Cage

see / hear / eat / drink / smell / speak / spit / cry

"What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc...., he accepts in spite of himself this "wound with nine openings," which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body. — Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes."

[E.M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided]

Nina Simone / Love Me or Leave Me

Profit / Prophet / Prophit

Paul Chan's notes from Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

From Joy Garnett's Flickr set of Paul Chan's Cultural Politics

Bookworms

My bad

Found today while walking to work

Merleau-Ponty book covers

Sense and Non-Sense

Phenomenology of Perception

German rebuses, ca. 1896-1899

Found in two antique German books, Das Neue Universum, vols. 16 and 19.

Jean Painlevé

Cher Ami, pigeon of honor

A couple of neighborhood birds have taken a liking to sitting in the windowsill next to my new desk to stare at me while tilting their heads sideways. They bring a bit of the curious urban wilderness into my daily orbit. My notion of "wilderness" has become so debased that it has come to this.

Then I discovered a whole underground subset of the pigeon population, carrier pigeons. Among their ranks are several WORLD RENOWNED pigeons like Cher Ami (believe it or not, he is not the only pigeon with its own Wikipedia biography), a homing pigeon that helped save 200+ lives during WWI and returned from his last mission blinded and with one leg hanging by a thread. After his leg was amputated, he received a wooden prosthesis. He's now in the Natural History Museum, god rest his soul.

Storyville, New Orleans, E.J. Bellocq

Some of E.J. Bellocq's photographs of the women from Storyville, New Orleans, around the turn of the century. The book of photographs with introduction by Susan Sontag, though somewhat challenging to find, is highly recommended.

Busby Berkeley dreams