Meditation on Beauty

Teebs’ “While You Doooo”, which I decided a while ago is the most beautiful song in the world.

I’d watch this with “While You Doooo”

“Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.”

~Stendhal

So

if we assume nature promises beauty,

and beauty promises happiness,

then by the transitive property,

nature promises happiness.

This means happiness is all around us,

now it’s only a matter of looking at it like that.

Spectacular photos by Jane Thomas:

The focus of this meditation is that sometimes I wonder if it can be detrimental to love beauty too much, to indulge in it excessively, to search for beauty in things that may not be beautiful at all…is this my optimism, naivety, or sheer ignorance?

New works by my favorite Mars1:

For starters, I wonder what would happen if you just avoided things that you didn’t find beautiful. For me, that would be horror movies (also known as DEATH), the news, economics, anything useful in the “real world”, etc. I might just lose sight of reality, in my search for beauty, and forget that a darkness even exists.

I still can’t tell whether or not this Utopia is where one would want to be though…

For the most part, I’m not trying to lose sight of reality, and after all, I’m not even sure if beauty can exist without darkness.

It only seems logical that you need to have both, in order to know that either exists. The recognition of the existence of darkness allows us to appreciate when life shows us something truly brilliant.

In my opinion, the mere possibility that we will all eventually succumb to an eternal darkness
should motivate people to save their lives only for what is beautiful, while we still have light to illuminate the world’s magnificent complexities.
Focusing on anything else would simply be a waste of time.

What I’ve concluded just might be that as long as we are aware of the presence of darkness, we should be able to see beauty even more, everywhere, in anything and everything that signifies LIFE. It’s not ignorance. It’s okay.

Richard Gray

On a lighter note, my birthday is coming up on December 6th, and for dinner we’re going out to a Mexican place like last year. We’ve decided each roommate will buy me a margarita (right guys?)
The reason I want to go to a Mexican dinner is because of the lack of Mexican food in Canada as a whole. No Taco Bell, no Chipotle, no one to practice Spanish with. It’s one of the few parts of America I truly miss, and I’m sure other Americans would be upset if queso and salsa disappeared from their lives too:

I spend too much time cracking up at pictures online.

There’s a neighborhood cat that likes to meow outside my windowsill until I open the back door for him. When I let him in from the cold, all he wants to do is cuddle. He sometimes wanders to other parts of the house, but when I put dubstep on, he comes back. Perfect man? Just might have to do for now.

Ode to the Misfits

Glasser- Tremel (Jamie XX remix)

One time, my roommate from Bordeaux told me

“Si te existe pas, on pourrait pas t'invente.”

This French expression roughly means,

”If you didn't exist, we couldn't possibly have invented you.”

With the exception of my friend Ryan, who told me

that when he’s around me he see lots of colors,

whatever that means,

that’s the best compliment I’ve ever received!

These paintings are quite like me, then, since they are

full of color

no distinct image

floating between forms

(neither liquid nor solid)

and what matters is the big idea.

I insist

we’re all creating ourselves as masterpieces.

Little by little, our brush guides us

as we play with paint, just

searching searching searching

for something to hold onto,

to call our own story,

to show what’s possible…

It doesn’t matter whether or not

“anyone could do it”.

It’s the fact that you did.

(don’t worry about me, I’m just some text floating between two beautiful works of art)

(art by Katrina Schaman, Keith Tyson and Casey Weldon)

My masterpiece will definitely be unlike anyone else’s. After all, lately I’ve been thinking about how I truly do not fit in any category (and I don’t know if anyone does). My canvas still has lots of room for growth and direction, though. I’m already starting to plan.

For example, when I grow up, I’m going to own an art gallery. When I get home from work at night, and when I want somewhere to write, I’m going to have a hideaway  in my backyard that looks like this:

and inside it’s going to look like this:

with a house cat that looks like this:

A bright future, for sure.

 
         

On that same note, I recently discovered another blogger in Montreal who shares my optimism. If you like my writing, you might like his too. Here is an excerpt from his blog, Vanities Views, about our most powerful accessory, the smile:
“…i beg you to look into the eyes of a child; life's true performing poets or
go outside and see for yourself
the symmetry of a butterflies wings, the scent of a women, the fragility of a flower, a lovers tender kiss, the intricacies of friendships, the purity of a newborns palms, the stories found in wrinkles, the gentle breeze in the desert
and maybe i've been to burning man too many times
or maybe i have to much faith in strangers
but i keep looking and hoping that kindness and happiness is not yet endangered
because i think if everyone single person on this earth smiled at the same time and globally we shared a moment of true happiness
Evil would be washed away .a global baptism true adhesiveness
but lets start today even if your life is a little grey and your in dismay or a victim of foul play just curve your lips and your already halfway
smiles are the weapons of your soul weapons of mass construction
and lets begin our happiness seduction…”




  
You heard the man. Let’s begin…

It all starts by realizing that we are all misfits,














no one is either this or that,

so we should smile at them for being the masterpieces they are.

the fridge door was open the whole time I was writing this

Dillon Francis’ I.D.G.A.F.O.S.

“A wise man once defined the purpose of art as ‘making the phenomenon strange.’ Things can become so familiar that we no longer perceive them at all. Art, however, can take the sound of the sea, the intonation of a voice, the texture of a fabric, the design of a face, the play of light upon a landscape, and wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop of existence and force them into the foreground of consideration.”
~James Carey

This statement marks my sympathy for the dinosaurs,

but guess what!

I was a pirate for Halloween. 3 times. (what kind of rule is it that you have to dress as something new each night, especially if yarr gettin’ parrrticularrrly into yarrr character?)

(more to be found here http://www.flixya.com/blog/3882413/Great-pumpkin-craving-art)

also appropriate for Halloween:

Giant Clown Terrorizes Portland

you were a cell for a half hour.

that’s right!

one cell, a half hour.

then you grew so many complexities

and now you’re sitting on the bus

wondering just how you got so complicated

when it seems like all the strangers just seem to have appeared

at that age, as if they’d been that way forever,

and that’s how you’ll remember them,

forever.

did you know that
everyone you’ve seen in your dreams you’ve seen in real life?

and that
Crayola's senior crayon maker, Emerson Moser, who molded a record-breaking 1.4 billion crayons in his 37-year career, announced upon his retirement that he was color blind?

hey I’ve been wondering,
when you’re dreaming and someone talks to you, are you really just talking to yourself?

Cultural Waste

Bassnectar’s Dorfex Bos. Coming to Montreal November 25!!!

I am the gypsy of cultural waste
I find things that people have made
for no straight survival purpose
whatsoever.
scavengers like me
find these artifacts
and recycle them
and give them new context
new life
new meaning.
I call these cultural waste
not because they waste time or space
or because they lack value,
but because these important commentaries
build up like residue
on the outer edges of society,
unappreciated,
while the artists and writers move forward
leaving behind a trail of what
once
mattered.



(featured artist Christian Hidaka)








Linda Besemer:

The Ninja Turtles are a great example of cultural waste. They’re still around some places, making appearances in random art like this and t-shirts and what not. One day, your Ninja Turtles lunch box will be worth a fortune.

Rachel Sumpter:

Shirley Kaneda:

Tangyau Hoong:



More cultural waste, including:

A random animated video that someone probably spent a lot of time on but will probably not be watched much--

BOB from Jacob Frey on Vimeo.

A hilarious article about the evolution of emo to Skrillex featured in McGill’s Leacocks magazine:
http://leacocks.com/FeaturesBlog/2011/10/my-name-is-skrillex/

One of Jeremy Dower’s creations with no reason other than to spook/trip you out:

Death Koala from Jeremy Dower on Vimeo.

Rediscovered photos of Barack Obama as a college student, smoking cigarettes, shockingly…hipster?:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1866765_1815171,00.html



A book called Rave Culture and Religion:
“The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture, and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at geographic locations as diverse as Goa, India, and Nevada's Burning Man festival. Contributors examine raving as a new religious or revitalization movement; a powerful locus of sacrifice and transgression; a lived bodily experience; a practice comparable with world entheogenic rituals; and as evidencing a new Orientalism. Rave Culture and Religion will be essential reading for advanced students and academics in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and religious studies.”
--it’s funny, because I often think the same things about raving.


more Tanyou Hoong:

My new apartment is awesome. You should come visit. I have some pictures for  you:

Yep. Only in my apartment does it look like this,

all the time.