memories of funny things we said in the past

i was editing my facebook profile and found a old list of quotes i had there...i tried to add one and it wouldn't save, so i thought i'd save them all here - they uncharacteristically for this blog have capital letters, but i wanted to preserve them:


"Fart is not the f-word." --Owen & Finn, 11/06.08

"London is the opposite of Copenhagen." --Sabin, Munich, 22/5.08

"The fanny pack is like a modern chastity belt." --Megan, Munich, 22/5.08

"Can't you hear I'm screaming in myself?" --Sabin, Munich, 21/5.08

"He didn't even have the decency to pick a leaf..." - Richard, Batangas, 8/8.07

"Say things that are not true in the name of humor." - Monica, Batangas, 8/8.07

"I was in Hawaii and became friendly with the Canadian Navy." - Christell, 31/10.07, Hornbæk

"I taught myself to swim. I'm no good at it." --Richard, 15/2.07

"You can always recover in a Starbucks--from heat stroke or a hangover or whatever. It will fix you. Thank god they're everywhere..." --me, thessaloniki, 28/7.07

“Work hard, laugh when you can and don’t dwell on things you can’t change.” - Land Girls by the BBC

inside of ourselves

"you never know how inside of themselves people are." i read that long ago in a barbara kingsolver novel and it's stuck with me ever since. in any given situation, you don't really know where people are coming from. maybe they've had a completely shit week. maybe it's been awesome. maybe it's been both - up and down, like any other week. maybe they've just learned they have a terminal illness. maybe their father just died. maybe their mother with alzheimer's just failed to recognize them for the first time. maybe they just lost their job. maybe they just got a new one. maybe they just learned they're pregnant. or perhaps they miscarried. maybe they're tired or have a toothache. maybe they feel lonely or sad or joyful. you just don't know. maybe the path ahead of them seems clear. or perhaps it's obscured and murky. maybe they're relieved the sun is finally shining after too many days of rain. maybe their awesome boss just quit. maybe they feel like they're in limbo. perhaps they're caught up in needless office politics. what if they have a need to be right? to be comforted? to be understood? what if they feel bewildered and alone and cast adrift? what if they are newly in love and their stomach is full of butterflies? you just don't know. you can never really know. and quite possibly they'll never really be able to tell you. but maybe what they most need from you is that you see them - really see them. no matter how inside of themselves they are.

wandering in oslo

when we went last month, i hadn't been in oslo in 5 years and it seemed to be much cooler and more happening than i remembered. a lot had changed, a lot had been built (some of it by apparently blind architects, as it's a real mish-mash (more about that in another post)), a lot was under renovation. it seems that norway, with its gazillion dollar sovereign oil fund, didn't suffer from the same economic crisis as the rest of the world. oslo is a pretty and very walkable little city. they had this art thing going on along aker brygge and i took a few shots of some of the thoughts. i'm not sure what i make of them, but i kind of like that they also ended up as selfies. i was happy to be wearing my new felt hat. we need to wear hats more often, don't you think? what do you make of these quotes?

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i need me a bibliotherapist.

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wacky theories about the pyramids are nothing new.

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the danish brand of socialism is actually pretty good.

100 happy days :: day 81

these are a selection of the little quotes and drawings i'm working on in the new kitchen. they will line the baseboards and have meaning for us in various ways...either because they are favorite sayings, or were said by our respective fathers or because they amuse us in some way. i've limited the palette to only black, red and a few gold or silver accents here and there, which has been both restrictive and a good thing. i love how they're turning out.

as zeitgeisty as it gets

i wrote this review of the 1996 "classic" microserfs by douglas coupland on goodreads (hence the uncharacteristic capital letters). i'm too tired to change them all, so you'll just have to live with them. i loved the book. it spoke to my 90s soul. i can't believe i didn't read it at the time. if you didn't read it at the time, read it now. if you did, read it again, there's still something to it. and it's still about as zeitgeisty as it gets.

I read Generation X years ago and then didn't read anything else by Douglas Coupland. I'm not sure why. But in some sense, I can't believe I didn't read this back in 1996 when it came out. That said, I'm not sure I would have appreciated it then like I did reading it today. I accidentally worked for Microsoft myself during the early 2000s (accidentally because they bought the company I was working for, so I didn't exactly choose it). Not much had changed since the mid 90s, apparently, as the Microsoft he described was much as I remember it, tho' there were perhaps many more soulless cubicles on campus by the time I got there. I think the layers of fat in middle management he hints at were stronger by the early noughties and the Cult of Bill had definitely not subsided.

This book is dated in many ways - it's amusing now to harken back to Apple's Troubled Years Without Steve and the programming languages they talk about are a bit passé. But how prescient was Coupland with Oop! - it's Minecraft in a nutshell and those Minecraft guys are raking in the cash, albeit in Sweden, not in Silicon Valley.

And of course, the LEGO references throughout are nothing short of awesome in my eyes.

I wholly embraced postmodernist writing in the 90s and I think this is a prime example of it - I love the lists, the pages of code, the diary-style. It just speaks to me. But then, I guess I am of Generation X, so that's not much of a surprise. However, I also find it a bit lazy. Like Coupland included whole sections of his own diaries, filled with profound, but disjointed thoughts, rather than actually weaving them into a real story. However, this somehow accurately reflects how we are these days and that seems powerful.

It just speaks to my 90s soul and makes me want to dig out my Calvin Kleins and a worn flannel shirt and just sort of slouch around the place, lamenting the suicide of Kurt Cobain.

AND now to the quotes...
On LEGO (from Abe's Theory of LEGO):
"Now I think it is safe to say that LEGO is a potent three-dimensional modeling tool and a language in itself. And prolonged exposure to any language, either visual or verbal, undoubtedly alters the way a child perceives its universe. "

"First, LEGO is ontologically not unlike computers. This is to say that a computer by itself is, well ... nothing. Computers only become something when given a specific application. Ditto LEGO. ... A PC or a LEGO brick by itself is inert and pointless: a doorstop; litter."

"Second, LEGO is 'binary--a yes/no structure; that is to say, the little nubblies atop any given LEGO block are either connected to another unit of LEGO or they are not. Analog relationships do not exist."

"Third, LEGO anticipates a future of pixelated ideas. It is digital. The charm and fun of LEGO derives from reducing the organic to the modular."

"What do I think of LEGO? LEGO is, like, Satan's playtoy. These seemingly 'educational' little blocks of connectable fun and happiness have irrevocably brainwashed entire generations of youth from the infomration-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular - populated by bland limbless creatures with cultishly sweet smiles."

"LEGO is directly or indirectly responsible for everything from postmodern architecture (a crime) to middle class anal behavior over the perfect lawn. You worked at Microsoft, Dan, you know them - their lawns...you know what I mean."

"LEGO promotes an overly mechanical worldview which once engendered is rilly, rilly (sic) impossible to surrender."

"LEGO is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of small, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination and death. Try imagining a forest made of LEGO. Good luck. Do you ever see LEGO made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No--grotacious, or what?"

"We agree about the LEGO. It is too pretty to sell. Somewhere a few weeks ago, like a piece of DNA with just the right number of proteins added, it became alive. We can't kill it."

SOME OF THE OTHER GOOD QUOTES TO REMEMBER:

"We can no longer create the feeling of an era ... of time being particular to one spot in time."

"Palo Alto is so invisible from the outside, but invisibility is invariably where one locates the ACTION."

"I got to feeling meditative. I felt as though my inner self was much closer to the surface than it usually gets. It's a nice feeling. It takes quiet to get there."

"Flight Simulation games are actually out-of-body experience emulators. There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed."

"In the end, multimedia interactive won't resemble literature so much as sports."

"I began noticing long ago that years are beginning to shrink - that a year no longer felt like a year, and that one life was not one life anymore--that *life multiplication* was going to be necessary."

"I also say the world 'like' too much, and Karla said there was no useful explanation for people saying this word. Her best guess was that saying 'like' is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known. Not too flattering."

"It seems everybody's trying to find a word that expresses more bigness than the mere word 'supermodel' - hyper model - gigamodel - megamodel. Michael suggested that our inability to come up with a word bigger than supermodel reflects our inability to deal with the crushing weight of history we've created for ourselves as a species."

"How do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward."

"I'm coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious...that, no matter how you look at it, machines really are our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn't come down to earth and make machines for us...we made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls...by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving."

"And the continuing democratizing of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of 'knowledge is power' is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able - knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish."

Lucky Charms are symptomatic of a culture in decline.

"There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what's important. ... I think memories are always there. They just get...unfindable."

"Games have only recently been revealed as the passageway for the future of the human race."

"People without lives like to hang out with other people who don't have lives. Thus they form lives."

"Randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that's bigger than anything we can hold in our minds. Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make."

"Las Vegas: it's like the subconsciousness of the culture exploded and made municipal."

"I guess the number of things we build defines the limits of ourselves as a species."

"Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems."

"I guess it's sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories.

Not at all, because we use so many machines, it's not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one externalization of subjective memory-first through notches in trees, then databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.

As our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history's pace feels faster, it is 'accelerating' at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster."

"What then--when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?"
This is not a frightening question. IT is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably use these new memory pebbles to build new paths."

BRILLIANT RE: DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MACS & PCs:

"She's Mac, I'm Windows.
Entirely appropriate, because Windows is more male, and Mac is more female.
"Windows is nonintuitive...counterintuitive, sometimes. But it's so MALE to just go buy a Windows PC system and waste a bunch of time learning bogus commands and reading a thousand dialog boxes every time you want to change a point size or whatever...MEN are just used to sitting there, taking orders, executing needless commands, and feeling like they got such a good deal because they saved $200. WOMEN crave efficiency, elegance...the Mac lets them move within their digital universe exactly as they'd like, without cluttering up their human memory banks. I think the reason why so many women used to feel like they didn't "understand computers" was because PCs are so brain-dead....the Macintosh is responsible for upping not only the earning potential of women but also the feeling of mastering technology, which they get told is impossible for them."

ON THE GAP (the clothing store):

"You can go into a Gap anywhere, buy anything they sell, and never have to worry about coming out and looking like a dweeb wearing whatever it was you bought there."

"I figured that Gap clothing is what you wear if you want to appear like you're from nowhere; it's clothing that allows you to erase geographical differences and be just like everybody else from anywhere else."

"We also figured that Gap clothing isn't about a place, nor is about a time, either. Not only does Gap clothing allow you to look like you're from nowhere in particular, it also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present either. ... Gap permits Gap wearers to disassociate from the now and enter a nebulous then, whenever one wants then to be in one's head...this big places that stretches from Picasso's 20s to the hippie 60s."

"There are more Gaps than just the Gap. J. Crew is a thinly veiled Gap. So is Eddie Bauer. Banana Republic is owned by the same people as the Gap. Armani A/X is a EuroGap. Books Brothers ia Gap for people with more disposable income whose bodies need hiding, upscaling and standardization. Victoria's Secret is a Gap of calculated naughtiness for ladies..."

"The unifying theme amid all of this Gappiness is, of course, the computer spreadsheet and barcoded inventory.

"Deep in your heart, you go to the Gap because you hope that they'll have something that other Gap stores won't have...even the most meager deviation from their highly standardized inventoried norm becomes a valued treasure."

reality is frequently inaccurate

i am a confirmed collector of quotations. i have small notebooks full of them. many from books and a few from films, but mostly from the clever people who surround me. i remember some years ago, a friend complaining that he could never make my quote book. but if you are trying too hard, you'll never make it. and he did eventually do so, with some quote about biology, as i recall (i cannot currently locate that small notebook, as many of my books are still packed away awaiting the renovations of this house).

but i've found myself thinking about quotations recently. because a lot of them seem to be floating around. there are these trendy postcards with pithy comments on them that i think have been brought on by an odd combination of mad men and pinterest. and those "keep calm and ..." variations. and my facebook feed is full of self-help quotes. platitudes really. and i wonder what it is that makes us need platitudes so much at this particular juncture? they're generally quite obvious and a bit vapid and aimed at boosting our self-esteem. but why do we need that?

is it really more prevalent now than in other times? has world economic crisis really shaken our confidence so much that we need empty reassurance that it's all going to be ok if we just believe, don't look back, crush monsanto, eat right, live in the now, stop medicating, eat raw, grow our own, look for the silver lining?

but what if it's not...what if all of the true Idea People are gone and all we're left with is mediocrity? and these platitudes are the logical conclusion. and what we're witnessing is the end of civilization as we knew it? what if it's not going to be ok?

where are the cutesy 50s postcards about that?

cognitive dissonance

ok, so i write in library books. so sue me.

i recently read william gibson's book of collected essays, distrust that particular flavor. they represent his non-fiction that's appeared in various magazines (wired, rolling stone, nytimes magazine) and other places over the years. it gave me so much food for thought that i immediately reread it. many thoughts and reactions are tumbling in my head and i still haven't synthesized them all.

but in the meantime, i wanted to share some of my favorite bits (it's my blog and i can use it as my memory if i want to):

"...there's often something in a good translation that can't quite be captured in the original."

"If you are fifteen or so, today I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, an anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture."

"...every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now."

"...imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written."

"I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been."

"A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response."

"It was entirely a matter of taking dictation from some part of my unconscious that rarely checks in this directly. I wish that that happened more frequently, but I'll take what I can get."

talking about the digital age:
"All of us, creators or audience, have participated in the change so far. It's been something many of us haven't yet gotten a handle on. We are too much of it to see it. It may be that we never do get a handle on it, as the general rate of technological innovation shows no indication of slowing."

"Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes."

on Singapore, which he, like me (and i swear i had no idea, tho' he did publish the piece in Wired in 1993) characterizes it as Disneyland with the Death Penalty:
"Singapore's airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world."

great turns of phrase:
cognitive dissonance
democratizaton of connoisseurship
terminal documents

on collecting:
"The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce."

"eBay is simply the only thing I've found on the Web that keeps me coming back. It is, for me anyway, the first "real" virtual place." (he wrote this in 1999.)

on Tokyo:
"If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan."

"Something about dreams, about the interface between the private and the consensual. You can do that here, in Tokyo: be a teenage girl on the street in a bondage-nurse outfit. You can dream in public. And the reason you can do it is that this is one of the safest cities in the world, and a special zone, Harajuku, has already been set aside for you."

on the media:
"Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society."

"This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of everything that we do with information."

"This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician, and corporate leader: The future, eventually, will find out you. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

"A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of the deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily."

"Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either - except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place."

"If you wish to know an era, study its more lucid nightmares."

On Greg Gerard's Phantom Shanghai:
"Liminal. Images at the threshold. Of the threshold. The dividing line. Something slicing across accretions of cultural memory like Buñuel's razor."

on history:
"History, I was learning, there at the start of the 1960s, never stops happening."
my own scrawl in response to this (because you know i wrote in this library book):
"...it just seems like it does when you're in the midst of it."

"...history, though initially discovered in whatever soggy trunk or in whatever caliber, is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries."

on whether we'll have chips in our heads:
"There is another argument against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. It's a very simple one, so simply that some have difficulty grasping it. It has to do with a certain archaic disctinction we still tend to make, a distinction between computing and 'the world.' Between, if you like, the virtual and the real...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't."

"So, it won't, I don't think, be a matter of computers crawling buglike down into the most intimate chasms of our being, but of humanity crawling buglike out into the dappled light and shadow of the presence of that which we will have created, which we are creating now, and which seems to me to already be in process of re-creating us."

perhaps this is why we like reality t.v.:
"We sit here, watching video of places a few blocks away, and feel--pleasurably--less real."

on the real cyborg:
"...as I watched Dr. Satan on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in the process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed...And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted."

"The world's cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe we've yet to understand it."

"We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous sytems. Invisible. We cannot touch it. We are it. We are already the Borg."

"There's my cybernetic organism: the Internet. If you accept that 'physical' isn't only the things we can touch, it's the largest man-made object on the planet....And we who participate in it are physically a part of it."

So much food for thought here, don't you think? in any case, it seems we're already in the matrix.

tuesday means it's time for randomness

totally gratuitous picture of an airplane wing

because she did it and so did she 

and i hate to be albanienated (great word HRH TFM!)

yes, it's time for one of those random posts. is it usually on a tuesday? do i always feel random on tuesdays? does my brain always overload on tuesday? these are just a small selection of the random thoughts going through my head at the moment. here are the rest.

: : danes should not rap. they have not suffered enough. there is no 'hood. danish sounds like crap when rapped.

: : even more so norwegians. it's just not authentic when you're so white and so upper middle class. do not rap, please. got it?

: : thankfully, i have never heard swedish rap. swedes probably have too much taste and class. and too many volvos. people never rap about a volvo. or a saab.

: : i'm a night person, not a morning person. night feels deliciously long, it stretches out to be all the time i need it to be. morning feels impossibly fleeting and bound to be interrupted by day itself. gimme night any day.

: : "i made some new spaces inside myself." --jane campion, IHT, 17/5.09

: : still doing tara's double colons instead of bullets. i love them.

: : why oh why did they make more than one episode of that ridiculous stylista show? i'm only watching again in the eternal futile hope that they are all taken out back and shot at the end of THIS one.

: : "i followed your blog now. does that mean it will come when i call it?" --monique, via googletalk, 18/5.09

: : i want a tattoo of a helleristning.

: : do you think it's possible that otherwise cool cities have pockets of dorkiness? how do they become that way when they're surrounded by coolness?

: : do you ever have the feeling that everyone else has it all figured out and you're the only one who doesn't?

: : when will the last of the dinosaurs really die out?

it's just so good to get this out. thanks for listening. if you have answers to any of these questions, please do leave a comment! or just share your own randomness. it's all good.

glorious weekend

it was a glorious weekend. sunshine and definite scent of spring in the air. time spent with an old friend i hadn't seen in ages. freshly-baked bread for dinner. a major clean-up/air-out of the studio. gathered a whole lot of stones on the beach (some of the ones below we had before, so not ALL of those in one go), but plenty of new materials/inspiration.

why yes, that is a metal basket full of rocks hanging out conveniently just outside my studio door.

do you think it's possible to fall madly in love with a rusty old pickup that's sitting by the side of the road?

gorgeous polish embroidery found at det blå marked in haslev. major treasure!

evidence of sunshine in my studio today. it looks so beautiful shining on my sari. i had the sari out, looking at and wondering if i should just have a bollywood party or turn it into something else...

and these, the coolest (and starting to be biggest) 8-year-old feet on the block. she's so hip with her red converse all-stars.

and the first report of brazil just in from husband: "so far, brazil looks like the balkans in the jungle."

i found that hilarious beyond belief. 

if you've been to the balkans, you would too.

more tomorrow. our time changed today, so i'm going to try to adjust.

so far, it's been great, but i'll be sorry tomorrow morning.

monday morning links and quotes

monday morning links...a wonderfully funny and erudite piece on the enduring presence of our favorite alaskan by dick cavett (who knew he was so smart?)...frank rich's article on the issues facing the GOP going forward, which won me over by crediting david letterman with calling the election before the primaries were even over when he said that the ten GOP candidates looked like "guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club."...and maureen dowd's musings on hillary as secretary of state...and, lest you think i'm all politics, a great story of a little girl activist in iowa that makes me feel like i'm definitely not doing enough to make a difference in the world...and a disturbing article on the rising popularity of spam. times must be tough indeed. and yes, i only looked at the NYT this morning. i do it so you don't have to. :-)

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great quotes of the day:

"the worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead."--frank rich, the moose stops here, NYT, sunday, nov. 16, 2008

"typically american to participate in global warming in this extreme way."--husband, watching news of california wildfires on CNN, monday, nov. 17, 2008

"it is admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any." --dick cavett, the wild wordsmith of wasilla, NYT, friday, nov. 14, 2008

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and because no monday is complete without inspiration, some more links...this time, just to the fun stuff, i promise:

• frikadeller recipe as requested in the comments on saturday's post
• gorgeous vintage inspired modern fabrics.
• beautiful paintings by mandy budan. (too bad i'm not getting anything for christmas this year. :-( )
• very cool maps of imaginary places by paint and ink on etsy.
• this idea for a virtual quilting group.

what's inspiring you this monday morning?

incremental steps

at my painting class today i made great progress and here it is!! it's not finished by any means, as i haven't actually PAINTED on it yet. but, with shaking hands and a pounding heart, i ripped my beloved pretty papers. i think it was good for me, even tho' it felt strange at first. after my heart stopped pounding, it was quite fun to lay them all out and move them around on the large canvas until they seemed right. then i glued them down.

i began thinking that i wanted there to be a bunch of writing in between the pieces of paper. private journal-style writing. but when i started to think about what to write, quotes came out. some favorites that are simply in my head, but then a bunch of those i've been collecting in my little black books for ages. at first, i had intended to paint completely over the writing so that it can't be read, but as i began to scatter the quotes, it seems like now i want them to show, at least to an extent. i'm not finished yet, writing on it. and i've only thought about the painting. what i want to do is extend the pattern again with paint--sort of make the ripped paper whole again using paint. i think that i can learn something about mixing colors and also get to the bottom of what pleases me so much in these papers--what it is that gives me that feeling of molecular alignment .

maybe painting will be the thing that helps me through after all...