Just passing through...

1.
Best line in the book: "Many Hipsters let things grow naturally and brag that their vaginas are 'old school.'"

2.
My advice: Take a tape recorder out into the world. Listen to people. Read more fiction not involving boy wizards.

3.
...bored, officious goons who will make you suffer if you don't pretend they are the beloved guardians of your safety.

4.
Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

5.
Photo Essays by Herman Krieger

Flotsam

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world.

Often the demands of the outside world become so great that we lose track of what we really want in life and spend our time trying to live up to someone else's expectations. Even worse, we internalize those expectations and convince ourselves that they are our own.

The professor said, "photograph what you know or what you want to know."

A shrink I met at a party a while back told me that crying is perhaps the only proper response to what is going on now.

Here's the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents.

Condiments

"The young are violent because they have no inner life. And they have no inner life because they have no thoughts. And they have no thoughts because they know no words. And they know no words because they never speak. And they never speak because the music's too loud."
~ Quentin Crisp

"The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge."

Visit the "Alternative Photography" site's gallery to see Karl P. Koenig's "gumoil" photographs, Walter Crump's pinhole photographs, and Keith Gerling's gum bichromates, as well as works by other artists.

ketchup
1711, from Malay kichap, from Chinese (Amoy dial.) koechiap "brine of fish." Catsup (earlier catchup) is a failed attempt at Anglicization, still in use in U.S. Originally a fish sauce, early English recipes included among their ingredients mushrooms, walnuts, cucumbers, and oysters. Modern form of the sauce began to emerge when U.S. seamen added tomatoes.

* Sure enough, my bottle of Heinz is labeled not merely "Ketchup" but "Tomato Ketchup."

mustard
1190, from O.Fr. moustarde, from moust "must," from L. mustum "new wine" (short for vinum mustum "fresh wine," neut. of mustus "fresh, new"); so called because it was originally prepared by adding must to the ground seeds of the plant to make a paste.

* Now I am sorely tempted to make my own... Where can I find some new wine?

Headlights on the Highway

"[T]o the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents [...] literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them."
~ George Bernard Shaw, Afterword to Pygmalion, 1916
(as seen at Nervous Unto Thirst)

O===O

"When you eavesdrop on cell-phone conversations, you learn who people are by what they are saying to their friends: 'I am now doing one thing. I am now doing another. I will report them all and notice none.' And in effect this mode of constant self-report can be summed up in a single phrase: 'I am on the phone. I am on the phone. I am on the phone.'"
~ n+1, Issue 5, "Whatever Minutes"

O===O

"Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours, no feet but yours;
yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion looks out on the world,
yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good
and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now."
~ Teresa of Ávila
(as seen at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish)

O===O

How can you learn to create pictorial space?
"If you succeed the canvas will be alive: the flat surface will be activated by the spatial effect."
~ from Maxson J. McDowell's remarkable e-book Cézanne and Hans Hofmann on Pictorial Space

Who Knew?

"Late-stage Baby Boomer" or "early Gen-X"? It turns out my borderline cohort (I was born in 1963) has a name of its own: Generation Jones. "The birth years typically used in the U.S. are 1954-1965, but tend to vary slightly in other countries [U.K., Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand], usually starting no earlier than 1953, and ending no later than 1968."

Dirty Found: "We collect DIRTY FOUND stuff: pervy Polaroids, sleazy birthday cards, raunchy to-do lists, nasty poetry on napkins, illustrations--anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's sex life. It's just like our sister, FOUND Magazine, only sleazier."
Oddly, not as interesting as the blurb suggests.
Even more oddly, Ohio (Columbus and Cincinnatti) seems to be disproportionately represented on the "Dirty Finds" page...

Far more interesting is PassiveAggressiveNotes.com: "passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers"

Spot The Fake Smile
I got 18 out of 20 correct -- but only one really fooled me. The other I missed due to overconfident haste. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! :-)

Three Quotes to Ponder by R. D. Laing & Derrick Jensen

Peroration

per·o·ra·tion [per-uh-rey-shuhn], noun
1. a long speech characterized by lofty and often pompous language.
2. Rhetoric. the concluding part of a speech or discourse, in which the speaker or writer recapitulates the principal points and urges them with greater earnestness and force.

[from Latin perorationem (nom. peroratio) "the ending of a speech or argument of a case," from peroratus, pp. of perorare "argue a case to the end, bring a speech to a close," from per- "to the end" + orare "to speak, plead"]

"[Robert] Olsen's small quiet painting, a wry observation on the misguided and futile efforts of the public works department, is in fact a sonorous peroration." ~ Jacques de Beaufort

The Invisible

"To sense the invisible and to be able to create it: that is art."
~ Hans Hofmann














"Memoria in Aeternum" (1962), Hans Hofmann

Links:
Hans Hofmann website
Clement Greenberg on Hofmann
Walter Darby Bannard on Hofmann