…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
“People that I went to school with almost acted as if I had died,” Mr. Colfer, now 22, said in a recent interview at the Trump SoHo hotel. Classmates who once treated him like toxic waste were now bragging on Facebook that they had been best of friends. “I thought, Wow, this must be what someone feels like at their eulogy.”
That old Tom Sawyer fantasy is the basis of “Struck by Lightning,” a film that Mr. Colfer wrote and stars in. After having its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, it was released on video on demand last week and opens in theaters Jan. 11.
Mr. Colfer plays Carson Phillips, a high-school outcast who, in the hope of getting into Northwestern University, blackmails classmates into contributing to his literary magazine. The film is told in flashback: in the first scene, Carson is, indeed, struck by lightning and dies.
Mr. Colfer conceived the story when he was 16, well before landing on TV. He first performed it in high school, as a monologue for his speech and debate team.
But the movie isn’t just deferred juvenilia. It’s part of Mr. Colfer’s bid to become a multi-platform showbiz hyphenate. In 2011, he signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown. The first book, “The Land of Stories,” which came out this summer, is a young-adult adventure novel that upends classic fairy tales, in the manner of Gregory Maguire. (He’s at work on a sequel.) He also published a companion book to “Struck by Lightning,” written as Carson’s journal. [via nytimes: The Many Hats of Chris Colfer]
“So you, the young… bizarrely awesome… technicolor dream of weirdness…” -Peter Travers on Ezra Miller
Ezra Miller interviewed by the great PETER TRAVERS of Rolling Stone, who never ever disappoints… seriously. Never die, Peter Travers. NEVER. DIE.
Okay so, I fully expected to loathe this kid by the looks of him. Like I loathed reading Perks of Being a Wallflower, followed by loathing the film 15 years or something later. I poorly assumed he would come off pretentious, thinking he was wise beyond his then 19 years. It didn’t help that he was born and bred in a neighboring county in the dreaded New Jersey, and I naturally make my judgements about ALT NJ BOYZ.
Though all my assumptions were wrong, something about him sits strangely with me. Maybe it is because he exemplifies so many men (well, boys) who wrapped themselves up in my cynical head and turned me around starry-eyed for the tiniest moments. They were almost always unattainable sexually— in the way that every part of them is attractive, the voice, the words, the mouth— you count the ways as you try and pin point it until you are literally weak in your knees and other places. Unattainable because you can’t figure out their sexuality, or rather if sex is important to them. They are sometimes gay, often queer (whether they boast the label or not), and sometimes asexual (ditto for the label). Ezra Miller is strangely aware of his queerness, and does not boast about it. Catching me off guard he talks about sexuality in a way that makes you look closer to see if he is in fact passing a joint back and forth with Mr. Travers, but is also so intelligently put, educated and well versed, acutely self-aware. Instead of thinking “ugh I’ve so smoked with this kid in a NJ basement” I was thinking “UGH I want to smoke with this kid in a NJ basement and then spend all night kissing him in a bathtub”.
These mysterious men make you want not only to bed them, but to be trapped mid-December in a deserted cottage in upstate New York with only pinot noir and a space heater, talking endlessly and never putting your clothes back on, unaware of time and society and the cold outside the sparkling warmth of that space. Ezra Miller you are all the men I’ve lusted after and admired in my past pre-21, but somehow you come off as a rad individual—- BRAVO!
I will now end this imbroglio of confused observation turned love letter turned the beginnings of my first romance novel.
But on the plus side, I am not alone because - as with a million lonely girls and boys before - books, TV, and music are looking after me now. I am being raised by witches, wolves, and unexpected guest stars on late-night chat shows. All art is someone trying to tell you something, I realize. There’re thousands of people who want to talk to me, so long as I open their book or turn on their show.Caitlin Moran, How To Be a Woman (via norbertcleeverhook)
(via fuckyeahcaitlinmoran)
They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?
The Incantation of Frida K, Kate Braverman (via floralnymph)
Wow, wow, a hundred times wow.
(via floralnymph)
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘99:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blind sides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
- Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen are the common names of an article titled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997, but often erroneously attributed to a commencement speech by author Kurt Vonnegut. Both its subject and tone are similar to the 1927 poem “Desiderata”. The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, released in 1999, by Baz Luhrmann.
Seeking summer reading recommendations…
Dear kind souls of the Tumblr-universe, Might I trouble you for a recommendation or five regarding some decent books I should be reading?
I recently read Just Kids by Patti Smith, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and The Rise of Enlightened Sexism by Susan Douglas.
First and foremost, I’m in the mood for a good novel. Secondly, I would like to keep my eye out for the following: a solid memoir, a frivolous beach read, and possibly a classic “Summer Reading List” book I never actually read in high school (or one that is at least worth a revisit) to indulge this summer.
Classic to contemporary, rich to ridiculous - you name it, I’ll read it. Request and I’ll review! I’m sure that gives you zero incentive, but I’ll take my chances. The cave in which I have tossed possibly interesting book titles (that I rarely remember to actually purchase) and what my mother has used as a Christmas list with my name on it for years now is my Alibris Wishlist (of Rich and Ridiculous Literature) (or Trashcan Organization: The Kate Borbas Story).
Give me some titles! Stat!
Murakami bingo! On point, indeed. Alex is reading Norwegian Wood right now, repeating choice passages to me. It has been a long time since I visited this strange world.
Am I the only one who didn’t enjoy and deeply connect to this book as a young impressionable girl? Same thing with Catcher in the Rye, but maybe I’m just weird.
I love that shade of green, though… and Emma Watson.
The book reader of the future, 1935 (via @boingboing)
A very complicated Kindle concept.
(via bookoisseur)
“a humument” by tom phillips (1970)
A Humument: A treated Victorian novel is an altered book by British artist Tom Phillips, first published in 1970. It is a piece of art created over W H Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document whose title results from the partial deletion of the original title: A Hum
an document.
Phillips drew, painted, and collaged over the pages, while leaving some of the original text to show through. The final product was a new story with a new protagonist named Bill Toge, whose name appears only when the word “together” or “altogether” appears in Mallock’s original text (…) (wikipedia)browse through the book here: http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/index.html
(via fuckyeahbookarts)
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs
I had no idea William S. Burroughs briefly danced with Scientology (of all devils)! But in true mischievous fashion he also disguised himself as a plumber to sneak into the offices and steal paperwork.
