Hipstamatic 170 Cometh

The update for the Hipstamatic app for iPhone is hitting iTunes tomorrow!!! Some of the new features available that I'm aware of will be the ability to order high quality prints of your beautiful pictures directly from your phone. I'm really excited to see what those look since the look of a Hipstamatic print seems to lose it's resilience and inner glow when I have printed them at home. They look great on the computer screen and I would love to see some of that light duplicated and sustained in a print.

The other big deal is a new lens, the Bettie XL lens. Below is an example of a picture taken with the Bettie XL lens. This was taken by one of my newest flickr contacts, zinkwazi.

Much credit is due to zinkwazi's compositional skill but I'm also knocked out but the triple tone spectral light leaks around the edges and the brilliantly filmy colors. It's almost like looking at something through a soap bubble. I cannot wait to try it out! I'm really praying that this is not the only new lens and that perhaps there will also be one or two new film paks. WEE!!!

Four Things That made me Happy Today

-Looking in the mirror at the subtle shade of purple eyeshadow I applied this morning.
-Buying an engagement card for friends, whose engagement party we will attend next Saturday.
-Buying an Anniversary card for Fran for our 7 year Anniversary in December. 
-Meeting my co-workers cousins. (They had great accents!)

Knit 1 Purl 1 Row 1...

One summer, years ago, I did an internship at Harper Collins. In their basement they had this great big bookshelf with a bunch of books you could take for free and I would be there browsing and stocking up every week. I remember finding and reading a small book called "The Knitting Sutra," which was about one woman's passion for and study of knitting in different cultures. The idea of knitting as a Sutra or prayer and meditation really appealed to me. I imagine that because of the repetitive nature of knitting, it has been interpreted in many cultures as sort of a silent chant. For myself, it is often a way to center and focus my mind away from troubling thoughts, from a cycle of disturbed contemplation spinning out of control, seemingly with no end. To me knitting is a prayer that manifests itself in my hands immediately. Knit and purl are the only building blocks for knitting and hundreds of combinations result in as many patterns. To make something functional with your own hands is to truly feel some measure of control over what you produce, something which our society has rapidly lost all touch which. We would sooner pay hundreds of dollars for something handmade than make it ourselves. And I'm not judging. I consume way more than I create no matter how much I wish it was otherwise.

 I usually start knitting  for the purpose gaining some much needed equilibrium than that I need one more scarf. Although this fall, I fully intend to commit myself to learning how to crotchet and to make something seamless or knit in the round.  I deeply admire people who make things with their hands that we use in everyday life whether functional, ornamental or both. Even if it takes me a while to complete, I want to at least know that I have the ability to complete a hat or sweater or a pair of mittens, something to wear or give a a gift to keep someone warm with intentions and well wishes as well as wool.

Godric Returns?

Ep. 36: Evil Is Going On - Preview

"True Blood" haters, close thine eyes. Or just don't read this entry. I've been very good I think about not writing and tiresome opinion entries about my favorite HBO show, "True Blood." I may have written about when it first came out but honestly I think it's kind of tacky to write stuff like, "oh, I love it so much" if that's all one has to say.

Ummm, does anyone remember how Godric, the oldest, most powerful vampire died in the last season, Season 2? He died willingly on a roof, exposing himself to the sun to meet the "true death" as his progeny Eric begged on his knees and in tears that he spare himself while Sookie watched on from behind.He had had enough of what to him had become the pointless war between vampires and humans.  It was a jaw dropping scene. It really raised the bar of performance on the show and honestly I don't think any other episode since has been as equally compelling. And now it seems he is is making a somewhat celestial comeback in the finale.

I have to admit that my initial excitement over the show has sharply vacillated since last season and finally waned. I like just about every characters but sometimes all their performances are a bit lame and over the top. I do find it interesting to watch Anna Paquin and Malloy in their Sookie and Bill dance considering that they are not only just married in real life but seem to have an uncommonly genuine love for each other or at least that's what I pick up from reading about them an seeing them together. It's nice to feel that coming from the screen in their scenes together.Because ultimately, my own personal fascination with vampires has always been about two things primarily: the fact that they get to live forever (if they avoid staking and the sun) because imagine all the shit you get to see living that long (depending on when you were turned) history, human nature, food, sex etc. The other thing I love, which remains tied to the lore of Count Vladimir Dracula is that long deep search for one's true love over "oceans of time." I'm a sucker for that. Alan Ball has put a perverse and humorous twist of both these themes and more but at this point, without Godric in the picture to sort of elevate it's meaning it does often seem to be little more than a soap opera which is not what I expected. But then again, I'm not sure I ever really know what to expect from Alan Ball. Maybe that's why I keep watching anyway.

Cookies at Work

Originally uploaded by Zanalee

A collaborative effort by anonymous co-workers, and me. Yes, I can be this childish. It keeps me alive.
LOL!

warmwind_elemental

warmwind_elemental
Originally uploaded by jillbliss
I discovered Jill Bliss years ago when a co-worker gave me a lovely card designed by her as a thank you for a scarf I had made her for her for Christmas. Okay wait actually, I had purchased a journal she designed a while before that. I hadn't realized she designed stationary in general until I received that card. As you may or may not know I am a stationary glutton. I have stationary collected and saved up from over ten years ago. I probably have stuff I don't even know I have. I've fantasized about having a pen pal all my life but as technology progresses, that seems less and less likely to happen. Still, I am a romantic.

My first job ever was working retail at Kates Paperie in Soho. They had some of the most amazing journals, cards, rubber stamps, old school wax seal stamps, fountain pens, and you name it in paper goods. They even had workshops and illustration presentations. But we never got Jill Bliss whom I didn't even know about way back then.

JB is very much into nature which I believe is one of the reasons why her work appeals to me so much. Major themes of the sea, the woods, the sky, the stream and the story in these elements embody many of her illustrations. I keep up with her latest stuff, her studies ad collaborations on her flickr site. This one above was done by five artists including her.

One More Look at You

Somewhere only we know

I don’t remember exactly how many times I’ve been back to Bard College after I dropped out in ’96. It used to be one of my deepest, most painful regrets. I think I kept going back to see if it hurt less each time I went. Bard is a strange and beautiful, improbable little place and I know now, why I had to leave, although I can’t quite verbalize it. I no longer feel there is a need to. This last visit though, may have been my last visit in true.

What’s weird for me about time, is that after a while, what ever I hold onto becomes internalized. I discovered a while ago that your memories of a place can never again be matched by the place itself, not quite and once you move on, you don’t need to hold as much anymore to the past. It’s just a sort of law of nature. There’s only so much you can hold on to at once in your mind and heart. In order to truly function and live you have to move forward, and be present in the now. Once you’ve made the decision to do that, old things, which no longer serve any purpose in your world are like dead weights that fall away. And all of a sudden, I’m riding without training wheels or without anyone holding me up. Sorry to throw that weird metaphor in but that’s how I understand it. It was like magic to me when I was a little girl, how my dad would try to teach me to ride a bike by first holding on to the back and pushing me for a while. At some point I would hear him and my brother yelling from behind me, “You’ve got it! You’re doing it! Keep on going!” or something like that. I would look back, see that my dad was not holding the bike any longer and stop and fall over just like that.

Fear had taken hold. I didn’t know how to get there by myself. Or did I? Many years later after we had left Brooklyn to move into a house in the Bronx, I taught myself how to ride one summer in our back yard. I was bored. There’s nothing like teaching yourself something you never thought you would be able to do. Nothing.

But getting back to memory, I realize as I get older that memory consists of holding on to a picture of physical spaces at a particular time in your life which will never come again. I have always believed that places have energy or a spirit.That energy or spirit combined with whatever time you spend there and the people with whom you form bonds with creates memories, which can never be replicated by simply visiting the place, because now there are only ghosts and projections. What you experienced now lives inside you. What lives inside you is yours alone.

There are times when I will go rifling through the attic of my mind for a deep wound, checking to see what progress it has made in healing and suddenly I notice, I don’t need to do that anymore, that it is very far from me, in another time, so fuzzy, it’s not worth squinting to focus on, because I’m to busy focusing on the now. And it’s so strange! Once upon a time it meant everything! It was so intense and dramatic, so desperate! And now it’s like a faded kiss, dissolving on someone elses' forehead in a drama played out in another world. I’m done. But I’m not finished.