X-Muppets
Something about me loves my childhood meeting my teenage nerdery. If only it were real.
Masks and Time
I found a wonderful little book at the used books place yesterday: Mexican Art: From the Beginnings to the Olmecs, Bernard Noel, Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1968. It has many fine plates that I find somehow more pleasing because they are presented in black and white. The one above is a Guerrero mask. The text is wonderful too. Here’s a bit I read to Cindy yesterday as one of those things that confirms aspects of her fine knowledge of Mexican time:
The pre-Classic period began with the expansion of agriculture; it was a formative period during which societies organized themselves and invented a religion, which became more and more complex. This religion was fundamentally a worship of time. All agricultural societies have more or less deified time, but the Mexicans refined infinitely on this conception. It was not an abstract entity for them; it was bound to space and with it formed a unique substance which went through an endless cycle of birth, growth, decline and rebirth according to the pulsation of a rhythm that man maintained but did not control. Without man, time would have perished, so man had both to understand and foster it.
Bright Lights. Big City.
Windom, Texas. April 30, 2011.
Cinema Komunisto
From Cinema Komunisto, a documentary about the Yugoslav film industry. Directed by Mila Turajlic.
In dreams
Bo Diddley was enlightening me.
Actually, as I explained to the one fellow who approached us at the bar, I was already enlightened. And I was getting more enlightened.
Trees cocooned in spider webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan
(Via @josephpearson)
Made, pt 3.
A small casting room in a casting studio in Hollywood. 30 or so girls per day, (Update: culled from over 1,000 submissions.) Three hours in a row, three days of casting and one day of call backs, next week. Girls come in, hand the casting director their headshot/resume stapled together. I smile encouragingly and try to say something nice about their shoes. They all tell me where they bought their shoes, and it helps a little bit. A few girls are incredible. Some people make my mind wander. They all try, and I feel for them. I can’t imagine being an actor, given 2 minutes to impress a host of people you don’t know, who can’t know who you are.
Watching 18 people in a row do a scene about my dying grandmother was more internally upsetting than I had anticipated. As was the scene I wrote about the boy who never loved me in college. As was the scene about how vastly different the lives are of the girls I went to school with. I watch these girls be me, to me. I wonder if they are a lot like me, as they talk. Is she as sad as I felt? Does she understand? I hardly can decide before we have to move on, but it’s okay, all on film, all ready to be seen again, a steady stream of possible me’s, to talk to the three other me’s in the movie, to be directed by me. It seems silly to feign ignorance of process at this point, but I had no idea.
I laugh at my own jokes, every time. It’s funny to me, every time. I turn to the line producer and ask her when it’ll stop being funny. I sound like a jerk.
from the archives: March 18, 2010
Damn, this was fine.
Like you’d expect, it started out good and the comments made it all more betterer.
searching for the house of Ruben Bustes
Daryl, Sheila and I saw something today we think is the setting for a story. Driving through an old Oak Cliff neighborhood, looking for the house of Ruben Bustes (that’s a story in itself), we came across a one story ranch on a corner lot. The back was fenced with low chain link fortified inside with cactus. Inside the yard was another fence, also fortified with cactus, that housed a small dog house. I think that’s all we’ve got. Please tell us what it means.
You are listening to Los Angeles
Okay. My 24/7 soundtrack. Ambient music and live LAPD police radio.
(Thank you, Mr. Ledgerwood.)
Ted Serios: Paranormal Photographs
On exhibition through March 27 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County: “Psychic Projections/Photographic Impressions: Paranormal Photographs from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios.”
Ted Serios was an alcoholic Chicago bellhop said to have possessed an uncanny gift. Holding a Polaroid camera and focusing on the lens, he produced what he called thoughtographs: images of his thoughts transferred directly to the film.
In connection with the UMBC exhibition, the Chronicle Review features a fascinating article titled Ted Serios and Psychic Projections.
Last Night I Dreamed…
Before bed, Danny and I purposely measured our vodka. We went to bed early. I didn’t fall asleep as easily as usual. I slept the night fitfully. Between brief dreams, I was awake with eyes closed, thoughts came and went. I dreamed I was in a car with people. It seemed I was on a highway in North Central Arkansas. I was driving ahead of, or into a thunderstorm. I took the car off the highway into a little town of quaint neighborhoods. I stopped.
Suddenly, crazy, amazing lightning lit the town, then thunder. People came out of houses around the car looking up to the sky. I looked out the car window as lightning bolted and hit a man standing just outside the car, lifting him into the sky and letting him go to fall somewhere nearby. Enormous thunder boomed. “Oh, God! Did you see that?” I called to folks in the car, “He was electrified, enlightened.” A girl-child was at my side. She asked, “What happened to him?”
“Oh, honey,” I said. “He was lifted into the sky. It’s time to move!” I put the car in “drive” and squealed around. I woke up. I don’t know if I was headed away from or into the eye of the storm.
My food truck fantasies
Fransk dog as served by Danish pølsevogn. (via Street Cuisine)
have been evolving over the past week, which began with my confessing to having entertained the notion of converting my Honda Element into a food truck. A friend asked what I’d serve.
“Pasties,” I replied. “Spicy pasties.”
Then I got thinking. Ooh, yes. And empanadas. And samosas. And calzones. And pierogis. And knishes.
But I got sidetracked by an art project.
Read more
from the comments
I have another repeat dream that is easier on me. I’m walking by a tree and it opens. I climb in and there is an entire world in that tree, people, lights, colors, things unheard of. I keep thinking, this is IT, quick, get some paper and write it all down and put it in a pocket so I can remember when I wake up. But I’m too distracted to find some paper and a pen and tell myself it’s okay, because I will remember it, this time. Then it’s time to leave the tree, I go out the opening, say goodbye, see you soon and the tree zips back up, or something. But it all drifts away because I’m waking up, grasping for the details I did not write down. Then, another night, I’m walking by a tree and it opens…
Dear Clusterflock – Recurring dreams, past and present?
Have you had them?
Have we discussed this before? If so, sorry!
I remember jack shit about dreams and then suddenly this week I remembered a recurring dream from the 80s and 90s. It was fairly simple, I was always a distance from home and I was always naked from the waist down and I was always trying to get home! I was running and although slightly put out by the situation I got on with it. That’s all I remember.
Bold Choices
Best erotic dream ever
Encounter with Patrick McGoohan. Woke up just after we entered his hotel room, but that was all right. It was sweet enough for me.
from the comments
One of last night’s dreamland vignettes was set in Finland in 1939. A tire on our vehicle had developed bald patches, and we had no spare. A sympathetic man and his son (who was really his daughter) offered to take us to where we could get a replacement tire, but I thought that might place them in too much danger, so we set off on our own.
Then something else happened.
In a hypnagogic state,
I summed up the night’s dreaming by saying to myself, “This shall live in The Lay of the Leavings of Leacock.”
And no, I have no idea.
Dear Clusterflock: The New Year…
Hopes? Dreams? Aspirations?
Analogue hyperlinks for a book on dreams.
Maria Fischer. “Traumgedanken.” Final year project at University of Applied Sciences Augsburg. 20 × 28 cm. 76 pages. Japanese binding.
The book “Traumgedanken” (“Thoughts about dreams”) contains a collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts which provide an insight into different dream theories.
To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.
(via @pruned)
“Disneyland Dream”
In the summer of 1956, an amateur filmmaker named Robbins Barstow made a record of his family’s trip to the Magic Kingdom, “Disneyland Dream,” that was recently admitted to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
Robbins Barstow died in November at the age of 91. You can view “Disneyland Dream” either on YouTube or the Internet Archive.
Watching “Disneyland Dream” reminded me of a friend’s discovery of a Flickr stream that included photos of the library in the town where he lived until he was four. He said looking at those photos was “like looking into a dream.” “Disneyland Dream” feels a bit like that for me, too, but not because I ever visited Disneyland. The Barstow family lived in Wethersfield, Connecticut, my parents’ hometown and the site of our annual summer pilgrimage. I returned to Wethersfield a couple of times as an adult, but in my mind it remains as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a child.
The Insects’ Christmas (1913)
“Rozhdestvo obitateley lesa” (Wladyslaw Starewicz).
Thanks to Stan Carey for this.
I’m not sure about the soundtrack, presumably chosen by XmasFLIX (me, I might go with something by Leoš Janáček), but the film is enchanting.
Especially so in light of my roommates, the invincible box elder bugs, who refuse to die and persist in traveling toward Outside, though Outside is now white and frozen. They remember that they once lived there.
Father Christmas fucked my pussy (Christmas pussy song)
(thanks, Aaron)
coming out of sleep
Fuck white meat.
“Getcha Popcorn Ready”
The NY Times had a pretty fascinating article yesterday on professional athletes who trademark their own names, nicknames and catchphrases:
[Darelle] Revis cited Owens and Ochocinco as players who have successfully marketed themselves, even if, in the case of Ochocinco, Revis said, “I wouldn’t do some of the things he does.”
Owens wrote a children’s book, had a breakfast cereal named for him, made guest appearances on several television shows and commercials, and in 2009 starred in a VH1 reality show, “The T. O. Show.” In addition to registering “I Love Me Some Me,” he has also sought protection for “Getcha Popcorn Ready” and a logo featuring his initials, T. O.
Did you know that Pat Riley owns the rights to “three-peat?”
