Merry Christmas!

"The whole nation of you in the house will go from one thing to another. The secret of the best Christmases is everybody doing the same things all at the same time. You will all fall to and string cranberries and popcorn for the tree, and the bright lines each of you has a hold on will radiate from the tree like ribbons on a maypole. Everybody will have needles and thread in the mouth, you will all get in each other's way, but that is the art of doing Christmas right."

-- Robert P. Tristam Coffin

(image: Christmas Janet Leigh)

Anna Pogossovas

From Anna Pogossovas Iceland Series

Found here

I’m in love with people’s hands and the way they clench their fists and the way their fingertips lightly press down onto piano keys or thighs. Calloused fingers or dainty fingers. Hands writing poems or memos or parking tickets. Hands writing futures. To me, every crease on the palm is a love line.

-- Mesogeios

(images found here)

Sunday Tune

Yoncé’ on Her Knees

Yoncé’ on Her Knees

by dream hampton

The politics of pleasure as a public performance, delivered in the middle of the night, by a complete boss. Beyoncé’s presentation of the erotic is evidence of her lived experience of a sexual trust and intimate safety that is the true fantasy. The freedom to be filthy, to be submissive, to be in control, to be contemplative, to leave or to stay.

Romantic and sexual relationships are as complicated as there are possible configurations: of gender, of gender and sexual expression, of sexual identity, of levels of commitment. But being in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage doesn’t make sex and romance and love straightforward.

We have focused on the pleasure of seeing Beyoncé's entire ass on a table. But she also sings about distrust and insecurity. She sings about power dynamics that skew towards men, even when you're rich, beautiful and can relax into a back bend. In long term relationships there are the ecstatic moments of synchronicity and trust, and those moments when you consider packing your partners' luggage and leaving it on the other side of a closed door. There are moments of betrayal and seething and deep sighs into complete comfort and bliss.

Beyoncé’s other long time relationship is with the public. The mindless adoration, the baseless evisceration, the love, the hate, speculation, the projection, the pedestal. They are the rent she pays for her place in the constellation. That Beyoncé chose to set on fire that lease, that contractual agreement about what is respectable or feminist or pop enough, is radical. That it has become the year’s biggest success was never a sure thing. What we do know is that she is a grown, changed woman, and it is deeply satisfying to witness. Dirty 30’s indeed. 

YES.
Read this too.

We wax, we wane. It's the dance of life.

"Nature Has A Formula That Tells Us When It's Time To Die"

www.npr.org 

Libra

This week, the world is going to be so rich, so wild, so full, that it’s maybe going to feel a little tangled all around you; it’s maybe going to feel a little bit messy, a little weird. It’s okay. It’s a week for figuring things out, for living in the messiness, in the uncertainty, in your own soft body. If you let them, like this can work magic. They can change the way you see, they can change the way you move, they it can light up your entire world. Listen to Beyoncé, obviously.

-- Madame Clairevoyant

Light

Images found here

"Art Isn't Anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives."

-- Cheryl Strayed

HYPERSURFACES

Hypersurfacers from maker of magicYesenia Thibault-Picazo.

Midnight Sun | Iceland from SCIENTIFANTASTIC on Vimeo.

'If You Leave'

Light images from If You leave curated by Laurence von Thomas.

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in. 

  -- Leonard Cohen

Dan Flavin.
untitled (to the "innovator" of Wheeling Peachblow), 1966-1968

Lee Jung

Lee Jung

…taking midnight out of our pockets, we shall light a fire

 

-- Henri Pichette 

Sunday Tune

Friday!

this feels appropriate.

 Source: illhaveuknowthatiloveyou

Frida!

Fred Hüning

"Love and sex, life and death, beauty and transience, lust and suffering are the centre of my photographic interests."

--  Fred Hüning, 2013

Interview with Fred Hüning from The Photographers' Gallery on Vimeo.

Fred Hüning's stunning work is currently part of the Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity. Exhibition at The Photographers Gallery. GO SEE IT.

Masaki Nakayama

Perpetually Roaming

"Glaciers are simultaneously ancient while also being constantly reborn. Formations like these have sometimes been around for thousands of years, though the water they contain rejuvenates through a forever shifting process of melting, moving and refreezing. Their hunks of bright blue ice may seem immovable, but they’re actually perpetually roaming the lands they form on top of, albeit quite slowly."

Photos by Vishal Marapon

Inspiring words and photos from Kinfolk Magazine

Controlled Time

“Only Art controls Time. It can freeze it, pin its moment, accelerate it, ignore it, invent and re-invent it, spin it over, under, sideways, down. Consequently (imagination being truer than fact), our artists have become our best recorders of all our worlds. Time and Place are conjoined and frozen in the fullness of their reportage; we see how it was There and Then—in the house in Delft, where Vermeer’s girl reads her letter, or in the early twentieth-century Byleorussian village which Chagall showed from his most credible point of view, of the couple flying above it. The most touching are particular to their time and their place.”

The Public Domain Review highlights the work of Eric Ravilious.

Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass appeals to me!

Odysseus' Journey

I highly recommend you spend some time with this nifty interactive map, which plots Ulysses’s epic ten-year voyage of The Odyssey on a real-life globe, placing the sirens, the cyclops, and the lotus-eaters in a recognizable geographical context.