Your Photos, Their Words: December 22-29, 2022
The Mission:
Throughout your week, take photos from your life (at least 2, no more than 10). These can be pictures of your holiday celebrating, your travels, an object in your living room - anything you see during the course of your week. Pair each photo with someone else’s words - a line from a poem, a song lyric, a paragraph from a book, etc. - that you think go well with that photo.
The Submissions:
by Heart of Darkness
The snow slows them down
If just for a day
But here comes the sun
Those toxic old rays
-Vampire Weekend
Everything I love gets lost in the drawers
I want to start over, I want to be winning
-The National
by Captain Quillard
I, like so many of you, am now looking to get my joy back, after it ran away to a more deserving land than this one. And maybe that is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Whenever there’s a history happening, there’s more than one history happening. To tell the story of the American colonies, you have to tell the story of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Britain, not to mention the Middle Passage or the indigenous tribal cultures in North American that were violently displaced by the new arrivals. To tell the story of the Ulster Protestants, you have to tell the story of the Irish Catholics. It’s not quite right to say that these are parallel histories, because parallel lines never cross. They are nonparallel histories, messily intertwined, multiply interdependent, and they remind you both that you can’t learn one without the other and also that anything you’re seeing is also something that you’re not seeing.
-Questlove
Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.
You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.
People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.
-Anthony Bourdain
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.
Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principle complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
And the road was like a ribbon
and the moon was like a bone
He didn't seem to be like any guy
she'd ever known
He kind of looked like Farley Granger with his hair
slicked back
She says, I'm a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat
How far are you going?
Said depends
on what you mean
He says I'm only stopping here to get some gasoline
I guess I'm going thataway
just as long as it's paved
And I guess you'd say I'm on my way
to Burma Shave
-Tom Waits
Springtime comes
and the leaves are back on the trees again
The snipers are harder to see, my friends
Weeding out your weekends
Summer comes
and gravity undoes you
You're happy because of
the lovely way the sunshine bends
Hiding from your close friends
Weeding out the weekends
Candy left over from Halloween
A unified theory of everything
Love left over from lovers leaving
Books, they all know they're not worth reading
It's not for the season
When autumn comes
you sit in your chair and you stare
at the TV square
Hiding in the deep end
Weeding out the weekends
Winter comes
and the days all start late
There's motion on the boughs where the dark
shapes prowl
Feeling all your feelings
Feeling out your feelings
Candy left over from Halloween
A unified theory of everything
Love left over from lovers leaving
Books, they all know they're not worth reading
They're not worth reading
-Loose Fur
by Anonymous Frau Redux
Anon Frau Redux here and captured this images of my besties.
Paired with p. 179 of:
by Anonymous Frau Redux
Anon Frau Redux again with this, paired with Foo Fighters “Run”
by Anonymous Frau Redux
Saw this while out today for lunch tucked in the tree/shrubbery.
Paired with…
Next Week’s Assignment:
I’ll be honest: I’ve always kind of hated New Year’s Eve. The holiday just feels so arbitrary and made up and silly, and so do the resolutions that go with it. That said, while I’m not a fan of new year’s resolutions, I do believe it’s smart and healthy to set intentions for yourself, regardless of what time of year you do it—not in a woo-woo, witchy, vision board type of way, necessarily—just in whatever way helps you take stock of where you are and where you want to be going forward. So for this week, make art of any kind you like that represents you setting intentions for the future, be that 2023 or the coming decade or just next Tuesday. Up to you whether you want to share your actual intentions or just art that shows you setting some. Extra points if you actually stick to your plan. :)