Priscilla Yea-Eun Ahn @priscillayeaeunahn - Tumblr Blog

Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing [actions shows on TV], as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

Andy Warhol

I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Andy Warhol

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work" because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

Andy Warhol

Before I was shot [June, 1968], I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television - you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.

Andy Warhol

thedesertsoflove

From an interview with Tom Waits by Elizabeth Gilbert -

He was driving along the freeway in Los Angeles. All of a sudden he hears a melody. Tantalising…he wants it. But he doesn’t have a tape recorder, he doesn’t have a pencil. All his old anxiety begins to rise in him. I’m going to lose it, he thinks. I’ll be haunted by this thing forever. I won’t be good enough. I won’t be able to do it. But instead of panicking, he just stops and finishes his thoughts. He looks up to the sky and exclaims, ‘excuse me, can’t you see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? Look, if you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you, otherwise go bother someone else today…like…Leonard Cohen’.

Patti Smith - Interview, Stockholm October 1976

That was his whole philosophy, in the development of the mind, my mother believed in the development of the heart, and I believed in the development of the hands...They’re all Hs. H-H-H That’s good. Hand, Heart, and Head.

#patti smith

Making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.

Alan Watts

LM: What's the reason for this inability to write in your own voice? KA: The honest answer has to do with my personality, and even my sexuality. What I recognize now is that I am passive. Deeply, deeply passive. So the quality of making or creation in me that comes out--whatever it is in my has to do wth making--is based on a reactive rather than an active principle. I don't see a blank page when I'm writing. Ever. Or when I do nothing happens. I can't even write people letters. I've never applied for a grant. The blank page is like an invitation to paralysis for me, not to creative activity.

An Interview with Kathy Acker Larry McCaffery and Kathy Acker

#kathy acker #larry mccaffery

Elsje Christiaens Hanging on a Gibbet, 1664.

“eighteen-year old Elsje Christiaens from Jutland, Denmark...came to Amsterdam in April 1664 to find work as a servant. On the 27th of that month her landlady beat her with a broomstick because she failed to pay her rent. Elsje, in turn, grabbed an axe that was at hand. In the fight that followed, the landlady fell down the stairs to her death. Elsje fled but was quickly apprehended. She was sentenced on May 1st to be secured to a stake on a scaffold and choked until she died (a regular form of execution at that time) and then receive blows on her head with the same axe with which she had attached her landlady. The court had more to say. After her death she was to be displayed on Volewijk, an island in the River IJ just north of Amsterdamn, the guilty axe placed by her head, her body left to rot. The gallows field on Volewijk, seen by domestic and foreign sailors entering amsterdam’s harbor, was intended to deter crime...[one of] his only drawings of sensational contemporary events. In the one in which Elsje is seen frontally, her face has a childlike quality, not that of a convicted criminal. In the other, which is in less-than-good condition and has some wash added by another hand, Rembrandt gives equal attention to the limp, lifeless figure and to the straps, bolts, blocks, and timber stakes to which she has been secured.” Seymour Slive in Rembrandt Drawings

#rembrandt

Winter Landscape, ca. 1648-50 Rembrandt

“Few of the master’s landscapes achieve its depth and atmospheric effect with more economy.” ~Seymour Slive in Rembrandt Drawings

#rembrandt

Do you perceive you live your life through love or fear? They are very different manifestations. My favorite quote is by the English novelist Iris Murdoch. She said, “Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.” I like the idea that all that love is, is acknowledging another’s reality.

Milton Glaser