Welcome again to my sketchbook project!
If you want to see the front cover, preface, and 1st page of go here.
For 2nd and 3rd page, go here!
So that left page (page 4) is of my winnie the pooh alarm clock that I think Mar gave me for college when I graduated from high school. I was trying to take a picture of the time but the flash blanked it out and I got emptiness instead–
Timeless
Right now time doesn’t matter. What
matters is you. Forget the deadlines,
the wasting sand, biological clocks,
and alarms. Stay in the present, with
me. Be in time with your pulse, your
blood flow, your beating heart. Match
yours with my own rhythm. Let’s slow
dance to our mutual beat. This way,
we’d never misstep. Close our eyes and
let the world revolve without us. And
let only gravity hold us down. You look
handsome tonight, and every night, for
every millennium to come. And I know my
beauty will be renown in legends passed
down through the ages. We are timeless,
effortless, and hopelessly in love. The
stars and the sun will explode. Another
asteroid can hit our Earth. Global
warming will drown us all. But we’ll
still be slow dancing in a burning
room. And only our hearts will catch
fire.
Beneath the prose poem and photograph is Rain Taxi‘s book review by Steve Matuszak of the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire.
Read Matuszak’s review (scroll to the 2nd page) because honestly I can’t do it justice. He did such a great job. McGuire’s original incarnation was as a six page strip in Raw in 1989. It was highly influential and completely pivotal to the comic form. You can read it here. He later on expanded it to 360 pages, which is in the above review, and you can discover how he made it here. So fucking fascinating.
Anyway, I grabbed a free copy of Rain Taxi in NYC, at a bookstore but I forget which one, soz. I really enjoy their book reviews and hopefully I’ll be able to read them again. I think I was reading it and I realized it’d make the perfect background for my Timeless piece. Just the fact they’re dancing alone was enough. But how Matuszak explained how time functions within the comic and what being “here” means, just added a lovely layer to my prose.
I love serendipity so much.
Uhh, it hit me that I did not comprehend the meaning of John Mayer’s Slow Dancing in a Burning Room at all when I wrote this haha. Beautiful song though! And I love the phrase so much, so it’s my own take on it.
I love the idea of not being bound to time at all. That no other circumstances matter except for the one shared between you and your most significant other. That you both are completely impervious to all conflicts, boundaries, and doomsayers.
And what do you both do when time is no longer an obstacle? When nothing can harm you, age you, prevent you from doing whatever the hell you want? When you’re divine and above everything that dares to trap you but never will?
You slow dance, in a warm embrace, to a love song only meant for you two: the mutual rhythm and blues of your heartbeats. You let the Earth rotate without you, because you know that the only world you ever needed is within each other. With closed eyes, close bodies, and closed doors, as the universe burns eternal.
In honor of you.
And here’s another take on a slow dance I wrote four years ago (it would’ve hit the anniversary if I published this on Monday, the 18th, but oh well). I still want that. I haven’t slow danced in forever, not sure I want to count the waltz or rumba I did this past Saturday since it wasn’t to 90s R & B like I wanted, so I won’t.
I wonder if brotap will let me slow dance with him on my birthday? {HE FUCKING BETTER! are you reading this!? lol} I haven’t slow danced since middle school probably, everything after that was mostly grinding really. So overrated. Slow dancing is so much sweeter and romantic. And I’d rather grind with my clothes off LOL.
Anyway, back to your scheduled programming, here’s what page 5 says:
Small Pleasures
Strangers smiling back, looking up a
word and getting it right, connecting
two jigsaw puzzle pieces perfectly, taking
pictures of books I own; reading,
listening to, and watching something
that understands me; dropping a coin in
my teddy bear bank, crossing out a day
on the calendar, crushing things with
my feet, blowing out candles,
completing a page.
Those chocolates in the snapshot are from the one seen in the background. Pretty yummy and it’s from Neuhaus, though I forget which one it is, though it’s definitely on this page. Chocolate is for sure a very sweet, small pleasure for me. I was inspired by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie, my favorite movie ever. Never fails to warm my heart, encourage me to seek adventure, and to be good to others. Watching the trailer just filled me with such joy. Here’s the scene where the narrator talks about Amelie’s small pleasures.
And this is a French short film called Foutaises (English title: Things I Like, Things I Hate) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet yet again, and released in 1990, which is where that Amelie scene originates. I love this so much. It’s so well-edited and shot. I need to watch more of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movies. Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children were such delights, though they tend to be dark, especially the latter, and so creative.
I knew that there was a movie called The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, but I had no clue that Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed it! It’s based on one of my favorite novels which is the incredibly innovative “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” by Reif Larsen. It’s about a young boy (TS, durh) who travels to DC for an award and in the margins of the book are his schematics, drawings, and graphs. I love the way he processes information and it was wonderfully designed. I want to try my hand at thinking about the world that way, at least for a few pages in my journal.
I actually went to his signing for I Am Radar (which I sadly haven’t read yet). And Larsen was so gracious and kind and so funny. I really enjoyed visiting the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. I gotta go back again.
He wrote a Borgesian love story called “Entrances & Exits” for Editions at Play which is an innovative publishing collaboration between Google and Visual Editions (which I think is the coolest press ever). It’s told through Google Street View, in which the narrator discovers a mysterious key in an abandoned bookshop and gradually learns of its power to open and close doors around the world. Lovely right?
Here’s another list of things I enjoy:
- Reading someone else’s words which echo my own thoughts or experiences, especially when I never told anyone about them, especially when they’re hard to explain or are taboo.
- Coming across a location that I always wanted to visit but by simple coincidence. Serendipity.
- Having the exact amount of money for the cashier.
- Observing how beautiful the sky is.
- The hypnotism of telephone lines as I’m riding in a car
- Looking through the #midoritravelersnotebook hashtag on instagram. And especially looking at Sasha Martinez‘s lovely artmesses and mail art. She has the most beautiful captions I swear.
- Making myself laugh, especially when no one around me will understand why. Their perplexed and WTF expressions make me crack up harder lol.
- When cream and milk swirl into the coffee and make it lighter.
- Catching someone you like like looking at you.
- Getting a package or personal letter you forgot to expect
- The doughy, rawish middle of a chocolate chip cookie, freshly baked. I miss my primary school’s cookies :/
- Finding faces in unexpected places.
And here’s a list of things I dislike:
- Dandruff on people’s eyebrows
- Losing a draft or published blog (<<<especially) to the void
- Accidentally deleting precious locked texts and treasured voicemail. There’s a text conversation between a wrong number and I that I lost once I got a new phone because it malfunctioned and I couldn’t record in time. I miss it more than I miss the guy I wanted to contact originally…
- Loose threads– on clothing, stories, and in life
- Stickers going unstuck
- People putting in unnecessary ellipses at the end of their texts or posts…
- The little remaining puddle of face wash, lotion, other goodness that you cannot GET OUT of the bottle!!!!
- When cell autocorrects your “fucking” to “ducking”. It was cute the first few times phone, but not no more!
- Getting a red squiggly line under your name (my middle name in my case), or any of your loved ones really. Bleh.
- The grease marks your fingerprints leave on pristine black book covers, especially when they’re your own tomes.
- Discovering that the article or novel you’re reading is missing a page or section. And you bought that shit.
- When a favorite CD is scratched and you can hear it skip repeatedly and remain stuck, like a torturous water drip.
And to reward you for hanging on to my every word and sticking through my complaints, I’m going to share with you a coupon code you can use for the sketchbook project for 20% off your order! It is: “FRIENDSofFRIENDS“. But hurry, it expires 4/18, MONDAY, at 11:59 pm EST!!!
In case you don’t know what the sketchbook project is, it’s “the world’s largest library of artists’ books, crowd-sourced from every corner of the globe. The project is changing the way creative people share their work while creating a worldwide community resource. By getting a sketchbook, you are joining the movement, adding your voice and becoming part of something huge. Draw, write, collage, cut, print, photograph – It starts with an idea.”
And you’re looking at one right now! Those pages above are a part of my own sketchbook project which you can see all of what I blogged so far in order, here. I will continue to blog this until all 32 pages and the back covers have been documented.
And they moved to a new location! It’s still in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but now it’s here. I want to visit once my sketchbook is mailed in and on their shelves! I’m planning to go there for my birthday party in July. I haven’t been there in years, but it’ll be great to spend a few hours there, looking at all these awesome sketchbooks. I’m getting giddy just thinking about it!
Okay, long enough lol. Enjoy the code and let me know if you signed up or already have one on the site/library! I’d love to see it 😀
see you space cowboy
eileen