This year, watching the Tour de France on TV, I heard one of the announcers say, “There’s the beautiful sunflower field” and it made me happy that, given all the manful muscling in the pelotonic tumult, he thought to mention that quiet golden place. Since then the words”There is the beautiful sunflower” have lodged themselves in my imagination in the inexplicable way certain words and phrases do from time to time, becoming something like a prayer or an offering or a streamer of solace unfurled the way a strand of birch bark can be freed from the tree.

Also?

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

How to catch an octopus
by Patrick Widdess

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

I like the feeling of dream, the look of dream, the words of dream, the music of dream, the LSD of dream. I like the blur, the opacity, and the glow of dream. I like the strange wrong flawed perfect images of dream that sometimes tell a strange wrong flawed perfect truth.

When colour isn’t present to advance the story, form and texture are what keep the narrative moving.

Red’s not my favourite, it must be said, altho’ I appreciate that it stands for kisses and communism and a vast spectrum of things in between.

To be honest, it took me ages to write this piece on the work of Toronto-based sculptor Lynn Jackson. I keep structuring the damn thing to be a tidy, polite, well-behaved little enterprise. I finally realised that that couldn’t be the form it took because Jackson’s work makes me shiver and shudder, it makes me gasp and flinch, it makes me want to be held in your arms.

The backbone of the backbone.