…:::jamieleigh:::…

puke.

A new book has been written/illustrated for the purpose of helping little girls understand why mommy got a nip/tuck. I’m not sure what offends me more: the message behind the story or the trashy illustrations… ok, it’s the message.

This book glosses over an important and dangerous decision of plastic surgery and placates the child’s curiosity with fluffy non-answers. It does not explain to the child why mommy is cutting up her nose, stomach, and breasts- creating a dangerous desensitivity to a potentially fatal surgery.

If a parent decides to go under the knife and a child wants to know why, would it not be better to be truthful and honest (at an age-appropriate level) about the realities of plastic surgery?

In the illustration below the little girl tells her mommy that she is “already the prettiest mommy in the whole wide world” yet mommy’s only response is to continue with the surgery- this enforces to the little girl that her view of beauty is WRONG and that she must conform to and accept what other people’s (magazines, advertisements, celebrities, plastic surgeons) view of beauty is.

Yuck. You can check out more of the nastiness here.

You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold meddals in your honour,
Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1950

Last night in my visual arts class we had a one hour lecture on drawing, etc. My prof showed a couple quick drawings and tried to describe the difference between utilitarian and expressive drawings… I’m still a little confused about that one, so I’ll do some more research.

Until then, I had to post about one artist that really made an impact on me; William Kentridge. We saw a film about how he creates charcoal animations, and it was inspiring to say the least. He starts with a charcoal drawing, takes a photo, then makes additions/subtractions to that same drawing and takes another shot. When he erases an image it leaves an impression or trace of the past drawings on the page which seem to haunt and remind of the past….. interesting how sometimes life is/is not like that. Reminds me of a quote from one of the Hannibal movies: “Scars… have the power to remind us that the past was real.”

Needless to say I am enjoying class so much this summer :)

“A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.”

- John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

My first class of the semester was Slavic studies 307: Literature and Film in Eastern Europe. The class started out with heavy material and I do not think it will get any lighter. Our focus is on Polish literature and film, with the holocaust as a main theme. Today we watched one film and discussed a poem.

“The Passenger” is an unfinished film directed by Andrzej Munk; the central theme seems to be about perspective and memory; it is haunting how a German SS woman remembers a story of one woman in Auschwitz. The film leaves many unanswered questions, but I am not too sure if it is to do with its unfinished state or not.

The poem is called “Dedication” and was written by Czeslaw Milosz. I think that it speaks volumes of the sensitivity of reduced language and the role of literature in the wake of something horrible.

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

Czeslaw Milos, Warsaw 1945

i love this band.

every time that i think they can’t be more original, they come out and do something else that knocks my socks off.

i received an email yesterday from waste.uk.com:

“To celebrate this week’s single release (we still have those in England) Radiohead have broken up the song ‘Nude’ into pieces for you to remix.
For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, you can buy the separate components or ’stems’ (bass, voice, guitar, strings/FX and drums) and remix your own version of the song. You can do this by adding your own beats and instrumentation or just remixing the original parts. More information here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/
You can buy the stems here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/buy/

You can upload your finished mixes here http://www.radioheadremix.comand be judged and even voted on by ‘the public’.

You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be sent through too.

Hope you enjoy it

For those of you who aren’t that way inclined, Nude is also available in its entirety on CD and 7 inch (UK release) at the usual retail outlets.”

I’ve been listening to different remixes of Nude for two days… YUM!

i often think about the things that i have stored in my brain. some things are useless factoids, some are emotionally charged memories, some are reminders of the myriad of exhausting hours that i must spend memorizing more information so that i might prove myself worthy on yet another examination.

do you ever wish that you could have an SD card slot in your brain?

i was speaking to someone a while ago about my capacity for memory. how my brain feels like a bucket and water is information. i can only fill my bucket up so much until information sloshes over the sides, lost. lost. lost until i relearn it.

former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem that reminds me of this phenomena. my favorite lines are the ones where he speaks about getting up at night to look up information forgotten. “no wonder you you rise in the middle of the night…” as if the shadow of this memory haunts so deeply that one rises out of the warm haven of sleep to reclaim that lost factoid.

someone put the poem to animation, which is neat:

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins