rachel profile picture

rachel

I am here for Friends

About Me

you are a victim of the rules you live by, you are guileless in your dreams, you are responsible for constituting the meaning of things, you are the past present and future, you can live on through your descendants, you can't expect people to be something they're not, you can't fool others if you're fooling yourself, you don't know what's what until you support yourself, you have to hurt others to be extraordinary, you must have one grand passion, you owe the world not the other way around, you should study as much as possible, your actions are pointless if no one notices, your oldest fears are the worst ones

My Interests

Ephemera, mostly. The art that is not art! BODY SUSPENSION. Graffiti, street art, paste-ups, t-shirt literature. Photography. Toy cameras. Holzer, Burtynsky, Witkin, LaChapelle, Helmut Newton. Culture jamming. Manipulating images. Urban exploration, trespassing, abandoned buildings. Things that are weathered, rusty, forgotten. Ghost towns, graveyards, local haunts. Activism, in whatever form. Magical realism, phenomenology, synchronicity. Wanderlust. Northern Africa, Central America. Women's health. In search of the Best Burger Ever. Hitting the road. Running for it. Losing bets. Wasting time. Oceans.

I'd like to meet:

"And what if you hadn't met me?"
"I don't know, but you're here, you see..."

Movies:

Takashi Miike, Dario Argento, Andrei Tarkovsky.Gore, cannibalism, zombies. Beautiful horror, shameless smut. Exploitation or mainstream. Documentaries. Whatever.

Television:

America's Next Top Model, Supernatural, Lost

Books:

62: A Model Kit, Arrow of God, The Art of Dreaming, The Bell Jar, Borges: Collected Fictions, Crime and Punishment, Dr. Glas, God Dies by the Nile, Hopscotch, House of Leaves, Labryinths, Malcolm X, Midaq Alley, Norwegian Wood, Pedro Paramo, A Personal Matter, The Sinners, Sputnik Sweetheart, The Stranger, Things Fall Apart, The Trial, White Noise, Wisdom Sits in Places, the Woman in the Dunes

Heroes:

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

My Blog

excuse me, but can i be you for a while?

my favourite tori songs."silent all these years" "cooling" "bells for her" "winter" "black dove" "mother" AND THE VIDEO FORCAUGHT A LITE SNEEZE ...
Posted by rachel on Fri, 02 Nov 2007 07:30:00 PST

Felicity

The Hill of Prayer sits in a desolate part of the California desert.Here, the Wall of the Ages - claiming to serve no practical purpose - which is supposed to contain the collective memory of humanity...
Posted by rachel on Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:33:00 PST

Letter Four: July 16, 1903

Letter Four Worpswede, near Bremen July 16, 1903 About ten days ago I left Paris, tired and quite sick, and traveled to this great northern plain, whose vastness and silence and sky ought to make me...
Posted by rachel on Sun, 26 Aug 2007 02:21:00 PST

Letter Seven: May 14, 1904

Letter Seven Rome May 14, 1904 My dear Mr. Kappus, Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and...
Posted by rachel on Sun, 26 Aug 2007 02:35:00 PST

Golden

Yesterday, two of my bestest (Fluffy and Jon) and myself went on a mini-road trip to Golden, NM. Perhaps you have heard of this place -- it's on New Mexico 14 towards Santa Fe, about 40 miles outside ...
Posted by rachel on Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:21:00 PST

new random photos

Another photo update?! YUPPS!People have been asking me what I have been up to...Well, since I have been back, I've been: 1) working the PAINT CREW2) hanging out skaters3) dancingI've spent a great de...
Posted by rachel on Sun, 05 Aug 2007 07:15:00 PST

pretty pictures

So, I'm bored and have done some photo coolness lately, and I wanted to share, just to keep everyone posted on what I've been up to.Random People Shots:"B"XiaoFluffy FaceSilly JohnBen showing off perf...
Posted by rachel on Tue, 03 Jul 2007 05:44:00 PST

a sight to behold

more Tikal:BelizeLamanaiETC:fully reconstructable vessel we found in our unit!check out the architecture we found.in the unit pictured above we uncovered a lithic cache with over 4500 pieces of flakes...
Posted by rachel on Sat, 23 Jun 2007 05:00:00 PST

get there

I've begun the process of sorting, editing, and posting my photographs from the trip online. Tikal and Guatemala photographs make up this post. Expect more soon.. and lots from Belize and our work at ...
Posted by rachel on Mon, 18 Jun 2007 07:46:00 PST

diving into the wreck

First having read the book of myths,and loaded the camera,and checked the edge of the knife-blade,I put onthe body-armor of black rubberthe absurd flippersthe grave and awkward mask.I am having to do ...
Posted by rachel on Tue, 15 May 2007 09:45:00 PST