tamarshmallows-blog

[tamarshmallows-blog]

[tamarshmallows-blog]

Rodarte's Spring 2015 RTW collection is beautiful. Someone, go write a poem about this girl's eyebrows. Maybe I'll write it.  

[tamarshmallows-blog]

My favorite photo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/08/26/piggy-bank/

[tamarshmallows-blog]

The wind has so many things in it!

The humor in this poem kills me: "And the plants undulating underwater, like slow, dumb trees -- for what is water if not oafish wind?" "This is the common air  that bathes the globe." James Gendron The wind has so many things in it! For one thing, every leaf in the world. Important documents torn from the hands of their owners, flowing into the future. Outdoor songs, contorted by giant heaves of wind, collapsing in the ear as gorgeous shipwrecks. George Washington’s hair. Satan’s hair. An historically important monkey’s hair. The missing link! She had a sad life, I imagine, but a very important one; her hair blowing this way and that, asking questions. The hair of the judge, and the hair of the ultrajudge. This is the common hair that bathes the globe. The smell of the jagged mint leaf and the smell of one trillion farts pervade the atmosphere in little windborne particles. The pyramids my hat and the bees in the meadow. And the plants undulating underwater, like slow, dumb trees—for what is water if not oafish wind? Sometimes I think the wind is cute; then it destroys a town. We don’t know what we’re doing down here or how we arrived. Perhaps the wind carried us. But how do they make electricity out of it? How have my eyeballs grown wings and ascended to the sky? How am I licked by every single person in the world until I disappear?

[tamarshmallows-blog]

A mysterious image and then a poem:

  The Future is Here

  Man burns at a certain degree but I always burned a little slower. When I went into school I left a trail of blackened footprints to my classroom of spelling words, never starred. At the end of the earth we’ll be locked in our own spelling mistakes, our arms around the legs of our mother so she won’t leave, our heads filled with beer, the light receding. What kind of death is reserved for me? The green plastic soldier has his gun up against everything. And what does one do with a gun really? I’ve only held three my entire life. The third I held was the first I used. I was with Rebecca and her father, deep in the woods of       Vermont when she was staying with me in the heap. I shot at a beer can until my hands went numb. And I loved her the whole time. With car accidents and barbiturates. The way she got wasted, knocked her teeth into her lap and told me I loved her too much—what was all that? What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. I have mine in an enormous envelope two feet behind me. My name looks good in gangster font. It makes me want to alight on the thigh of my beloved like a moth because I know all careful grief comes out from behind the thigh and makes a fist at the grey sky above Brooklyn. The destroyed continue into the snow-filled future, shoveling. And love is either perpetually filthy or intermittently lewd. I’m sweeping the entire apartment because it’s mine forever. And that’s valid, too: domestic eroticisms. The way he gets up out of bed before you and puts on clothes and can’t find his keys. All of it, without parents, without children, without roommates. It feels good to get something back. And the whole feels detrimental and complicated and forever stimulating. Which is why we live—and why we send out balloons into the atmosphere with notes tied to them that say Nothing bad can touch this life I haven’t already imagined.

–Originally published in Souvenir, Feb 2013. Art by Geoff McFetridge, Poem by Bianca Stone

[tamarshmallows-blog]

Growing up black in the whitest city in America by Michell S. Jackson

Elegant words from Mitchell S. Jackson about the places we can never return to. This essay reminds me of Dr. Philip Leaf at Johns Hopkins, who speaks urgently about violence in Baltimore and being respectful in the presence of widespread trauma. "What can I say about the whole sad business? My peers and I longed to make a life but couldn’t see the means beyond a sport or selling dope. We craved love but were loved to a dearth if at all. We ached for honor but had an ultra-skewed sense of what that was and how to earn it. Far too many forged atomic toughness, took up arms as panacea, let bullets prove their tensile strength. What that meant for melanin-blessed residents was this: When someone was robbed or stabbed or shot or beat or killed, there was a chance you knew the assailant and the victim and almost a sure bet that you were no more than a third person removed from both, e.g., the time in high school when the point guard on my hoop team, a guy I considered a homeboy, shot my cousin. Our communion was such that in aftermaths our allegiance was often confused. Our intimacies made most of our outcomes feel preordained."

From Growing up black in the whitest city in America, by a writer I am beginning to love. Michell S. Jackson's debut novel The Residue Years was just named as a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction.

[tamarshmallows-blog]

What a wonderful sculpture. The texture of the petals is dope. I love it. "Seated Flower" by Klara Kristalova.

[tamarshmallows-blog]

Cover for Jugend (no. 40, 1897), Ludwik Von Zumbusch (top). Ver Sacrum Kalender 1903, Wilhelm Liszt (bottom). 

Reflections: (1) These pieces are strikingly sexy. I feel like a big part of what makes them sexy is their representations of women in private, ecstatic moments where they don't realize they can be seen. They're unselfconscious.  

(2) When I looked up "Jugend" I learned that by the 1930s, the youth magazine had become a Nazi publication. It was a very strange moment for me because I often do not know the politics of artists when I casually look through their work. I really love the Zumbusch piece and I frantically searched the web for English-language writing about his Nazi connection. Ultimately I learned that he contributed to Jugend about 30 years before it aligned with the Nazis. Jugend was founded by Georg Hirth. It was named after the Jugendstil artistic and literary movement.  I still know very little about him.

This is all to say that I want to teach myself more about the politics of the artists whose work I admire.

-Tamar

"Everything is art, everything is politics" -Ai Weiwei

[tamarshmallows-blog]

Ruffles

Little Brown has reissued I Know What You Did Last Summer.  From the original:  “Julie had been sprawled in his arms, and she had been wearing a pink blouse with ruffles. Everywhere his hands went there were ruffles, and they had been laughing about it, and while they laughed they were kissing.”

From the “21st Century Facelift”: “Aside from that, he didn’t remember much, because he had been making out with Julie most of the time during that ride […] Julie had been sprawled in his arms, and she had been wearing a pink T-shirt that clung to her curves and slid up, revealing her flat stomach.”)

Personally, I’m a big fan of him getting lost in the ruffles.

[tamarshmallows-blog]

+

[tamarshmallows-blog]

#beauty #burlap 

[tamarshmallows-blog]

I saw this photo in the New Yorker over two years ago and glued it into my notebook. Today I found it again spontaneously while googling "Virginia Woolf."

[tamarshmallows-blog]

I am obsessed with this gif. It is dumb and smart. It is plain and mystical. It moves like breath. 

[tamarshmallows-blog]

A photograph about scale and fake garbage

[tamarshmallows-blog]

Most beautiful Mr. Frostee

[tamarshmallows-blog]

Berry in trash

[tamarshmallows-blog]