Lady Chatterley's Lover

The opening paragraph of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Jiha Moon

Beautiful, beautiful paintings by Jiha Moon.







Jiha Moon website

Sketches

Sketches for my next paintings, for the series to be called "Babydoll." I could go into what Babydoll represents, or you can just figure it out, or put a meaning to it that you want. I'm cool with that. I will say though we've all got Babydoll in our lives and the way we deal with it, the way it affects us, is as different as each one of us are.



"Robin, a dog and Babydoll (Nightwood)"


detail




"Anaïs was a good friend of mine"
(with Babydoll on her back)


detail

Zeng Fanzhi

I am completely in love with paintings of Zeng Fanzhi, particularly of the mask series. It seems like he has many different styles and is not afraid to explore all of them through his paintings. In fact they vary so much that you would not know that it was done by one artist. This shows curiosity and openness to growth and change which is such an admirable quality. His need is not only to create, to stick to what he "knows" but to explore, to be fearless, to be fluid.

Again though, my favorite style of his is in his mask pieces.









On an exciting personal front, I will be setting up a studio for myself, finally, within the next few weeks (after not having a place for a whole month!) I am very excited and happy to say I am filled with ideas, sketches, creativity, energy. I've spent months now absorbing, being inspired, soaking in, developing in other ways than actively creating, now it's time for my hands to do a bit of work since my eyes, mind and dreams have been working hella hard (I don't know where hella came from, but I like it.)

Devendra Banhart

So I think I tried pretty hard not to like him, but I lose.

I like him.

Here's a really great song "I feel like a Child"




And here's an amazing song by him called "Freely"



Freely

It ain't about a heart you find
It's about the one inside
It's about the love you hide
It's waitin' to be let outside

And it ain't about losing your mind
But if you happen to, that's fine
But there’s only one way to shine
And it's called trying to live

Freely, freely meu coracao
Freely, freely meu coracao
I'd like to live that way
I'd like to live that way

And my mother may not understand
Why I’m the way that I am
But i love her and I wanna let her in (do you love her?)
Get to know a friend

And now we gotta take some time
Get to know each other our whole lives
And I call on you to remind
Nothing's really mine
Except for

Freedom, freedom en meu coracao
Freedom, freedom en meu coracao
I'd like to live that way
Oh I'd wanna stay stay that way

You ever seen anything as kind
As the wind blowing by
I've never seen anything as wise
As the sun rise that shines

Freely, freely en meu coracao
Freely, freely meu coracao
I'd like to live that way
Oh I'd wanna live that way

Anais, Anais, Anais

"When you live closely to individual dramas you marvel that we do not have continuous war, knowing what nightmares human beings conceal, what secret obsessions and hidden cruelties.

I felt I had not shared in the hatreds, angers, and love of destruction, but that I would share in the punishment. But I knew the origin of war, which was in each of us, and I knew that our concept of hero was outdated, that the modern hero was the one who would master his own neurosis so that it would not become universal, who would struggle with his myths, who would know that he himself created them, who would enter the labyrinth and fight the monster. This monster who sleeps at the bottom of his own brain."

at Michelle's bakery

the Anais Nin

angelfood cupcake filled with dulce de leche (oozes out when bitten into) topped with fresh whipped cream garnished with gold leaf.


the Henry Miller

an "everything" cupcake (pour a tablespoon from all different cupcake batters into each mold) with cream cheese frosting, topped with rum soaked banana pieces and sprinkled with sugar in the raw. flambed at the table (frosting melts, banana sets on fire, sugar caramelizes then hardens.)


the Oscar Wilde

mini dainty vanilla cupcakes with velvety violet lavender infused frosting. garnished with bright edible flowers.


more to come. also coming soon- artist cookies.

Henry Miller wrote my artist/life statement and didn’t tell me til now. Bastard. I love you.

Learning to Ride, 2006

"And as the train stops, I put my foot down and my foot has put a deep big hole in the dream... I have gained nothing by the enlargements of my world: on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a super-infantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I want to pass the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take my guide as Oberon the night rider who under the spread of his black wings eliminated both the beauty and the horror of the past: I want to flee towards a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret of repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wigs will enable be to treverse. Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers, I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me and alien to me and hostile to me. In retroversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world looks like I do not know, now am I sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me."

-Henry Miller

Garfield minus Garfield

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb."











Garfield minus Garfield

You've got mail

I just ordered this. It should be here by the end of the week. I can not contain my excitement.




"La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc" by Carl Th. Dreyer with an amazing performance by Maria Falconetti (her only performance on film/screen ever.)

Food Fight

Brilliant. Thanks to Emily White for e-mailing this.

The list of wars/conflicts (do not read until after viewing the video if you don't want spoilers)-






1. The World
2. WWII - Holocaust / French surrender / London Bombing / Pearl Harbor / Battle of Midway / D-day / fall of Berlin / Hiroshima
3. Arab-Israeli War
4. Korean War
5. Cuban Missile Crisis
6. Vietnam
7. Cold War
8. Intifada
9. Gulf War
10. 9/11
11. Afghanistan
12. Gulf War II
13. Bug Food

In conclusion

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

D.H. Lawrence

Dandy

From the movie "Wilde." Scenes of Bosie's (Lord Alfred Douglas) legendary fights with Oscar Wilde-

Lawrence to Miller- on being Alive

"What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."

D.H. Lawrence Apocalypse (1930)


"It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirgies! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! "

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Sleepless in Seattle

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.
But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living."

-from Diary of Anais Nin Volume I