The World has Always had Color (Who Knew?)

Fell in love with this set of color Depression-era photos today.

It’s cliche, but you really DO forget the world had color back then, if only from the absolute glut of stark black and white photography that represents that era. To see these brightly colored dresses and red lipstick is to realize just how much like us these people are. The world, basically, looks exactly the same if we don’t have that stripped-out layer of color to separate us.

Two particular favorites:

Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Clinton, Iowa, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Mike Evans, a welder, at the rip tracks at Proviso yard of the Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Chicago, Illinois, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Couldn’t Decide

Couldn’t decide which of these Sad and Useless comic panels I liked the best, so just going to gank them from there and post them here. But you should totally follow Sad and Useless, as they are awesome, and continuously posting fantastic things that make your heart sing.

Best Thing in My World at the Moment

So here’s the best thing in my world right now. Last year, I found the ultimate pair of sandals. They were flats that were not thongs, and stylish enough to wear to work and casual enough to wear out and SO comfortable even on my stupid formerly broke foot. They’re about as close as you can get to not wearing shoes at all.  I bought them, and I wore them every single day from May to September, until they were scary, smelly tattered messes. And this year I have searched fruitlessly for some kind of replacement for them, finding nothing. I couldn’t bear to part with the old, perfect sandals, even though I could also not wear them, as the lining had ripped out. And a week or so ago, I was on ebay, and what did I find? THE SAME SANDALS. And I ordered them! Above you will see my fresh, clean new sandals, the receipt of which allowed me to finally toss out the old, horrible disgusting sandals. I paid probably twice as much for the replacements as the original ones, and I do not care at all, they are totally worth it.

SO! Simple things that make me happy – here is one. Hooray, sandals!

New Favorite Blog o’ the Moment

Stuff No One Told Me

Yay Netflix for Wii!

I am so not sorry for giving up my satellite and going to Netflix. I have not missed television at all so far, and have had much more time to focus on watching things I really want to watch and actually spending significant time reading again. I feel like I might even get my calm and my attention span back. I fear to hope, but maybe.

Tonight I watched the most fascinating PBS documentary, the first of three parts. It’s called “This Emotional Life” and the first episode focuses on relationships and why/how they’re important to us. They start at the beginning with attachment and various disorders relating to attachment difficulty, then they move on to discussing Asperger syndrome, bullying and how to prevent it, marriage and why relationships fail and why they succeed. They talk about the importance of friendships, and how we’re affected when we don’t have social ties. I found it totally fascinating and really well done.

They intersperse the various stories with short interviews with celebrities and for some reason I was very touched to hear Chevy Chase talking about how he has three friends. How he misses his wife when she’s not home and calls her just to hear her voice. How he’s struggled with depression. It’s not a good thing, exactly, but a somehow humanizing thing, to hear people we’d think of as successful talk about how they also struggle with these issues.

Anyway! Totally recommend this! Can’t wait to watch the other two in the series and see what they’re all about.

Blue Morpho Girl

Originally uploaded by Susannah B

I just love this.

My Favorite Window

The light is so pretty here.

Language is a Virus – Poetry Generator

This is the third October in a row that I’ve found this randomly generated LiaV poem compelling enough to post.

Always for different reasons, reading meaning into what is nothingness. These are like horoscopes, you take away what you want to.

Enjoy.

Poetry Generator

All angry over the spirits

All angry under the bullshit
I cavort with dazzling spells among the clouds
Be aware! The sin was good
So sensuous within the fire
We sense luminous vapors before the fire
Awaken, awaken! The passion must continue

All angry over the spirits
You expel yellow flames among the ground
Heavy! The birth has died
translucent thirsty
across the water
empty hands
How many times
the foreigner
come singing
before help could come

Kharma

Picked up a book at Left Bank this week that is completely rocking my socks. Daniil Kharms’ “Today I Wrote Nothing”

Kharms (1905–1942) is described as the first Russian microfiction writer, and that alone is intriguing. He was part of a group of other artists and writers (the OBERIU) who were fascinated with the mundane and the absurd, and in most cases I do believe they thought those things were the same. His fiction is short, plain and startling. Since starting to read the book I’ve pretty much wanted to buy a copy for everyone I know and force them to sit down and read it while I watch them. It’s one of those books that almost hurts to be read alone, since every other page makes you want to read it out loud to someone. (The dogs don’t care much for absurdist Russian microfiction, it turns out.)

Anyway, since I’ve been all Kharms-infatuated this week, I was trying to find links for some friends so that they could read what I was rhapsodizing about – but it’s no good. The translation in this volume (by Matvei Yankelevich) is vastly superior to anything I could find elsewhere online. The translation in some cases changes the entire tenor of the passages, and I can’t recommend anything I’ve found online. You really have to have the book.

One of my favorite exchanges so far is from his story “The Old Woman” about (you guessed it) an old woman who comes uninvited into the narrator’s apartment and promptly dies. The narrator doesn’t know what to do about this, and leaves the apartment to get drunk with a friend who has no idea what’s going on. Perhaps feeling his friend out about what to do, he has this conversation with him:

“What is your attitude towards dead people?” I asked Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“Absolutely negative.” said Sakerdon Mikhailovich. “I’m afraid of them.”

“Yeah I can’t stand dead people either,” I said. “Were I to bump into a dead person, and if he wasn’t a relative, I’d probably kick him.”

“One shouldn’t kick dead people,” said Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“I would give him a boot right in the muzzle,” I said. “I just can’t stand dead people and children.”

Which is an insane conversation, and yet is also something I feel like I’ve overheard my friends saying at the bar. Anyway, all I can say is that his writing is exhilarating, and inspirational, and it makes me feel fresh and clean in my brains. You probably need to read this.

Can we be absent anymore?

Once more Cary Tennis’s advice resonates with me. Not only because this guy is a whiny dipshit (I am hoping he’s young, and hasn’t figured this stuff out yet because he’s young, and not because he’s always going to be this whiny of a bitch.) who violated his wife’s privacy, but because Cary takes such a mundane event and strip mines it for the one true thing it really addresses: the fact that it’s almost impossible to be gone in this world. And while I like that my people cannot often be gone from me, I do sometimes wish to be gone from them. So it’s a conundrum.

My wife doesn’t miss me! | Salon Life

…the very definitions of presence and absence have changed; absence has become contingent; presence has become inescapable. No matter where we are, our virtual selves remain under surveillance.

Until recently, one could actually achieve absence. One could go somewhere and be gone. The traveler would send postcards. The postcards would have pictures of beaches or statues. They would be eagerly awaited and gratefully received. Absence was simple. It was an absolute condition, soon relieved by presence. Presence was also an absolute condition.

No more.

Now absence and presence are contingent and variable, matters of degree and form. A person may cease responding to e-mail and achieve a sort of absence although he or she remains in place. Or a person may go to India and yet be as present as always.

A version of us is always present. We are over-connected. We spy on each other from afar.

The quality of our absence is thus degraded. Absenceness is a precious resource we are fast running out of. Soon there will be nothing but presence. We will wish we could go away but will not be able to. The pain of constant presence will be too much for some to bear; it will be a torture like that of sleep deprivation. There will be a rash of virtual suicides, in which people disconnect themselves and appear to be dead. We will have virtual funerals for them. This will all come in time.

via My wife doesn’t miss me! | Salon Life.

I have extremely useful friends

My friends make me feel like a major underachiever sometimes. Collectively I don’t know that there is much they cannot accomplish. Since my main contribution to any group seems to be snark and a bad attitude, I think I would really be likely to be the first one killed off if we were in a horror movie. I am just saying.

So the lovely and talented Narcise finished my Dave McKean bracelet and pendant set last week, and they could not be more perfect! I love them beyond all reason, and most of all because I know that no one in the world has them. They are mine all mine.

The bracelet is fabulously chunky and makes really satisfying sounds when I flail my arms about. It’s also extra-strong to keep me from breaking it.

See below:

Bracelet. I scanned this, and it came out a little blurry, but I think you get the idea.

Pendant. This was the only warm-toned image of the bunch, and as such it stands alone very well as a pendant.

Bracelet on my arm, to give you an idea of the scale (they're very large stamps)

If you’re interested in your very own Narcise creation, you can get in touch with her via her Etsy shop. She makes many lovely things that you can purchase and (obviously) also does custom work. She worked with me to make sure that my pieces fit my needs exactly, and I am very pleased with them.

You can also see her September 26th and 27th at the Strange Folk festival in O’Fallon, Illinois.

In other news, another friend of mine is doing some landscaping work in the front of my house, and it looks amazing. So neat and tidy! I was totally overwhelmed by the hot mess of dirt and weeds out there, and he was able to sort it out within a matter of days. I think he will finish tomorrow, and totally change the look of the front of my house. And he even put up with a hornet attack, and the random weirdos who wander up and down these city streets pushing lawnmowers.

Still another friend of mine is going to come over and install some ceiling fans for me – another task that seems insurmountable, and yet he considers no big deal. And today MyTodd sorted out a longstanding personal problem of mine in two sentences. Just listened to the story, explained the issue, and there it was. Crystal clear. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s like free therapy, so I bought him lunch.

Honestly, there’s no end to my friends’ utility, and I don’t know what I would do without access to their skillz.

My Newest Blog Addiction

I plow through favorite blogs on a never-ending, ADHD-fueled cycle. One week it’s Why Women Hate Men, the next it’s Fuck You, Penguin, and this week it’s Alice and Kev.

A game design student in the UK has created a homeless Sims family, and documents their struggles (with screenshots) on this blog. So what’s it like when you’re chronically exhausted from sleeping on a park bench, hungry and angry with some form of mental illness and no social skills? How are you going to relate to your immediate family members and the world at large when none of your basic needs are met? It’s fascinating.

Make sure you read it from the original post onward, as the story is chronological and shows their character development and aging process.

Alice and her father Kev, sleeping on park benches in the Sims 3

Things About Which I Am Excited

So a few months ago Neil Gaiman twittered something about Dave McKean designing some stamps. Not just any old stamps, Mythical Creatures stamps. Naturally I knew that I needed to own any such a thing, but somehow just owning them didn’t seem to be enough. What fun is it to have some beautiful miniature artworks created by my favorite artist, and then just stick them on a shelf somewhere? It’s not like I would pull them out periodically for reverential gazing. I thought about ordering two sets and framing one, or displaying them in some other way in my house.

Coincidentally, my friend Jenny twittered something around the same time about a new jewelry technique she was trying out, and like your chocolate getting in my peanut butter, and your peanut butter getting on my chocolate, a great idea was born in my noggin.

See Jenny does these lovely custom jewelry pieces, and has the technology to make me better, faster stronger… wait no, that’s the Bionic Woman. What Jenny has is the talent and know-how to take my lovely, lovely stamps and create a beautiful one-of-a-kind bracelet for me! I talked to her about it, and she knew just where to order the settings she would need for the project. (And she also knew to make the links extra strong since I have a tendency to be tough on my jewelry in general, and bracelets in particular.)

The stamps arrived in early June, and earlier this week I dropped them off with her – and I got to see the setting they will be in! She ended up deciding to make a bracelet and a pendant from the stamps, since there are 6 and the bracelet was the perfect size using only 5.

Here are the stamps, the dragon is the one she’s using for the pendant, the rest will be used on the bracelet.

In case you can't see, it's a unicorn, a dragon, a giant, a mermaid, a fairy queen and a pixie.

She’s working on it now, and I can’t wait to see it finished! Stay tuned and I will post pictures when the pieces are done.

He e-mailed us to say, “I’m dating both of you” | Salon Life

I love this man and his advice. I seriously, seriously do.

Craving his attention is not a good basis for a relationship. Craving his attention is like needing a drug. He made you a nice dinner. He says nice things to you. Those things — the slow-dancing, the CD, the dinner — those are not the relationship. They are relationship-oriented products. He has shown himself to be an adequate producer of relationship-oriented products. You haven’t really encountered him as a person yet; you’ve only encountered him as a competent dispenser of feeling-like substances.

via He e-mailed us to say, “I’m dating both of you” | Salon Life.

Rare DCD Track for Download

If you’re not already signed up for Brendan Perry’s newsletter, you should be. In addition to periodic updates on what Brendan is doing and news on the release date for his upcoming album (pending… always pending…) sometimes he also sends out links to rare or unreleased tracks from Dead Can Dance. These are always happy surprises in my inbox, and his is one of the few newsletters I bother to open and/or read.

Here are the details on his latest edition/download:

‘A Means of Escape’ was the first professional studio recording by Dead Can Dance featuring the original line-up of Brendan Perry (Vocals & Electric Guitar), Lisa Gerrard (Pearl Syncussion), Paul Erikson (Bass Guitar) and Simon Monroe (Drums).

Recorded in early 1982 by the Australian producer, Chris Thompson at Richmond Recorders, Melbourne, it captures the early Joy Division inspired wall of sound that became DCD’s sonic trademark in the early eighties.

The file is a high quality mp3 – 320kbps

Check out his website here to subscribe.