a confession

image via counterforce

i recently and randomly read a time magazine essay from may 18, 1970 called "violent protest: a debased language"...a key paragraph got me thinking...

The ultimate debasement of language, of course, is violence...—most dissenters turn to violence in a desperate effort to communicate their profound feelings of grievance. Yet surely this is too crude a way to get their message across. A bomb, for example, lacks specificity; its meaning is as scattered as its debris...Violence is, essentially, a confession of ultimate inarticulateness.

and then the words and ideas filtered down, and what really got a hold of me was— violence is, essentially, a confession... of what exactly? of everything that lives inside us but can't get out, of everything that exists but can't be named, of everything we want acknowledged but instead has always been met with disregard, intolerance and neglect. violence then, is a sad confession of our fragility and weakness, our tragic inability to perfectly express our existence...

Read more of the essay at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909175-2,00.html#ixzz0y92NXg2a

in cold blood

portraits of clutter family murderers dick hickock & perry smith
taken by richard avedon, 1960
image via this isn't happiness

i'm about 70 or so pages out from the end. i told myself i wouldn't look up what perry and dick really looked like till i finished the book. but i just couldn't wait. even though i know i will finish the book later tonight... i couldn't stop myself. these portraits are astounding. i'm undone and overwhelmed and my heart is racing. i had no idea their photos would say so much. i had no idea i would feel so much.
truman capote breaks into the story with measured beats, and though the pulse of his language often gathers into sharp and clear points , it keeps a steady ever-haunting and gripping pace—
5 pages in and capote writes:
but then, in the earliest hours of that morning in november, a sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly holcomb noises— on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. at the time not a soul in sleeping holcomb heard them— four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.

and this is the bit of text that keeps playing over and over in my mind as i look at the photos of dick and perry... i can see and hear and smell those shotgun blasts...those blasts that killed the clutter family of four, and later, and less directly, dick and perry...

a bit of brilliance i found:

THOSE FIRST FIVE MINUTES

Finally realizing that though the person you’ve been talking to obviously likes you, they haven’t been laughing at your jokes.

Finally realizing that the person you’ve been talking to has an appearance completely incidental to their personality rather than essential to it.

— from alice at ornament of my might

the map is not the territory

image via malibu magazine

image via sfcitizen

image via why don't you...

john baldessari— conceptual, californian, absurd, ironic..."suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?"

american ease

ash jalouse boot
image via polyvore

rachel comey penpal short boots
image via polyvore

charles david bryden boot
image via amazon

aren't all these boots absolutely perfect for fall? i love their simplicity and functionality, and i think they are timelessly good-looking. but seasons don't really matter much to me 'cause i live in boots all year long. i guess it's because san francisco is always boot-wearing-weather, and i walk everywhere so i like a bit of practicality, and i have a dog so i'm in the park pretty much everyday, rain or shine. i feel most at home in boots— at ease, unrestricted, footloose and fancy free. hmmm...that seems so american, so frontiersman-like...wow... how "out west" of me.

prodigal son

photo by glen friedman, via flickriver

image via the barstool romantic

i just watched dogtown and z-boys again. there are some really gorgeous moments in that film, in the story it tells— movement, ideas, images...ragged youth, rough-edged talent, bright things, attitude... the gathering, the building, and then the dissipation, the scattering. these photos are all of jay adams— an orginal z-boy...influential, individual, fearless...the real thing.