• Site Redesign: From Disposable Darling to Synesthesia Garden

    07.29.10 | Macerated Ego, Second Skin

    If you used to follow DisposableDarling.com, you may have noticed that the blog has undergone a total makeover. The redesign had been brewing in my mind for months, and I and my skinny love (the Web designer) finally got down to it this past week or two.

    Here’s a screencap of the old blog:

                                                 Click for a larger view

    I conceptualized/visualized the new design, down to the last detail (or rather, I imagined it pretty much all at once, in a complete image), and Nick worked reeeallly hard to get everything right and the way I wanted it, as I’m really OCD and picky with details and was literally going, “Can you shift this two spaces to the right?” every five minutes.

    I wanted to take the site in another aesthetic direction. I have about a million directions in me, but I settled on this one and had a vision of it inside my head that I would tweak and bring different parts of into focus at random times during the day. While Disposable Darling was white with red as the accompanying color, minimal, and rather precious-looking, I wanted the new one to be a little bit grungier, edgier, and more cluttered (a very orderly clutter). It’s basically a sort of visual negative of Disposable Darling – an inversion. The colors are black (the base color), white, and pink. Fonts are bigger, bolder, more graphic, and more integrated with the whole layout. Everything is enwrapped in boxes to satisfy my lust for visual order and integrity.

    Instead of a baroque design with lots of flourishes and an old-timey vibe (which I love also), I opted for a starker, sleek, modern layout. But I always wanted a kind of elaborate crest in the header image, so we used a vector graphic from Chadlonius (he’s amazing) and modified it and added the twin hearts, which are vintage medical textbook illustrations. Those two hearts represent the idea of the “second heart,” which comes from a poem I really like that goes, “the second heart murmurs/its beatific perversions/to the first” (see poetry post below). That can mean a lot of things, obviously; but part of it, for me, is that my vision of the future incarnations of the blog would keep whispering to me and making my fingers itch, it wouldn’t let me rest. We are inspired to change by that restlessness.

    {Another part of it is that I don’t think that we’re always guided by our most obvious motivations or goals, five-year plans or whatever; like, with me, all my actions can sort of be traced to an emotional origin that lies in a deeper, more buried, and more embedded sort of “second heart,” maybe, that lives alongside the first, or encloses the first within it. This has nothing to do with the subconscious or intuition, but everything to do with the primary, underlying motivations of our personalities and the broad themes that shape and describe our lives. And our complexity has to do with modernity; it’s as if we grow a second heart over time, as we evolve.}

    Anyway, thanks to everyone who ever glanced at the blog and liked what they saw. And thanks especially to those 300 or so of you who’ve read it on at least a semi-regular basis. You guys are all wonderful! I hope you still enjoy it. I’m going to try to make things a little more organized from now on. I’m currently going through the 200+ posts I made on Disposable Darling and editing each one of them, which is a pain in the ass. God, I write poorly sometimes. A lot of them probably won’t be put up. I’m trying to be more disciplined – let’s see how long that lasts.

    Goodbye, Disposable Darling.

    Hello, Synesthesia Garden.

    - L.

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  • Poetry: Apocrypha

    07.25.10 | Infection, Semiotic

    “Envy tastes like copper filings.

    It settles into the stomach wall and plies
    its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
    at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
    waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
    Under fallopian awnings
    they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
    lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
    once, twice.

    Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
    is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
    so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.

    Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
    with rotted diamonds.
    It claws and adores and kisses the edge
    without guessing the center, cobbling a
    hermetic path, yellow and grey,
    down into the rickety basement door
    of the second heart–
    the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
    that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
    while storm shutters screen against glass
    threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
    rooms of the interior.

    This other heart is a city of wan-faced slattern-beasts,
    snouts pressed against frozen windows, bones
    howling for hot bread. But it is beautiful there, in the black
    aorta, blood pure as grain alcohol.
    In these jealous walls the self instructs the self–
    the second heart murmurs
    its beatific perversions
    to the first.    ”

    from Apocrypha by Catherynne M. Valente

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  • Dream Machine [001]

    07.24.10 | Exquisite Corpse, Macerated Ego

    I had this weird dream one night last week where there was something wrong with my chest — I felt it, and so my teacher said, “Go to the hospital, a doctor,” and when I went to the hospital I saw a group of doctors standing in front of me, and I went forward, bent sightly over, with my hand over my chest, holding it carefully, with a wounded look on my face, and I felt a slight pain, no more than a papercut or a dull tiny cut, though, really. It was like I was tenderly holding my wound like an injured sparrow held cupped in my hands against my chest. I was afraid of showing it to the doctors, like you’re afraid of opening your mouth for the dentist when you’re a child. I imagined, from outside me, I saw an image of myself with a big hole in my chest, punched right through the rib cage, right in the center, with my heart missing and only destroyed tissue there. (In true dream fashion, it was right in the center, not slightly off to the left, because I don’t think my subconscious takes note of these details.) But when I pulled my hands away and finally showed the doctors, it transformed into, or turned out to be, only a small wound near my collarbone, on my right side, that was thick and dark with blood already like a clotted rope.

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  • Zoe Keating’s “Into the Trees”

    06.27.10 | Aural Pleasures

    I’ve been listening to famed cellist Zoe Keating’s new album, Into the Trees, which is streaming for free up on her site here. It’s wonderful. I can’t ever really listen to instrumental music for that long, because I’m more held by and drawn to rock songs with typical structure and vocals and that’s just how my brain works, but as far as all-instrumental albums go, this one is pretty awesome. It goes all over the place like good cello should, it’s deep and rich and sonorous and adventurous, it rolls from frenetic to melancholy and back over and over. I first heard of Zoe Keating’s work when she was a band member of Rasputina; Raspy almost singlehandedly inspired my love of the cello.

    I read the interview with Zoe Keating in (the current) Issue 5 of Coilhouse Magazine, and it was pretty interesting. Zoe details her self-publishing of all of her music and how getting a big record deal is maybe obsolete in this electronic age, when she gets $.70 from each iTunes sale and major record companies that once rejected her as too much of a risk are now asking after her, offering a “good deal” – half the profits. As she says, “Yeah, right.”

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