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Willem talking about trying to fail. 

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I’ll just pin this here

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My queen

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“Oh, for sure. I mean, I don’t really understand what I’ve said until I’ve written it. I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written it down, or found another piece of writing that can articulate it. So I feel, again, that we’re in this extremely privileged position of our work being that very thing which is not knowing. Our work as artists is exploring.”

“What I am trying to do for myself, always, is honor the delicacy of complication—the idea that people are not really one thing or the other, that there is this amalgamation of all sorts of nerve endings and truths.”

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Whew. (I’d like to think this applies to corporate writing too, at least if the itching sort of anxiety when writing is any mark of craft)

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“[When writing], I try to have a good relationship with procrastination instead of just thinking “that’s bad, don’t do that.” I see it as warming up or working up an appetite. As long as I’m doing things that are restorative (like being outside) or tactile (like chores) or stimulating (like reading), and there is space for an idea to come into my mind and I’m not staring at a screen for too long (since writing entails staring at a screen for a really long time)—then it’s necessary. Especially to break up the task of writing about your own life, which can make me feel detached from reality and solipsistic.”

And

“Acting has taught me how to surrender control when I am writing. Even if I’m alone, I feel as though there is some kind of force that is, to some extent, out of my control and is going to surprise me. Stephen Shore, I believe, said when you take a photo, you’re not trying to construct anything. The photo already exists and you’re just trying to reveal it.”

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I listen to Talk Talk because it feels like a mediation in presence. It seems that was at least somewhat the intention of Mark Hollis as he entered the studio, where his goal was to capture an attitude in the improvised recordings above any sort of scripted performance. “Drums were miked far from the kit, sounds were allowed to echo through the studio space, mistakes were an integral part of the performance, and the album’s dynamics are entirely genuine, the live feel of a jazz recording combined with the abrasive qualities of rock and the instrumentation of classical music,” Wallace writes here.

A few highlights from the piece. Silence is key. Hollis says he’d rather hear one note than two, and silence than one. Negative space is nature’s tool that Hollis uses to engineer noises that ring familiar but have a ghostly effect, like hearing words your lover has said repeated from the mouth of a child. No matter what the content is, the effect will be chilling.

This life makes it so much easier to let nothingness speak than to fill the void with sound. It is so much easier to do nothing than it is to create something, no matter what it is. Even if it is true that we are put on earth to create, it’s important to remember that simply creating something is an act of bending the will of nature. But once you start creating something, there’s a choice at every step, an opportunity to divert from a path at every intersection. So when songs come out the way they do, it is by choice—by either the intellect or the one’s artist beneath the surface, living in the world of instinct—that it sounds the way it does. Talk Talk’s music is a study in this balance between choice and instinct. As Tom Fleming of Wild Beasts says: “As I listen to it, I more and more get the sense that the whole album is a mutation of a single idea; that a song is an uncertain thing. I could never imagine the album to be carefully rehearsed and reproduced. Rather, it's the sound of never-ending process. Not being a progression towards an ultimate end, the whole point is in the doing, of the present moment. Songs begin in silence, and then cut off mid-sentence, guitars and pianos are played VERY slowly and deliberately, Mark Hollis' voice is almost buried behind the (very quiet) instruments.”

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This was good for my soul. In a few ways.

I think the biggest is the importance of reclaiming the beliefs that you grew up with. When something is spoken in the name of God, it reaches down to our cellular level to really shape us, especially when we’re children. Some of the beliefs that shaped up is right and some wrong. But the work of exploring those beliefs and weeding your garden is such beautiful work. Besides talking about this idea, Pete and Nadia rope their lasso around the idea that the Bible is both and neitber literally true—the Bible is not about factuality, it’s about showing you a metaphor that’s truer than true.

I also love the fleshiness and sensuality of the Bible they talk about. Ugh, so good.

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A beautiful conversation about the role of teachers and how books can be teachers too. “Read, read, read, and read some more, and then write.” Thank you, Hilton.

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Ugh. I think having heroes is one of the only thing I know to be true always. And not only is Tavi my motherfucking hero, but I think she first espoused the idea of believing in obsession, which I hold most dear now.

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I think I’m sunsetting my finsta. I relate a lot to this article. But in addition to displaying instead of expressing my pain, I also often feel like finsta is a cheap way to hear intimate details about the life of someone I don’t know as well as I want to.

Because finsta is really just a way for me to hear the intimate details of a person’s life without actually getting to engage with them, I think it’d be healthier for me to work a little harder and hear from them. Finsta doesn’t create the conversation I want and instead makes me feel like a voyeur peering in with none of the emotional work a relationship requires. Again, a platform isn’t inherently healthy or unhealthy. It’s all about how you use them.

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It's that scene in The Master when Joaquin drives into the landscape and doesn't stop. When his laugh wears as thin as his lips and into something just shy of a frown.

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A friend. Michael made me want to write a letter to my family every month. ("As the air conditioner under my desk loves to remind me, summer is in full swing.") He told me that reading 40 percent of the Summa Theologicae was "wildly impressive." Here he writes one of the biggest lessons that I hold most dear—"Because liturgical practices are performed not for some external end, but simply for the good of the practice itself, they remind us that human activity is inherently meaningful, that our lives have value over and above the values we choose to assign to them."

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William Holman Hunt’s painting “The Light of the World.” In my favorite New Yorker article, Tobias Wolff talks about hating this painting so much that it dissuaded him from having faith. But good art? That can change your beliefs in a second. To him, TS Eliot was a vision of beauty that helped him see another world. Full piece here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/09/winter-light

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Part of the 9-eyes.com series by Jon Rafman. Catches stills from Google Earth. Have been strangely enchanted by this for awhile now.