Open: Louis C.K. Homage

A ten minute writing exercise. Theme: “Someone I Admire”

You know the feeling. When the middle-aged lady in the mall has the same bowl-cut hair as her teenage son and they are slowly eating an orange together in the food court; and his sister is a young branch stripped of everything feminine and so honest and unquestioning in her foliage you know they are never going to find a husband she can love; and the grandfather is yelling instructions across the crowded tables to the father who carries a single tray with one order of fries and two small fountain pops - how are they sharing? And your little cousin with the same almond eyes and the same glossy ebon hair looks up from his Nintendo 3DS and elbows you smirking, and you smirk, laugh a little and half-heartedly chastise him. And inside you sink. Because you love them. And have been taught that everything good in your life comes at the expense of you being able to walk over to them and just say that. And you take a breath and find yourself giggling again anyways. 

Close: Sweet Fruit of Patience

accidentalchemy:

122. The Hinterlands

I’ve been sitting on this photo of Jordan’s since the early days of typophotography. I secretly hoard his photo contributions to the project for selfish purposes. They embody exactly what the project is about: one form of art acting as a catalyst for inspiration in another form. I have him to thank for some written pieces that are most near and dear to me.

{JT.}

おかげさまでね

Open: Saturday Texts

J: It snowed so I cancelled all my plans for the day

M: Haha was there that much snow?

J: I have ultra-Kramer hair and am wearing my old "Blossom" denim coat walking through Walmart. Aside from my D&G glasses I'm indistinguishable from a hobo

J: I didn't have a snowbrush

J: Just got ID'd for a game I bought

M: Hahahahahahahahha

M: How do you not have a snowbrush?

M: And you bought a denim jacket at Walmart?

J: Rental car

J: And it`s the denim jacket from Market Collective lol

M: Oh right

M: Lol sure

J: Just scraped my windows then decided to go back in for an aux cable to play my iPod in the rental car

J: Next dilemma: should I go to the Walmart McDonald`s rather than drive across the parking lot to Smash Burger

J: ?

M: Smash Burger always

J: Then I have to drive across the parking lot and wait for it

M: I don't know J

J: A lesbian dressed like a Walmart-brand Bieber just rolled a 60 inch LCD out on a trolley

M: Haha

J: We are kindred spirits lol

J: Oh and I think the Indian guy in the electronics centre was making fun of me with his Latina coworker bc when I paid for my aux cord she laughed and then over-apologized lol

M: Rude!

J: lol

J: All the cars outside of Smash Burger are parked in a desperate fashion, all crooked and outside of the lines

M: Hahaha join them

J: I parked perfectly for once

M: Way to stand out

M: <3

J: I think I have to write this for my blog

M: Please do

J: Happy ending?: the cashier at Smash Burger is a cute lil thing named Logan. She has a short cropped coiffe that tends to her right. While I type my PIN number we catch ourselves looking the other over. I'm afraid she's gonna make fun of me

J: She says, "I really like your hair" lol. I awkwardly reply that it's bedhead and confess I like her glasses. I thank her by name, accept my receipt and then text you. Lol

M: Number!!!

J: Can't. The story's over

J: And I think she's a teenageer

M: Oh haha then no

J: Yup lol

Open/Close: Corona

This is my prayer:

What is it?
It is knowing the not and saying no to it
It is knowing yes and saying yes
It is being everything I can be when the sun rises
And only what I am when it sets
May the two ever become the same
And therein become a third

Jordan Baylon, May 16th, 2012

photograph taken December 12th, 2011

“Who bathed me with their divine gaze, and through what gilded gate, and how do I go forward still bearing that glimmer, and why?”

Close: Breaking Silence

Jordan Baylon - 7/30/2012

Open: So begins my love letter to daniel j kirk

…I now urge my patients at such times actually to paint what they have seen in dream or fantasy. As a rule I am met with the objection: “I am not a painter.” To this I usually reply that neither are modern painters - for which very reason modern painting is absolutely free - and that is anyhow not a question of the beautiful, but merely of the trouble one takes with a picture. How little my way of painting has to do with “art” I saw recently in the case of a talented portraitist; she had to begin all over again with pitiably childish efforts - literally as if she had never had a brush in her hand. To paint what we see before us is a different matter from painting what we see within.

- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul 

Open in a Close

Jordan Baylon, “Blue Moon”

Kitchen Lithograph, September 16th, 2012

Close in an Open

Jordan Baylon - “Blue Moon”

Windermere, August 31, 2012

Close: I.M. Maya Kosaka

Strange isn’t it, when you are just wandering and someone else’s world finds you? When you are no longer fastened to the tracks of your own time and can hear the echos of another’s?

I remember being lulled to the artificial pond on the campus by bells chiming a convocation. Lawn, shrubbery, flower bed - hell, even sight-lines - all looking like they were copied exactly from an adolescent artist’s sketchbook, because that’s when even a promising illustrator’s line tries to hold onto everything, never to fully capture any one thing. That time when everything in a picture can include only exactly what it says it does, and never anything more. That’s the message the bells quoted, like a challenge.

So I sat on the bench and watched the graduates pose with their families, trying really hard not to let other graduates and their families slip into the frame. Each wore a polyester robe and cap they would later doff as their toll of passage from that place. Each paid their smiles to unnecessary flashes lost in the afternoon sun.

To the bell’s melody my head drifted left to the tree, and then spun me round to face the plaque that anchored my back in coolness. I nodded to someone, maybe to myself and also not. Only when the bell could be ringing from inside me could I get up and walk again.

- June, 2012

Open: One Sentence

fuckyeahzen:

One night in February of 1968, I sat among fifty black-robed fellow students, mostly young Americans, at Zen Mountain Center, Tassajara Springs, ten miles inland from Big Sur, California, deep in the mountain wilderness. The kerosene lamplight illuminated our breath in the winter air of the unheated room.

Before us the founder of the first Zen Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere, Shunryu Suzuki, had concluded a lecture from his seat on the altar platform. “Thank you very much,” he said softly, with a genuine feeling of gratitude. He took a sip of water, cleared his throat, and looked at his students. “Is there some question?” he asked, just loud enough to be heard above the sound of the creek gushing in the darkness outside.
I bowed, hands together, and caught his eye.
“Hai?” he said, meaning yes.

“Suzuki Roshi, I’ve been listening to your lectures for years,” I said, “and I really love them, and they’re very inspiring, and I know that what you’re talking about is actually very clear and simple. But I must admit I just don’t understand. I love it, but I feel like I could listen to you for a thousand years and still not get it. Could you just please put it in a nutshell? Can you reduce Buddhism to one phrase?”

Everyone laughed. He laughed. What a ludicrous question. I don’t think any of us expected him to answer it. He was not a man you could pin down, and he didn’t like to give his students something definite to cling to. He had often said not to have “some idea” of what Buddhism was.

But Suzuki did answer. He looked at me and said,

“Everything changes.”

Then he asked for another question.

(via musashi-no-kami)