Shermer, Illinois

I live to love you. - Duckie



Ferris Opening with John Hughes' commentary.











John Hughes Oscar Tribute.

Essentials

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience. — Joan Didion via Stephen Elliot

4 Volumes

Collocation No. 14 (NATURE)
by Mickey Smith

Kate Macdowell

I was searching for images of Daphne yesterday and discovered Kate Macdowell.

Uprooted

Idea

Taking Root

Solastalgia

Soliphilia

Taste

Venus - natural light

Venus

Rootbound

Invasive Flora

Invasive Flora

Daphne

Daphne

Interview with Kate here.

More of her work here.

Is There An Ecological Unconscious? And reader comments to the article here.

Environment Change, Distress & Human Emotions

Glenn Albrecht speaking about solastalgia and soliphilia.

Inspiration for the Day

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity. - Anatole Broyard

I've been obsessing about these birds... And this song.

Check this out. Thanks, JW.

Ralph Stanley, Bill Monroe, Elvis Presley

My grandfather and uncles and these old boys (who used to fall out when my grandfather came in to town) used to play this in my aunt Ollie's living room while I sipped on a rootbeer float. It's too much isn't it? Her name really was Ollie. Actually, I don't know what it really was, but everyone called her Ollie.



Bill Monroe and Elvis. The museum supervisor of the Ryman Auditoriam interviewed in the video was my housemate once upon a time.

Choose Life: 127 Hours

What do we need to write? Adrenalin. Action. James Franco.

Late Night Music Obsession

One of my favorite songs. I grew up hating it actually. Life is so funny, no?



And look at little June Carter. Oh my, ain't she a cutie?







The Storms Are On the Ocean, The Carter Family (Original Bristol Recording August 1927)

Borel - Castellano Throwdown

Egads! Calvin Borel lights into Javier Castellano for jostling his horse during the Breeders' Cup Marathon last Friday.



Here's the race.

Horticulture Runs Amok

Francesca Woodman, Taxidermy

"Thanks, Signor," replied Beatrice, with her rich voice that came forth as it were like a gush of music; and with a mirthful expression half childish and half woman-like. "I accept your gift, and would fain recompense it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into the air, it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must even content himself with my thanks."
She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then as if inwardly ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to a stranger's greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But, few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one, at so great a distance.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, 1980

For many days after this incident, the young man avoided the window that looked into Doctor Rappaccini's garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eye-sight, had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible power, by the communication which he had opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself, at once; the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and day-light view of Beatrice; thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight, should Giovanni have remained so near this extraordinary being, that the proximity and possibility even of intercourse, should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing. Guasconti had not a deep heart--or at all events, its depths were not sounded now--but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever-pitch. Whether or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes--that fatal breath--the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers--which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.
Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid walk through the streets of Padua, or beyond its gates; his footsteps kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to accelerate itself to a race. One day, he found himself arrested; his arm was seized by a portly personage who had turned back on recognizing the young man, and expended much breath in overtaking him.
"Signor Giovanni!--stay, my young friend!" --cried he. "Have you forgotten me? That might well be the case, if I were as much altered as yourself." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappacini's Daughter
Read the whole story here.