Grimes has infiltrated culture from all sides (baby mama to Elon Musk, darling of Karl Lagerfeld, collaborated with Janelle Monae) but this will forever and always be the best version of her.
"The Blue House", Tomas Tranströmer (1983) [literature]
"There is a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route."
I recently told a friend that I wanted to split the universe and live out two future versions of myself. My words kind of just slipped out, willy nilly as usual, but as soon as they hit the air I felt a pang of melancholy. It is a painful truth that we can only live one life.
Tranströmer (who received a Nobel Prize for his poetry) puts this eloquently; excruciatingly so in “The Blue House.”
The poem (if you can call it that, it could also be a short story) is narrated by a man who is standing in the woods near his house looking in on it. From this perspective, he can see his life for what it is, and also consider other lives he could have had.
Who doesn’t? Why shouldn’t we?
This is the poem. Favorite verse in bold.
It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.
It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush, from the inside.
On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.
Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.
The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind that the gilded frame cannot subdue.
It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.
A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.
Oblique Strategies, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt (1975) [idea clutch]
Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas
Long-time collaborators musician (artist? producer? theorist? technologist?) Brian Eno and composer (painter? educator? tinkerer) Peter Schmidt teamed up in 1975 to create a deck of cards with prompts intended to help break a creative block. I’ve also successfully used them as-slightly abstract-conversation starters with close pals and strangers alike.
I often think about this quote from Eno’s diary, when he surely on his way to conceiving of these cards, “stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences”
The look and feel of cards have evolved quite a bit, but the original ethos has remained. Here are some images of the first set of cards. You can buy a modern edition here.
Weapon of Choice Music Video, Spike Jonze (2001) [music]
Christopher Walken + Fatboy Slim + Spike Jonze
You know the saying, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Yeah. This thing won a Grammy.
"The Suspects Wore Louboutons," Nancy Jo Sales (2010) [pop culture]
The article that inspired Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring
Anyone who knows me knows I love a story about naughty teenage girls, and this is one of the best. We get rich teens sipping Frappuccino’s while driving around in convertibles. We get LA real estate belonging to celebrities only teenage girls would have their eye on (Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Miranda Kerr, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Ashley Tisdale). We get celebrity fashion and jewelry. We get a heist plot involving teens following popular blogs to see when targets were out of town on extravagant vacations and celebrity events… resulting in over $3 million of stolen goods.
I will also say this this article is *peak* Vanity Fair. When they are good… they are SO GOOD. Link to the article here.
Some (incredible) photography from the article:
And here’s a screenshot of a scene from The Bling Ring, by Sopia Coppola that I personally do not think got the praise it deserved.
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