Mystery on Fifth Avenue

This article from the NY Times is so cool. I would have killed to live in this apartment as a kid.

"They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they appear to be: an enormous ’20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post), gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic woods with unpronounceable names.

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino."

analemma

This is what it looks like if you take a picture of the sun every day at the same time for a year.

Joy

Speaking of eggs...

I just read that each person in China eats 38 pounds of eggs per year.

Paul Driesser - The Killing of An Egg

They used to show this on Nickelodeon between shows and I can't tell you how it unsettled me. Ah, and all of my traumatic childhood memories come flooding back.

Consciousness - David Lynch

David Lynch: Ideas come from consciousness because ideas are things. Consciousness turns itself into things. So the whole cosmos is vibrating consciousness. There are things that cinema can do that can catch an abstraction and it can say something that can't be said any other way, or it could be said with words but it would take a poet. Cinema can do abstractions, but I don't think cinema can make you transcend. I think cinema could get you into deeper and deeper levels, theoretically I guess it could. It can say deeper and abstract things and give indications of hidden things. It's a magical medium, but this thing of consciousness... The best way to know what it is is to pretend that you didn't have it. And if you didn't have consciousness, you wouldn't exist. Or if you did exist, you wouldn't know it. It's the "I am" ness. It's the ageless thing we talk to. It's awareness and it's the thing. Some people think, "I think, therefore I am", that the brain produces consciousness. But it's the other way round; consciousness produces the brain - it produces a fish, it produces a tree, from the subtlest it just keeps coming out. It just makes things.

Synchronicity - David Lynch

David Lynch: It is true that Laura Dern came along and started this. She was walking down the sidewalk in front of my house and smiling as she approached. I hadn't seen her in a long time. She came and announced that she was my new neighbour. And this made us both very happy. And then she said, "David, we gotta do something again some time." And it struck me and I said, "Yes, we do. Maybe I'll write something." And that meeting there triggered a thing, a desire to write something. And desire is like a bait, it can bring things in. And lo and behold, it started bringing things in.

Where the title came from is another story. Later, in the middle of shooting, about a third through, she was telling me that her husband was from the Inland Empire, which is an area east of LA that encompasses many towns. She went on talking but my mind stuck on those words. I'd heard them before but now they had a new meaning and I stopped her and I said, "That's the title of this film." Then, at the same time almost, my brother who was up in Montana, cleaning the basement of my parents' log cabin, discovered this old scrapbook that had fallen behind a chest of drawers. He dusted it off and found that it was my scrapbook from when I lived in Spokane, Washington, aged five. He sent it to me. I get this, I open it up and the first picture is an aerial view of Spokane and underneath it says, "Inland Empire." So I had the most beautiful feeling of a correct title.

The Stockholm subway system

It's in a cave.

On writing

"I think of it as a bad habit. In my childhood, stories were respected and revered. I understood from my teachers that there was nothing better you could do than write a story, paint a painting, play a musical instrument. And then I grew up into a world where none of that matters. A world of a million TV channels and terrible movies and music."

Julie Hecht in The Believer.

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.