wow.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

just a few recent photographs

two digital and two film, respectively, and just to be fair.

i hate perfume

this guy makes the most amazing perfume oils ever. they come with names like "burning leaves"
and "in the library" and each one has a little back story to go with it. the story for the one above goes like this:
" This scent is a memory of my Grandfather, the sawmill that he owned and the stone house where he lived. It is blended with Sawdust, Fresh Cut Hay, Worn Leather Work Gloves, Pipe Tobacco and a healthy amount of Dirt. There is also a faint whiff of cotton overalls covered in Axel Grease..."

how perfect is that??? the correlation between scent and memory has always intrigued me. there's a crappy little grocery store in town called paul's food center and something in there always reminds me of my grandparents' house in north carolina. the scent causes a flood of memories of that house that i never think about until i walk into paul's. it's like little details come back to me. the color of the walls, the way the burgundy rugs in the bathroom feel on my feet, the sound of the porch swing squeakin' as my grandmother rocks back and forth, the hoe on the porch that she uses to chop off the heads of poisonous snakes that come too close...

deborah aschheim has done projects dealing with similar issues by trying to transfer her own memories of her aunts to other people. she fed people food and drinks and surrounded them with scents (such as the cigarettes they smoked) that reminded her of her aunts while reading memories to them and then does it all again after certain periods of time to see how much they remember by experiencing those things again. much of her art is memory related and she has a scientific way of going about her creation. click on her link if it sounds interesting to you, and totally go see her installations if you ever get a chance.

the flood

a couple weeks ago, adam and i were visiting my parents' house in rockland. it was a super rainy night and the creek in front of their house was filling up and starting to flood the driveway and road to the point where cars had to slow down and go around. My brother went into the basement to see if the pump was working. it wasn't. water was flooding down a concrete slab on the east end of the house and creeping across the gigantic basement. the outlet next to the pump had shorted out so we ran an extension cord upstairs to get it working again. no more than 10 minutes later we went downstairs to make sure it was still pumping. noooope. it had escalated to this:
water started pouring in the windows and there was nothing we could do to stop it. the water turned black with oil from our furnace. we started trying to move important things up above everything else, pretty much by stacking less important stuff and putting the good stuff on top. in less than 20 minutes, shit looked even bleaker.
i don't know if you can see it, but there are multiple televisions floating in that mess. also, that's a basement with really high ceilings-so you're looking at 4+ feet of wa-wa. my dad came home and braved his way over to the pump to fix it and by morning, the water was gone. my hero. adam and i took advantage of the tension in the atmosphere and took photos of eachother.

It constantly surprises me how a dog's temperament can be influenced by their breed. Egypt is an italian greyhound that we rescued in june. We had little to no knowledge of the breed when we decided to adopt her so we researched on the internet prior to her arrival (mostly on youtube, so what?). All their mannerisms and idiosyncrasies are so simlilar, and we found egypt to be no different. She is always either snuggling or running around like a little mingus, just like these igs: