Good Stuff: Magic Beans

Pretty sure this is made from beans, nut and corn. Which is awesome. Who ever said don't play with your food was a fool. Find it here.

Good Stuff: Private Moon

   I've seen quite a few of these photos on tumblr and flickr but wasn't aware it was a series of photographs or that there was a story behind it. I found the artist's, Leonid Tishkov, website today along with the original photographs from the series and the poem. It's strangely beautiful and wanted to share.

    "Writer Chesterton once said that there couldn’t be a personal faith as there couldn’t be a personal sun or a personal moon. In Russia everything is the other way round: we are faced with life one to one, and we are completely lonely in the face of the problem of time, that is, the problem of life and death, the problem of losses and gains, the moon, the sun, and everything in this life. We could, conceivably, turn to someone for support. But we are still lonely…However, that shouldn’t make us grieve or suffer. Loneliness of this sort means that we exist, we are here, we are at the center of the universe and we are comparable to the Moon, to the other celestial bodies. 

    'Private Moon' is a visual poem telling the story of a man who met the Moon and stayed with her for the rest of his life. In the upper world, in fact in the attic of his own house, he saw the Moon falling off from the sky. Once she was hiding from the Sun in a dark and damp tunnel. But the passing trains frightened her. Now she came to this man’s house. Having wrapped the Moon with warm blankets he treated her with autumn apples, gave her a cup of tea, and when she got well he took her in his boat across the dark river to the high bank overgrown with moon pine-trees. He descended into the lower world dressed in the clothes of his deceased father and then returned from there lighting up his path with his personal Moon. Crossing the borderline between the two worlds across a narrow bridge, immersed in a dream and taking care of this heavenly creature, the man became a mythological being living in a real world as in a fairytale. 

    Each photograph is a poetic tale, a little poem in its own right. Therefore each picture is accompanied by my own verse, which I wrote when I drew my sketches for the photographs. So it turns out that the Moon overcomes our loneliness in the universe uniting many of us around it." 

-Leonid Tishkov, via

"Like Magritte’s
Day and Night
The moon was stuck in a pine tree’s crown
a needle adhered to its radient sleeve"

"The sky is near.
Open the attic and you’ll see
there next to the wasp nest
rings the blinding light"
of the lost moon

"Open the closet
there among the old coats, the moon
hides from people"
 

"Autumn is so chilly
even the moon has caught a cold"

I cross the dark river
to the high bank
where the lunar evergreens grow

"I grope about in the dark
carrying the heavenly light
on my back in a swarm of sparkling bees"

 "The Moscow Moon
 in a starless sky
 has sat down on the edge of a roof"

"I invite the moon to tea
like a lump of sugar
the damp night dissolves the moon in
an apple tree"

"After everyone has gone to bed
go to the window and there
the crescent moon has appeared to you"

"A bundle of light is the moon
on a sleigh. The sky
worries, when will he return?
Where have they taken him?"

"Like a lunar unicorn
Under the covers she
shines even brighter"

"The funeral of the moon-every morning
Come nightfall you discover the body of the newborn moon
and help return it to the sky
leaving a mere trace in the snow
a thawing light impression"

Leonid Tishkov 2003. Photographs by Leonid Tishkov & Boris Bendikov, 2002-2005

Insides: Brandi Strickland

I was checking out some of Brandi’s new work today and stumbled upon her photo diaries, I posted my favorites below. You can check out the rest of the photos here.

Inspired: Warsan Shire

How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?

how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short?

why do you find the unavailable so alluring?

where did it begin?

what went wrong?

and who made you feel so worthless?

if they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you?

all this time, you were begging for love silently; thinking they couldn’t hear you,

but they smelt it on you.

you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin.

and what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it?

how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful?

where did you learn this, to want what does not want you? 
where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?

  QUESTIONS FOR THE WOMAN I WAS LAST NIGHT

  Warsan Shire

You are a horse running alone

and he tries to tame you compares you to an impossible highway

to a burning house

says you are blinding him

that he could never leave you

forget you want anything but you

you dizzy him,

you are unbearable every woman before or after you

is doused in your name

you fill his mouth his teeth ache with memory of taste

his body just a long shadow seeking yours

but you are always too intense

frightening in the way you want him

unashamed and sacrificial he tells you that no man can live up to the one who

lives in your head

and you tried to change didn’t you?

closed your mouth more tried to be softer

prettier

less volatile, less awake

but even when sleeping you could feel him travelling away from you in his dreams

so what did you want to do love

split his head open?

you can’t make homes out of human beings

someone should have already told you that a

and if he wants to leave then let him leave

you are terrifying

and strange and beautiful

something not everyone knows how to love.”

  FOR WOMEN WHO ARE DIFFICULT TO LOVE

  Warsan Shire

Why do you live in your body

like you will be given another?

As if it were temporary.

You starve it,

you let anyone touch it,

you berate it.

Tell it that it should be completely different.

You tug at your soft flesh,

wish it thinner,

wish it gone.

You fell in love with those

who praise the way it sighs

under their hands,

but who praises the way

it holds up your weight,

even when you are falling apart?

  PRAISE

  Warsan Shire

You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘wow, isn’t she so terribly brave to love a man who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.

  WHOLE

  Warsan Shire

Under their breath, someone said.:

By the time I’ve finished with you, you won’t know whether you’ve been kissed or cut. whether you were loved or butchered. and either way you probably won’t care. just grateful you came close enough to touch.

  GRATEFUL

  Warsan Shire

Your daughter is ugly.

She knows loss intimately,

carries whole cities in her belly.

As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.

She was splintered wood and sea water.

They said she reminded them of the war.

On her fifteenth birthday you taught her

how to tie her hair like rope

and smoke it over burning frankincense.

You made her gargle rosewater and while she coughed, said

macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell

of lonely or empty.

You are her mother.

Why did you not warn her,

hold her like a rotting boat

and tell her that men will not love her

if she is covered in continents,

if her teeth are small colonies,

if her stomach is an island

if her thighs are borders?

What man wants to lay down

and watch the world burn

in his bedroom?

Your daughter’s face is a small riot,

her hands are a civil war,

a refugee camp behind each ear,

a body littered with ugly things

but God,

doesn’t she wear

the world well.

  UGLY

  Warsan Shire

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