mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Your search for cursive returned 17 posts.
All of the brightest things live in the darkest places. [ expired film ], by Cursive Buildings.

All of the brightest things live in the darkest places. [ expired film ], by Cursive Buildings.

Mills County Champion Baker. Eight years ago, when one Googled my name the first hit announced Mills County Champion Baker: it was a modest website proclaiming the winner of a baking contest held in Mills County, Iowa. A few years after that, I had this hat made at the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, and despite some chewing from Five it’s still dear to me. I was reminded of this when Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings commented on this photo: Listen, you need to start accepting applications for a personal chef specializing in baked goods. You can call it the Mills Baker Looks for Mills’ Baker Contest. Interested parties may submit resumes in the comments below; my benefactor will arrange for salary and relocation.

Mills County Champion Baker.

Eight years ago, when one Googled my name the first hit announced Mills County Champion Baker: it was a modest website proclaiming the winner of a baking contest held in Mills County, Iowa. A few years after that, I had this hat made at the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, and despite some chewing from Five it’s still dear to me.

I was reminded of this when Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings commented on this photo:

Listen, you need to start accepting applications for a personal chef specializing in baked goods. You can call it the Mills Baker Looks for Mills’ Baker Contest.

Interested parties may submit resumes in the comments below; my benefactor will arrange for salary and relocation.

Tags: me hat baton rouge
The camera belonging to the amazing Joshua Heinman, of Cursive Buildings, “died a spectacular death” and as it did so it captured a beautiful cityscape: “This was the final thought as the circuit brains scrambled & blinked out of existence. Sort of a beautiful parting shot.” He later used the resurrected camera for this lovely zombie video.

The camera belonging to the amazing Joshua Heinman, of Cursive Buildings, “died a spectacular death” and as it did so it captured a beautiful cityscape: “This was the final thought as the circuit brains scrambled & blinked out of existence. Sort of a beautiful parting shot.”

He later used the resurrected camera for this lovely zombie video.

Tags: art magic photography
Humanum est Errare; to Forgive, Divine. (By Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings).

Humanum est Errare; to Forgive, Divine. (By Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings).

“The shadow of a passing cloud drags over railroad tracks in Minnesota,” by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings. “Angelic Melancholic, 2008,” ibid. “`Umikûmâlima,” ibid. Looking at Heineman’s photographs affects me in a peculiar way that recalls the pitched sense of longing I felt seeing my grandfather’s old model train set, with its European hills and forlorn, precisely-painted trees, and the German buildings of an architecture at once archetypal and unfamiliar to me. Miniaturization, and I would include such phenomena as tilt-shift photography and Heineman’s beautiful loops*, provokes an irresolvable sort of longing in us that is familiar from aging: by reducing the scale of the world, we can envelop its structures and forms completely, bringing buildings into ourselves, holding trees in hand and running our fingers over the smooth hills. We can at last examine the details in which we’ve hidden so much youthful meaning, the spaces into which we crammed our childhoods, while holding cities still and at arm’s length. At the same time, minituratization excludes us forever from these spaces. We cannot enter the train station and run between its delicate columns and benches, and we can no longer climb into the tree and consider it our castle. The hills are papier-mâché or plaster, and will break beneath us. Perhaps the world was too vast when we were young, but now it is too small. Growing larger means we nervously and clumsily handle these fragile artifacts, while when little we bounced between them with abandon; we sink into the cushions which were once our forts; we have in hand the whole tiny world and can at last bring it fully into mind, but we lumber like plump monsters across shrunken fields -how could we have thought them so vast?-, and looking at the marvel in our palm -the scale model of something that we might have entered only decades before- we feel at once expansive and banished, encompassing and forbidden (while perhaps inside, childhood continues without us). It sometimes seems to me that Heineman can return at will to those spaces and stride into the model train stations or onto the tops of little skyscrapers, staying long enough at least to send us photographs we recognize: that’s what our world looked like before we reduced it irretrievably: “Only Minutes from a Dream,” ibid. *Note from above: speed and repetition are associated with size for reasons worth contemplating.

“The shadow of a passing cloud drags over railroad tracks in Minnesota,” by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings.

“Angelic Melancholic, 2008,” ibid.

“`Umikûmâlima,” ibid.

Looking at Heineman’s photographs affects me in a peculiar way that recalls the pitched sense of longing I felt seeing my grandfather’s old model train set, with its European hills and forlorn, precisely-painted trees, and the German buildings of an architecture at once archetypal and unfamiliar to me.

Miniaturization, and I would include such phenomena as tilt-shift photography and Heineman’s beautiful loops*, provokes an irresolvable sort of longing in us that is familiar from aging: by reducing the scale of the world, we can envelop its structures and forms completely, bringing buildings into ourselves, holding trees in hand and running our fingers over the smooth hills. We can at last examine the details in which we’ve hidden so much youthful meaning, the spaces into which we crammed our childhoods, while holding cities still and at arm’s length.

At the same time, minituratization excludes us forever from these spaces. We cannot enter the train station and run between its delicate columns and benches, and we can no longer climb into the tree and consider it our castle. The hills are papier-mâché or plaster, and will break beneath us. Perhaps the world was too vast when we were young, but now it is too small.

Growing larger means we nervously and clumsily handle these fragile artifacts, while when little we bounced between them with abandon; we sink into the cushions which were once our forts; we have in hand the whole tiny world and can at last bring it fully into mind, but we lumber like plump monsters across shrunken fields -how could we have thought them so vast?-, and looking at the marvel in our palm -the scale model of something that we might have entered only decades before- we feel at once expansive and banished, encompassing and forbidden (while perhaps inside, childhood continues without us).

It sometimes seems to me that Heineman can return at will to those spaces and stride into the model train stations or onto the tops of little skyscrapers, staying long enough at least to send us photographs we recognize: that’s what our world looked like before we reduced it irretrievably:

“Only Minutes from a Dream,” ibid.

*Note from above: speed and repetition are associated with size for reasons worth contemplating.

Tags: art memory

Who are you?

My comment on a previous post that this site mostly reflects who I am when alone -that is, that the tone and content of my posts tends to come from the iteration of my self that exists in between bouts of social extroversion and the stimulated enthusiasm that comes from them- drew interesting notes from Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings and Raynor Ganan of The Ragbag (two of my absolute favorite presences online, both genuinely brilliant and delightful and fascinating).

Joshua wrote:

ever notice how you’re a slightly different person to everyone you know? & how you play into that, whether consciously or no… & how it makes you feel dirty. & by you, i mean everyone (i think?).

I have, and I think it explains a bit of the everpresent shame I feel about my identity, the persistent notion I have that I’m a fraud: this multiplicity of willed and unwilled personas makes any one personality seem false, manipulative.

Nudawn was emphatic that we are not who we are online, and this is true. But it is also true that we create from our selves, and the question of which self is truer or more authentic is as unanswerable as it is irrelevant. Milan Kundera claims that the self present in an author’s works is truer than the self present in his or her biography, making inquiries into whom this or that writer slept with or what a writer drank or smoked utterly beside any point. This seems only partly convincing.

I know that those who know me as a giggly, gregarious, immature, screaming, profane boy sometimes find these posts affected, as though I pretend to a severity that is not mine, but the reality is that in the hours of the day, and particularly those of the night, when I’m not in laughing conversation, this is closer to how I feel, think, and see. It is the version of myself I know best; it is the least automatic as well.

In other words: for most of my life, this is who I am. Raynor added, with characteristic wit:

i would love for all my favourite tumblrs to fill out a sentence like this. as for me, who i am here is who i am had i been born 100 years ago and in a romanticized parallel dimension.

So, for Raynor, whom we all owe a great deal for his brilliant work: who are you?

Tags: milan kundera psychology philosophy

CREATING A GOOD BLOG IS LIKE WRITING A GOOD BOOK THAT NO ONE READS PAST THE FIRST PAGE

Cursive Buildings:

creating a good blog is like hiding your treasure under piles of new treasure.
creating a bad blog is like burying your trash under piles of new trash.

i try to walk a fine line around here.

This is one formal issue with a blog’s structure, and it weighs on me. Who hasn’t been tempted to resurrect something from the previous year and show it again, knowing that now it is dead and gone, buried in the damp earth of the archive? Who doesn’t sometimes feel that the blog mirrors, in its obsession with the instantaneous present or the very-near past, our own time’s preoccupation with the now over history, the immediate over the reflective?

Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings has posted the latest free and wonderful issue of AHHHHH MEGA-ZINE. From his post: FREE DOWNLOAD HERE FEATURING WORK BY:kimberly sink (website)reid corzatt (email)javan makhmali (website) editor’s note:j.makhmali is the creator of rreset, a radical gallery wall for flickr photosets. READ THE FOURTH ISSUE HERE.” As usual, it’s great; everything in it is lovely, and the polaroid photographs alone are worth the download. Take a look at the other issues, too!

Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings has posted the latest free and wonderful issue of AHHHHH MEGA-ZINE. From his post:

FREE DOWNLOAD HERE

FEATURING WORK BY:
kimberly sink (website)
reid corzatt (email)
javan makhmali (website)

editor’s note:
j.makhmali is the creator of rreset, a radical gallery wall for flickr photosets.

READ THE FOURTH ISSUE HERE.”

As usual, it’s great; everything in it is lovely, and the polaroid photographs alone are worth the download. Take a look at the other issues, too!

Speaking of those I admire: one of my favorite Tumblr-users -Cursive Buildings- was prominently featured on the VSL, for his work “transforming antique photographs into eye-popping three-dimensional animated GIFs.” That project, Reaching for the Out of Reach, is one of several, all linked from his site. I suppose I mention him a lot, but he does so much good work: above is “Imitation is Flattery.” (Note: I would have reblogged the image from him -as did the fantastic Bronze Medal- but I wanted it to appear in maximum width for Dashboard viewers).

Speaking of those I admire: one of my favorite Tumblr-users -Cursive Buildings- was prominently featured on the VSL, for his work “transforming antique photographs into eye-popping three-dimensional animated GIFs.” That project, Reaching for the Out of Reach, is one of several, all linked from his site.

I suppose I mention him a lot, but he does so much good work: above is “Imitation is Flattery.”

(Note: I would have reblogged the image from him -as did the fantastic Bronze Medal- but I wanted it to appear in maximum width for Dashboard viewers).

Mao, Roy Lichtenstein (1971) I am partly persuaded that postmodern ‘playfulness’ is a very good thing, that by desacralizing images, words, and concepts we can more exhaustively interrogate them, sorting out what matters and why and developing our understanding of the world. This has been my first -but not only- line of defense on behalf of works of art that violate whatever boundaries of taste, sensitivity, or custom, and I extend the defense to utterances among friends (as do most of us, I think). But it is always arresting to remember that some images have correspondences in the world of human experience that seem beyond “play.” I wrote previously of the associations one cannot avoid between the wonderful work by the amazing Cursive Buildings below and September 11th, associations which first forced their way into my awareness when rewatching Brazil after the attacks: The image of Mao above, and those many Maos fashioned by Warhol below, reminds me of this. Mao was as evil as any human being has ever been, as evil as any can be; that he was ostensibly driven by ideology to pursue, acquire, and deploy maximum individuated power in no way absolves him. Several tens of millions of people died because of Mao, many at his direct instruction; many were tortured to death. In some senses we are all their kin, but of course those victims must have living relatives, too. One wonders how they feel about images like the Warhol below: do they find them an interesting reclamation of signifier and symbol, or a kaleidoscopic horror? How would you imagine it if the face were Hitler’s, or Pol Pot’s? And indeed, how do you feel about the Dead Kennedys’ song “Holiday in Cambodia”? Or about this Stalin / Colonel Sanders KFC / KGB brand mashup? Is it as funny when one thinks of the weeping, begging sisters and brothers marched through the Lubyanka to be shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night? The older one gets -the more one knows about the lives of others- the greater the number of images, symbols, narratives, histories, and jokes one can no longer take lightly. One knows someone who lost a child; the “dead baby” meme loses its luster in light of her tears. One knows of a city that washed away and someone whose life was wrecked: you change the station if “When the Levee Breaks” comes on. And so on. It doesn’t mean terribly much about the things in themselves, as philosophers say, but it means something about the things in oneself, the widening sense one has of the seriousness of tragedy, the importance of history, the fragility of life. And year by year, I worry that “play” gets harder. (None of which is to say I can’t take a joke; I still laugh at many of these things, but now with some slight concern that wasn’t always there).

Mao, Roy Lichtenstein (1971)

I am partly persuaded that postmodern ‘playfulness’ is a very good thing, that by desacralizing images, words, and concepts we can more exhaustively interrogate them, sorting out what matters and why and developing our understanding of the world. This has been my first -but not only- line of defense on behalf of works of art that violate whatever boundaries of taste, sensitivity, or custom, and I extend the defense to utterances among friends (as do most of us, I think).

But it is always arresting to remember that some images have correspondences in the world of human experience that seem beyond “play.” I wrote previously of the associations one cannot avoid between the wonderful work by the amazing Cursive Buildings below and September 11th, associations which first forced their way into my awareness when rewatching Brazil after the attacks:

The image of Mao above, and those many Maos fashioned by Warhol below, reminds me of this. Mao was as evil as any human being has ever been, as evil as any can be; that he was ostensibly driven by ideology to pursue, acquire, and deploy maximum individuated power in no way absolves him. Several tens of millions of people died because of Mao, many at his direct instruction; many were tortured to death.

In some senses we are all their kin, but of course those victims must have living relatives, too. One wonders how they feel about images like the Warhol below: do they find them an interesting reclamation of signifier and symbol, or a kaleidoscopic horror? How would you imagine it if the face were Hitler’s, or Pol Pot’s?

And indeed, how do you feel about the Dead Kennedys’ song “Holiday in Cambodia”? Or about this Stalin / Colonel Sanders KFC / KGB brand mashup? Is it as funny when one thinks of the weeping, begging sisters and brothers marched through the Lubyanka to be shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night?

The older one gets -the more one knows about the lives of others- the greater the number of images, symbols, narratives, histories, and jokes one can no longer take lightly. One knows someone who lost a child; the “dead baby” meme loses its luster in light of her tears. One knows of a city that washed away and someone whose life was wrecked: you change the station if “When the Levee Breaks” comes on. And so on.

It doesn’t mean terribly much about the things in themselves, as philosophers say, but it means something about the things in oneself, the widening sense one has of the seriousness of tragedy, the importance of history, the fragility of life. And year by year, I worry that “play” gets harder.

(None of which is to say I can’t take a joke; I still laugh at many of these things, but now with some slight concern that wasn’t always there).

Tags: art politics culture
“As a young child, during moments of acute heartache or shame, I would wonder how such tremendous pain could ever possibly leave me.  In late adolescence, I became acquainted with the soul’s self-preserving anesthesia, and learned to draw strength by anticipating the wash of numb which inevitably cooled and detached me from all feeling, allowing what once felt inescapable, to ultimately sit safely distanced within abstracted memory. Sitting here now, no longer a child, but never a man, I’ve grown loathsome of this knack for unfeeling, and I can only meditate on how I might trap this tingling, retching unease within my body as long as I can bear.”

Jace Cooke, whose tumblelog is excellent. Although I might propose possible remedies for the loss of his “tingling, retching unease,” most of them involving media of various forms (and with various limitations), all are superfluous: without invoking eternal return, I think it likely that we’ll all experience these feelings again and again in our lives, without needing to preserve what will return too soon with shocking force.

Heartbreak, shame, and anguish are such integral parts of life that we shouldn’t worry about the success of our anesthetizing capacity for internal abstraction; a fresh and excruciating administering of pain is just around the corner!

But Cooke here formulates the dilemma of the sufferer: one needn’t be a Buddhist to see how pain substantiates the self, and anyone who has been lovelorn knows that one doesn’t want to lose the pain; one clings to it, sometimes as proof of the love, sometimes as evidence of one’s moral superiority, sometimes because some passionate feeling must replace devotion and infatuation, and it might as well be misery.

Cursive Buildings advised that one should not enjoy melancholy, advice I appreciated and admired, but like Cooke I worry that the flight from despair by way of a “knack for unfeeling” is not quite the transcendence, the ”letting go” required, but something else: a form of cowed shrinking, a fearful reluctance to feel, a deadening and slackening and hiding and abandoning.

Tags: philosophy psychology childhood shame
Rory O’Rear found another wonderful piece by Cursive Buildings, and I can’t resist posting it: “Modern Lovers.” Click here for a larger view, and click here for his Flickr, since I have to stop putting one of these up every other day.

Rory O’Rear found another wonderful piece by Cursive Buildings, and I can’t resist posting it: “Modern Lovers.”

Click here for a larger view, and click here for his Flickr, since I have to stop putting one of these up every other day.

Tags: art
FABLE, by Cursive Buildings, who has a whole series of beautifully altered (and well-titled) polaroids.

FABLE, by Cursive Buildings, who has a whole series of beautifully altered (and well-titled) polaroids.

Tags: art
Another from Cursive Buildings: LOOK. IDEAS, NOT IDEALS No. 3 aka “A MIRACLE IN VENICE” aka “JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTS W/HIS FEET & SO DO YOU” [ ingredients: photograph from my secret spot on the Grand Canal, small print of a 1984 painting by Mark Tansey, ink pen ] As linked above, here is the larger version.

Another from Cursive Buildings:

LOOK.

IDEAS, NOT IDEALS No. 3
aka “A MIRACLE IN VENICE”
aka “JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTS W/HIS FEET & SO DO YOU”

[ ingredients: photograph from my secret spot on the Grand Canal, small print of a 1984 painting by Mark Tansey, ink pen ]

As linked above, here is the larger version.

Tags: art

The Last Works Of Egon Schiele

Joshua Heineman (Cursive Buildings) has written a very affecting short story about the artist Egon Schiele and his wife Edith, which I can’t recommend highly enough. The effortless subtlety with which he’s displayed private catastrophe against serial global paroxysms of death is moving, as are the gently honest references to all the threads of a marriage: disappointment, dependence, futurity.

As is always true, it’s better to read it than read about it.