blue again

I've been hanging out on the Tumblr lamenting the fact that I am not good with words.

There's a longer post hanging out at the back of my mind somewhere. Will endeavour to seek it out.

Blessings, xox

Happy New Year (Everyone)

Davids Bazan and Dark talk sense - ‘the fruit on the tree, that’s the thing’ - http://qideas.org/video/unsettled-questions.aspx

As I clearly have not been posting regularly here at the moment I have taken to Twitter (@mosteverybody) and Tumblr (http://mosteverybody.tumblr.com/) to see how that goes - maybe I can kickstart a bit more posting activity through triangulation.

Love to all who come across this.

hitch r.i.p.

Drawing this and reading this I was unaware that Christopher Hitchens had died in the early hours of the morning. He will be much missed. Already is.

notebooks

Hooray!!!
Here's a random page from mine (it is not much but it is something).

no religion

Surely my misunderstanding of the, I think, faithfully mischievous, Kornelis Miskotte. He gives a huge amount to think about. And he really does look and read as crazily happy as pictured here.

do you wanna live

Handmade Portraits: tUnE-yArDs from Etsy on Vimeo.

seeing conan

I love that, 'at this stage nothing is a mistake'. A lot to think about the time it takes to see someone here. (HT to AK)

drifting off the surface of the planet and coming to in San Francisco

Just returned from a trip to San Francisco. This was about as artistic as I got on the visit. Everywhere we went there was the most amazing street art. Most of what follows is from one trip through the Mission District.

Clarion Alley offers ever changing views on what is happening in and to the world.

This was possibly my favourite mural - there is a cartoon quality to this that I like that combines well with the fact that it is, in all senses, news.

Cat looks familiar

During our visit we ran into Herbert Gold. We discovered his legendary status only post meeting. He wrote about Haiti years ago.

She looks familiar and new.

The Women's Building. Just as vibrant on the inside.

Deliriously happy in a mid walk Tartine visit.

And, in a bonus encounter, I met one of the founders of the amazing organization Walls that Teach on the plane ride home.

my take (such as it is) on 'the gift'...

...with a detour into other things that caught my eye

the challenge of Jesus drawn

we are all in this together again

John Berger thinks clearly.

my scrappy abstract art

First reactions.

lucien freud

I will miss sharing food with Lucian. We had some lovely breakfasts together at his place. I would say he was a good, plain cook – an idiosyncratic cook, perhaps, but a good one. He could take a hung woodcock and pop it in the oven and it would be a very good lunch. He was generally good on the subject of wine and on food. He was a stylish man and, although not a great eater, he did like to go out in the evenings. He would have day sitters and night sitters in his home and he would usually take them out afterwards as part of the payment. He liked the Wolseley in Piccadilly, in particular. I would say it was his current favourite and had been for a while. He called it "the best room in London", so I am not surprised they have honoured him with a black tablecloth and a candle on his regular table. He liked Clarke's in Kensington, too, and, in fact, both Sally Clarke and Jeremy King of the Wolseley sat for him. Lucian used to like the River Cafe too… I have lost count of the places we have gone out to together.
William Feaver

a brief effort to recall some of the parts of my day

A late-in-the-day effort to recall the last twenty four hours of reading and watching.
Some of those highlights:
Zizek - funniest thing I have read in the Guardian ever
Twombly - ongoing
The Tree of Life - saw it Friday - love it - This is our story. It has not ended. Jesus & God seemed to be quite palpably in this.
The thump and sigh of my heart
Inspector Bellamy
Heartbreaker
The klezmer joy surprise - stumbled upon Magpie - Live!

Sean Penn/Robert Smith Nazi Hunter

bread

'twombly creating language' - 'thinking was mainly what he did'

Cy Twombly's art hit me with a lot of force this week as I read obituaries and listened to interviews. In particular, as introductions, there were Michael Wood's juxtapositions here and Jonathan Jones's reflection (now a few years old) here.

neil gaiman

You once said that your biggest influence, for your writing, was punk rock—the idea that you could do something just by doing it.
It still is. You have to be willing to make mistakes, and you have to be willing to make mistakes in public. Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did. When I was 15 going on 16, punk rock, the idea of here’s a chord, here’s another, here’s one more chord, now form a band, is one that sort of always stayed with me. I remember recruiting the drummer in my punk band because he used to hit things. And he used to hit me! [Laughs] I thought, If he’s really good at hitting me, he’s obviously got a lot of aggression. I sort of sidled over to this guy, who later became my best friend. Up until this point, he had been somebody who punched me on the way to class. And I said, you want to be a drummer? He said, oh yeah I want to be a drummer. So I said, cool. I’m starting a punk band. He said, great! We’ll start it in my parent’s garage. It still seems to be the smartest, most glorious way to do anything: You do it. People who want to be writers say, what should I do? And you say, write! [Laughs] And they’ll say, then what? And you say, well, finish things! And they say, well, then what? Well, write something else. That’s how you do it. If you do it over and over, sooner or later you’re going to be writing stuff that’s publishable. And if you keep doing it, you’ll probably get fairly good. You have, you know, a million lousy words inside you, and you’ve got to get them out. I think there’s something very real and very true in that. How do you do it? You do it. Look at other people. Learn everything you can from everywhere. The most important thing is to do it.

paul muldoon

It doesn’t come naturally to me to defend these things as poems. As a concept, I see it like this: the word “poetry,” as you know, means “making,” so these are constructs in the world…. One is trying to construct something that will help us to make sense of things, and a construct, or building even, let’s say, a space, a clearing, a momentary stay against confusion (from Robert Frost’s phrase), which, when we enter, we have some clarification, however slight, and when we leave it, something, however slight, has been clarified. We have been helped in some way to make sense of the world.

So that is what poetry means to me. I need to be provoked by it. I can’t quite accept what seems to be a fairly conventional notion of poetry as that which bolsters us up in what we already know. I am less interested in that than in poetry that puts us in a difficult position and makes us think again about how things are, and that is almost an article of faith.

Another article of faith (which I touched on briefly) has to do with unknowing, and that, I think, connects it to many experiences that could be described as “spiritual” experiences, and I know you are all familiar with those, where one has a sense of giving oneself over to something beyond oneself, something one doesn’t quite understand; and only when one does that, and only in a spirit of humility, is there half a chance that one will come out the other side knowing anything at all in some minor way. So I think I am really pleased that you enter these discussions in the spirit of unknowing, because that is the spirit in which we all engage in the business of trying to write poems.

Paul Muldoon

statuesque

'the main thing is to document'

Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned for making movies.

This excerpt from 'This is not a Film' gets at the pressures he has been under and movingly shows his determination and ability to make films, to create, under any circumstances.

listening in, drawing

Not feeling very inspired and definitely not very wordy at the moment. But I was very happy finding this excerpt from a Joann Sfar work in progress, to be put out by Citizen Film.

A rough cut excerpt from Joann Sfar Draws from Memory, directed by Sam Ball from Citizen Film on Vimeo.