Josef Albers in VES, 2011

Doing Josef Albers color studies in one of my painting classes was one of the happiest times of my life, and one of the saddest to remember.
Some of the assignments: make one color look like two different colors by placing it on different backgrounds. Make two different colors look like the same color. Make two different colors seem transparent where they overlap. For all these tasks, we had thousands of different sheets of colored paper to choose from.

The most perfect song ever written

"The Beer" by Kimya Dawson.

It's really more of an incantation and it is brutal. I remember a friend's quasi-abusive ex boyfriend posting it online, and watching this video with the lyrics, getting more and more enchanted until I started crying. I mean, what is it!?

After that song, I felt as devastated as the pine in our yard that got hit by a lucky lightning bolt and ended up naked, standing in a ring of its own singed bark. We had to cut that tree down!

Here are a couple of the lines that recently most lightning-strike my aesthetic core:

"The Christians gave me comic books as if I would be scared/of burning in hell, well I was already there."

"We had to sit down on skateboards just to make it down the hill."

As well as the most perfect song ever written, it might be among the most perfect short stories. I've wasted so much time trying to recapture in my own stories what this song makes me feel.

When I first heard the song this is the line that just killed me: "First I cried for him, and then I cried for me/haunted by the ghost of the girl I used to be."

Just for making this post I watched this video of Kimya Dawson performing it and its power slayed me all over again!

This video was recorded at Chaz's in Durham when I still lived there. Where was I??

For more things that I think are the best thing ever:

http://malborkmalbork.blogspot.no/2012/12/so-long-its-been-good-to-know-you.html
http://malborkmalbork.blogspot.no/2012/11/one-poem-for-day.html