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.)

A Sin for Dante's Inferno

Among those who practice Black Magic, The Phenomenologists

Amidst a dying forest we came upon a workshop

In the center was a metal table covered with tools

And just in reach of all, a hacked stump of wood lay atop.

Men crowded round, and occasionally would drop a knife

Or hammer to grab at their hair-- or seizing on the brink

Of discovery they froze, slavering to taste of life.

They moved together, waves of anxiety rolling through

Like an ocean eternally crashing against the shore

Each man working till the appeasing day might rise anew.

But that honey colored sun, they were never blessed to see.

One man broke away from the group and wandered towards us,

He seemed to be trying to tear the air from his body.

He mumbled “being-towards-life… the meaning of not-being”

His face lit and he shouted, “That being for whom being

Is no longer a concern for it.” Then broke off mumbling,

“No, that is present-at-hand, but, it is, it must be so.”

At that, this great thinker I recognized as Heidegger

He noticed the sign in my face and let his story go.

“You must be curious to know: I lived to grasp of death.

I found and greedily abused, the bliss of non-existence

Now I yearn only for what I missed in that sweet life’s breath

Knowing not my soul would endure thereafter, I lit upon anxiety,

And the emptiness that freed me to choose

A meaning of my design. God was a concept so petty.

We learned to resist the one and the calm of his embrace

And in its stead sought the thrill of self-slaved potential

It was a true Pyrrhic victory, how my heart would race,

 When it heard the cries of my tortured soul.” With that he turned,

Though drawn to work by sudden inspiration. I wondered

At this and questioned my master, this answer he returned:

“They long to feel of peace, the truth of life they shunned as such.

But their work they never can complete, for all equipment

Breaks to unleash that anxiety cursed to follow their touch.

As they taught ‘being-in-the-world,’ here their souls enact

To suffer what they thought, and the air sticks to their bodies

As though there was no freedom of the spirit from the fact.”

It sometimes seems that they are freed, swimming in their strife, then

A thickened cry rises, as the air turns like an angry sea

And they begin to suffocate from that which gave them life.

“Each man believes what he seeks is real, further, better

Than the others, yet sees their tasks as futile as they truly are.”

“Is that not a consolation?” I put to my master.

“Not at all,” he replied, “If they knew their shared state,

Either vain or fruitful, they might find comfort in common good

Rather than the silent cage of loneliness breeding hate.”