Home

And then there was Frank’s cock. I mean, I know that size isn’t everything but it just seemed to fit, you know? As soon as I got him inside me I felt like I was home, like for the first time in my life I knew what home was.

MIKE HOOLBOOM, winner of the 2009 Bell Award in Video Art, from Frank’s Cock, 1993.

Still from Frank’s Cock, d. Mike Hoolboom, 8 minutes, 16 mm, 1993.

Touched by it

“Everything gets touched. All your relationships are touched by it. You’re never your normal happy-go-lucky person. Your countenance, your self-esteem goes. You think, ‘I’m not employable.’ ”

There’s nothing worse than one’s talents being unmet, under-utilised, unrewarded, or unsung.

“May I always be a boy.”

For all happiness that has ever thrilled the heart; all greatness, even to think of which almost destroys us; every spacious, world-transforming idea: there was a moment when these were nothing but a pursing of the lips, the lifting of the eyebrows or the shadow on a brow: and this contour of the mouth, this line above the eyelids, this shadow on a face . . .

Sweet

Saturdays

it’s a BOY!

“Get it wet, boy.”

“Go ahead, take it in your mouth.”

His

marvel

Why I’m a gayboy.

“the awesome”

Thanks, sweet man.

Night passage

Studying at night, originally uploaded by gl66.

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born. There I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the course of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world.

Niccolò MACHIAVELLI, The Literary Works of Machiavelli, ed. John Hale ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1961.

The swing set

 

To get there

is to be

here.

 

We can only move from here.

We cannot move from there.

 

How do we know

there is better

than here

when we are

neither

here nor

there?

 

There is no place like home. 

 

JEFF KIRBY

Summer Brings a Wave of Homeless Families

Outcasts in your own country

The swing set, originally uploaded by IrenaS.

“Home” by Low from Secret Name

Long division.

 

 

There is a soul in me

It is asking

to be given its body

 

LOUISE GLÜCK

Vespers ["once I believed in you"]

A Myth of Innocence

It’s so obviously the most miraculous thing to do

Mary Karr on Glück

The golden moments pass and have no trace.*

I just get very sad at the homogenized life we lead now.

We love the place we hate,
then hate the place we love.
We leave the place we love,
then spend a lifetime trying to regain it.

Between loving and hating the real journey starts.

TERENCE DAVIES, from his documentary Of Time and the City, at the Bloor Cinema, February 1-4

DISTANT VOICES: THE FILMS OF TERENCE DAVIES
at Cinematheque, January 23 – February 7

*Chekov

Vera and me.

Photos: Don Pyle

Swans

Thanks Brian.
Photo: MICHAEL BAKER

Home value.

One day alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about my job. I know I gave him details, examples, but while he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood I wanted a solution to work, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee finally and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. At home, with your people. Just go to work; get your money and come on home.”

That is what he said. This is what I heard:

1. Whatever the work, do it well, not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked with all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, wide-hearted and narrow, and had many kinds of jobs, but from that moment on, I never considered the level of labor to be the measure of self or placed the security of a job above the value of home.

TONI MORRISON, from She and Me in What Moves the Margin: Selected Nonfiction / Toni Morrison, Carolyn C. Denard, ed. University Press of Mississippi, 2008.