Finnish Bread Advertisement, Hinted To Me By Anonymous Submitter. “Only In This Country You Can Avertise

夾鏡鳴琴 35. Double Reflections and the Sound of a Lute 'Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan'

You licked houmous off my fingers which is one way to win an argument — Shailja Patel, Love Poem for London

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky (via naranzarian)

Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly - it was the best advice ever given me.

Aldous Huxley Island (1962)

Tsang Chui Mei（Chinese, b.1972）

The Death of Strawberry  士多啤梨之死  2011  Acrylic on canvas 122 x 61cm  via

Why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field? The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

David Graeber What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun

Although you mention Venice keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us really knows. There is only this train slipping through pastures of snow, a sleigh reaching down to touch its buried runners. We meet on the shaking platform, the wind’s broken teeth sinking into us. You unwrap your dark bread and share with me the coffee sloshing into your gloves. Telegraph posts chop the winter fields into white blocks, in each window the crude painting of a small farm. We listen to mothers scolding children in English as if we do not understand a word of it– sit still, sit still. There are few clues as to where we are: the baled wheat scattered everywhere like missing coffins. The distant yellow kitchen lights wiped with oil. Everywhere the black dipping wires stretching messages from one side of a country to the other. The men who stand on every border waving to us. Wiping ovals of breath from the windows in order to see ourselves, you touch the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face. Days later, you are showing me photographs of a woman and children smiling from the windows of your wallet. Each time the train slows, a man with our faces in the gold buttons of his coat passes through the cars muttering the name of a city. Each time we lose people. Each time I find you again between the cars, holding out a scrap of bread for me, something hot to drink, until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you, sliding your hands into my coat, telling me your name over and over, hurrying your mouth into mine. We have, each of us, nothing. We will give it to each other.

For the Stranger  Carolyn Forché

An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man under Socialism

Yvan Feusi - Media Overdose