MELISSALAND

“…Before our collective paradigm shift (the financial “crisis”, or “clusterfuck”, etc.) this is what the future looked like; rich black tarmac paved and waiting to be surrounded by a subdivision. The trees would have to go, of course, and a dozen more just like this would have to be built, clustered tightly inside whatever preplanned area fit best with the land purchase. The real gift, given to us by the meltdown, is that of a better future; even if that future is still purely hypothetical, as this empty cul-de-sac, above. Of course, we don’t know what this new future will look like, yet. There are thousands of ways to go from here and the evidence is still underdetermined as to which is the best. It’s fortunate, I guess, considering how badly we failed in our previous utopiuan dreams. Eventually, though, we’re going to have to settle down and figure out exactly what we want our bright-shiny-new future to look like and then set about constructing it.”

——–

Photo by: Stacy Arezou Mehrfar - Magnolia, Texas. April 2006 #1 — from the series American Palimpsests

Text by: William Ball

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

Make for yourself a world you can believe in.
It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

— Jonathan Safran Foer, A Convergence Of Birds

(image: Robert & Shana Parkeharrison)

“Balancing intuition against sensory information, and sensitivity to one’s self against pragmatic knowledge of the world, is not a stance unique to artists. The specialness of artists is the degree to which these precarious balances are crucial backups for their real endeavor. Their essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse’s neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again. When they find that they have ridden and ridden - maybe for years, full tilt - in what is for them a mistaken direction, they must unearth within themselves some readiness to turn direction and gallop off again. They may spend a little time scraping off the mud, resting the horse, having a hot bath, laughing and sitting in candlelight with friends. But in the back of their minds they never forget that the dark, driving run is theirs to make again. They need their balances in order to support their risks. The more they develop an understanding of all their experiences - the more it is at their command - the more they carry with them into the whistling wind.”
- Anne Truitt
Daybook (via Whiskey River)

Today is a cocorosie day. Werewolf playing in the background as my soundtrack to this wintery mess……

Werewolf by Cocorosie

“I’ma shake you off though
Get up on that horse and
Ride into the sunset
Look back with no remorse”

I am also having waking dreams of a late evening over the summer spent walking, scared out of my mind, through a forest. There is nothing like adjusting your eyes to that type of dark. When every cell in your body is listening. I want to be back there very badly…..

I want that scared feeling. The one that shakes you to your core and heightens every fucking sense from slumber. To stop playing safe. To forgo a good night’s sleep for something more…..meaningful. To sit in the dark just listening to a heart beating wildly.

Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you’re lazy, your art is lazy. When you hold back it holds back. When you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets.”
- David Bales and Ted Orland
Art and Fear

(via whiskey river)

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. - From “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles

(The beautiful photo above is by Stuart Franklin)

“We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
- Annie Dillard

Photo: Boys Falling by Mary Frey

Lynn Kohlman, fashion model, photographer, author, and creative director at DKNY, passed away from cancer this weekend. Reading about her courageous battle this afternoon, I was extremely saddened and at the same time inspired. She seemed like an incredible woman and I am sure she will be missed terribly. Someone who can make this strong statement and walk boldly towards the unknown is, in my mind, an amazing human being….

“I do feel transformed and awakened by cancer.  I have never truly felt so wonderful.  I feel that I needed to be bopped over the head and breast cancer didn’t really do it for me, so I needed to have brain cancer.  I feel like I chose it, and I needed it.  I’ve certainly chosen a different journey than I would have if cancer hadn’t come to meet me.  Now I have cancer by my side, and it’s made me aware of my mortality and not afraid of it.  I breathe every day in with a different, totally transformed and different level of appreciation of life.  It is wildly great.” - Lynn Kohlman

Those brave words will resonate with me for a long time.

Every human is a scale set to measure the pleasure or pain other humans inflict on us. Each act of pleasure or pain is a pebble placed on this scale. But the scale is out of balance. Most people need more pleasure than pain, others the reverse, to keep the scale in balance. Or perhaps it’s just that pain weighs more than pleasure for most people, and for a few, the reverse. When the scale is too far out of balance for too long, the pebbles are removed, and the scale reverts to neutral. Or rather, it attempts to, because the very act of measuring these weights distorts the calibration, and we constantly drift, never really knowing true measurement, but trying anyway.

(via: constant siege)