A letter that I started but never sent to Tyler

I have spoken to you about D., she was such a powerful and influential person in my life.  This is her newest show happening down the block from your house.  I don’t think that I will see it, though I have been invited, and I am not recommending it to you, but I wanted to give you an image, hopefully open the doorway to her immensity for you to see a fraction of a glimpse.  I feel like I have been trying to say her to you and have always fallen way short.  At times I still feel inside that company, internal sanctuary of drive, value, and solidity.  I am wearing her dress today, I just found it after two years, a relic.  I was with the company for four and a half years, it now feels like Atlantis swallowed by the sea, time has overlapped that form of thinking in me.  She was a totem, radiant and magnetic.  I gave her so much, and was inspired by her.  She is also born under the sign of Aquarius, maverick, singular, visionary, boundless creature, painting the air with conscious landscapes.  She is also a selfish tyrant who would manipulate anyone and anything to conjure her power and give access to her voice.  After seeing S. I realized that I need to take my trophies from that time, our giant photo and review in the NY Times and the photo of our show in the New Yorker, and frame them as accolades of my past.  Weird clippings, leftovers that can be used like coins for others to see, represent the value and worth of the real work, even if it is incapable of possessing the direct voice and power.

the must be the place- talking heads

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb - burn with a weak heart
(So I) guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up + say goodnight . . . say goodnight[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/t/talking_heads/this_must_be_the_place_naive_melody.html ]
Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - -she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time Before we were born
If someone asks, this where I'll be . . . where I'll be

Hi yo We drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all tose kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head Ah ooh

Conquest of the Useless

Art is Useless, WTF

I hung out at Hungarian last night with Tyler and his friend Ron.  He met Ron at the coffee shop and the two of them are scientists, Ron is an out of work physicist who has a two year old child.  I think her name was Sylvie and she slept the whole time we talked.  Ron is an incredibly informed person with a great memory, focus, and ability to organize his thoughts.  However he had such a strong personal sequencing to his logic that he would skip over, rather than submerge himself in, the structures of comments that Tyler and I made.  It was a minor character flaw next to his immensity and I felt embarrassed that I had to monitor my frustration at him being a hit or miss listener.  He was a huge person, inspiringly driven and, above all, crafted by years and layers of education.  He didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the humanities, preferring to ground himself in the objective truth (mapping) of science. The experience really shook me, and caused me to call into question my devotion to the arts.  I half listened, head downturned in prayer to the writing of Robert Smithson.  Smithson’s personal narrative of time and space collapsing into points, aesthetic science.  I would drift into the conversation of Ron and Tyler, the function of neutrinos, back to Smithon, mirrors are masterpieces, voids delivering perfect form.  Walking through to the other side, to look back from a new perspective, displaced. 

The Talking Heads movie title ‘Stop Making Sense’ was pulled from a song about losing sight while growing old, but it's also a a catchphrase for the liberating gateway of all art.  Loving art is loving storytellers, without facts.  It makes me feel frustrated to tears.   I am devoting myself to things that are ends in themselves, a toolbox of instruments that function for a physical or mental transformation without the need to be correct.  All art is partially pretty, decorative.  Frivolous like a flower, transmitters, mystic, secreting energy, but without practicality, perhaps a devotion to being useless.  I want everything to be polished but ripe with intention.  More intention than material.  Give me money and technology, make me professional, so I can say things that should reach the eyes of others.  The church of public attention.  The symbols of mass devotion.  Guide in a useful way.  The flute master leading the rats from the sewer to god only knows where, a delusion that is constructive?  A death of their rationality, an escape?

 Robert Kelly:

  Art needs to prove

                    only what is not the case.

                    Proof of what is not
                    yet the case.  Control

                    the future.  The uncanny

                    feels around your heart.

                    Stalin on the Black Sea coast

                    stared south through mist

                    remembering homeland music.

                    A tear in his eye.  Seagull cry.

Then I knew the stars had come

                    take up their places on the grid

                    53^rd St and Fifth Avenue, Sixth

                    Avenue and 8^th Street, Bleecker

                    and Macdougal, Lenox and One

                    hundred twenty fifth, we know

                    the places where they shone

                    when there was still nighttime

                    in the old city.  The meek angels

                    stood among us and taught us

                    to reason and to rhythm and to sing,

                    every number was a friend then

                    and every friend was full of honey

                    and everybody loved us, every

                    body told us what we had to do.

                    At last you know (the bird said)

                    what the mind thinks

                    is not what thinks the mind.

cybele's reverie

Cybele's Reverie

matiéres sensuelles et sans suites
matiéres sensuelles et sans suites
l'enfance est plus sympathique
l'enfance apporte le magique
que faire quand on a tout fait
tout lu, tout bu, tout mangé
tout donné en vrac et en détail
quand on a crié sur tous les toîts
pleuré et ris dans les villes et en campagne
l'enfance est plus authentique
le jardin au haut portique
les pierres, lea arbres, les murs racontent
(la maison, la maison d'autrefois, la maison la maison d'avenir)
et le silence (-trera) me pénétrera

Cybele's Reverie (translation)

sensuous and incoherent matters
sensuous and incoherent matters
childhood is much nicer
childhood brings the magical
what to do when we've done everything
read everything, drank everything, ate everything
given everything loose or retail
when we have screamed on all the rooftops
cried and laughed in the cities and the country
childhood is more authentic
the garden with the high porch
the rocks, the trees, the walls narrate
(the house, the house of old, the house, the house of the future)
and silence will penetrate me.

Stereolab

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTokeb7M4fU

Stereolab's trademark 1996 record "Emperor Tomato Ketchup"
TRACK LISTING:
1) Metronomic Underground
2) Cybele's Reverie
3) Percolator
4) Les Yper-Sound
5) Spark Plug
6) OLV 26
7) The Noise of Carpet
8) Tomorrow Is Already Here
9) Emperor Tomato Ketchup
10) Monstre Sacre
11) Motoroller Scalatron
12) Slow Fast Hazel
13) Anonymous Collective

Tom Waits - That Feel

Tom Waits "Sea of Love"

Tom Waits - Take Me Home

Au Palais - Pathos

Sad Songs - New Order - Love Vigilantes

Talking Heads - "This Must Be The Place" (Naive Melody)

MI AND L'AU - BINGO

mi and l'au - philosopher

Nick Drake - Time Has Told Me

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Magnetic Fields - The Book Of Love

The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing by The Magnetic Fields

Absolutely Cuckoo - 69 love songs

The Magnetic Fields - When My Boy Walks Down the Street

The Magnetic Fields - You're My Only Home

37. Chicken with its head cut off - The Magnetic Fields

I Hate Perfume

http://www.cbihateperfume.com/

M1 Narcissus

The scent of narcissus, clean running water over mossy stones, the wind gently blowing through green leaves

 

The Story

The narcissus is not a simple flower. What does it mean?
A legend of a beautiful man destroyed by vanity. Is this true? What lies beneath? Realities dim as the world grows old, convention is laid over truth but the truth remains.
The ancients believed that the eye was the window to the soul. Looking into anothers eye was to know that person truly a dangerous pursuit. The narcissus flower was thought to represent the eye. Where is the link from man to flower to eye?
What then was this beautiful man really searching for gazing into the rippling waters of that clear brook? What really did he find there bending lower, lower, lower still? Gazing into his own eyes until the water engulfed him and he was lost. Vanity is too simple an answer.
What then really destroyed him? What is the secret hidden in this transformation? Man to flower, flower to eye What do we find when we look into this blazing eye that gazes out at the world each spring?
The narcissus is one of the first spring flowers there is no mistaking this significance in myth. Spring is a time of transformation. The time of contemplation is over and the world changes. Something is lost this is inevitable but something greater is gained. We are changed and are the wiser for it.
This is the secret hidden in the heart of the narcissus and this is the true power of spring

Tea/Rose

M5 Where We Are There Is No Here

WHERE WE ARE THERE IS NO HERE is carefully worked from ISO E Super, Hedione, Moroccan, Indian and Egyptian Jasmine Absolutes, Amber Absolute, Australian and Mysore Sandalwoods, and a special “invisible musk” accord designed specifically for this perfume.

405 is a paradox – the antithesis of perfume. It is completely intangible and almost undetectable. Yet it has great presence and allure. Like the ghost of a flower, it touches the subconscious of those who wear it – and those who encounter it. Inspired by the last of Cocteau’s films, WHERE WE ARE THERE IS NO HERE is made to create a special place in the inner world. The world of poetry. The world of the imagination. The world of the surreal.

White Flowers/Cradle of Light

The Scent

Cradle of Light is a glorious blend of pure white flower absolutes: Moroccan, Indian, Egyptian and Tunisian Jasmine Grandiflorum, Indian Night Blooming Jasmine, Jonquil, Narcissus, Tuberose and White Lotus. The bouquet is set against a green background of Sumac, Tomato and Violet Leaves with a hint of Galbanum and grounded in a base of Sandalwoods and CBMUSK.
The scent begins with a fresh green presence; gradually the flowers emerge becoming warmer and richer. Cradle of Light is a supremely elegant perfume with a serene and euphoric effect. Wearing it can be slightly hypnotic...
Cradle of Light Water Perfumes are available by special order. Please email info@cbihateperfume.com for more information.

I have always loved books.  I am told this was the case even before I could read for myself.  When I was very small, I loved the bedtime story and being read to by my mother.  As a child, books provided a fantastic escape from boredom and a rather dreary daily life.  As I grew older, I began to read voraciously and spent as much time as possible in the school library.  I borrowed books with wild abandon and I read every one.
As an adult in New York, my reading increased further and I began to cover a much wider group of topics - possibly a rather strange group but fascinating to me nonetheless.  Now I can say that reading has been perhaps the most important element of my life.  So much of who I am, what I've discovered and what I know began with a book.  Indeed even becoming a perfumer started in the main reading room of the New York Public Library. 
In my time, I've acquired an enormous number of books.  When I was very young, my parents subscribed me to a book club and they came every month in the mail.  I got books regularly as birthday presents and Christmas gifts.  When I was about thirteen and earning a bit of money of my own, I began to buy them for myself.  One of the first was a collection of James Thurber stories, which I have to this day.  I have spent countless hours of my life in bookshops large and small perusing titles carefully and hunting for the interesting.  I have bought books like groceries and for much the same purpose - except instead of food for the body, books are nourishment for the spirit.
Now collecting books is one of my greatest passions.  Many years ago I began hunting first editions of my favorite authors.  I have learned that these can be found in the oddest places and I find few things more thrilling that stumbling across an unexpected treasure.  I cannot pass a second hand bookshop and rarely come away without at least one additional volume.  I now have quite a collection...
Whenever I read, the start of the journey is always opening the book and breathing deeply.  There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book.  Newly printed books certainly smell very different from older ones.  Their ink is so crisp though the odor of their paper is so faint.  Older books smell riper and often sweeter.  Illustrated books have a very different odor from those with straight text and this smell often speaks of their quality.  I've also noticed that books from different countries and different periods have very individual scents too.  These speak not only of their origin, but of their history to this moment.  I can distinguish books that were well cared for from those that were neglected.  I can often tell books that lived in libraries where pipes or cigars were regularly smoked.  Occasionally I run across one that I am certain belonged to an older woman fond of powdery scent.  Books from California smell very different from those I buy in New York, London or Paris.  I can tell books that have come from humid places - these have a musty richness in the scent of their pages.
And then of course there are the scents of different bindings:  the glues, the leathers, the cloths and boards, even the paperbacks all have very unique characteristics and, to my mind, add an extra dash of personality to an otherwise mundane object.  And yes, sometimes if a book has had the misfortune of being very poorly kept, I can detect a faint whiff of mildew.  This doesn't bother me in the least.  It means this book has survived.
To many of course, these various bookish odors mean nothing.  But to an avid reader and collector like myself, these smells are as magical as the bouquet of a great wine is to a connoisseur - a sort of literary terroir.  These scents mean Excitement, Adventure, Discovery, Enlightenment and Knowledge.  Of course my deep love of reading is exactly what lead me in the first place to begin capturing the scent of books and of the libraries where they live.  That's what this perfume is all about.
Now, whenever I have the chance, I read aloud to my nieces and nephews.  I am delighted they so enjoy this and are so eager to listen.  I love sharing with them some of my own childhood favorites.  There have been some very interesting discussions afterward about some of these...
But before I begin to read to the children, I always take a moment to open the book and encourage them to take a whiff.  I hope for them, as it has been for me, this smell will mark the beginning of a long and wondrous journey. 

"The World in 2030" by Dr. Michio Kaku

Global Warming is FAKE (Neil Degrasse Tyson vs Bob Lutz)

The World of the Dinosaurs - Symphony of Science

How do you start to get close to animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago?

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, di-Dinosaurs, di-di-di-dino-Dinosaurs

 Dinosaurs weren’t just giant lizards, but a truly unique kind of reptile

Dinosaurs roamed for more than 150 million years

Dinosaurs roamed in amazing shapes and sizes.

Very few left evidence for their existence, and those bones never cease to fascinate us.

The more we find, the more complete our understanding, awesomely awe inspiring, the world of the dinosaurs.

There are always new discoveries out there, waiting to be found, waiting to be found.

The more we find, the more complete our understanding, awesomely awe inspiring, the world of the dinosaurs.

Musical interlude (the world of the dinosaurs)

Tyrannosaurus i’ lar-lar-large’ flesh eater the world has ever seen, Flesh, dinosaurs, rep, they’re called the dinosaurs followed the well trod(ed) trail to oblivion

Rock layers span the age of dinosaurs, layers span the age of dinosaurs, the deeper the layer, the deeper the layer, the older the rock, older the rock, at the top, rock from the cretaceous, at the top, rock from the cretaceous, below that, the Jurassic, below that, the Jurassic, and near the bottom the red Triassic badlands, red Triassic badlands, when dinosaurs first appeared, when dinosaurs first appeared,

The more we find, the more complete our understanding, awesomely awe inspiring, the world of the dinosaurs.

Musical interlude (the world of the dinosaurs)

Sixty-five million years ago, the meteor smashed into the earth, hurtling toward our planet, at 100,000 kilometers a second

If we had never found their bones, we wouldn’t ever have known, that these ancient animals ever existed

If we had never found their bones, we wouldn’t ever have known, that these ancient animals ever existed

The more we find, the more complete our understanding, awesomely awe inspiring, the world of the dinosaurs.

There are always new discoveries out there, waiting to be found, waiting to be found.

The more we find, the more complete our understanding, awesomely awe inspiring, the world of the dinosaurs.

There are always new discoveries out there, (waiting to be found) awesomely awe inspiring, the world of the dinosaurs.

The Future: Images for My Husband

The future is translucent, it is the portal we look through to learn more about the moment. The future is the mind itself, collecting and collaging images and instances out of our remarkable ability to formulate possibilities from habits, moments that map our thinking. I love you in my future. I love you so much now. My future, your future, or any future gathered here today, will never exist.  A different future, strange and plain will occur.  Any future that you can think of will never happen.  You can’t know the future.  When you imagine it, you are only saying what will never transpire.  You are crafting the lie that guides, nothing more.  I hope that we can be reticent enough to catch and examine the future when it occurs.  To both receive it’s dailiness and redirect it’s happening tenderly and without too much blindness.  This moment we are living, back when it was my future and I was riding in the back of my fathers Westfalia looking at paper doll wedding dresses, was going to take place at a mansion, and I would be wearing a flapper dress and a great hat. So that future never happened, but it did direct me here, into your embrace as a very fortunate person. The future is an icon that guides the everyday into it's perceived forms.
You and I are at the entryway of a fantastic mystery. In my future I take care of you, we have enough money to live, we have two kids with thin light brown hair and hazel eyes, and we are supportive of each other as individuals. We support and we try really hard to take space when we need it, or do what's right even if it's not pleasant or self serving. I really believe in family, if belief is faith and thought is spiritual, then you are a stained glass window in the cathedral of my psychology that I will look to for stories, for light, and for wonder.  You will be in my thoughts, my concerns, my value system, my rational and irrational thoughts, I will drink deeply of you, and I support you and love you through knowledge, compassion, tenderness, warmth and respect. I know that you are remarkable. I know that you are capable, agile, loving, bold and warm. I like laughing with you. Choosing to be your partner is the biggest decision of my life to date, it will dictate much of what is to come for me. I can't think of anything else that I could choose that determines this much of the future.
I want you to be successful in life. A lot of success involves tranquility, stability and affection as well as independence, actualization, and expression. I will work to keep our family strong. To adapt to the changes that mark time, to look after you and in so doing look after myself. What's good for you will provide good for me and vis-versa, not exclusive good, we are different people, but your happiness will provide my happiness, and I will look out for both of us to the best of my capabilities.  Partnership, the borderline that marks the meeting ground. May this future guide both of us to happiness.
May the years that are to come be guided by an ever changing future, conjuring images, exploring new truths that we will never reach. Rather, our striving will be marked with the material remains of hours, moments, memories and discoveries. Whatever will be will be, in the endless future, the day will stop the ever possible, it will conclude the reaching towards the invisible masterpiece of a visionary tomorrow with a daily droll, with a common chaos, the infinite grandness of the now. Here is to the everydayness we will share, the macaroni and cheese in bed, the smelling farts at fifty, the way I'll pick up the kids on Tuesday, and buy you a CD that you don't even want. Here is to the drool on the pillow, and all the little things that I will know about you that no one else will. Here is to the two grave stones side by side, to dentist trips, to skateboards, to great jokes, and knowing looks, to getting you another glass of wine. Here is to being in the audience at your film screenings and cheering obnoxiously, and congratulating you with deep earnesty in the car. Here is to conversations about should we live in LA, New York, Portland or San Francisco. Here is to listening to your tears on an old couch, and hugging you though it will only do so much good. Here is to watching Iron Man at five in the morning and falling asleep to Bergman. Here is to all the books that I will buy but you will read, to your insights that have my back and my intuitions that will have yours. I am signing on for the kingship of boredom and the knighthood of extremity because I love you, and in my future I love you, in new and unexpected ways. Here is to all our tomorrow's, marked now only as a dream, to be shaped and known together in the living out of our days as partners, lovers, monsters, angels, heroes, tormentors, but mostly loving friends, for life.

Seeing in the minds eye

http://mp3.rapidlibrary.com/mp3.php?file=976677&song=tim+leonido+reading

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/LiveKWH/2009/Live_KWH_79/06_Reading_Leonido-Tim_November-Live_KWH-UPenn_11-30-09.mp3
http://mp3.rapidlibrary.com/mp3.php?file=976677&song=tim+leonido+reading
This is the reading of an old friend of mine, Tim, nice to hear his voice and his work, a blast from the past.

at a Professional Pace

C goes running to the back of the office.  She has decided that running to and from locations is a good way to keep the blood flowing.  An alternative to coffee, a great way to charge the brain and increase productivity.  While bouncing through the office she makes the ‘sound’ of running, a light up and down tone. 

S: I just think that you are being unprofessional, that’s all.

C:  What is professional?  What is professional about Z taking off her shoes and walking around the office?  And who is to say that professional isn’t an anarchy against the natural justice of our bodies?  Just because we might not know a better system, who is to say that this system is the best, maybe professional is just another type of sickness or something, like a cancer, that finally reveals its ills after enough time, enough churning and mounting of professionalism. 

C walks away thinking ‘Then the body decays, gets wiped out by the repetition of emptiness, boredom, a sense of conformity without a specific dictator, no all seeing god of the office insisting on the mundane droll, while the electric clock is ticking silently.  Carpet shuffles become calling cards, the weight and movement indicates who is sneaking up behind me to see me reading The Times rather than doing my professional activities.  Activity is the only morality these days.  No need to look at quality.  No time.  We live in the century where time is being eaten by activity, productivity, "progress".  We have developed into mechanism. The timing of phone calls and paper pushing rewards my humanity, it is the social sugar cube in my mouth for my job well done, I am a labor horse that daydreams fields of thought where I can graze at my own pace.  Maverick.  Wild.  Lawless.’

Idea: Monologues for Orpheus

A negation ceremony.
The audience would see the show one at a time.  They fill out questions such as where do you live, what is your job title, who are your parents, what is your name, do you have children, if so who are they, what is the most important thing to you, what is the least?  All the questions have to do with things that we identify through and hopefully have been signifying our characters for our whole lives.  Attachment.  A person comes down the long hallway that you are standing at the entrance to.  would be so great if this could take place underground, like Roden Crater.  Walking with faith, guided through nothing, a fragile body, breakable, decomposing and composing, tough, resilient, alert.  The person is a totem, dressed without a face, a facade, a singular substance.  They hand you a thin sugar disk ceremoniously.  By accepting the offering you give yourself over to the process entirely.  You take the disk, put it in your mouth, and are told to walk down the hall.  There are no lights, you walk blind, without eyes, no space, no place that is correct, nothing to know.  In the chamber at the end you enter into a bright room, all the walls are white, the ceiling is tall, and in the center there is a bath for one.  'Please take off your clothes' says the voice over the sound system.  You do.  A person enters, they are also naked.  They take your clothes and exit.  They enter.  'Please,' says the voice over the loud speaker, 'don't do anything'.  The two of you stand there in silence staring at each other, naked.  Five minutes pass, you go through phases, adjusting to the situation and learning to drop all pretense.  The person leaves.  'Please,' says the voice over the loud speaker, 'get in the tub,' you do, 'you will now be bathed.'  The person enters with washing supplies.  They pass you a full bottle of water.  In the tub they start at your feet working their way up your body, with care, scrubbing you. The voice has asked you not to speak, you don't.  After you are washed, no soap, you sit alone in silence for ten minutes.  'Repeat after me, I am not...' the voice says your name, you repeat what the voice says, each time saying that you are not what you are normally expressing yourself by.  The list of the questioner is read off, sometimes the voice asks you to scream, to get out of the tub and say it like you mean it, as though your mother were standing there, and you are telling her off, that you are not the name she gave you, you are not the job you have, you are not the house you live in, or the people you know, or the people you make, or love, or the things that you do, want to do, nothing, none of it, not at all.  The naked person comes back in with a chair.  The voice asks you to get out of the tub.  You do, and you are dried off.  The voice asks you to sit while the attendant exists and returns with hot rags.  You are wrapped up.  The screen flashes.  Just dots, loud stripes, no depth, no represented form, no face or person.  Then a hand with paper comes on and the show begins.  A speaks, and the troubles of Orpheus and his words erasing what is before him start to unfold.  Orpheus is played by Robert himself, filmed in his living room, like one of Tacita Dean's films.  He is projected on a wall, when the voices are speaking he is just sitting, staring out the window, nothing happening, or so it seems, meanwhile the stories brew just below the surface.  And when the voices are not talking there are just flashes of color, like a Stan Brakhage film melded with Yayoi.  On the third wall Eurydice dances.  When the show ends you are unwrapped, given your clothes and asked by the voice to exit the way you came.

Hauser and Wirth Gallery

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/

Phill Niblock / Roulette TV excerpt

Mike Kelley- Carmen

http://www.hatjecantz.de/en/collectorseditions/detail.php?titzif=09202255
Inspiration for Narrator part Deux

Francesca Gavin

http://wow.sportmax.com/en/?p=2655
http://roughversion.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet (1985)

The dolphin jetpack that lets you swim like one

Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - Swamp

Boccherini Cello Concerto in B flat major, Podhoransky, SCO

Robyn 'Call Your Girlfriend' Official Video

'Call Your Girlfriend' Robyn/ Erato cover by Lennon & Maisy Stella

stamps

http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_100.htm
http://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2012/pb22328/html/info_014.htm
https://store.usps.com/store/browse/uspsProductDetailMultiSkuDropDown.jsp?productId=S_210540&categoryId=subcatS_SCS_StampedEnvelopes
https://store.usps.com/store/browse/uspsProductDetailMultiSkuDropDown.jsp?categoryNav=false&navAction=jump&navCount=0&productId=S_104440&categoryId=subcatS_S_OtherPostage
https://store.usps.com/store/browse/uspsProductDetailMultiSkuDropDown.jsp?categoryNav=false&navAction=jump&navCount=5&productId=S_468049&categoryId=subcatS_S_45cFirstClass

Charles Mingus - Moanin'

Charles Mingus - Moanin'

wedding thanks idea

http://www.etsy.com/listing/62066122/vintage-wedding-invitation-record-with
It would be cool to make a real recording to send as a thank you card.  Maybe a tape that has recording of the band from the wedding and starts off with us saying thank you.  Maybe a cd. We could create our own lovely cd case and the sticker cd things that you put on the front.  They could say Thank You, and then Joel and I could write a brief personal statement to each person. 

http://www.etsy.com/shop/VerdeStudio?ref=seller_info
stamps

wedding stamps

http://www.etsy.com/listing/62231005/botanical-i-unused-vintage-postage?ref=sr_gallery_36&ga_search_submit=&ga_search_query=Botanical+Wedding+Invitation&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=US&ga_page=4&ga_search_type=handmade&ga_facet=handmade

Thank You Seeds post wedding

http://www.etsy.com/listing/81048096/100-personalized-eco-wedding-flower-seed?ref=sc_2

Dave End - "Sophia"

Dave End 9/11/08

Lau Nau - Vuoren laelle

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Problems in Topology, Post-Perelman - Stephen Smale

7

In his absence, others have taken the lead in trying to verify and disseminate his work. Dr. Kleiner of Yale and John Lott of the University of Michigan have assembled a monograph annotating and explicating Dr. Perelman’s proof of the two conjectures.
Dr. Morgan of Columbia and Gang Tian of Princeton have followed Dr. Perelman’s prescription to produce a more detailed 473-page step-by-step proof only of Poincaré’s Conjecture. “Perelman did all the work,” Dr. Morgan said. “This is just explaining it.”

6

Until his papers on Poincaré started appearing, some friends thought Dr. Perelman had left mathematics. Although they were so technical and abbreviated that few mathematicians could read them, they quickly attracted interest among experts. In the spring of 2003, Dr. Perelman came back to the United States to give a series of lectures at Stony Brook and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also spoke at Columbia, New York University and Princeton.
But once he was back in St. Petersburg, he did not respond to further invitations. The e-mail gradually ceased.
“He came once, he explained things, and that was it,” Dr. Anderson said. “Anything else was superfluous.”
Recently, Dr. Perelman is said to have resigned from Steklov. E-mail messages addressed to him and to the Steklov Institute went unanswered.

Elusive Proof, 5

In a series of postdoctoral fellowships in the United States in the early 1990’s, Dr. Perelman impressed his colleagues as “a kind of unworldly person,” in the words of Dr. Greene of U.C.L.A. — friendly, but shy and not interested in material wealth.
“He looked like Rasputin, with long hair and fingernails,” Dr. Greene said.
Asked about Dr. Perelman’s pleasures, Dr. Anderson said that he talked a lot about hiking in the woods near St. Petersburg looking for mushrooms.
Dr. Perelman returned to those woods, and the Steklov Institute, in 1995, spurning offers from Stanford and Princeton, among others. In 1996 he added to his legend by turning down a prize for young mathematicians from the European Mathematics Society.

Elusive Proof, 4

Dr. Perelman’s first paper, promising “a sketch of an eclectic proof,” came as a bolt from the blue when it was posted on the Internet in November 2002. “Nobody knew he was working on the Poincaré conjecture,” said Michael T. Anderson of the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
Dr. Perelman had already established himself as a master of differential geometry, the study of curves and surfaces, which is essential to, among other things, relativity and string theory Born in St. Petersburg in 1966, he distinguished himself as a high school student by winning a gold medal with a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1982. After getting a Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State, he joined the Steklov Institute of Mathematics at St. Petersburg.

Elusive Proof, 3

Depending on who is talking, Poincaré’s conjecture can sound either daunting or deceptively simple. It asserts that if any loop in a certain kind of three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point without ripping or tearing either the loop or the space, the space is equivalent to a sphere.
The conjecture is fundamental to topology, the branch of math that deals with shapes, sometimes described as geometry without the details. To a topologist, a sphere, a cigar and a rabbit’s head are all the same because they can be deformed into one another. Likewise, a coffee mug and a doughnut are also the same because each has one hole, but they are not equivalent to a sphere.
In effect, what Poincaré suggested was that anything without holes has to be a sphere. The one qualification was that this “anything” had to be what mathematicians call compact, or closed, meaning that it has a finite extent: no matter how far you strike out in one direction or another, you can get only so far away before you start coming back, the way you can never get more than 12,500 miles from home on the Earth.

In the case of two dimensions, like the surface of a sphere or a doughnut, it is easy to see what Poincaré was talking about: imagine a rubber band stretched around an apple or a doughnut; on the apple, the rubber band can be shrunk without limit, but on the doughnut it is stopped by the hole
With three dimensions, it is harder to discern the overall shape of something; we cannot see where the holes might be. “We can’t draw pictures of 3-D spaces,” Dr. Morgan said, explaining that when we envision the surface of a sphere or an apple, we are really seeing a two-dimensional object embedded in three dimensions. Indeed, astronomers are still arguing about the overall shape of the universe, wondering if its topology resembles a sphere, a bagel or something even more complicated.
Poincaré’s conjecture was subsequently generalized to any number of dimensions, but in fact the three-dimensional version has turned out to be the most difficult of all cases to prove. In 1960 Stephen Smale, now at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, proved that it is true in five or more dimensions and was awarded a Fields Medal. In 1983, Michael Freedman, now at Microsoft, proved that it is true in four dimensions and also won a Fields.
“You get a Fields Medal for just getting close to this conjecture,” Dr. Morgan said.
In the late 1970’s, Dr. Thurston extended Poincaré’s conjecture, showing that it was only a special case of a more powerful and general conjecture about three-dimensional geometry, namely that any space can be decomposed into a few basic shapes.
Mathematicians had known since the time of Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, in the 19th century, that in two dimensions there are only three possible shapes: flat like a sheet of paper, closed like a sphere, or curved uniformly in two opposite directions like a saddle or the flare of a trumpet. Dr. Thurston suggested that eight different shapes could be used to make up any three-dimensional space.
“Thurston’s conjecture almost leads to a list,” Dr. Morgan said. “If it is true,” he added, “Poincaré’s conjecture falls out immediately.” Dr. Thurston won a Fields in 1982.
Topologists have developed an elaborate set of tools to study and dissect shapes, including imaginary cutting and pasting, which they refer to as “surgery,” but they were not getting anywhere for a long time.
In the early 1980’s Richard Hamilton of Columbia suggested a new technique, called the Ricci flow, borrowed from the kind of mathematics that underlies Einstein’s general theory of relativity and string theory, to investigate the shapes of spaces.
Dr. Hamilton’s technique makes use of the fact that for any kind of geometric space there is a formula called the metric, which determines the distance between any pair of nearby points. Applied mathematically to this metric, the Ricci flow acts like heat, flowing through the space in question, smoothing and straightening all its bumps and curves to reveal its essential shape, the way a hair dryer shrink-wraps plastic.
Dr. Hamilton succeeded in showing that certain generally round objects, like a head, would evolve into spheres under this process, but the fates of more complicated objects were problematic. As the Ricci flow progressed, kinks and neck pinches, places of infinite density known as singularities, could appear, pinch off and even shrink away. Topologists could cut them away, but there was no guarantee that new ones would not keep popping up forever.
“All sorts of things can potentially happen in the Ricci flow,” said Robert Greene, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nobody knew what to do with these things, so the result was a logjam.
It was Dr. Perelman who broke the logjam. He was able to show that the singularities were all friendly. They turned into spheres or tubes. Moreover, they did it in a finite time once the Ricci flow started. That meant topologists could, in their fashion, cut them off, and allow the Ricci process to continue to its end, revealing the topologically spherical essence of the space in question, and thus proving the conjectures of both Poincaré and Thurston.

Elusive Proof, 2

“It’s very unusual in math that somebody announces a result this big and leaves it hanging,” said John Morgan of Columbia, one of the scholars who has also been filling in the details of Dr. Perelman’s work.
Mathematicians have been waiting for this result for more than 100 years, ever since the French polymath Henri Poincaré posed the problem in 1904. And they acknowledge that it may be another 100 years before its full implications for math and physics are understood. For now, they say, it is just beautiful, like art or a challenging new opera.
Dr. Morgan said the excitement came not from the final proof of the conjecture, which everybody felt was true, but the method, “finding deep connections between what were unrelated fields of mathematics.”
William Thurston of Cornell, the author of a deeper conjecture that includes Poincaré’s and that is now apparently proved, said, “Math is really about the human mind, about how people can think effectively, and why curiosity is quite a good guide,” explaining that curiosity is tied in some way with intuition.
“You don’t see what you’re seeing until you see it,” Dr. Thurston said, “but when you do see it, it lets you see many other things.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/science/15math.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&ei=5070&en=9eb83005e5d0c45c&ex=1156392000&emc=eta1

Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery By DENNIS OVERBYE, 1

Grisha Perelman, where are you?
Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.
After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.
Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.
As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.
“It’s really a great moment in mathematics,” said Bruce Kleiner of Yale, who has spent the last three years helping to explicate Dr. Perelman’s work. “It could have happened 100 years from now, or never.”
In a speech at a conference in Beijing this summer, Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard said the understanding of three-dimensional space brought about by Poincaré’s conjecture could be one of the major pillars of math in the 21st century.
Quoting Poincaré himself, Dr.Yau said, “Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.”
But at the moment of his putative triumph, Dr. Perelman is nowhere in sight. He is an odds-on favorite to win a Fields Medal, math’s version of the Nobel Prize, when the International Mathematics Union convenes in Madrid next Tuesday. But there is no indication whether he will show up.
Also left hanging, for now, is $1 million offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., for the first published proof of the conjecture, one of seven outstanding questions for which they offered a ransom back at the beginning of the millennium.

at a Professional Pace

C goes running to the back of the office.  She has decided that running to and from locations is a good way to keep the blood flowing.  An alternative to coffee, a great way to charge the brain and increase productivity.  While bouncing through the office she makes the ‘sound’ of running, a light up and down tone. 

S: I just think that you are being unprofessional, that’s all.

C:  What is professional?  What is professional about Z taking off her shoes and walking around the office?  And who is to say that professional isn’t an anarchy against the natural justice of our bodies?  Just because we might not know a better system, who is to say that this system is the best, maybe professional is just another type of sickness or something, like a cancer, that finally reveals its ills after enough time, enough churning and mounting of professionalism. 

C walks away thinking ‘Then the body decays, gets wiped out by the repetition of emptiness, boredom, a sense of conformity without a specific dictator, no all seeing god of the office insisting on the mundane droll, while the electric clock is ticking silently.  Carpet shuffles become calling cards, the weight and movement indicates who is sneaking up behind me to see me reading The Times rather than doing my professional activities.  Activity is the only morality these days.  No need to look at quality.  No time.  We live in the century where time is being eaten by activity, productivity, progress.  We have developed into mechanism. The timing of phone calls and paper pushing rewards my humanity, it is the social sugar cube in my mouth for my job well done, I am a labor horse that daydreams fields of thought where I can graze at my own pace.  Maverick.  Wild.  Lawless.’

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