MELISSALAND

A Wal-Mart associate here in Hudson, New York describes how Wal-Mart has affected our town and what issues she faces as an employee. It is a heart-breaking video.

My mother has held a job as a waitress at the same restaurant for the past 30 years. Thirthy years. That number still astounds me. Thirty years at a small neighborhood, mom-n-pop restaurant. It is the exact opposite of Wal-Mart. The management was, and still is, like family to my mother (and my mom is not the only one who pulls a 30 year employment record there)

I wish there were more businesses like the restaurant my mom works for - ones that treat their employees like family.

Seth Godin has a great post about using your voice to, as he says: “get what you promote”. If you dislike Wal-Mart for treating their employees like shit - say so. If you love the local coffee shop for remembering your name, and the drink you like, every time you walk in (Nolita!!) - say so.

Seth’s post explains:

It’s simple, I think. In a world where consumers have so much power, we now have two responsibilities:

• If you don’t like what an organization stands for, work actively to spread the word and force them to change

and

• If you will miss a product, a service, a book, a site or a professional when they close up shop, stand up, speak up and bring them masses of new business.

We get what we promote.

I can’t think of a better time than now to promote the great small businesses in our towns which are struggling to stay open. Support the places you love. Tell other people about them. Let them know they are appreciated.

to see more videos like one above check out: http://www.walmartspeakout.com/

(via: the 12534)

Trying to work on 3 different logos tonight and fonts seems to be all I can think about. Sweet, delicious fonts. Came across this. If I dream letters in my sleep, this will be why……

Flickermood 2.0 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo.

(that music is great)

edit: (the is the poem the video plays with)

second edit: and this might just be my (new) most favorite poem ever.

Legend has it that a gentleman once approached Picasso on the street and criticized his paintings as distorting reality. Seeming to change the subject, the artist asked the gentleman if he had a girlfriend. He did, and produced a small picture of her from his wallet. “She’s beautiful,” replied Picasso, “but she’s so tiny.”

Tonight I came across this interesting story about one Fred and one Anne and their photo album of erased memories……..

http://www.squareamerica.com/es.htm

Love, love, love Richard Edelman’s series from “Beneath Canal’ - Gorgeous prints. Just started working with him at the gallery. I think I may have to buy one of them…..

…hard part is deciding which!

(It’s such an eerie, quiet New York, isn’t it?)

Richard Edelman is a graduate, in photography, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, with a graduate degree from Pratt Institute. He received fellowships from CAPS (NY Creative Artists Public Service Program) in 1982 and from the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 1985 & 2002.

Richard’s photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), Brooklyn Museum (NY), Polaroid International Collection (Offenbach), Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) and Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY)

He was a member of the faculty at the New School and has also taught photography at the School of Visual Arts and International Center for Photography, all in New York City

See more work here

I have daydreams of living is some tiny cottage, in the middle of the countryside in England. Very few belongings; soft white sheets, cozy sweaters, lots of earl grey tea, some good red wine, many long walks, the fog, pencil and paper, and a collection of books.

That’s it. That’s all I need. I’d waste my days away writing nonsense. piles of it…..

——————–

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.”

- Jack Gilbert

Absofuckinglutely great.

http://thehorrors.co.uk/

(photos by Johannes Courtens)

more info about this exhibit here

I hope to make it to this exhibit at the Met before is closes (on March 22nd). The show looks pretty interesting - I was going through the images online and came across this one by Mark Wyse

Mark Wyse (American, b. 1970)
Marks of Indifference #4 (Accident #1), 2006
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2008 (2008.84)

The accompanying text to the photo states:

A professional printer as well as a photographer, Wyse makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. The title of the series, Marks of Indifference, refers to an essay on photography and conceptual art by the artist Jeff Wall. Wyse uses this reference to denote the idea of the camera as a dispassionate recording device as well as the larger question of how artists’ conscious and unconscious intentions manifest themselves in photographs. The “indifference” of the title also applies to the subjects of the pictures themselves: a car with a large dent in its side, a road sign surrounded by overgrown foliage, the marks left by shelves torn from a wall. In this photograph of a squirrel left for dead on a paved suburban street, the large scale, sharp focus, and unusual worm’s-eye view combine to give the picture a powerful, dreamlike intensity.

Funny, my friend Mark Gregory has an photograph very near to Wyse’s. I liked it when he first took it, and I still like it now (even despite its rather gruesome nature):

Oh the funny world of syncronicity, eh?

You need to see Dan Auerbach perform live.

A big thank you to Glenn for scoring last minute tickets to Dan’s sold out concert at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night - it was amazing. I miss seeing intimate shows like this one, and it was just the type of thing I needed to hear. Powerful blues with an unbelievable amount of passion. I cannot get enough of the lovely lullaby, “When the Night Comes”

I came across a post about passion that I thought was super inspiring, and I could easily relate to it:

“I spent a large chunk of Tuesday in a car with a friend driving up to Manchester. He and I were at the University there in the 80s and we were driving up to spec out a project for later this year. He’s a record exec (of course! which of your so-called friends aren’t? I hear you crow). His job requires him to be constantly in contact with people who work with and for him and so I sat in the passenger listening to his speakerphone conversations: lawyers telling him how he was “their guy” and how and they honestly wanted to sign to him, American executives telling him how genuinely excited about their projects they were , new employees telling him how sincerely they were looking forward to their job… It was a veritable sea of love and sincerity. It reminded of my A&R days and how so much of what got people out of bed depended on passion. It may sound like they’re being insincere but you do really need to tap into some emotion to get through all the pain, rejection and terrible midweeks.“

Working with/for people who spend their entire lives creating something so personal, so extremely intimate and close to their hearts - you find yourself wanting to do nothing more than feed that passion. You become addicted to just being around it. You want to be reminded that you are not half-alive. And in order to be more than half-alive you need to work at it - every single day. You need to make a real effort.

I like being around those who make an effort. Those who show up daily, who are always learning, who own their lives, who try harder, who confess their love, who take action….

“but who can say what’s best? that’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. my experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
-haruki murakami norwegian wood

NIN: The Fragile live from on stage, Adelaide 2.28.09 [HD] from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

I want a Canon 5D Mark II.

(I love this song…….)