(via fatalistichues)
seeing is believing
Minister:Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.
Ariana Lindquist / New York Times / Redux
Crescent Moon Lake is a naturally occurring spring in the middle of the Gobi desert, along the Silk Road in Gansu province, China. Photographer Ariana Lindquist notes, “The picturesque pagoda you see in the photograph is a cheap stand-in for a Buddhist shrine that was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Crescent Moon Lake has become a typical tourist site, with camel and dune-buggy rides. Still, it’s amazing to fly into this environment and imagine that 1,000 years ago, when it was part of the Silk Road, caravans would come across this immense desert to the little oasis town of Dunhuang. It’s becoming famous now for clean energy. Just outside town, they’re going to build one of China’s largest solar-power stations.”
Albums released in the first decade of the new millennium, that changed my life in the first decade of the new millennium. Part I.
1. Rilo Kiley, The Execution of All Things
2. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
3. The Postal Service, Give Up
4. Band of Horses, Everything All the Time
5. Feist, The Reminder
6. M.I.A., Kala
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Fiona Apple & Maude Maggart: It’s Only a Paper Moon
(via sometimesagreatnotion)
Well, yesterday’s Fiona Apple cover was so popular, I decided to keep a good thing going. In that spirit, then, here’s another old standard, this time offered up by Fiona and her older sister Amber, who performs under the stage name Maude Maggart.
Yes, you read that right: Fiona Apple has an older sister who also makes music (mostly cabaret) - and Fiona Apple’s actual real name is the decidedly less catchy Fiona Apple McAfee Maggart.
This beautiful a capella duet of the old standard, “It’s Only A Paper Moon”, makes you feel a bit envious of any fly on the Maggart’s walls growing up - and makes your family sing-a-longs look like crap.
What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.
