Wanderlust: Night Drive

(All The Little) Flying Houses

I'm loving France-based photographer Laurent Chehere's Flying Houses series, in which he photoshops houses and apartment buildings onto relatively clean and uncluttered skies. According to My Modern Met, the series is a metaphor for travel:


While some journey into another land in the lap of luxury, others have to deal with the confines of flying coach. Sometimes being in such close quarters with a crying baby and a person with uncontrollable fits of coughing can feel like you're trapped in a burning building.

Have a look at Chehere's other work here.

Poetry Wednesday

Affair

The darkening hours were spent, always,

at the edge of the sea

with his eyes breaching the water,

an apex.

Our meeting was a broken picture

blurred around the edges, and

I felt as though he had been waiting there forever,

sliding against the jellies and the grinning fishes,

waiting for me to climb down between the

rocks.

Wood from many ships was caught on him

in places it could catch; planks and planes,

a great mast

hung

and did not sparkle.

I did not think he was a monster; I saw the shadow

of the wreck, down through the water, and

I knew we were the same.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Adolescence II

by Rita Dove

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. 

Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert. 

Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips. 

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round 

As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines. 

They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl, 

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. 

"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper. 

I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

 

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. 

"Well, maybe next time." And they rise, 

Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight, 

And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes 

They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. 

Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

Inked, At Long Last

So I finally gave in and got my first tattoo. It's just a little feather along my collarbone, but I'm really happy with it. If you've been reading from Little Houses all along, you know that I'm fascinated with tattoos, and with human-as-canvas, and it was probably only a matter of time until I settled on something permanent.



A friend in my grad program told me not to try and pick a design with a ton of personal meaning. He said I'd never be entirely happy with something so loaded, and that tattoos should be whims. He's got full sleeves on both arms, and they're awesome, so I listened to his advice.


Here's what I can say about my first tattoo experience:

1.) Don't get tattooed in a place where you're sun-burnt. It will sting more than it needs to, and your surly tattoo artist will make fun of you.
2.) Tattoos do not hurt nearly as much as nose piercings. Nose piercings require determination, and a post-piercing shot of whiskey.
3.) There's something really hilarious about being four tattoos behind your mother.

Wanderlust: Light As A Feather

Nele Azevedo's Melting Men

In 2002, Brazilian artist/researcher Nele Azevedo began working on her Minimum Monument project, intervening in public and highly-trafficked spaces with hundreds of humanoid ice sculptures, each 20 centimeters high, and doomed. The installations are so defined by their ephemerality that they can only be set out quickly enough with the help of passers-by.

The result is breathtaking, but also alarming as we learn that the works serve as a warning of the dangers of global warming. We must watch the doleful figures waste away and eventually disappear, with the drip, drip, drip of their melting bodies reinforcing the passage of time like a terrible clock. Reflexively, we wish to save them. We're made to understand, if we've forgotten, that a human being is more precious than commodity, but that, like the thing, we are dispensable. We are no more immortal than a block of ice, left out in the sun.

With her "army of melting men," Azevedo has traveled worldwide.

Wanderlust: Night Flowers

 

Poetry Wednesday

Handy

Sharing water from a jar we

talk about the day our

air conditioner fell two stories

and killed no one we

wipe salt from our upper lips, remember

being cool.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Moreover, the Moon ---
by Mina Loy

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.

Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.