chester, my love.

i listen to dance music and this guy

there are some things that are more than worth sharing.
taken from a 16 year old's blog

residues of a dream world

jim lambie

learning from the recent past

i found a new website today via this kid. haven't gone through all of it but i am a little obssessed.

this is tomorrow

i haven't done anything since i moved to california. i mean, i've done things, such as win amazing shuffleboard games, drink cheap beers with new friends, walk up mega hills, and read a lot of post-colonial theory. but i haven't swam in the pacific or driven down the coast. i haven't been to wine country or even crossed the golden gate bridge. i want to see huge trees. i want to smell them actually.

i hear these stories about the trees. that you've never seen a tree until you've seen a redwood. jenny told me before she saw a tree on the east coast, she never realized they could be so small. i said, seriously? there are some pretty big trees where i am from. a man named allan told me how easy it is. just 20 minutes and you'll be there. just cross the bridge. i wanted to yell at him...do you realize how busy i am? why are you even talking to me right now? but i nodded and smiled and said yes, i am definitely going soon. that was over a month ago. i'm still here, sitting on my couch and thinking about the trees. i was supposed to go, over a year ago. marc said we would rent a car and drive out there and sit and listen. it never happened and it still hasn't. i feel i may not be considered a californian resident until i see the trees. what if there is a question on a test i might have to take at some point about the trees? i will fail.

i guess if i really wanted to go, i would have already. i guess i'm just lazy. i mean, i'm not doing anything right now except listening to my friends talk about near death experiences and plastic surgery. i suppose its about that time.

a statement for the ages

witness to the absolutely contemporary

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

you've got me

hunting for freedom, i've found the real prison. but at least it's a prison i've chosen for myself.
maurizio cattelan

1904-2009

the house i grew up in turned 100 five years ago. when it was built, it was surrounded by farm land before englewood became a bustling suburb of new york city. i imagine there were grand parties held there. full of women wearing white gloves and servants and children spying down from the staircase. live music and champagne and flapper dresses. my parents had a few parties. i was allowed to go down in my nightgown and say hello to the guests and courtsey and tell them what i had done that day. and mary would then take my hand and put me to bed and i would slip out and watch from the top of the stairs as people said goodnight.

there was an elevator on the third floor, which hung in suspension for all the years we lived there. probably for more than that as the places it would stop on the second and first floor were made into closets long before my parents bought the house. my mother always wanted me to stay away from the elevator. it had a wooden door with glass panels and it was locked to keep the children from playing in it.

in the attic with the elevator were things from us and previous owners. tons of paintings of horses and large wooden wheels taken from ships that my grandfather bought for his antique collection. my favorite was a large, purple-ish baroque headboard. it looks as if it were fit for a queen and i tried to get my mother to put it in my bedroom, but finally settled for a canopy bed from ethan allen. i would hide behind the headboard in games of hide and seek because no one ever wanted to come into the attic. they would always stop looking and end up playing pool or computer games in my brother's room, which was just across the hall. when that happened, i would quietly sit there, in the dust, making up stories in my head about people who had lived there before us.

in the nursery, there was a sleeping porch for hot summer nights that wrapped around the side of the house. boys from long ago had left games out there and i always tried to get out but it was alarmed. only on special occasions would my mother un-arm the door and i would run around out there, trying to gather as many trinkets as i could, speedily talking to my mother, convincing her that it should be utilized as a sleeping porch once again. i think it scared her. the doors to the porch were white and had round porthole windows that were too tall for me to look through. they were cloudy too, not having been cleaned for years and years. that porch held so much mystery for me. the laughter of the boys who slept there seemed to steep into my brain. how i wished i could join them on those hot summer nights.

i've mixed up memories and dreams about that place and now have no idea what is real. i suppose its all real in some way and all dreams in another. everything seems to be a dream lately and for that i wish i could sleep continuously and wake up in the bedroom i had when i was eleven, throw on a bathing suit, eat my cheerios, and jump into the cool clean water for a day full of sunshine and sweet iced tea.

epitaph for my heart

where do my bluebirds fly?

Voltaire in a letter to his partner Marie Louise Denis: "Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed."

a world of quiet delirium

je suis sur le feu

one time, i was walking home and it started to pour. torrential downpour which was so thick i could barely see. i was blocks from my house and listening to bruce springsteen on my ipod. of course. i'm on fire. i remember it distinctly. i took my shoes off and stood in the middle of street and sang the words, words that have echoed in my heart since the beginning of time. i stood there and sang and turned my face toward the sky and swallowed the rain drops and continued to sing.

one time, a boy called me on the telephone to tell me he missed me. i missed him as well; i had missed him ever since he left two weeks before. he called me everyday when he woke up and i called him every night before bed. we sent text messages and gchatted and did everything a couple could do when living across the country from each other. this one day, i was in milwaukee and i didn't answer the phone. he left a voicemail and when i checked it, he was singing i'm on fire. i listened to that voicemail everyday for the remainder of our courtship. and even for a few days after the end, when i thought it would make me feel happy again.

one time, i was sitting on an airplane with tears streaming down my face. i was headed out west and i just said goodbye to chicago. i was wearing my yellow hoodie and sunglasses to hide from everyone and kept thinking that i was crazy to have thought i could do this all by myself. right before i turned my phone off, i got a text message that said "and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul." and i listened to bruce springsteen on repeat for the entire flight.

top ten

these are the ten blogs i look at on pretty much a daily basis. each image is from what they have on their first pages right now.

boy boys boys

syllogisms and metaphors

the life and times of cody hudson

cherry coloured

the canary

blogging molly

wooster collective

sight second

dailyafterthought

le love