DFW - FTW

Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid it is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this dark world AND to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
-David Foster Wallace

An Accidental Artwork

This morning I was reading the January issue of  Martha Stewart Living looking for recipe ideas for dinner tonight. I was ruminating on how it might feel to live on a daily basis with any of her stunning decors and flower arrangements. Then I came to "The Root of the Matter", an article on plant sickness. Seeing droopy plants in a Martha Stewart magazine was quite the trip. It was like the feeling of Van Gogh's beautiful dying sunflowers with a sickening antiseptic twist. Unlike a Van Gogh though, where life and death in the sunflowers appear natural together, the contrast between the natural sickness presented in the article and unnatural perfection in the rest of the magazine was kind of jarring.

Between The Elements of Air and Earth

I had a wonderful image that came to me before I fell asleep on Friday that I credit to an exhibit I saw at art murmur earlier in the evening. The concept was of the Earth as a type of element in which humanity is a necessary level for a particular energy transference. The image was of the planet covered in strange looking tentacles that wiggled like a brain made of snakes.
 
It made me think of this softly, subtly mind blowing video by artist Tadashi Moriyama. I love the very Japanese, detailed and dangerously balanced aesthetic. But it also breaks boundaries of color and concept that I don't expect paired with that aesthetic. The paintings alone were just as awesome, each one the only and any universe at the same time:

I remembered this (and it got thrown back to Waiting for Godot) when I saw Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel on Monday. I finally conceptualized something that I hadn't before in Two Headed Boy Pt. 2.

What got me was that God isn't human or rational or loving or judgmental, but rather, god is a place... maybe our planet, or a temple, or a patch of grass. This becomes really crazy cool if you think that Earth is only a place to us, but on a larger scale, it is an object in space which we are a necessary part of. Its like we're the electron cloud of an atom and we see our place as whizzing around the nucleus, but any other perspective would not imagine the nucleus as a place at all.

I feel like I could write for days, paint a hundred paintings, and maybe even compose a symphony and I still wouldn't run out of things to say about this topic.

Blogs are for Recipes!

On Monday I decided to make edibles for my travels. I'm not a big fan of weed, but I'm learning to like it. My main intention was really bringing out the weed flavor in the cookies. I even imagined that if I made them well enough, the flavor of the cookie might influence the type of high. I'm still not sure if that part worked. Nonetheless, its a fun thing to think about, the culinary possibilities of edibles.

Here is a rough estimate of my recipe:

1/2 cup of your nickelodeon slime butter
1/2 cup almond butter
2 cups flour
1/3 cup honey
1 egg
handful of oats
1 tsp cardamom
1-2 tsp lemon juice

1. Mix ingredients together
2. Only cookie-making noobs read directions
3. That said, I didn't put in enough flour so some of the butter melted out. Add more flour if your cookies look too wet!
4. Bake em till they're done

The cookies were enjoyed in and around a hot tub, with and with out clothes, sometimes dancing, in one night. (They weren't too strong.)