I'm Head Over Heels for Data Romance

This is not even music to me, it's so powerful, that I have to classify it as something else. I just don't know what to call it yet. It's universally beautiful and so compelling; I don't care who you are this will effect you. Data romance can evoke emotion from a stone. Within the first few seconds I felt the music tugging on my heart strings and by the end of the song I was on the verge of tears. Just amazing, that's all I can say, utterly amazing.

Keep in mind that's just how I feel about the music. Now on to the video...It's like a glimpse into someone's hidden home videos, beautiful, sentimental, romantic, but there is a tinge of sadness and longing too. Just like the song, I'm still wrestling with it to figure out exactly how it makes me feel.

I know I am overly sentimental and a complete hopeless romantic but just give it a listen and tell me you don't feel the same way.

You Heard it Here First!

...Or maybe you didn't but Nu-Disco, is where it's at! I know what you're thinking "There's nothing new under the sun. Everything is just being tweaked, not invented." Well, you might be right and I might be crazy, but this is just too good not to check it out.

Nu-disco is a 21st century dance music genre associated with a renewed interest in 1970s and early 1980s disco, mid-1980s Italo disco, and the synthesizer-heavy Eurodisco aesthetics. I am so deep into this genre right now, especially the stuff coming out of Europe (mostly France). It touches my soul's naughty bits and it's if wrong, well heck, I don't ever want to be right. Fear of Tigers, Anoraak, Calvin Harris, FM Attack, Valerie and Friends, etc. ...oh man it's so SICK that my belly hurts.

Here are a couple for you to try:



One more...

Diane von Zombiebrainburger

Here's the background story to my new favorite game: Becky and I were chatting on Facebook about TV Shows we love. I asked her if she'd seen AMC's The Walking Dead yet. She said no, so I tried to convince here it's worth checking out by letting her know I haven't been so hooked on a show since Sex and the City. Which you all know I was infatuated with, if you know me at all. Then came the fun; we decided to start pairing fashion designer's names with zombies. For example, Gibraini Verzombie (Gianni Versace) or my personal favorite Diane von Zombiebrainburger. This is good for hours of brain-gobbling fun!

Piece of Mind...

Today I was offered a full-time position at the advertising agency! My title is still in the works depending on what HR and the CEO decide on but tentatively it looks like I will be the "Operations Coordinator". This means a raise, health insurance and paid vacation and sick time. Hooray!! I'm hoping this translates into me enjoying the city more, not constantly struggling with money and enjoying some piece of mind.

Momento Mori

This phrase, or the idea of this phrase rather "Remember to die" or "Remember you will die" is a notion I have seen resurfacing time and time again lately. Not that it has ever gone away or will every go away. I know it seems morbid blogging about this but to me this idea is more about life than it is about death. It's a reminder of our mortality but in the sense to remind us to live our life while we can as life is the most fleeting possession we can claim as our own.

In ancient Rome, the words are believed to have been used on the occasion when a Roman general was parading through the streets after a victory in war. Standing behind the triumphant general was his slave, who was tasked to remind the general that, though his highness was at his peak today, tomorrow he could fall or more likely be brought down. The servant conveyed this by telling the general that he should remember, "Memento mori." Or more likely that the servant said instead, "Respice post te! Hominem te memento!": "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man!", as noted by Tertullian in his Apologeticus.

The thought of Momento Mori really took hold during Mideval European times when Christianity reigned supreme. The notion of Divine Judgement, Heaven, Hell and the soul brought not only death but the thoughts of how to live one's life to the forefront of the mind. To the Christian, the prospect of death serves to emphasize the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and thus also as an invitation to focus one's thoughts on the prospect of the afterlife. Even though I am learning ephemeral pleasures are fleeting and worth no more attention than the fly on the wall, I have a hard time devoting my life to something I may never know if it exists or not, until I experience it for myself. Instead, I focus my thoughts on loving the tangible keystones of my world, friends, family, the joys of knowledge and wonder.

Maybe this is why Felix Gonzalez-Torres is my favorite artist. He understood life is perishable and that everything we hold dear should be treasured before it fades away with time. The paper stacks and candy mounds where the public is encouraged to take them until they are all gone... In fact, much of his art can be seen as a memorial to his long time boyfriend Ross Laycock.

"Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art. "
— Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Seize the day my friends!

NYC vs. NJ

No contest. NYC is the winner *Ding! Ding! Ding!* (That's the victory bell, by the way). Last night, I had one of those great NYC nights. Happy hour at the office, a gallery opening at Barry Friendman Ltd. for artists Sergei Isupov and Takahiro Kondo, where I met my friend Andrew, who is a great artist with a book coming out soon and then spent the remainder of the night snuggled up next to a stylist from Saks 5th Ave. at G Lounge. Flash forward to today in NJ and I'm still in my pajamas waiting for Tanya to get home from work so we can go to Wal-Mart. The difference between last night and today is like night and day. But today feels pretty damn good too.

I'll Be Your Lover Too

I know some would say this is sacrilegious, pairing a Van Morrison song with a Robert Pattinson song and in theory I would completely agree. But my bleeding emo heart doesn't care about theory or other pretenses and both of these songs break my heart in different ways. Never Think is definitely not made for tweens (even though a tween obviously created this video with all the spelling errors but I digress).

I Just Can't Get Enough!

I am so irrevocably in love with www.verymarykate.com. It is sheer comic genius.



Now can you understand why Elaine Carroll is my comic soulmate?

Nonsensical Non-Sense

I have enough sense to love the nonsensical logic of Bataille. Some of his thoughts are so incomplete and fragmented, but when he gets it, he gets it.

"Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus. It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher's stone. It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements. An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality. An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love. A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love. A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms. Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager's vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments. They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors. The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting. The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.

Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another. (See what I mean? He gets it!) - Georges Bataille, Solar Anus

I find his travels into the dark recesses of the human psyche disturbing and fascinating all at the same time. It takes equal amounts of courage, curiosity and stupidity to allow yourself to descend into insanity. I think it's brave to not only explore these dark corners of the mind, but to speak what you find there. Most people spend a great deal of time and energy repressing and dismissing negative characteristics of human nature, and Bataille lays every last rotten morsle on the table.