Baby Madonna

The dying of childrens' imagination is so terribly sad.
So sad that I barely let myself comprehend how real it is. Our world doesn't let kids relish in the imagination that is so crucial to creativity and freedom of thought and speech that they also need to be in touch with later in life.
Kids used to play in the streets til it was dark out, playing marbles or drawing with chalk. Now they sit in front of Leap Frogs or PlayStations as their parents peer out the windows for child molesters.
Kids used to draw on paper and on the walls. Now there are coloring books to stay in the lines and Mr Clean Magic Erasers.
Hide and Seek to Hannah Montana.
This revolution is really brutal for me to just stand-by and watch as someone who was an impressionable child not too long ago and who understands - at least from a subjective viewpoint - that just being a dumb, rampant kid is so much more important than trying to figure out how to use a cellphone to tell the neighbour to meet at the sandbox in five.

I don't want to see "sexy" 8-year olds, or the very rigid outlines of gender in general,
I don't want to see training bras for infants,
I don't want kids to only know how to think "in the box",
I don't want there to be necessity for sexual education for kindergarteners,
I don't want kids to have calculators before they have paintbrushes,
I don't want a child's post-secondary potential to be determined by their reading capability at age six,
I don't want kids to have eating disorders and body-image issues before they even hit puberty, or see punishment for screwing up while experimenting with harmless but possibly "weird" things.
The list goes on and on.
Just some food for thought.

Erin McKenna is a Goddess, whatever.

I really have to share this recipe.
For those of you who don't know, I've been vegan for over a month now and am really enjoying it.
This is a recipe that I found online by Erin McKenna (raw, whole, and vegan food extraordinaire) who apparently worked on the recipe here and there for about six months before she got it right.
These "Brownie Bites" are wheat/gluten-free, and dairy-free and you will fool everyone in thinking that they are "normal".

Ingredients
Vegetable oil spray
1 cup and 4 tablespoons Bob's Red Mill gluten-free, all-purpose baking flour (organic, unbleached flour is also okay)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum (I used 3/4 teaspoon of corn starch instead)
1 cup applesauce (sweetened or unsweetened is fine)
1/2 cup canola oil
2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup dairy-free mini chocolate chips (Foley's is a good brand of these. I used the dark chocolate ones. You can also use Carob chips but personally I don't like the flavour of them very much)

Directions
1.Preheat the oven to 325°. Spray 2 muffin pans with vegetable oil spray. In a bowl, whisk the baking flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt and xanthan gum. In another bowl, whisk the applesauce, oil and vanilla; stir into the dry ingredients. Stir in the chocolate chips. Spoon the batter into the muffin pans, filling them three-quarters full. Bake for 15 minutes, or until set. Let the brownies cool in the pans for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

Recipe from Food & Wine

Mark Rothko meets Balenciaga

This Balenciaga skirt reminds me of a more refined Mark Rothko painting.
Rothko here:





The first time I saw Rothko paintings in the flesh was at the MOMA in New York. It might at first seem easy, without much knowledge of his work, to dismiss it as mindless and childish but after some time and information, you may find yourself feeling suspicion of them, and having them imprinted on your mind, several minutes after you stop viewing them. I realized that they're meant as instalments, not as an intention to imitate the physical realm of reality.
Other modern classic, abstract expressionists from the mid 20th century have more explicit imagery that can "be explored," so to speak.
However, this doesn't go to say that there isn't power in his work. "Real" art cannot possibly be characterized by the human ability to understand what it intends to implore.
After some dabbling in more literal forms of expressionism, he realized that post-war artists were polite and accurate in the assumption that at this point in time, the human body could not be fairly depicted unless it was mutilated.
From that point on, he reduced his literal forms to more vague shapes and images.
Eventually, he realized that all he ever really wanted to do was depict emotion anyways - grief, loss, ecstasy, etc which led him to his most unique and recognizable style.
This is the time when the above paintings were created.
Language cannot even precisely represent such a vague thing as emotion, and he really believed that painting was another medium through which to try.
People would weep in the face of his paintings, and those are the people that he painted for. He actually accepted a commission from the Four Seasons Hotel on the bottom floor of the Seagram building for $2.5 million, spent a number of years completing it, and after having one meal there, rejected the offer. He believed that nobody who would pay so much for a meal could possibly appreciate or even notice the effort of his art.
Say what you will about Mark Rothko (and please don't draw your conclusions based on these thumbnails), but he had such a breath-taking, bleak and sad angle of human emotion during a period of pop-art, that focused on human beings, not on the world at large.

Back from not being around.

I remember hearing in a Philosophy class;
A person has as many personalities as there are people on earth.
I found this dangerously interesting because how many times have I been told "Treat everyone the same" in my up-bringing?
Though I understand that the treat-everyone-the-same mentality is probably meant in the sense that we should treat everyone with the same respect, I can recall thinking, even in elementary school about applying the concept and it not seeming feasible (obviously).
Quite simply, you would not treat your best friend the way you treat someone you just meet. You would not treat your grandmother the same way you treat the person who sells you fruits and vegetables.

But do we really change "who we are" according to every interaction?
I think so.
Sometimes when I get people from different fields of my life together (ie. school friends with work friends), I can tend to feel torn because I know that each group is interested in different things.
Though I can get along with both just wonderfully in separate realms, it is a curious dynamic when they collide. They know different sides of me, they make me feel like interacting in different ways. This dynamic applies even to a level as minute as one person from each group.

This idea comes from a person who considers herself confident and self-assured which makes me believe that changing how you act and how you interact from one person to the next doesn't have anything to do with feeling unsure of yourself.

Maybe this is all a very obvious concept, but I just think it is very interesting to ponder who a person really is, (if a "neutral state" actually exists) when they're all alone with no other person to "shape" what they are in that moment.
Or maybe having no other persons around creates a single personality in itself!

Brick-breaker

Today I was at Pet Habitat and there were little white kittens all hanging out in a big glass cage.
And two of them were especially fond of each other, hopping and gliding up against the other.
One of them looked like Frida, short-haired with a pointy little face and the other a baby white persian/himalayan kitten with baby blue eyes.
The himalayan really caught my eye. I'd climb mountains for that cat.
She had little eye crusties and was looking at me with a pet-store kind of bottom-lip-pout that gets me every time.
I stuck my pinky under the sticker that read,
"Do not stick anything, especially not fingers under the door".

She was just sweet.

Lay your body down and put this on your ceiling

Cecily Brown.
Theres something about her depiction of the naked body that is so satisfying. She doesn't lie about the shapes, she doesn't fake any flawless seams, she just crafts abstract expressionist globs of pure sex. Her figures tend to creep behind the dense structure of the paint, into forms reminiscent of Cezanne's, creating a dreamy elusiveness.
Her kaliedoscopic, anti-academic diatribes suggest sexual deviance while drawing limits for themselves, being shy - not telling the whole story. I think that even people who curse abstract expressionism can find appreciation for her work. It leaves a lot of room to put the pieces together for yourself, but not in a blindingly formless way like Pollock or even deKooning.

Some of her images remind me of watching interviews on the news wherein the person wants to remain anonymous so their face is blurred out. There's a strength paired with cowardice in those figures sometimes, and I feel like Brown does that with her art.

It's not about being explicit, raw and bloody dirty but about giving the viewer a simple outline, and allowing them to fill in the blanks, plug in their own fantasies, and turn it into something that really belongs to them.
Whatever it may be.

C-breeze

Alright summer, here I come. Time to watch every possible Charlotte Gainsbourg film imaginable.
Watch the six minute short film called "My Heart Laid Bare".
She narrates it beautifully.

(So I carry, I carry the flowers
the flowers that are dead in my hands
they wilt naturally. Understand
that today is the day
that we find out once and for all
Now you know I must leave here
You must let me stand or fall.)

Canvas too Clean

Today, everything seems to be dawning on me in a way that falsely inflates the meaning of them.
Like, everything I look at seems to be woven together in a way that quickly turns too philosphical.
I entered a very strange state of consciousness last night where I seemed to be right in that little groove between sleeping and being awake. I felt like I was in my bed and surrounded by a dozen pots and pans, all with different soups, as well as yam and potato dishes. They were all in and around my bed, and then when I thought I woke up, I was still trying to sift through the strange feeling of them being around me, I actually felt like I couldn't move or else I'd disturb their cooking process. Then I sort of slipped into this state where I thought I could actually sort of smell these dishes.
I want to be able to distinguish which things are the result of the physical properties of my brain and which are the workings of my mind and imagination.

They are separate.

All I know is that this is my last week of school, there are at least five really amazing movies that I have downloaded that I need to watch, at least 15 books that have been carefully selected to sit on my desk which I'm dying to read, and 50 kilometres of biking I want to do in the next month.
I keep trying to plan my next big step, but the only things that feel right seem to be the little ones.