lost in sprawl city

The Green Light.

Sat, 18 May 2013 02:18:03 -0400

The Green Light.

Compton.

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:44:40 -0400

Compton.

"Maybe we love our dolls because we can’t love ourselves,” a friend of mine—an artist who made..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:43:00 -0400

““Maybe we love our dolls because we can’t love ourselves,” a friend of mine—an artist who made drawings of dolls missing legs or arms or eyes, that all looked, somehow, eerily like her—once suggested. Perhaps this is the essential truth behind why we make effigies. And maybe this is why we tend to believe that children should have dolls that look like them, or at least that look like what they might eventually become. In 1959, Mattel introduced a doll that was, unlike most other dolls marketed for children, not a baby doll. The doll had breasts and wore makeup and was modeled after a doll sold in Germany as a gag gift for grown men. The man who designed the American version of the doll, a man who had formerly designed Sparrow and Hawk missiles for the Pentagon and was briefly married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, was charged with making the new Barbie doll look less like a “German street walker,” which he attempted in part by filing off her nipples.
In the past few decades, quite a few people have suggested—citing most often the offense of impossible proportions—that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls “provoked rejection, hatred, and violence,” and many girls preferred Barbie torture— by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving—over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were “plastic.” The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. “On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,” one of the researchers remarked. “She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.””

- “Relations” by Eula Biss

Response to a Bourgeois Nigger by the Watts Prophets, The Black...

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:25:07 -0400

Response to a Bourgeois Nigger by the Watts Prophets, The Black Voices on the Street in Watts (1969)

Mermaid on Spring.

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:39:42 -0400

Mermaid on Spring.

Public vs. private. Asked to step away from this fountain/not...

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:26:48 -0400

Public vs. private. Asked to step away from this fountain/not sit at it. Owned by Macguire Properties. That’s the Library/US Bank tower behind it.

Postscript: Not allowed to lay down on a nearby bench, so security asked came back out just to tell me to sit up. Guess I oughtta peace.

Consider carefully:

Sat, 11 May 2013 07:03:26 -0400

When did it become four am?

If my love gets lost in a black hole I'll only have myself and gravity to blame

Sat, 11 May 2013 06:40:00 -0400

listen

i don’t believe in heaven

but i do believe in heavenly bodies

like ours, colliding and swirling into one

another, spirited tangle or tango

aren’t the arms of the Mice flung out

in dance, coiling around each others’ necks

until death do us come together

two salacious celestials at the other end

of an intergalactic voyeur.

making love and making light don’t seem so

different anymore, do they?

Every kiss on the neck a star

bursting into existence our universe

is like some backwoods bazaar

and we’re standing in the corner

under dim lamplight

dancing to a composition death

emitting jets of heat from the centers of ourselves

like listen

i don’t believe in church

but i do believe in the mass

of a black hole

and the silence at the end of a song

and the darkness at the end of light

and the destruction at the end of our creation

A rose petal I really liked that I picked from a garden called...

Sat, 11 May 2013 06:00:15 -0400

A rose petal I really liked that I picked from a garden called Heaven (seriously). It gossiped with me about Jackson Pollock.

I don’t mean to disappoint. I’m just not sorry when I do.

Sat, 11 May 2013 05:51:47 -0400

I don’t mean to disappoint. I’m just not sorry when I do.

Divinity on South Broadway

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:32:43 -0400

Divinity on South Broadway

Photo

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:42:59 -0400

Dolls (3)

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:05:30 -0400

plastic succubae, they haunted my childhood sleep-those

throbless creatures with odd necks that snapped or crumbled

when thrown from the bed or bashed with a hammer

and i would wake into the welcoming dark, relieved

for those rosy-cheeked specters with fingers that would not part

had vanished and i could will myself to better dreams, forget

those blank voids that caused me cringings-for although

i could not appreciate death, i understood not living

Wanda Coleman

Sick video. Give Detroit this.

Wed, 08 May 2013 17:50:00 -0400

Sick video. Give Detroit this.

Newtonian graffiti.

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:16:42 -0400

Newtonian graffiti.

Photo

Sat, 04 May 2013 06:27:28 -0400

The Invention of Your Face

Sat, 04 May 2013 06:26:00 -0400

I was waiting when you came back from

Argentina—the summer you smuggled

Dulce de leche in your luggage. You talked

About the film: you’d discovered how

The proscenium shifted, haloing the body

In the camera gaze—and how you emerged

Through that fluid arch each frame. You’d

Missed me, you’d missed her: six years old

And suddenly shy in your presence. You

Spooned sweet milk paste from the tin into

Her cereal bowl—then let image after image

Appear for her through a camera lens you made

Of your hands, held like half-opened wings in the air.

She could see the great waterfall, Iguaçú, and miles

Of hardwood trees, called Breakers of the Axe,

Quebracho, as they swirled up in the Chaco—and one red

Horse galloping all by itself across the Pampa. I watched her

Changing expressions: I knew how many nights she’d gone

Searching for you, beyond the movable walls of a dream.

You showed her a little bird that sang in Pagatonia wearing

A gaucho’s hat and she ate sugar paste she barely tasted. She

Was a child; she took in whatever sweetness you

Provided—what sweetness there was in the world

That we could see. Silent, the two of us, staring at you—

We could never get past it: the invention of your face.

Carol Muske-Dukes

"But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 06:09:11 -0400

“But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.”

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Andromeda

Sat, 04 May 2013 05:45:32 -0400

Andromeda

Grand Central Station, NYC, 1941. The light does not stream in...

Fri, 03 May 2013 06:10:33 -0400

Grand Central Station, NYC, 1941. The light does not stream in like this anymore because the buildings around the station are too tall.