“Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.”
— Alan Cohen
(Source: uni-tea)
October 10, 2012, 7:25am Comments
“Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.”
- Sam Harris
“The central paradox of love: almost everything we do is to protect us from pain, but most of the pain we feel comes from this protective behaviour.”
- Andrew G Marshall
September 27, 2012, 7:57pm Comments
Stanford neuroscientists host the world’s first love competition, asking contestants between the ages of 10 and 75 to spend 5 minutes in an fMRI machine thinking deeply about the person they love. The results are certain to bring a tear to your eye.
Complementary reading: 5 essential books on the psychology of love.
this is beautiful
March 09, 2012, 4:08pm Comments
In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.
Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote the following beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright.
June 19, 1937
Dear Cedric,
A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.
Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.
Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.
I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.
Ansel
February 15, 2012, 12:17am Comments
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.”
— Virginia Woolf, Montaigne. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
January 03, 2012, 9:19am Comments
Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:
“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.
So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”
We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.
And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.
It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
oops now i’m crying
gilda gilda gilda gilda
how people show you they love you.
beautiful (in tears)
January 01, 2012, 11:15am Comments
Kate Bush - The Fog (featuring her father Dr. Bush on guest vocals and Nigel Kennedy on violin, from The Sensual World, 1989)
“It’s about trying to grow up. Growing up for most people is just trying to stop escaping, looking at things inside yourself rather than outside. But I’m not sure if people ever grow up properly. It’s a continual process, growing in a positive sense.
It’s meant to be the idea of a big expanse of water, and being in a relationship now and flashing back to being a child being taught how to swim, and using these two situations as the idea of learning to let go. When I was a child, my father used to take me out into the water, and he’d hold me by my hands and then let go and say “OK, now come on, you swim to me.” As he’d say this, he’d be walking backwards so the gap would be getting bigger and bigger, and then I’d go [Splutters]. I thought that was such an interesting situation where you’re scared because you think you’re going to drown, but you know you won’t because your father won’t let you drown, and the same for him, he’s kind of letting go, he’s letting the child be alone in this situation. Everyone’s learning and hopefully growing and the idea that the relationship is to be in this again, back there swimming and being taught to swim, but not by your father but by your partner, and the idea that it’s OK because you are grown up now so you don’t have to be frightened, because all you have to do is put your feet down and the bottom’s there, the water isn’t so deep that you’ll drown. You put your feet down, you can stand up and it’s only waist height. Look! What’s the problem, what are you worried about?
Again, I think it’s such a human condition, where we actually, a lot of the time, have such fear of things actually there’s no need to be frightened of at all. It’s all in our heads, this big kind of trap - you know, that actually it’s not always as terrifying as we think. Again, you know, it’s meant to be saying “OK, so it can be rough but there must be a way out - it’s all right!’ [Laughs]
I thought it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that’s a part of real love, don’t you think, the letting go?” - Kate Bush
“You see, I’m all grown up now.”
He said,
“Just put your feet down child,
‘Cause you’re all grown up now.”
Just like a photograph,
I pick you up.
Just like a station on the radio,
I pick you up.
Just like a face in the crowd,
I pick you up.
Just like a feeling that you’re sending out,
I pick it up.
But I can’t let you go.
If I let you go,
You slip into the fog…
This love was big enough for the both of us.
This love of yours was big enough to be frightened of.
It’s deep and dark, like the water was,
The day I learned to swim.
He said,
“Just put your feet down, child.
“Just put your feet down child,
The water is only waist high.
I’ll let go of you gently,
Then you can swim to me.”
Is this love big enough to watch over me?
Big enough to let go of me
Without hurting me,
Like the day I learned to swim?
“‘Cause you’re all grown up now.
Just put your feet down, child,
The water is only waist high.
I’ll let go of you gently,
Then you can swim to me.”
October 31, 2011, 12:10pm Comments
MARIANNE: I was standing in the shop with my basket waiting to pick up bottled water and milk. And he is standing in the door way with the sun behind him. And then you don’t see the face, you just see the contours. And so I hear his voice, saying: ”Would you like to join us, we’re sitting outside?”
And I reply thank you, and I finish my shopping. Then I go outside. And I sit down at this table where there were 3-4 people sitting, who lived in Hydra at the time.
INTERVIEWER: Can you remember what he looked like?
MARIANNE: He was wearing khaki trousers, which were a shade more green. And also he had his beloved… what we in the old days called tennis shoes. And he also always wore shirts with rolled up sleeves. In addition he had a beautiful little sixpence cap.
What I didn’t know when I met him was that he knew everything about what had happened before I returned. Because after all he had been there, and realised what was going on. So I think that already when he saw me he had enormous compassion for me and my child. But I remember well that when my eyes met his eyes I felt it throughout my body. You know what that is. Drums her fingers It is utterly incredible.
(via)
September 07, 2011, 1:42pm Comments
Leonard Cohen wrote this song about a woman named Marianne Jensen that he lived with throughout the 1960s. He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. This song always gets to me, every goddamn verse and the chorus, especially in this live version because everyone joins along. In this video he becomes too overwhelmed by the song and leaves the stage.
so long, Marianne, it’s time that we began
to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.This is beautiful.
September 07, 2011, 12:41pm Comments
John Maus - Hey Moon (from We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves)
June 07, 2011, 1:14am Comments
Happy 75th to Harold Budd (b. May 24, 1936) - American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet…
Harold Budd & Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois: Foreshadowed - from The Pearl, 1984
(via kalanlar)
ALL TIME HALL OF FAME!!!
May 24, 2011, 10:29pm Comments
Henri Cartier-Bresson Isabelle Huppert, Paris 1994
April 28, 2011, 11:32am Comments
!!!
`The score for Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS was recorded on something called an ANS synthesizer, which somehow etched sound waves onto glass discs, which would then be used to reproduce the sound. Download for free via Gizmodo.’ (via Criterion Collection)
Coil also released an album made with the ANS synthesizer, read more and listen here.
April 20, 2011, 11:09pm Comments
