Five Favorites

Blogging is obsessive, egotistical, infanticidal and Oedipal.  One is ever viligante and immersed, tied to the desk like a naughty lover.  Then one day, you get the Bloggers’ Chain Letter and though faintly like the Plea from your Ugandan Uncle for Cash or the latest heaven-sent Money Angel…with this one you are forced to play the game in the name of links, audience share and blogger love.

So, Lucy Raubertas from Indieperfumes chose me as one of her favorite blogs and I am compelled to return the favor, shout out to her and name 5 blogs myself. And just for kicks, you are required to name 5 addictions too! Jesus, Omyugandancuzzin!, True Confessions! I will deposit el dinero ASAP and spring you from prison!

Digress.  Back to Lucy. I do love her blog, this evocative image of Moroccan women harvesters of Argan oil from indieperfumes will give you the flavor.  Let her take you softly and intelligently from the origins and history of scent to hand-crafted perfumes and small special shops selling scents n’ sensabilities, she is voraciously and sensuously into the meaning behind it all…comme moi.

Ancient texts from several cultures speak about the world beginning with a scent…and so, here begins a glimpse into my favorite blog worlds and my addiction to infinity.  Strap yourself in…it’s a long ride.

MY TOP FIVE BLOGS OF THE MOMENT

HOME

The Selby does rich portraits of creative people in their homes, so one craves “lifestyle” vs. “material goods”…always a good thing.  Above is Julia Restoin Roitfeld, daughter of the Carine Roitfeld of the Vogue magazine.  Each person or couple gets a homey, crayoned questionaire at the end, like this one from model Erin Wesson.  (Julia’s is not there, she must be busy)

I love Erin’s home for its islands of collaged images, her collections of odd animal heads, and her, for dancing recently to Augusto Pablo and believing there are aliens all around. Me too on all of the above.

BODY STYLE

This is Clean.  This is Fashion on Warp Speed.  Every image on JAK & JIL sends me. The format and the starkness make it my favorite fashion blog because it’s like a wake-up call.  The way someone with Big Style can instantly wake you up when you spot them on the street or in a crowd.  Attn: Boys and Girls, if you like shoes, you will be in heaven here.

SATURATED PASSION

She can be found in a little shaman bearclaw.  She sings on the moors like a little goth rock Heathcliff lover. Goddess or Lady Lavona?  The Lady’s blog, Cabinet of Curiosities is gorgeous and so rich to read.  She is my Muse for Fusing my witchy, herb-loving and city blood self.  The above image from Jennifer Tzar, the photographer who used an antique relic LIKE Lady Lavona’s Black Forest Relics in the shoot, is an example of the aesthetic of “new hipster hippie” that runs through her choices of art to music to coffins.  (Attn: stylist friends…go for the Lady’s relics, she just added new ones!)  Her coverage of the gold biodegradable coffin pod from Ecopod really sent me.  Here is one of her magikal items, a Venus love nest of pink quartz for the heart. (I do love her talismans made from animal claws and teeth, more precious because she sells out all the time!)

CLOSET QUEENS

Globally and unGodly, girls are opening up their closets and blogging about it and it runs the gamut from painful to pretty.  My favorite of all is the reigning two Queens of the News from The My Closet Genre… All hail Queen Michelle and Queen Marie from Kingdom of Style!

These two London girls make my day when they wax on about crafty indie designers (and make a point of following them repeatedly, which is really honorable), make things to wear and model them (see Queen Michelle above, she LOVES her leggings!) and basically can intrigue me on any topic from the mundane to sublime and I can’t even hear their sexy accents!

ART? OR MUSIC? OR VERYLIFE ITSELF?

For number 5 I’ve been agonizing for all of Sunday over which ART blog to share more intimately with everyone. It was a 3-way tie between my Great Loves, Circleculture, where the pink Jaybo Aka Monk image below comes from or who killed bambi, where the image by Miles Aldridge from the top of the blog came from or from a trip into the bizarre and tasty world of Wurzeltod.

The winner? i listen to everything by Diana Miller, a talent executive with Last Call with Carson Daly. This post already is so flush with art and the very specific and precious worlds of Circleculture, who killed bambi and wurzeltod are best discovered on one’s own without comment or illustration from me.  Take a look when you have time. But, music, especially as covered in Diana’s blog, is pop-in-able any time and her presentation is a perfect osmosis of the artists’ lives and their music.  The image is Lykke Li, who we covered last year in a summer music post by Felicia Chen.(yes, this is a bleg for Felicia to do a repeat;-)

ALL ABOUT ALTER ME.

And one last plug.  It may be true. I or someone I know is an extra-terrestial stuck in the body of a stripper named Chelsea Nicole and she blogs here…iti phone home about celebrities, boobs and chakras.

AND NOW, MY TOP FIVE ADDICTIVE MOMENTS…

Addictions, I have seen all kinds. I thankfully do not have that kind of personality.  I am only addicted to finding the orgasmic in every moment so I claim that that addiction qualifies.

I am obsessed with the idea of obliterating the Binary Code of the brain and Emotions which I have found immediately results in INFINITY,  So, no holds barred, here five moments in my life where my addiction to infinity occurred and technically will never stop occurring…(oooh, fractal headache here)

THE RED CIRCLE.

A dare from the neighborhood kids to draw a perfect circle on demand. Ha!  I knew I could do this and distinctly remember calling upon all the forces of nature, Famous Artists Gone-By and The Grand Creator Itself…and I drew a perfect circle…to be echoed in the open mouths of babes surrounding me.  That moment of bravado, summoning The Force and total audience share qualifies as my first Addictive Infinite High.

THE ROCK.

Ripple effects.  Knowing this at age 11.  Just me, legs tucked up on a huge rock in the country and imagining and feeling a world of contentment as I became the hissing of the grass in front of  me and the breathless rising and falling of the golden insects in the sun together like a volume graph of a song.  I did feel my whole life perfect in that moment and can get there anytime.

THE BICYCLE.

Riding my bike, in a trance from the sound and feel of the wheels ( thank you Chad Landenberger for this perfect image) and looking up suddenly to a low brick wall (my favorite wall to perch on and contemplate the world) coming up on the left side of the path.  Deciding that the measurement of time to get there was Infinity and it was this: 8 and so I decided to stop time at that moment…and slo-mo’d my way to the wall.  In fact I am still there on that bike.

JOSEPH AND HIS COAT OF MANY COLORS.

A magic man from Portugal that I fell immediately in love with to Bowie’s song “Let’s Dance”, you know the one about the red shoes and yes, I was wearing them, he pulled me to dance and I was done from that moment on. Full of art, drama and mystical coincidences that convinced me Time Had Stopped, we followed each other to Europe and for years we lived in that world between dreamscape and “actuality.” This image from Mario Testino encapsulates for me one “Infinite Moment” and the whole experience of crossing paths with this man.

THE CAR CRASH.

Years later I was driving on a country road, through an allee, having just fought again with my boyfriend of 8 years and considering that this maybe “the end of the road”, a highway child, cast out into the world…

The last thing I remember was the techno music, the brilliant summer light blinking through the trees…

…and then the huge pink air balloon obliterating my world.   Near Death? I did die, in fact, and hovered for while in that still moment of choice to re-enter this world and clean up the mess.

I emerged with only a scratch, no one was hurt in a total miracle and I felt no impact or heard anything.  This convinced me instantly of the parallel infinite world that rides bigger in the temporary scaffolding of our soap opera days.

The crossroads where our God Perfection Meets Our Corporal Messy Emotions and Obsessions is honestly my addiction.  On the serious and humorous side, it makes for great art.  The structure and crashing of our technological and linear apparatus with our squishy biological bodies is the fascination of us all to differing degrees.

In this one climaxing incident was joined one of my favorite songs,”Warm Leatherette” from Grace Jones, books such as “Crash”, from J.G. Ballard, and the  movie of the same name by David Cronenberg, Tarantino’s Grindhouse and the lurid fascination of Andy Warhol employed as a police crash scenes photographer.  The American dream cut short on the highway…and very likely a new and better DREAM to emerge.

How to bi-furcate the binary coding in our emotionally fueled brains and reach infinity? Of course this is how fractals, the pattern of infinity, are made.  This flickering of on and off is the stuff our phenomenal worlds are made of according to physics.  The films of our lives are the running of sequential images of our desires.

“Flux and flurry,Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds”, by Esther Leslie in the Radical Philosophy magazine sums this up neatly and scholarly.

A blog is thus… a form of animated cartoon.  Those decrying the death crash of journalism via the hand of blogs, Facebook posts and tweets will remain moribund while the flash of imagination of the readers gains speed and illumination through new faster cinematic forms.

As Leslie points out, a snow globe is our world, still or animated by the touch of our thoughts.

…and this pic…is me, a dreaming blogger, FINALLY finished my “Chain letter, Addiction Blog Post” for now…progress…I think I found meaning….(as the yogis say, “not this, not that”)… a thousand points of light and ephemeral snowthingies …feeling much better than when we began! (thank you blogging pen pals…and Lolita for this image and btw she has an amazing blog you should see…

written by Jade Dressler