Current Obsession

jesus fucking christ, don’t you hate it when you talk in your sleep and someone records it, and you find it only after a well-meaning friend emails it to you? yeah, i hate that too.

Current obsession

I’ve been feeling very earth-bound but finding this was the highlight of my day(please click the link, watch, and let it highlight yours also)

Current Obsession

Current obsessions: horchata, reading in the grass, silver martin rabbits, giant sea kelp and my new career as a sea otter.

Current obsession

Current obsession: Lewis Hine, an early American photojournalist best known for documenting American labor, in particular, for exposing child labor and helping to end it.

When the “breaker boys” in the photo worked fourteen or sixteen hour days, any daydreams of the childhood they were missing were snuffed out by sheer exhaustion. What exhaustion didn’t kill, physical ailment mangled; one stray thought meant pieces of slate and coal went crashing into fingers and hands, breaking small bones. Thoughts of school or lazy Saturdays went up into the air along with the dust that went into their lungs and aged them from within. “Black lung” it was called, but the small miners knew it was just another side effect of the American Dream. Youthful energy didn’t go away; it clung to the coal, burned and ascended heaven like unheard prayers, blackening and condensing into smog. The hopes of a generation went into the incinerator along with the anthracite that fueled the Industrial Revolution, leaving instead massive amounts of CO2, soot particles which still gnaw away at the ozone layer.

So today, as you consider global warming and climate change and ways to “green” your life, it is the dead dreams of children that float over our heads. As the mercury inches up, crossing every line the scientists draw in the sand, the sins of our laisse faire fathers literally decide the fate of our children and us. Ultimately the ghost of child labor gets its revenge as the byproducts of burning coal still create the acid rain that chips away at the Carnegie and JP Morgan marble shrines to Industry and Wealth and Progress, built by youth mortgaged away ton by ton. Ironic that the small miners’ most lasting contribution is as visible and as invisible as they were.

Happy Earth Day.

Current obsession

Finding these was like one day opening the mailbox to find forwarded postcards from someone else’s trek through my dreams.

Current obsession, addendum to yesterday: Camille Seaman.

The clock is winding down on the exam, class, but I’m not noticing right now because I’m astounded to see photographic evidence of the exact colors and landscape that I didn’t think existed anywhere outside my head.  Use this time to your advantage.

Current obsession

Current obsessions: Subsidence as applied to daily life, dreams of being lost, so many times, (i) tried not to wonder:

Current obsession

Public Square, Cleveland and Edward Burtynsky’s Quarries.

Collapse vs excavation.

Current Obsession

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered.  The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny.  One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background.  All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.
 
-Anais Nin

(emphasis mine)

‘What’s life if you’re not obsessed?’

I’ve been asked why I am obsessed with current obsessions.  To keep it simple, I could drag out the quote from John Waters’ film Pecker, and keep a certain mystique about the whole thing. But really, that quote itself was an obsession for a bit and doesn’t tell the full story.

As much as I like winter now, there was a time when it was an unwieldy burden.  By  February each year,  I’d long since forgotten that I liked the cold, grey days or wearing three layers of striped socks.  Ideas stopped coming and any sort of creativity was essentially frozen until the front yard became a soupy green mess.  Each spring meant digging out and scraping together remnants of last fall’s inspiration until I was capable of cultivating my own as the days lengthened and I emerged from under the glacier of seasonal affective disorder.

When I finally realized this was a yearly pattern, I decided to make sure the next winter would be different. It had to be; I’d had a fairly explosive break-up and at the time, school was intense.  I started a series of projects called current obsessions whereby I had to come up with a new diversion, roughly lasting a week.  These led to experiments of eating only yellow foods, coloring in coloring books with every house visitor and posting the results on the fridge, kissing as many boys as possible, wearing color, hand-printing postcards, researching random things (foot-binding, fencing, the 1770s, geisha) and  generally trying to keep the water flowing mentally so the pipes didn’t freeze.  They didn’t. 

When spring came, I barely noticed because I’d been so busy.  That winter had actually been one of the most creatively productive times I had.  I continued recognizing and documenting current obsessions, at a slightly less frantic pace, for at least another year.  Then I graduated, moved, was sucked into the stresses of a new city and forgot to keep my curiosity alive.  

This time around, I’m coming out of a year-long winter, figuratively anyway.  Due to various forces at work, I virtually stopped reading and left my curiosity in my pants pocket, ran it through the washer and found all that remained were small papery bits.  I wondered why nothing good was coming out of my head and couldn’t figure it out, so I watched TV instead.  In short, 2007 is best summed-up as The Dumbening. 

Something, someone and somewhere jogged my memory about current obsessions.  I remembered how much fun I had with the project.   I had forgotten that I enjoyed the research, looking for patterns in things and getting interested in random stuff because I have the attention span of a magpie who is constantly distracted by the next and newest exciting shiny thing.  Collecting shiny things, as inspirations are apt to be, was and is a great project, and it created a mental curio shop that can be called upon in a creative famine, and reviewed with great fondness later after a creative flood.    So, in the spirit of the sugar-addled little sister of Pecker, “What’s life if you’re not obsessed?”  Little Chrissy, this one’s for you.

Current Obsessions

Current obsessions: Minor Threat, spinach, space in all forms, working towards being friends with some version of NYC.