Seven

Fever Ray - Seven from Mute Records on Vimeo.

I've got a friend who I've known since I was seven
We use to talk on the phone, if we have time, if it's the right time

Accompany me by the kitchen sink
We talk about love, we talk about dishwasher tablets, illness
And we dream about heaven

I know it, I think I know it from a hymn
They've said so, it doesn't need more explanation
A box to open up with light and sound
Making you cold
Very cold

I leave home at seven
Under a heavy sky, I ride my bike up, I ride my bike down

November smoke and your toes go numb
A new colour on the Globe
It goes from white to red, a little voice in my head says oh, oh, oh

I know it, I think I know it from a hymn
They've said so, it doesn't need more explanation
A box to open up with light and sound
And if you don't
You're on your own

Alice in Wonderland 1903

Are you excited for the new Alice In Wonderland by Tim Burton?
Here is the original, made over 100 years ago!

'Alice in Wonderland (1903), the first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll’s tale, has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive and premiered at a celebration of the history of the classic story at the British Library.

Made just 37 years after the novel’s publication and eight years after the birth of cinema, the first film adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations. Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. His production secretary May Clark played Alice, and even the family cat and dog got in on the act. The cat played the Cheshire Cat, and the dog would go on to become the first authentic British film star (canine or otherwise) to have his name in the credit of a film when he headlined the pioneering chase film Rescued By Rover in 1905.

Although originally running just 12 minutes, Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time and represented a major investment for the pioneering Hepworth Studios. However, despite its historical importance, it was almost lost for good, and just one incomplete print is known to survive.'

Synopsis by
BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

Erika Somogyi

Erika Somogyi paints wonderous often psychedelic dreamscapes which often collide the human figure with nature; resulting in gorgeous compositions of beauty and love. She has an exhibition coming up at Philadelphia's Space 1026 and a painting featured in the new issue of Beautiful Decay.



We will return together, 2006, 36" x 42", watercolor, gouache on paper




We will return together detail.

Wish You Were Here

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught in the cross fire of childhood and stardom.
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter.
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!

You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision.
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions.
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Maison Moschino

Of dreams, sort of like the Marpole Mansion from the Lady Lady! anime that comes up every now and again with fluffy pink clouds and twinkling stars.



Step into the lobby filled with lace dress lampshades, fabric clouds and sheep.





A floral covered wolf on the bed to endear you in the
"Little Red Riding Hood" room.



The "Forest" room where an owl resides. I prefer barn owls, but at the very least, this one doesn't have quite so threatening eyes...





Lock up your heart!



Sweeeeeeeet !!!!



A little voyage into Maison Moschino's distinctive style, where the ordinary world is painted with a brush of surrealism.

Photo indulgence by
SUSIE

Candy Cakes NYC

I love me a cupcake, and what's better than mini ones (especially for the waist line!). Candy Cakes NYC make the cutest, funnest, most delicious delectables that are bite-sized and the perfect party favor.

All individually decorated with toppings like mini oreo cookies, popcorn, gummy bears, mini snickers, red hots, mike and ikes, and glittery sprinkles. On top of that, Candy Cakes hand delivers by the adorable chef, Linda Silverman, herself, free of charge for anywhere in NYC! And what's better than getting baked goods from your moms? Linda + candy cakes!! Double desert

Quinoa Loaf with Mushrooms and Peas

Serves 8

'Welcome spring--or vegetarian guests--to your table with this delicious main-course recipe that is destined to become a favorite for family and feasts alike. For killer veggie burgers, serve any leftover slices on toasted whole wheat buns with lettuce and spicy mustard.'

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, plus more for greasing
8 ounces button mushrooms, sliced
Salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 (15-ounce) can no-salt-added garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
3/4 cup rolled oats
2 cups cooked quinoa ( Learn to Cook: Quinoa)
1 cup frozen green peas
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley and/or 1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme
10 sundried tomatoes, drained and chopped
1 cup (about 1 onion) chopped red onion

Method:

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease an 8-inch loaf pan with oil; set aside. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms, salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms are golden brown, 6 to 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, put beans, oats and 1/2 cup water into a food processor and pulse until almost smooth. In a large bowl, combine mushrooms, bean mixture, quinoa, peas, parsley, tomatoes, onion, salt and pepper. Transfer mixture to prepared loaf pan, gently pressing down and mounding it in the middle. Bake until firm and golden brown, 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Set aside to let rest for 10 minutes before slicing and serving.

Nutrition:

Per serving (about 6oz/172g-wt.): 170 calories (35 from fat), 4g total fat, 0g saturated fat, 0mg cholesterol, 200mg sodium, 28g total carbohydrate (6g dietary fiber, 4g sugar), 8g protein

Receipe by
WHOLE FOODS MARKET

I accompanied this with my baked fish!

Ingredients:

1 lb Haddock or cod or any white fish
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1/4 tsp. paprika
1/2 tsp. dill
1 tbs. olive oil
1/2 tsp. grated lemon rind
1 tbs. mayonnaise
Vegetable Spray
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

1. Combine bread crumbs, dill, paprika, and lemon rind on a plate. Add in salt and pepper to mixture if using.
2. Add oil and blend mixture with fork until thoroughly combined.
3. Spread a light coating of mayonnaise on both sides of fish.
4. Press fish into crumb mixture to coat both sides.
5. Place on baking sheet that has been pre-sprayed with Vegetable Spray.
6. Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees and bake for 12 minutes or until fish flakes easily with a fork.

Deeeelicious!!!

The Night of the Hunter

Rules of the Game

'In Europe, Japan, and the United States the populations of cities are mostly stable, which means, growing at a manageable rate. The most serious problems are not the ones confronting cities in Asia, Latin America and Africa caused by population explosions, but are a matter of finding ways to use their wealth to achieve the promised ends of advanced industrial civilization: universal social justice, liberation from poverty and drudge labor, opportunities to learn and grow and be creative, the chance of all people to be fully realized individuals and not merely statistics, numbers, cogs in the machinery.'

Extract From 'Rules of the Game'
An Essay By
LEBBUS WOODS

Tilapia with Citrus Basil Sauce

Ingredients:
2 6-8 oz Tilapia fillets
1/2 tablespoon each butter & olive oil, plus 2 teaspoons olive oil
3 cloves minced garlic
Juice of one blood (or regular) orange
Juice of half of a lemon
1 teaspoon each lemon & orange zest
2 tablespoons thinly sliced basil
Salt & pepper
Whole wheat spaghetti
Juice & zest of one lemon
1/4 olive oil
1/2 Parmesan cheese

1. Bring water to a boil and cook spaghetti until al dente. Whisk together olive oil, lemon juice, and Parmesan in a bowl. Set aside (I really like lemon flavor, so if you think that the flavor will be too strong for your tastes, just add less juice or zest).
2. Season fish with salt and pepper. Heat 2 teaspoons olive oil over medium heat, and cook fish until opaque and starts to flake, about 3 minutes per side.
3. Meanwhile, make the sauce. Heat butter and olive oil over medium-low heat. Add garlic and saute for about 30 seconds. Remove from heat and add in citrus juices, zest, and basil. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
4. Toss pasta with the lemon sauce. Serve tilapia over pasta with the citrus-basil sauce.

Discovered by
JESSICA VERDERAME

Subterraneans

Travel: The New

'A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old.
A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values.
Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature.
Our world is a world of things.
What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle,
is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws,
our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable.
We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.'

Quote By
HENRY MILLER

Bleak, Shallow, and Repetitive

Virtual life seems increasingly less worth living.

Now that the thrill of our hyper-connected existence is gone, virtual life has become a depressing daily grind. We toil late into the night, unleashing an endless stream of status updates and tweets in a desperate attempt to keep ourselves relevant, desirable and in. There’s an ominous irony in FarmVille, a Facebook application that enables users to build and maintain a virtual farm. It’s more than a game: It’s an allegory. Virtual existence is feudalism for the modern age. Those who hold the information are kings and those of us toiling in the virtual fields are the servile peasantry: selling our souls for the mind-numbing comfort of an online existence.

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) promise limitless, boundless friendship – a phenomenon that should make us happier than ever. But our optimism over connectivity has gradually morphed into cynicism and resentment. It turns out virtual life is less about connectivity than self-branding. SNSs entice us to divulge and update, stroking our fragile egos with filtered ads that utilize our personal information to reap huge profits, as our hundreds of “friends” perpetually rate our online popularity. Paranoid about how we’ll be perceived, we spend hour after hour trying to avoid the virtual consequences of being deemed uncool. We have more to worry about than our online acquaintances deleting us after we’re tagged in an unflattering photo. Sites like Lamebook, devoted to reposting cliché status updates and socially awkward wall exchanges, humiliate those virtual personas who are unfamiliar with the web’s mores and codes.

Bleak, shallow and repetitive, virtual life seems increasingly less worth living. Users are beginning to realize that it’s not leisure, it’s work that borders on servitude. But there’s a resistance growing among those tired of their virtual subjugation. In response to the electronic world’s rising indignation, virtual suicide sites like seppukoo.com and suicidemachine.org have started a countermovement, provoking users to kill their online selves and reclaim their real lives. These programs assist our virtual deaths by hacking into our profiles, completely annihilating our online personas and leaving no trace of our former selves behind. It’s social revolt for the online age: a mass uprising that will shatter the virtual hierarchy and restore order to our actual lives.

Letter from
ADBUSTERS #88 MAR/APR 2010

The Post-Postmodernism Issue

Maybe a bit of an overreaction?
Something to think about...

Army Dreamers

Army dreamers

Our little army boy
Is coming home from B.F.P.O.
I've a bunch of purple flowers
To decorate a mammy's hero.

Mourning in the aerodrome,
The weather warmer, he is colder.
Four men in uniform
To carry home my little soldier.

"What could he do?
Should have been a rock star."
But he didn't have the money for a guitar.
"What could he do?
Should have been a politician."
But he never had a proper education.
"What could he do?
Should have been a father."
But he never even made it to his twenties.
What a waste --
Army dreamers.
Ooh, what a waste of
Army dreamers.

Tears o'er a tin box.
Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know,
Like a chicken with a fox,
He couldn't win the war with ego.

Give the kid the pick of pips,
And give him all your stripes and ribbons.
Now he's sitting in his hole,
He might as well have buttons and bows.

"What could he do?
Should have been a rock star."
But he didn't have the money for a guitar.
"What could he do?
Should have been a politician."
But he never had a proper education.
"What could he do?
Should have been a father."
But he never even made it to his twenties.
What a waste --
Army dreamers.
Ooh, what a waste of
Army dreamers.
Ooh, what a waste of all that
Army dreamers,
Army dreamers,
Army dreamers, oh...

Understand

"Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve
perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?"

Quote From
HARUKI MURAKAMI

' The wind up Bird : Chronicle '

Intellectual Cowardice

First, what is intellectual cowardice? Secondly, why is it bad? And, thirdly, how does it actually manifest itself? Defining intellectual cowardice is the easiest of these three tasks, and so I will start with that. To say that someone is demonstrating intellectual cowardice is to say that they are simultaneously putting forward a claim as a claim and refusing to stand by it. For example, a scientist could demonstrate intellectual cowardice by presenting an empirical generalization on the basis of data but refusing to stand by that generalization as a good one. Intellectual cowardice is motivated by a fear of being shown to be wrong, hence its name, but at the same time desiring to be recognized for intellectual accomplishments. This leads to the somewhat contradictory practice of putting forward claims in one context, but at the same time adopting the position that the claim is not necessarily worth standing by. This allows them to accept any compliments that come their way as a result of the quality of their claim, but at the same time dismiss any criticism of it as reflecting badly on them, because they refuse to stand by it.



Shall we consider intellectual cowardice as a sin? Obviously the way it has been described makes it seem like being an intellectual coward is a bad thing- but just because we can cast it in a negative light doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be rejected. After all, fear can be appropriate in some contexts. And isn’t what really matters is the claim(s) which are being made? Why should we care about the attitudes adopted towards those claims by the people putting them forward? In a sense this is right, in an ideal world all that matters is the claim(s), and the people behind them are irrelevant; we judge the claims, not the people. But this is not an ideal world, and unfortunately we don’t have an infinite and perfect capacity with which to evaluate claims. Wasting our time with inferior claims can greatly slow down our ability to make progress. More disastrously, is the effect of a claim revealed to be flawed, which leads people to reject similar claims. That can be a real problem if some of those similar claims are far superior to the flawed claim.



It is worrying about being wrong that makes us explore all the consequences of our claims and how they stand up in comparison to variations on them, to leave none of their details unexamined, so that they can be the best claims that we can make when we actually put them forward. Someone who isn’t worried about being in error isn’t bound by this constraint. Instead, they are free to put forward whatever claims satisfy their pragmatic desires, which are usually for intellectual recognition. This results in pandering to popular ideas, constructing claims so that they will be maximally acceptable to the sensibilities of those who will judge them, or in constructing claims purely to be controversial, so that those claims will receive wider attention simply because so many will wish to object to them. Essentially, neither process results in the best possible claim(s).



However, I doubt that if we confronted someone who was being an intellectual coward about ethics in this way, that they would admit it. Perhaps they might argue that their ethical claims are still relevant because many people share the same intuitions as they do, and that in some way the claims they are making are thus “right” for a large number of people. But the entire edifice rests of the idea that somehow deduction from intuitions to specific ethical claims, or the coherence of ethical beliefs, matters. That, I believe, is an assumption that is completely without motivation given the belief that there is no absolute “right” answer when it comes to ethics. If we believe that there is a right answer then clearly coherence and incoherence matter because of true preservation and entailment; incoherence implies that some of the claims involved must be in error, possibly, the very claim that we are trying to establish, and so in striving for the truth we attempt to eliminate incoherence. But when truth doesn’t matter incoherence has no ill-effects. Certainly there are contradictions buried within many religious belief systems (the problem of evil, for example), and even if those contradictions can be somehow ironed out by dedicated theologians it is clear that most of the religious approach matters naively, such that their beliefs contain actual contradictions. Clearly, these contradictions do them no harm.



Of course, it is true that from contradictions anything can be derived, and thus that we cannot entertain a contradiction when we are attempting to derive a truth. But this isn’t a problem if there aren’t absolute truths in ethics, because we don’t attempt to derive truths from premises that aren’t themselves believed to be true. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping them from stomping their foot and simply insisting that coherence is required, even if nothing necessitates that coherence. But if nothing necessitates that coherence then it is simply an opinion, and if they wish to be intellectually honest they should preface their claims in ethics with a statement noting that they proceed on the basis of coherence despite the fact that they have no reason for doing so besides personal preference. Obviously doing this would result in people not really taking their claims seriously, but the omission of such a disclaimer is intellectually dishonest, since caring about coherence strongly implies the belief that claims can be true or false in this domain without it. And hopefully pointing out that fact would indicate to those who are intellectual cowards in this way that they are doing something wrong, even if it doesn’t exactly reveal the nature of the error.

Inspiration

Contemplation of the actions
of others always seems to inspire and
provoke thought.

You get Silent the Smarter you get, or so it seems...

Relics

"A rich indetermination gives them, by means of semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: “I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.” People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, sym-bolize and orient walkers’ steps: name that have ceased precisely to be “proper”."

Quote By
MICHAEL DE CERTEAU

'Walking In the City'

Painting By
ERIKA SOMOGYI

The Third And The Seventh

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

' A piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.'

Crossing the boarders of what is real and what is unreal, a truly amazing video.

Video By
ALEX ROMAN

Eyes

'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.'

Quote By
MARCEL PROUST