woodland dreams

if anyone would like to buy me a present anytime soon, i think i'd like something from this website please.

farm or woodland section. not interested in the trees or caves though.

i mean, just look at these!

summer reading

i'd like to read a tonne of books this summer. i'm trying.

i just finished this one...and it was the best of the three or so books i have read since school ended.
it's one of those books that i love so so so much that i'd really rather not share it but keep it locked away just as a secret for me to know about and yet it is just too delightful to do such a thing.

so, i invite you all to read The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman.

This is the kind of book i aspire to create someday.

and this is one of my favourite pages...but there are so many...



anybody else have some really good, inspiring books to recommend?

the best way to spend summer solstice?

...contra dancing under the moon, with a group of Quebecois seniors, on the top of Mont Royal.

life's nice.

splish splash

my first, messy foray into Diana-land.

The Aardvark Manifesto

I can subscribe to this. I guess I already do.
from here.

short lessons in love

I love: summer in montreal
I sit: on my balcony, in every park, on harbour docks
I drink: hendricks gin with blackberries and strawberries
I eat: mangoes. peel off the skin and take a bite. share.
I read: all the books and drawn and quarterly, and then I buy just one
I bike: everywhere. new basket, broken fender, broken bell. I make noise, I'm not sly.
I listen to: Tallest Man, Daniel, Fred & Julie, Andrew Bird, Wilco, BSS, Hoof and the Heel
I dance: in the streets, in the parks after midnight
I steal: lilacs and cherry blossoms

i guess marc johns says it best.

gah.


via Laura, via Jeff'm, from here

procrastination/escapism has reached a new low: watching a kid sit on the edge of the fountain, dangling his legs, on the charlottetown live eye.
I gotta get back to work.

"Anyone can do this assignment, you don't need any special yogi certification."

I have never laughed so genuinely nor been so enamoured with an essay topic.
I'm writing about Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More for an Art History paper and I'm finding it surprisingly...pleasant. How often, in my four years in university, have I used such a word to describe a paper? The instances are very few.

I could have just plagiarized myself and handed in an old essay on any other dull topic, about the YBAs or something. It's not like the class was anything important; it was a 300-level contemporary art class that I mostly skipped out of boredom. But I guess there was some desire to end my undergraduate career with four essays that really interested me. So I chose LTLYM as my subject and I just grinned my way through an entire evening of research.

This is my second last essay. My last one will be on Asterios Polyp, a masterpiece of a comic book, which I suggest you read. Borrow my copy. I'm pretty excited to write that one too.
It's just a matter of time. Two ten pagers in uh, four days? eep.

take out your pencils, it's (take-home) exam time

This I don't mind writing about:

(Go to Works --->Video --->King. Watch. Then watch Queen. Then, inspired, perform your own version.)

http://www.candicebreitz.net

This, I do:

Gross.
1 essay done, take home exam due tomorrow, 1 essay half-done, then another exam, two more essays. Then figure out what to do with my life. I think I've crossed off "Explore Biocybernetics in art" from that list of potential options, after dealing with those babies up there. Ick.

tell me I don't strike you as the ignorant hipster type...

...cause I just got scouted to be an "employee" of American Apparel and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

it's an extremely shallow process, in which they take your picture and get your e-mail address so they can invite you in for a "training session".
I wonder what goes on there?

-How to look bored and ironic on the job?
-How to colour-coordinate neons?
-How to get away with wearing sunglasses inside, at work?
-How to convince customers that a 40 dollar strip-of-cotton "scarf" made by illegal immigrants in LA is JUST the thing they need?

yeah, probably.


(also: they don't even ask you if you speak french! cause it's not even necessary! which is completely illegal in quebec, where a customer is supposed to be addressed in french first!)

return

(via ffffound!)

my bicycle bell is loose.
it rings inadvertently whenever I cycle over bumps and potholes.
My street is especially bumpy, and quite busy. I bike down it during the day and everyone thinks I am ringing to get their attention. They turn their heads as I bike by.

The worst part is when it's friday night, the beginning of Shabbat, and the Hasidic Jews are solemnly walking home from shul...one long line of black hats and long cloaks and there I go, ringing like I'm the midnight ice cream truck of Outremont.

beautiful losers

“In Montreal the cafes, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, ‘The winter has not killed us again!’ Spring comes into Quebec from Japan, and like a prewar Crackerjack prize it breaks the first day because we play too hard with it. Spring comes into Montreal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and everyone has to sleep with a foreigner, and suddenly the house lights flare and it’s summer, but we don’t mind because spring is really a little flashy for our taste, a little effeminate, like the furs of Hollywood lavatories. Spring is an exotic import, like rubber love equipment from Hong Kong, we only want it for a special afternoon, and vote tariffs tomorrow if necessary.”

-Leonard Cohen

happy days.

Free lentil soup and bread from the friendly French man at my neighbourhood deli makes me content with the world.

Does this happen in other places, that are not Montreal?
Sometimes I wonder.