When your mom really knows you.

When your mom really knows you, she'll take time out of her day to send you a note like this:
 Uncle Andrew showed us a new wine, that I thought was right up your alley, maybe you saw it already its called If You See Kay, its imported from Italy and some of the stores in the US are not happy with the name especially some liquor stores in NH. 
I told Andrew that's one Linda will go out and buy for her next party. 
Look it up on line there's a whole long story that goes along with the name.


So, of course I looked it up.
 Rachel Tepper for The Huffington Post wrote about it here. She says it better than me, so go there, read it and like it and follow her posts.

 The wine's from this awesome winery in Rutherford, CA. 

 A fellow wine lover says this about it: "It's a very good Cabernet Sauvignon blend (Primitivo and Petite Verdot grapes) from Lazio, Italy that's rich in color and body. 

The bottle looks like this:

Or or closer inspection... like this.

  Hundred Acre says this about the gal on the bottle: 
kay is a creature; she is an embodiment of a lifestyle, a genre, a feeling in your gut. kay is a force of nature, a wanderer.She represents the philosophy of “Wide Open Throttle or don’t bother doing it at all”. She’s not trying to be, she just is. Always uncontrollable, She’s wanted.


And now? I'm thinking of changing my name to Kay.

Better than the pictures, was the look on her face.

I went to the woods to see a friend

I ran down roads lined with scenes like this, as geese flew overhead

She asked me if I missed living in New Hampshire. I said. No. It's too hard to be isolated, to pine for the arrival of a UPS truck, a tree man, a visit from a neighbor. 

( I am a social animal.) 

 After a while, I missed dressing up, wearing high heels, being surrounded by pretty people wearing fashions I coveted. Though, sure, I missed the barn of cows and the raw milk waiting on the other side, the coffee can of cash, fresh cheese. So, I jogged down the road and bought morning eggs from a cooler in a yard, as a rooster greeted me.

 Of course we needed toast with our eggs, so a quick trip in the other direction, yielded fresh country bread, baked three days a week in this oven.

  Sold on the honor system in this unmanned storefront.

 I know that in a few weeks, this beauty will turn ugly. In a few months it will bottle up the people, chain them to woodpiles and fireplaces. The woods will be silent. The geese, long gone.

 And then, I remember, the way a community rallies. 

The way the kindness of your neighbors is what helps you make it through. When the oil runs out. When the ice storm takes your power. When your family is hungry and the driveway needs plowing. A land this pretty needs its ugly parts too. 

And maybe I do miss it. Just a little. 

 Or maybe now, having lived in the ugly for a while, I have forgotten 

how pretty simple can be.

I have fallen in love. Again.

This is the work of Ivan Rabuzin.  It's featured at the Croation Museum of Naïve Art.

I am going to go there and stand in front of these and dream.

For Kari. Who didn't know FRIDA.
Frida Kahlo (born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón;July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) was an internationally popular Mexican painter.She painted using vibrant colors in a style that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico and European influences including Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Many of her works are self-portraits that symbolically articulate her own pain and sexuality.

Insanity is super sanity.

"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."
Jean Dubuffet


I love that. After a week of writing, getting lost in alternate worlds and spending more time in my head puzzle solving, inventing and musing, it can be hard to bring myself back to reality- in whatever form. Though I will never be as bizarre as the artists below, I love them for their creativity, for their imagination, for their bravery. I wish I had more friends like that, people who understand that it's much too easy to be sane, to conform to a societal mold, to dismiss all of God's gifts by putting human restrictions first.
It's the artist who breaks free that intrigues me, that wins my respect.

( From 1942 to 1985, Dubuffet found himself drawn to the art of children and madmen, which he endowed with legitimacy and credibility as Art Brut. This in turn inclined him towards extreme forms and the expressive scrawls and scribbles of graffiti, and prompted him to begin experimenting with materials such as bitumen, sand and plant fibers, which made him one of the earliest and most prominent Matter artists.)

Manoir d'Essor, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark


Jean DUBUFFET, Galeries Lafayette, 1961, gouache sur papier

of course I'll mention some well-known experimental writers: Italo Calvino, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Michael Ondaatje, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Julio Cortázar.
they will change not only the way you read, but the way you think.
As will Robert Olen Butler if your read his book, Severance.
(a sequence of monologues from decapitated heads working on the concept that a head can live for 90 seconds after decapitation and humans speak at a rate of 160 words a second when in a "heightened state of emotion," for a grand total of 240 words for each monologue)

I won't even go into all the other literature devices ( read more here) but I do thank Shannon for introducing me to oulipo. A form that gave me a new exciting place to play, opened up a piece of me that needed exploring.


Musicians - way too many to mention in way too many fields- you know who I mean.. and we may not agree... but each one in their way changed the course of music by going out on a ledge with their ideas, by rocking the norm, by choosing to believe in themselves. And then there are musicians that take chances like this:

I love to discover quirky new music, watch odd, smart independent films and challenge myself every day to see something from someone else's perspective, to ask, "What if..."

With that thought, I'll share what I found this morning- how one guy found music in the ordinary


.
Diego Stocco - Music From Sand from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.


Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.
Loris Malaguzzi

Thrilling Singular Sensation? = Hot Date with Hubby

Escaping the captive confines of computer and office and heading out on the town.
Woo hoo.
Off to shave my legs.

Money and women. The reasons for making most mistakes in life. Looks like you've mixed up both.

That's a quote from the movie, Slumdog Millionaire.

Now go see it.

Hot Men in Tights. My Kind of Circus.

Going to see KOOZA tonight.
As an early Valentine's Day date... any way to avoid the mandatory, lame dinner date on the 14th.

Andrew Wyeth dies at 91

I have had the pleasure of living near and exploring the same landscape Wyeth painted. I think his work is magical. If only I had a few million bucks...


"Art to me, is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes, as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work. That's my art." Andrew Wyeth


I borrowed this from his UK obituary:

The one Wyeth owned by New York's Museum of Modern Art, Christina's World (1948), is the best known American painting of the 20th century. It is perhaps typical of Wyeth's darker side; it shows a crippled woman in her 50s, Christina Olson, dressed in an acid pink dress and crawling through a luminous field towards an 18th century farmhouse on the horizon. The setting is near Cushing, Maine. Christina's World, nearly four foot wide, is tempera on gessoed panel. It was bought for $1,800 and is permanently on view, an incongruous sight in the midst of the avant garde-isms of modern times. "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless," Wyeth said. "Limited physically but by no means spiritually."

And of course, underneath is all, there was a love story- though some say it was fabricated as a publicity stunt.
pishaw this is love.

and who doesn't know this famous painting?