"They know I want to fuck them so bad."

Last night may have been one of the top five all time nights in Edinburgh, next to slow-dancing with Jacob Bloomfield to the Backstreet Boys at the Big Cheese on Ridhima's eighteenth birthday (preposition beatdown). Seriously though. It was all kinds of the most hilarious shit ever. Beltane festival, up on Calton hill, which quite a few of my comrades seem to, in retrospect, have found fairly anticlimactic. But I thought it was a blast. Highlights include: drunkenly standing in a long line by myself for a while, trying to find my friends in a dark sea of people, getting home somehow (See also: making pancakes while listening to Scarface, spilling a lot of things). Alright that's really all there is. I realize I've done an extremely poor job of documenting anything remotely significant. Just Chill; here are some still-lifes by Goya:

Still-Life: A Butcher's Counter, 1810-12

Three Salmon Steaks, 1808-12

Elinor Carucci

Grandma Covers her Face, 1994

Mother drives me in the rain, 2000

Masks, 1996

The Hug, 2001

The only notes I have next to her name in my Art History notes, regarding "Closer," the set from which the above photos were taken, are: "The only intimacy she really knows how to portray is her own with the people she loves." This is something I really struggle with when it comes to my writing. I think photography is much more accommodating to this kind of reflection on one's own life, which quickly transgresses into indulgence when applied to literature. I think her photos are beautiful.

[Elinor Carucci Photography]

Eternity of the moment

"Cartier-Bresson has the weakness of his strength: an Apollonian elevation that subjugates life to an order of things already known, if never so well seen. He said that the essence of his art was, 'the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.' Too often, the 'significance' feels platitudinous, even as its expression dazzles. Robert Frank, whose book 'The Americans' treated subjects akin to many in the older photographer's work, put it harshly but justly: 'He travelled all over the goddamned world, and you never felt that he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.' The problem of Cartier-Bresson's art is the conjunction of aesthetic classicism and journalistic protocol: timeless truth and breaking news. He rendered a world that, set forth at MOMA by the museum's chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, richly satisfies the eye and the mind, while numbing the heart." Finding flaw in the seemingly flawless, Peter Schjeldahl reviews the Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MOMA.

[The New Yorker]

Karen Finley: performance artist, by Annie Leibovitz

Moi aussi, Marianne

Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians.

Clean up: the past two months