"The Talmud states: 'The deeds of the righteous are greater than the making of the heavens and the earth.' The explanation of this is that the creation of the heavens and the earth was the formation of the reality of something from nothing. By contrast the righteous transform reality back to nothingness. For from all the things they do, even physical things like eating, they raise the holy sparks [tikkun] from this food upward, and the same is true of every matter they engage in. So we find that they transform the real into the divine Nothing."

-Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch (from 'Maggid Devarav LeYaakov)

The Golden Key












"In the winter time, when deep snow lay on the ground, a poor boy was forced to go out on a sledge to fetch wood. When he had gathered it together, and packed it, he wished, as he was so frozen with cold, not to go home at once, but to light a fire and warm himself a little. So he scraped away the snow, and as he was thus clearing the ground, he found a tiny, gold key. Hereupon he thought that where the key was, the lock must be also, and dug in the ground and found an iron chest. "If the key does but fit it!" thought he; "no doubt there are precious things in that little box." He searched, but no keyhole was there. At last he discovered one, but so small that it was hardly visible. He tried it, and the key fitted it exactly. Then he turned it once round, and now we must wait until he has quite unlocked it and opened the lid, and then we shall learn what wonderful things were lying in that box."

-Brothers Grimm (KMH 200)

Why I Like Gustav Moreau


















Moreau's art is the product of a byzantine, classically-educated, almost autistic detail-oriented mind. While many of his fellow lotus-eaters could claim to opium fantasies, rarely were they of his caliber. So, you say you recently had a fever-dream of bedding Ethiopian princesses under the metalwork angels of St. Ambrose's crypt to the strains of Nonnus' poetry? Cool. But can you put it on vaporously-textured canvasses, hot-shot?

That's what I thought.

Why I Don't Like MIA














Her music/image/art smell distinctly of a dual degree in art and "design" and cultural studies from an English university.