glorybox, or proust part 2

while idly wasting time online i found a "make a mosaic of me" thing online

you answer a list of questions (like rsvp or the proust questionnaire) and find pictures you like (suggested to plug your answer into flickr because then you get a weird collection of results, often completely unrelated to you answers which makes it "interesting")

and then you put these into a mosaicking machine

and then you get, well, supposedly: you in all your glory.

okay i give up

have just looked at a blog by a 13 year old girl (unless this is one of the police set-ups, and the blogger is not 13 at all but a bored dyslexic 31 year old who needs a gimmick)
http://tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com/
it's funny, it's snazzy. i want to be cute as a drowned rat too. and rude to newspaper-people.

the kid herself

snap em up

just lately i've seen a few photo blogs that look at the world from a particular viewpoint

by theme
light + victory are two photographers on either side of the tasman, one in melbourne and surrounds, one in "rural new zealand".

some themes have been "orange", "words" and "three".

by geography
52 suburbs is a odyssey through sydney suburbs, one week one suburb but many photos. more than this, photos are presented as a diptych - the images hum against each other,

glimpses of cabramatta

and cronulla

i find this really special because this is what i try to do with my collages and, i guess, on my blog. a collection of ideas and images which (i hope) shimmy against each other, and produce thoughts and further ideas, rather than just being.

think, laugh, love. these are things i live by. i want to add create, inspire. then i reckon i'll be happy to think my work is done.

listing slightly

sometimes i find it hard to put my ideas or goals in motion

i need to motivate myself

over the years i've tried all sorts of ways

i made those foldy paper answer questions things (google searching tells me they're called chatterboxes or cootie catchers - yuck. i call them foldy paper answer questions things)

i like that the one pictured has "hedonism" as a choice. mine's nicer because it's made of pictures. however, it has no intrinsic use or purpose. it just is. it's an object i enjoyed making.
i also had a reward system going, using laminex colour swatches.

it didn't achieve anything, although i had lots of fun putting it together. deciding on rewards, finding images that matched the rewards

now i'm trying to put a 5 year plan in place. i'm trying not to be too soviet about it, naturally. no gulags or anything. although constructivist design is rather attractive.

and i am trying to introduce colour and various items of stationery as i try and conceptualise my goals and milestones.

i'm going more for thumb-tacks and coloured string, date stamps as well as some posh things, like a 5 year diary from moma
i'm sure good graphics and good design can help! suzy tuxen's lettering

lists can be pretty,

moon garden by mikala dwyer

a crazy world of words and pictures and actions and pictures
a crazy world of words and pictures and actions and pictures

and then there is the crazy world of infografics

showing you the answers to the important questions

like

which is the fastest growing economy?

and

WHO

is

the

biggest
movie
monster?

there are also self-made graphs as part of the mycrocosm project,

of course i'm supposed to do exactly these kinds of graphs to track my blood sugar levels ... things get tricky for me when pretty becomes purposeful
other good infographics i've seen,
an animated red riding hood (oh i forgot how good this was!)

there's a whole world of diversionary, i mean motivational, tactics out there!

and let's not forget Christoph Niemann's wonderful monthly blog, abstract city - this one's about sleep

can't decide

sometimes you have to ask yourself,

markus raetz, in a perpetual & kinetic state of indecision

or you can just wait for the signs ...

what would proust do?

how much can you know about someone from their responses to questions?
possibly not much, although scanning through some q&a can be entertaining

it seems this was highly entertaining for young frenchies at the fin-de-siecle. in fact the young proust (at 13) and the not quite so young proust (at 20) answered some questions, which were later used (loosely) by vanity fair to quiz celebrities of varying celebrity. they call it their proust questionnaire, see what they say:
joan fontaine (march 2008)
what do you consider the most overrated virtue? virginity
on what occasion do you lie? when being tactful … or evasive.
jasper johns (december 2007)
what is your most treasured possession? my refrigerator
What is it that you most dislike? seeing fish with silver skin marinating in cream (hmm, don't we all?)
helen thomas (april 2007)
How would you like to die? With my boots on.
donald sutherland (october 2005)
What is your favorite occupation? Imagining.
karl lagerfeld (september 2005)
What or who is the greatest love of your life? My life is not over yet. There is no other way to answer such a question …
How would you like to die? I hate the idea of death—I prefer to disappear …
umberto eco (july 2005)
What is your favorite journey? The years during which I am writing a new novel. I am wandering through a private and secret territory, nobody knows what I am doing, and I feel happy.
Which living person do you most admire? Let me wait until they die, so to be sure of my feelings.

a book which may or may not have much to do with proust, but has an amusing cover, and is about the mind and how we work things out for ourselves

another take on q&a which i saw via blog was in another magazine, where visual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann answered questions posed by art critic/curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in the best way he know how: in pictures
images borrowed from katherine bowman's site (she has lots of good pictures)
this is more exciting to me - i like the ambiguity of images as well as the pleasure from taken from looking at the visual

i suppose a blog is a way of posing your own questions, and then answering them. or sometimes, answering a question and setting it up as though there was a question in there somewhere...

so, evilmonika, what makes you happy?

and if you can be bothered, ask yourself:

Where would you like to live?
What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Your favorite painter?
Your favorite musician?
The quality you most admire in a man?
The quality you most admire in a woman?
Your favourite virtue?
Your favourite occupation?
Your favourite meal?

up, down, love & loss, a tear in the fabric

hardly a day goes by that i don't think of my dad

it's been more than a year, and the pain doesn't rip through me any more, but it's not dull either. it can be acute and, the hardest thing perhaps, it comes on me when i don't expect it.

watching a doco on beethoven the other day, the narrator commented he was quick to offence, quick to hurt, quick to anger, but generous and loving. and hearing it made me think of dad, and when they showed beethoven dying, i mourned and cried.

walking down the street i remembered a video of my dad carrying my nephew on his shoulders, singing and dancing - i don't know what triggered it. sometimes images, memories just appear, conjured from a thought, a smell, a glimpse. a tear in the fabric of time.

the other day in a shop near china town, i browsed the colourful figurines and bits and pieces, things i only understand by their surface colour and texture. i picked up a wad of hell money (after-life money; wikipedia tells me that missionaries telling chinese that they would go to hell when they died if they didn't convert to christianity was understood as going to the afterlife ... no problem, they knew that already)

but hell money isn't something you should leave lying around, it shouldn't be used for decoration even though it is quite exquisitely lovely. it should be hidden until you need it, and then burnt for the dead.

ancestor worship. i'm not comfortable with worshipping ancestors.

i spent my early years paying my dad enough obeisance, i don't think i need to do more now

last weekend, i read a review of a book called Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir. the book is by psychologist kay redfield jamieson and it is an account of her grief at the death of her husband. according to the review, poignantly titled a wife's voyage to the farthest shore of grief, she looks at grief and contrasts it to depression because as well as being a clinician she also suffers from bipolar.

she has also written the unquiet mind in which she explores her own difficulties with manic depression and the manner in which bipolarity threads through creative minds and lives.

i wandered down to the paperback at lunchtime and bought both. i am looking for insight, comfort and understanding, enlightenment, and ultimately hope.