from the comments
My childhood never involved chameleon brooches. Just sea monkeys, which I suggested to our friends they buy as they were wondering where they could get brine to make their own olives. Anyone try using pet monkeys to get out of a pickle?
from the comments
I finished Nashville Chrome this morning. I aim to sit with it in the morning to do the task you set before me yesterday, to review it with a link to Amazon. I’m thinking it won’t be long, or a real review, per se (I have little experience with such things, as you have, as Amanda Mae has.) Just a quote or two, with thoughts from someone who grew up then and knew some woods and knew some city and knew some music and knew the desire to be someone he did not grow up to become.
from the comments
I used to think I’d name a tortoise Hector, but these days I’m leaning toward Paul.
I woke up singing
You have to believe we are magic
Nothing can stand in our way.
Bicycle Tree
I just discovered the folk-artwork of Joshua Lowenfels.
“I fight with the handle of my little brown broom”
So Renner and I were emailing just now, and it’s not so weird what happened, as we were talking about Robert Wyatt, together with other stuff . . . . Still. There is this passage at the end of Wyatt’s “Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road.” The second half, actually. It begins more or less at the three-minute mark. It is sung by Ivor Cutler, and some people think Cutler wrote it, but no, the words are Wyatt’s. The voice is Cutler’s.
“I fight with the handle of my little brown broom,” it begins. And at almost the same instant of our email correspondence, Renner and I quoted that very line to one another by way of reference to our own travails.
That’s what friends are for.
The Homeless Museum
HoMu BKLYN is the headquarters of the Homeless Museum (HoMu), a conceptual art project by Filip Noterdaeme, located in Brooklyn, NY. From March 2005 to March 2007, HoMu BKLYN held monthly open houses. In April 2007, pressured by the forces of landlordism, HoMu BKLYN was privatized.
The great thing about a job . . .
. . . as Arbus realized in 1969, is that it ‘helps keep you from unanswerable questions’. Without the time-consuming distraction of a job even trivial questions assume the weight of fate itself. You have all day to dwell on the slights dealt out to you, the decisions wrongly made, but this, in turn, can generate its own solace: with nothing else to distract you such things start to seem like facts of life, as much a part of the human condition as a bench is part of a park. So when you come to a bench in the park, possibly your favourite bench, and find it broken, the experience comes as both a personal disappointment and corroboration of something to which you had already pretty much resigned yourself. In these circumstances, what can you do except look at it and try to work out how much should be read into it, how personally to take it, whether, actually, there is any difference at all between destiny and chance?
From The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.
Our chameleon was named Jasper,
and sometimes we found money in there with our peanuts.
I remember getting chameleon “brooches” at the State Fair of Texas when I was a kid. The chameleon had a string around its neck, with a safety pin on the other end to anchor to your clothes. Our chameleon was named Jasper, and he lived 3 years.
That’s my Dallas friend Susan Sanders Wansbrough talking. She confirmed my memory of State Fair chameleons and told about Jasper.
I recall girls arriving at school bright and early with limp chameleons pinned to their blouses. The chameleons would grow ever more limp and finally succumb around mid-afternoon. Susan said that her father had agreed to buy her a chameleon only because he assumed it would expire the next day, but “a diet of mealworms kept it going long past the usual lifetime for chameleon brooches.”
We shared more bizarre memories of childhood in Dallas.
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headline of the day
Ice carvers re-create ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ for Gaylord Texan’s winter wonderland
South Towards Libya
I came across this earlier this year whilst in Crete. It was a windy day and this piece of plastic hypnotised me for an age. Oh, the artist is M. Ward and the track is called Ella from the album End Of Amnesia.
Brian Evenson, Calling the Hour
Miniatures (III)
La Santa Biblia from Génesis to Apocalipsis. It’s even illustrated.
an old note
There may be something there.
I will sit down when I am hungry w/ whoever would prefer to join me.
Miniatures (II)
The Leo S. Singer Miniature Room Collection at the Palm Springs Art Museum consists of 12 miniature interiors that depict the theme of laundry, a subject with special significance for Mr. Singer.
Miniatures (I)
Nate Eagle began his career as a midget impresario around 1913, working first for famous midget managers “Baron” Leo Singer and Ike Rose before breaking out on his own.
I like that story, I wish it were true
The Oldest Photograph of an Aircraft
From National Geographic:
Aeronaut John Steiner inflates his hot air balloon at Erie, Pennsylvania, as seen in the oldest known photograph of an aircraft, a quarter-plate ambrotype taken in June 1857.
Personally, I like the frame.
(via)
from the comments
JJ:
I was not that girl. But I could have been, on a different continent, in a different time. Everyone thought that we were a couple (waiters, my flatmates, sweet men on trains). We looked good as a couple. We went for dinner together; we went on holiday together; we spent Valentine’s Day together. We practically lived together: I would get up in the morning and either I would call him or he would call me, and then we would meet up at one of our flats or in the city, and we would spend the whole day together, and in the evening we would cook dinner and watch TV curled up on one of our beds until we fell asleep; and then one of us would wake up and quietly go back to their own flat until the next morning.
Teeth Mug
I can’t decide whether this is creepy or brilliant.
(via)
Plastic Dancing in the Wind
From the most southern part of Europe. Sorry about the dodgy horizon – I have moving images to share at some stage.
How Press Screenings Work
I wrote about how press screenings work.
This carefully constructed and cautiously guarded world is all for the purpose of making the experience as enjoyable as possible, and it works. It’s hard not to factor these niceties in when giving a review, in the same way that it’s sometimes difficult to give a bad review to a film when the people involved have been very kind or thoughtful toward you. This is the entire premise of Almost Famous, that as a journalist you’re supposed to write the truth, but it becomes difficult when you like the talent or when you connect with the people involved. Sometimes it seems as if press screenings and favors are doled out dependent on your willingness to play the game and go along writing favorable reviews forever. There are always going to be people willing to do or say anything to get ahead, willing to give a bad film a glowing review to get in the studio’s good graces. But that isn’t the truth, and there are a lot of bad movies out there that people shouldn’t spend their money going to see.
It made me angrier than I thought it would. I left out how entitled most journalists act, too.
The Rent is Too Damn High – Gregory Bros. Edition
And yeah, this time I totally called it.
Ghosts of America
Not everything in Bonham, Texas is as it appears; this town has bloodcurdling enigmas obscured in the shadows.
From the Ghosts of America site.
My favorites among the site’s posted reports of supernatural encounters are those that are utterly, totally, irretrievably lame.
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