinnati when an admirer said "May you live one thousand years," you answered "I look forward happily to my death." What did you mean by that?

BORGES: I mean that when I'm unhappy––and that happens quite often to all of us––I find a real consolation in the thought that in a few years, or maybe in a few days, I'll be dead and then all this won't matter. I look forward to being blotted out. But if I thought that my death was a mere illusion, that after death I would go on, then I would feel very, very unhappy. For, really, I'm sick and tired of myself. Now, of course if I go on and I have no personal memory of ever having been Borges, then in that case it won't matter to me because I may have been hundreds of odd people before I was born, but those things won't worry me, since I will have forgotten them. When I think of mortality, or death, I think of those things in a hopeful way, in an expectant way. I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

There's a word in Spanish, I suppose you know. I wonder if it's any longer in use. Instead of saying "wake up," you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. My mother used to say Que me recuedre a las ocho "I want to be recorded to myself at eight." Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I'm being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here's the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody. I have certain commitments. One of the commitments is to live through the whole day. Then I see all that routine before me, and all things naturally make me tired. Of course when you're young, you don't feel that way. You feel, well, I am so glad I'm back in this marvelous world. But I don't think I ever felt that way. Even when I was young. Especially when I was young. Now I have resignation. Now I wake up and I say: I have to face another day. I let it go at that. I suppose people feel in different ways because many people think of immortality as a kind of happiness, perhaps because they don't realize it.

BARNSTONE: They don't realize what?

BORGES: The fact that going on and on would be, let's say, awful.

BARNSTONE: Would be another hell, as you say in one of your stories.

BORGES: Yes, it would be, yes. Since this life is already hell, why go in for more and more hell, for larger and larger doses!

BARNSTONE: For two hundred years?

BORGES: Yes. Well, of course you might say that those two hundred years don't exist. For what really exists is the present moment. The present moment being weighted down by the past and by the fear of the future. Really, when do we speak of the present moment? For the present moment is as much an abstraction as the past of the future. In the present moment, you always have some kind of past and some kind of future also. You are slipping all the time from one to the other.

BARNSTONE: But obviously you have great moments of pleasure during your life.

BORGES: Yes, I suppose everybody has. But I wonder. I suppose those moments are perhaps finer when you remember them. Because when you're happy, you're hardly conscious of things. The fact of being conscious makes for unhappiness.

BARNSTONE: To be conscious of happiness often lets in an intrusion of doubt.

BORGES: But I think I have known moments of happiness. I suppose all men have. There are moments, let's say, love, riding, swimming, talking to a friend, let's say, conversation, reading, even writing, or rather, not writing but inventing something. When you sit down to write it, then you are no longer happy because you're worried by technical problems. But when you think out something, then I suppose you may be allowed to be happy. And there are moments when you're slipping into sleep, and then you feel happy, or at least I do. I remember the first time I had sleeping pills. (They were efficient, of course, since they were new to me.) I used to say to myself: Now hearing that tramway turn around the corner, I won't be able to hear the end of the noise it makes, the rumble, because I'll be asleep. Then I felt very, very happy. I thought of unconsciousness.

BARNSTONE: Do you care about literary recognition? Do you want fame?

BORGES: No, No! Those things are nonexistent. At the same time, when it comes to me––and it may come to me––I feel that I should be grateful. I mean if people take me seriously, I think, well, they are wrong. At the same time I should be thankful to them.

BARNSTONE: Do you live for the next poem, story, or essay or conversation?

BORGES: Yes. Yes, I do.

BARNSTONE: It seems to me that you're a lucky man to have unending obsessions to create and to record. Do you know why you had that destiny of being a writer? That destiny of that obsession?

BORGES: The only thing I know is that I need those obsessions. Because if not, why should I go on living? Of course, I wouldn't commit suicide. But I should feel very unjustified. This doesn't mean I think very much of what I write. It means that I have to write. Because if I don't write something and keep on being obsessed by it, then I have to write it and be rid of it.

. . .

BARNSTONE: To go to reverie... you speak much of dream. What do you mean by dream? How is a dream different from any other state of wakefulness?

BORGES: Because a dream is creation. Of course wakefulness may be a creation: part of our solipsism and so on. But you don't think of it in that way. In the case of a dream, you know that all that comes from yourself, whereas, in the case of waking experience, many things may come to you that don't come out of yourself, unless you believe in solipsism. Then you are the dreamer all the time, whether waking or sleeping. I don't believe in solipsism. I don't suppose anybody really does. The essential difference between the waking experience and the sleeping or dreaming experience must lie in the fact that the dreaming experience is something that can be begotten by you, created by you, evolved out of you.

. . .

BARNSTONE: There's a lot of fun in you, Borges. You're very childlike, you enjoy things, you have tremendous humor.

BORGES: Well, I should, after all. I wonder if I'm really grown up. I don't suppose anybody is.

BARNSTONE: No, none of us is. When I was unhappy in the past, in love, some foolish things like that––

BORGES: No, not foolish. Those things are a part of every human experience. I mean the fact of loving and not being loved, that is a part of every biography, no? But if you came to me and said: I am in love with so-and-so, she's rejected me. I think that every human being can say that. Everyone has been rejected, and has rejected also. Both things stand out in everyone's life. Someone is turning down someone or being turned down. It's happening all the time. Of course when it happens to us, as Heine said, then we're very unhappy.

BARNSTONE: Sometimes when I was unhappy I wanted to die, but I knew that this was just a sign that I wanted to live...

––Borges at Eighty, Conversations: When I Wake Up

Soko

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:55:01 MST

She also does a decent cover of Donovan.
And I do love me some Donovan.

source: GorillavsBear

all the cities...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:56:03 MST

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the people that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

–– Jorge Luis Borges

Steven Alan 2012

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:09:47 MST

I love Steven Alan. So flirty and feminine, yet so simple, clean, and elegant.

The first set of images are pulled from the Spring Collection and the last three are pulled from the Resort Collection. I especially love the short-haired model's make-up, a strong brow with subtle pink hues. I dont really wear make-up often, but looking natural, wearing make-up so it looks like you're not wearing make-up, is really the way to go.

source: Steven Alan

Carlos Jimenez Cahua

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:52:03 MST

About a month ago, I fell in love with this series via UrbanNautica. I'm just as much in love with color theory as I was ten years ago. In many ways, these remind me of Agnes Martin paintings. So calming. I like the hazy washed out sky, the desaturated colors paired with texture in the landscape.
I don't get jealous of too many photographers. This is an exception.

sources: Carlos Jiménez Cahua, UrbanNautica

Hunger

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:00:00 MST

I have a crush on Michael Fassbender.
I think I know why. He shares a striking resemblance to a certain someone I know.

Bobby Sands: When you're hung from a cross you're gonna say anything. Jesus offers him a seat next to his daddy in a place called paradise you're always gonna put your hand up and have a piece of that.

Bobby Sands: I have my belief and in all its simplicity. That is the most powerful thing.

source: Mubi, My Mubi

The Mirage

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:51:27 MST

It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

– Paul Caponigro

facades

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:50:44 MST

Thirty-One

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:00:00 MST

Zion National Park

Human All Too Human

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:55:32 MST

I'd like to stay away from my computer... if at all possible, (not always possible) for the next two weeks. All posts within that time will be scheduled posts, with the possible exception of one from the road.

483
The enemies of Truth
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

490
The Illusions of Idealists
All idealists imagine that the cause which they serve is essentially better than all other causes, and will not believe that if their cause is really to flourish it requires precisely the same evil-smelling manure which all other human undertakings have need of.

508
Free Nature
We are so fond of being out among Nature, because it has no opinions about of us.

586
The Hour-Hand of Life
Life consists of rare single moments of the greatest importance, and of countless intervals during which, at best, the phantoms of those moments hover around us. Love, the spring, every fine melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea––all speak, but once fully to the heart, if, indeed, they ever do quite attain to speech. For many people have not those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of actual life.

605
The Danger in Free Opinions
Frivolous occupation with free opinions has a charm, like a kind of itching; if one yields further, one begins to chafe the places; until at last an open, painful wound results; that is to say, until the free opinion begins to disturb and torment us in our position in life and in our human relations.

606
Desire for Sore Affliction
When passion is over it leaves behind an obscure longing for it, and even in disappearing it casts a seductive glance at us. It must have afforded a kind of pleasure to have been beaten with this scourge. Compared with it, the more moderate sensations appear insipid; we still prefer, apparently, the more violent displeasure to the languid delight.

625
Lonely People
Some people are so much accustomed to being alone in self-communion that they do not at all compare themselves with others, but spin out their soliloquizing life in a quiet, happy mood, conversing pleasantly, and even hilariously, with themselves. If, however, they are brought to the point of comparing themselves with others, they are inclined to a brooding underestimation of their own worth, so that they have first to be compelled by others to form once more a good and just opinion of themselves, and even from this acquired opinion they will always want to subtract and abate something. We must not, therefore, grudge certain persons their loneliness or foolishly commiserate them on that account, as is often done.

Friedrich Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human: Man Alone by Himself