A Food/Cooking Blog from the Siblings:

check it, y'all. it's new, but pretty good so far: http://arndtyoueating.blogspot.com/

when i think about the way life works, i remember often and revel often in how blessed i am with people i love and who love me. it often bowls me over to the point of silliness.
i am also often quite flabbergasted by how powerful the world is, how powerful thought is, how the ways in which people and things make meaning, dive and soar in ways that create and, often, foment, revolution. it's so powerful and badass.
the older i get the more i have fetishize passion and intellect, the pursuit of focused passions about the world...almost whatever area it be in...i hope it just continues to build and goes on and on, 'cause without it, yawn... xoxo-

words are all we have to go on. xo-

"You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?"
—
Raymond Carver

when i think about words and how they sometimes soar in the brain and feel like little electrical sparks connecting and shooting in an almost bacchanalian dance, it feels like dance and flight and freedom. and the ways that they enable us to communicate things as simple as how to get from here to there or how long to keep the roast in the oven or "meet me at eight" or utter quietly of a devastation or even whisper the nuances between ecstatic or peaceful love, it amazes; what power they contain!
and yet and yet and yet. we are limited by what we might express. we are limited by our mediums, hence painting and sculpture and photography and music and so on and forever amen attempting to cross divides and reveal our hearts(selves) to each other and, by doing so, knit together in ways that might make us recognized as we "really are."
it seems to be all about binaries. and certainly there are greater subtleties than simple polarities in the ways that the heart and the mind and the world works, but it is the inherent isolation that seems to be the nature of things that makes these moments all the more lovely.

kings in hell-

my dear friend kat sent this link to me today, and i drooled over the imagery for quite a while. it was a good present, especially as she knows of my love for the cemeteries in nola and this certainly is reminiscent, and also brought to mind places i've been in italy. the agony and ecstasy of destruction and elation and emotion are gorgeous and bring to mind the strange internal spaces that moments of transcendence often elide. and some of the sculptures are clearly stone so impossibly in love with the body and its form that they almost become alive and yet in their very nature serve to make the viewers mindful of the transience of this existence. rapture and ruin rubbing against each other, concommitant.


http://hrstudioplus.com/775493/Servants-in-heaven-kings-in-hell

nola loves:

"Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture." -Stoppard

We walked down Decatur, and I wondered if the pavement felt the same underneath your feet as it did mine. The ways that the bricks were sunken and worn down but the cement surrounding still held firm, making one teeter a bit with every step, felt pleasantly strange, as it made one take notice. But more than wondering if you noticed the tipsy topsy nature of the pavement, I wanted to crawl in your head and find out *how* you felt it, if it actually was the same to you as me, or, if perhaps, the experience was subjective and shifted according to nerves and skin, foot-body-brain. And did the smell of the Quarter sing to you, yes, sing, the right word for what it did to my brain, did it sing to you in the same way? Like a faintly remembered lullabye from a previous life's childhood, unknown and yet infinitely familiar and comforting? Like something struggling to pull memories hidden to the forefront? The magnolias and stale beer and whisky and water and cigarettes and andouile and dirt and grass and bougainvillea and fried chicken and coffee and beignets and sliced bright watermelon and crawfish only to be made brighter by the way it saturated every pore, suspended in waves of humidity? Did it feel the same? And how is it that, in those moments, I also thought again of somehow swimming in your brain, to feel the way your consciousness moved in the world, the way that your body moved in the world, and the way your smell served to turn the key in a music box and play out some long lost strain of music and made me wish I could simply inhale and never feel the lungs subside...and as it started to pour, we ran down streets and in and out around people and in and of bars, laughing.

tv is dumb:

first response prego test commercial just said, "your body can tell you're pregnant before you can." the idea that i'm not my body is bizarre and makes no sense. thanks, ad people, for your minimally exceptional rhetoric.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.--Albert Camus

The past few years have felt very much like the Camus quote. Like the Vonnegut quote about being as close to the edge without going over because you can see more interesting things out there. We certainly all chart our own roads and the ways that those seem alternately purposeful, predicted, and hand-cut swaths through territories outlying are often little more than an aesthetically pleasing puzzle we examine for meaning, finding it occasionally. Some days these sort of far-flung intellectual/emotional/physical rambles are exhausting, some days feel a little like liberation. I hope it all balances out in the end. xoxo-