once upon a time...

These elaborate pop-up book installations by Su Blackwell make me want to dive into her fantastical cut-out world and dance with paper dolls!

The Sound of Music makes me happy-sad.

The above photograph is one of my most prized digital possessions (they are rated second only to wedding photographs and a picture of my husband dressed up like a German baker). It was taken in Austria while on my 2006 European vacation with my Mother and Grandfather. It was also taken in front of the gazebo where Liesel von Trapp sang "I am sixteen."
Being lifelong fans of "The Sound of Music," my mother and I dragged my grandfather around on a 4-hour Sound of Music tour throughout Salzberg and the surrounding towns. While on the bus with fellow fans, songs from the film blared through overhead speakers and we sang our hearts out. Little old ladies with plastic raincoats, japanese tourists, my mother, and I- boy, did we sing! Even the bus driver was embarrassed for us.
Before this musical bonding experience, I never really knew how far-reaching this childhood relic of a film was (or how many other children hold onto the same relic). I don't know why; I mean, obviously, if there is a whole tour in Salzberg devoted to the film, there were others who knew the songs inside-out.
Maybe I thought I loved it better or differently- like it was a special little ritual between my family and I that others just didn't get.
As though the unifying bus-tour wasn't enough to convince me of the universal adoration for Sound of Music, I was recently forwarded this youtube video by my best friend.
I watched it with my husband and cried! He did not understand why- it wasn't sad, so why was I crying? Because "The Sound of Music" makes me happy-sad. The songs shine with the melancholic beauty of nostalgia and the place it holds for so many makes me feel part of a world that appreciates something happy and sweet.
Then I forwarded this video to another friend, who forwarded it to her sisters- and they cried, too!
All this crying made me happy-sad.
but mostly happy :)

The Watchmen: A Good/Bad Movie

Going into the theatre to watch this movie last week, I was fully prepared to scoff during brief intervals of my boredom. I have never liked comic books, graphic novels, the funnies, or any other literary/art form intended for kids that becomes a nostalgic nerd's collector's item.

It begins with a trip down America's cultural memory- but this time with super heroes- and we move through the social movements of the sixties, Watergate, and disco fever. I loved how this introduction exaggerated the way history can be manipulated and made up. It was a great way to slowly warm up my suspension of disbelief.

If art is supposed to imitate life, then "The Watchmen" is art. I am aware that, in reality, there are no naked blue super heroes towering over NYC. However, this movie is filled with so many different genres, archetypes, fictions, and facts, that it appears to be its own, self-contained reality. The mash-up that is "The Watchmen," is also its downfall. For a movie- there is too much going on. For art- it's perfectly sprawling, vast, and open to interpretation.

Twins Are Creepy

I can say that twins are creepy because my Grandpa is one.
Once when I was little, at a big family reunion, I ran up to my grandpa's twin and hugged him around his legs. When he looked down at me and I realized it wasn't my Gramps, I quickly let go and ran away because, although they are identical, the my Grandpa's eyes are warmer than his twin's. It was like meeting his doppelganger.
This is unfair- my Grandpa's twin is a marvelous man.
I'm just being dramatic.
Anyway, the subject of twins came up after I read an article about an operatic adaptation of the book,"The Silent Twins," by Marjorie Wallace.
The book is now atop my reading list.
June and Jennifer were twins who, after experiencing extreme torment in kindergarten, made a pact to stop talking. They alienated themselves from their brother, sister, and parents- they never spoke. However, their mother knew that they could speak because she would overhear them playing with their dolls and narrating out loud in a fast-pace, high-frequency conversational style.
On the twins' birthday one year, their mother gave them a red leather diary with a lock on it and they both began dedicated journals with detailed accounts of their lives and relationship with the other twin.
The two were sent to a psychologist who noticed that June would glare at Jennifer in a way that seemed to be controlling her speech and movement. But there was nothing they could do to help the twins come out of their exclusive bubble of a universe.
When the twins hit their teen years, they became sexual deviants and repeatedly-offending vandals.
They were caught and sent to a psychiatric hospital for 10 years- until they were almost 30 years old. During this time, their journaling turned into fiction writing and, while institutionalized, each twin got a book published. Their diaries give dark accounts of their parasitic relationship. They began to believe that they could not live healthy lives while both alive- one of them would have to die to set the other free.
The night they were released from the institution, Jennifer got sick and died of an inflamed heart. There was no outside influence or illness. Her heart simply gave out.

ode to the second day of spring

honey dusted desert
musty sage sprig scattered
in royal purple wildly
dripped plains painted
bright and big and it is spring

Please Consider on Your Afternoon Walk Home...

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
by Wallace Stevens

Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

A Mysterious Tale of Two Lovers

About a year ago, I was reading the Los Angeles Times and I stumbled across an article that has held my interest since. Many of you may know about the mysterious suicides of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, and if you do, it's likely that it perplexed and saddened you.
Suicide is a subject that shakes humans to the core because it signifies the failure of the human race. We talk of a "will to live," but what happens when that dissolves in a person? It's really scary to me.
I had planned on writing my own article on these two fallen artists, but instead I find myself emoting onto my computer screen. I want to tell their story, from the little speculation I can speculate upon, but it's very sad. Maybe I shouldn't be listening to Bonnie "Prince" Billy right now...

I'll summarize Theresa and Jeremy's story the best I can.

Theresa Duncan was a small-town girl turned political pop-culture feminist. It's rumored she met Jeremy Blake at a Fugazi concert. She was 7 years older than him, and they fell deeply in love. Jeremy Blake was an artist who, most notably, did the artwork for the cover of Beck's album "Sea-Change" and the psychadelic effects in "Punch-Drunk Love." I really love his art.
As the two rose together through the ranks of the high art world, Theresa was repeatedly let down with the rising and falling of a film project she desperately wanted to conceive of: a film about two prep school girls that kidnap a rock star.
Jeremy Blake, from what I can surmise, felt her disappointment even more thoroughly than Theresa. The two just seemed that entwined with one another.
After Jeremy did the cover for Beck, they said that they were going to help Beck leave the Church of Scientology. Then the pair began to tell friends that The Church was trying to sabotage and threaten their careers...and lives. Eventually, their behavior became so paranoid that they made their friends sign loyalty oaths and cut ties with friends they had known for years.
Then they moved to nyc from venice, ca. Those who knew them say that the two held bohemian dinner parties with good whisky, intelligent and witty conversation, and that things seemed to be normal again. But once in a while, their paranoia would become invigorated and friends would receive long emails detailing the events that caused so much suspicion in the two.
Then one day, Jeremy Blake came home and found Theresa Duncan dead on their bed, her hand up to her slightly smiling face. Next to her, a glass of champagne and bottles of Tylenol pm and Benadryl.
A week later, a woman saw a man walk into the ocean and disappear. Police found Jeremy's clothes on the sand, with a note written on the back of a business card:
"I am going to be with my lovely Theresa."