Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
We've been looking for clay pot planters at yard sales because buying them new can get expensive. People at yard sales often just want to get rid of them, so they'll practically give them to you. At one recently, there were a lot of planters and a lot of succulents. We came home with some of the pots and this plumeria.
Sooner than later all sorts of people will be up in arms about people saying Merry Christmas again. I think I'd settle for people just saying good morning to each other again.
Literature, because it is made of language, returns language to us. If we have the words, we are not silenced, although we learn, through the enforced quiet of reading, what it means to be silent. – Jeanette Winterson
Citrus reveal party. We moved into a house in May with a diligent little citrus tree in the yard that looks like it’s been cut down a few times but kept coming back. When it bloomed we compared the flowers to those on trees at the nursery. Our best guess was that it’s a lemon tree. But we were prepared to love and squeeze and savor its fruit whatever it might be. It turns out it’s a lime tree, and to be honest that’s what we were hoping for.
This is what it looks like. It’s when Hiram makes blue corn tortillas for dinner quesadillas but not what it looks like when you wake up angry, from a dream that a family of four has cut in front of you in line at the Blue Willow and is ordering blueberry pancakes to go. What kind of nightmare monsters buy carry out pancakes? Good morning!
