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Four Eyes Friday

I have gone missing for a minute, I know.  I am swimming in the Blue Lagoon of life.  Wanderlust has overcome me this summer, and I’ve been squeezing as much adventure as possible into the margins of my to-do list.  I absolutely love how busy I am with work right now, but people!  The blueberries in Maine aren’t going to pick themselves!  Like Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson’s on-screen relationship, something’s gotta give.

To go along with my hit-the-road mentality of late, I’ve been reading a lot of the short stories over on Squat the Planet.  My escapades are pathetically uninteresting compared to such seasoned vets.  ArrowInOne’s “Don’t Touch Me There” is especially thrilling.  Can you taste the America seeping out of that one?  Can you??  It tastes like creamed corn and unfaltering buoyancy.

Wallflower Wednesday

Okay okay I know I am just so obsessed with this roadtrip.  I will stop talking about it sometime, I swear.  But obviously this Wallflower Wedensday is all about travel.

In Tahoe, before the actual start of the trip.  This was the pre-game.

The social ideology of the motorcar on bikereader.com When someone asked him how people would spend their time after the revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done away with, Marcuse answered, “We will tear down the big cities and build new ones.  That will keep us busy for a while.”

Similarly, Why people don’t use mass transit by Steven Dutch A research paper that analyzes and quantifies the values associated with mass transit.  Not too nice to Philadelphia either.

Legendary Surfers Amazing website that includes a history of surfing, art gallery, and essays on famous surfers.

Annals of Transport: There and back again in the New Yorker On that hellish thing we call commuting.

Travels in a San Francisco streetcar, 1905 (video) Related: Barcelona, 1908

Summer Vacation Slideshow

We flew to California, hopped in a sporty new car filled with iPods and Chex Mix, and saw the country.  Guys, I know it’s the holiday season and all but these feelings of true warm-blooded patriotism are real, okay?  Really real.  America is awesome.   Awesome, awesome, awesome.

A brief run-on sentence of what we did: rope-swinging in a canyon in San Diego, drank date milkshakes in Dateland, personified the saguaro cacti outside Tuscon, bought firecrackers in New Mexico, played dominoes in El Paso, argued over dinosaurs vs. astronauts on a barren highway, melted with love for Marfa, swam in cold springs in Austin, MASH-ed each other through Louisiana, absolutely died with love for every little thing in New Orleans, nursed hangovers through Mississippi, sucked the ribs clean in Tuscaloosa, watched hillbilly sledding in a landfill in Chattanooga, saw the largest underground lake in the country in Sweetwater, went rope-swinging in a swimming hole in Charlottesville.  Of course, no good roadtrip is complete without a trip to the ER, so we did that too at UVA.  After some heavily-medicated days of recovery (plus lots of ice cream!), it was back on the road–DC and then an anticlimactic return to Philadelphia.  All told: 3 people, 3400+ miles, 7 days, 0 tantrums.  Pretty good.

Here’s a slideshow of what the country looks like between California and Virginia.  I took most of these pictures with disposable cameras.  To see more pictures or to view them at larger sizes, click the “view all images” button.

Party in the USA

We actually did it.  We made it across the country.  Huge personal photo post forthcoming.

Four Eyes Friday

I think I’m probably poking around Prada Marfa as you’re reading this.  Again, these posts are coming to you via MAGIC.

Anyways in honor of my epic trek, this week’s FEF excerpt comes from John Muir’s The Mountains of California. Specifically, chapter 13, The Water Ouzel.  Here’s the link to the full chapter (as well as the full book), and below is my favorite bit:

“Love for song-birds, with their sweet human voices, appears to be more common and unfailing than love for flowers. Every one loves flowers to some extent, at least in life’s fresh morning, attracted by them as instinctively as humming-birds and bees. Even the young Digger Indians have sufficient love for the brightest of those found growing on the mountains to gather them and braid them as decorations for the hair. And I was glad to discover, through the few Indians that could be induced to talk on the subject, that they have names for the wild rose and the lily, and other conspicuous flowers, whether available as food or otherwise. Most men, however, whether savage or civilized, become apathetic toward all plants that have no other apparent use than the use of beauty. But fortunately one’s first instinctive love of songbirds is never wholly obliterated, no matter what the influences upon our lives may be. I have often been delighted to see a pure, spiritual glow come into the countenances of hard business-men and old miners, when a song-bird chanced to alight near them. Nevertheless, the little mouthful of meat that swells out the breasts of some song-birds is too often the cause of their death. Larks and robins in particular are brought to market in hundreds. But fortunately the Ouzel has no enemy so eager to eat his little body as to follow him into the mountain solitudes. I never knew him to be chased even by hawks.”

Wallflower Wednesday

As you’re reading this I am probably wading in the Pacific Ocean, surfboard in one arm and a breakfast burrito in the other.  So how is Wallflower Wednesday still happening?  Magic, people.  Magic.

So let’s have this magical Wallflower Wednesday be about magic.

Child prodigy explains the mysteries of the universe (video) A schoolboy from Russia’s southern Krasnodar Region has rocked the world of science with his findings in astronomy.

How to keep someone with you forever on Issendai’s Livejournal Potions and spells?  Trife.  Try creating a sick system instead.  Works like a charm!

Achillea millefolium on Wikipedia In the Middle Ages, witches were said to use yarrow to make incantations.  Nursery rhymes say if you put a yarrow sachet under your pillow, you will dream of your own true love. If you dream of cabbages (the leaves do have a similar scent), then death or other serious misfortune will strike.

Middle Pillar Exercise and Synesthesia: Cross-Modal Translations of Sensory Dimensions via Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge, Inc “The information indicates that one might be able to learn to pitch the magickal voice and loudness to induce a desired visual effect.  This is an experience of the immortal body, or philosopher’s stone.”  AAAAAAA

The Poetic Edda on sacred-texts.com A collection of the entire oral poetry tradition of Iceland and ancient Norse pagan beliefs.  Translated by Henry Adams Bellows.

Pythagoras and Music of the Spheres, via the class notes for Geometry in Art and Archetecture at Dartmouth College The Pythagoreans ruled.  Ruled, ruled ruled.  Vegetarian number-lovers who believed  “that the distances between the planets would have the same ratios as produced harmonious sounds in a plucked string. To them, the solar system consisted of ten spheres revolving in circles about a central fire, each sphere giving off a sound the way a projectile makes a sound as it swished through the air; the closer spheres gave lower tones while the farther moved faster and gave higher pitched sounds. All combined into a beautiful harmony, the music of the spheres.”

And one more bit of astronomical magic today:

Unknown “Structures” tugging at universe, study says on National Geographic News Dark flow.  It’s not just a bad psy-trance DJ name.  It’s warped space-time.

See ya in Texas!

Vacation-a-day Giveaway

I’m off this week and next for a seriously epic cross-country roadtrip.  Alas, the blog will be quiet for a minute while we see space age lodges in Arizona, bumble around Marfa, stuff ourselves with beignets, and, um, do whatever it is that people do in Chattanooga.  If anyone has tips/suggestions for stops along the route from San Diego to New Orleans to Charlottesville, holler at your girl.  Until then, I bid you adieu and leave you with some beach pics from the current show at the Met:

Four Eyes Friday

I was all set to do some fiddle-dee-dee excerpt of Dawn Powell and then I noticed my kitten having a nightmare.  Do kittens even have nightmares?  I have no idea.  But she was making really upset noises and couldn’t wake up.  Maybe she thought she ran out of areas of my room to colonize.

A skip and a jump through Google Books later and I was in some strange territory.  First came the Jung, then the Freud, then the hand of Google Books himself waved at me (this is the “intern-net”, quoth Artie), and after a brief pitstop in a December 2008 issue of Vibe, I remembered an legitimately fascinating book I had read ages ago on sleep paralysis: The Terror that Comes in the Night by David J. Hufford, a professor at UPenn on the ethnography of belief.  Don’t read his field work alone at night.  Really, don’t.  But do read it.

Wallflower Wednesday

For some reason religion keeps coming up his week, turning friendly conversations about pound cake and podcasts into discussions about traditional Catholocism.  I don’t know why–maybe it’s my sense of impending doom?  Whatever it is, I poked around the ol’ New Asshole bookmark archives and picked some reading materials this week on religion, morality, and what is right:

Apollo Sees by Daniel Wallace

Magnetic manipulation of the sense of morality on ScienceBlogs: “MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that magnetic pulses which disrupt activity in a specific region of the brain’s right hemisphere can interfere with the ability to make certain types of moral judgements, so that hypothetical situations involving attempted harm are perceived to be less morally forbidden and more permissable.”  Does this mean that Bluetooth in fact is the end of civilization?

Satan goes secular: Does evil exist in the absence of God in the Wall Street Journal: A review of homeslice Terry Eagleton’s latest book, On Evil.

Religion gone global: an interview with Reza Aslan on The Immanent Frame: Standard stuff about the fractured communities that the internet produces, the democracy of news, blah blah blah.  But then Aslan gets a little merciless with academics: “[scholars participating in global conversations is] often a total waste of time.  You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper. You have to be immersed in the kind of world in which there is no division between the academic and the popular…Trying to take staid academics and teach them to use words with fewer syllables is not the way to break that wall down.”

The wrong stuff: On air and on error: This American Life’s Ira Glass on being wrong on Slate:  I’m like, “I just think it’s really swell being interviewed!” And he’s like “THERE IS NO SELF.”

and finally, from the news desk:

French prostitutes oppose reopening brothels in the Global Post: “But the sex workers’ union, which represents more than 250 prostitutes in France, is adamantly opposed to government meddling in its business and would rather maintain as much independence over its members’ livelihoods as possible.”

PS-Notice the redesigned blog!  Eh?  Eh?  Now it actually looks like the website!

Four Eyes Friday

That’s right, a new weekly feature!  This blog really is on the up and up.  So Four Eyes Friday: every Friday, the blog will feature an excerpt from some reading material.  Just like summer reading lists!  Art writing, fiction, poetry, etc etc.  Put your glasses on; it’s time to get literary.

For the inaugural FEF, I’d like to post a short chapter from the book I just finished, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary.  A fantastic read–thanks Mom for giving it to me.  Here’s the chapter, in which Renee muses on art.  FYI, she is looking at a Dutch vanitas painting as she speaks (thus all the references to shellfish and sets)