The Mix

Blake Lively Preserves The Dream With A New Lifestyle Site

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Bryan Rowland’s haunting, luminous new film, Preserve, is as fine an introduction of Blake Lively’s new lifestyle site Preserve as I could imagine. The film and the site invoke the magic of preserving the dream that is now.

Here’s to that!

It is a bit early for me to pass judgment on Preserve — it’s young, and I more than anyone appreciates that things evolve, particularly in the immediacy that is digital space, and good things sometimes need time to marinate. Preserve is a bit earnest for me at the moment, a bit trying-to-hard, but there’s no shame in your reach exceeding your grasp.

As a Southerner, I love that Preserve feels familiar, though it isn’t the South I know. Still, it contains familiar echoes. It oozes food cooked slow on the stove, and peas being shelled on the porch, and un-fancy white folks sitting outside a trailer in a lawn chair in a scraggly patch of lawn, or un-fancy black ones sitting up on a rocking chair on the porch.

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Philip

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman Esquire

There are no words. I have no words. I speak anyway. First in a borrowed tongue. The words (word) of Questlove on Twitter… Just “Philip.” Jim Carrey’s beautiful, beautiful send up (send off)… “Dear Philip, a beautiful beautiful soul. For the most sensitive among us the noise can be too much. Bless your heart. ;^{.”

I was (am) heartbroken by the death of the great and luminous Philip Seymour Hoffman, who pulled up the greatest beauty from the depth of his soul.

I read a quote last week from Nietzsche that I’d somehow overlooked: “We have art in order not to die of the truth.” Well, the truth descended yesterday morning.

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Derek Walcott’s
“Love After Love”

LoveAfterLove_Ocean Waves

I discovered Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love” today, and it was a benediction. It opened my heart and strengthened my courage and grew my confidence — that the life I have been living all these years, humble and meandering and broken as it has sometimes been, has been the true life that I came here for. “The time will come/” he writes, “when, with elation/you will greet yourself arriving/at your own door, in your own mirror.” Where else should we be arriving to? And yet, there are the impostors, those shouting voices of fear urging us onward in the direction where we are not, that we might have the accolades and riches of this world, even as we secretly know that the richest place we will ever know is the place inside our own soul.

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We’re Back!
The Power Of The Pivot

 

Bird Taking Flight

 

Orange field

What can I say? Best laid plans and all of that. When we launched Revel In It last year, the plan was to post every day and send out a newsletter every week. But we’re lean and mean and, within 6 months, it became clear that wasn’t sustainable — at least, not if wanted to get anything else done (and I still have lots up my sleeve that I want to do and  am doing). And so, I’ve taken a play from the entrepreneur’s playbook and embraced the fine art of the pivot, a.k.a., “the fine art of finding what a thing is really for.”

To read more about pivots — and how they might apply to your life, even if you are not of an entrepreneurial bent — check out these articles.

Five Business Leaders Share Their Career Pivot Stories

The Pivot Point: How To Use The Energy Of Imbalance To Manifest Positive Change

My two favorite pivots of all time belong to Steve Jobs, who made the ultimate pivot when he turned his love for calligraphy into a game changing computer brand that leads with great design (and what, after all, is great design but a commitment to great aesthetic functionality) —

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Kim Gordon & How To Rock On
At Every Age

Kim Gordon In Elle

In Elle Magazine’s May Women In Music Issue, Lizzy Goodman wrote a profile on Kim Gordon, founder and singer/songwriter/bass and guitar player of Sonic Youth, that put the lie to any notion any of us may have that it’s “too late,” that our opportunities have passed us by, that the choices we made in the early days of our youth have locked us in, like cement, that we aren’t still perfectly free to make a glorious,  noise for the next decades of our lives. She’s a reminder to rock on until the stone’s rolled over our grave or our bodies are set ablaze, whichever the case may be, and an exemplar of what it looks like, in the words of Fleetwood Mac, to “handle the seasons of [our] li[ves].”

Gordon at 59 has started a new band, is painting like a fiend, and she’s dating again, being squired about by younger men, a restauranteur, actor and architect among them, following the end of he long marriage to Thurston Moore, her Sonic Youth co-founder and bandmate, and father of her young adult daughter Coco. The marriage ended as these things sometimes do — a midlife crisis, an affair with another woman, counseling, Thurston’s unwillingness, or inability, to leave the other woman so as to knit his family back into a piece.  Gordon is honest about the toll this loss took, and it’s her honesty that makes this next turn of her professional and personal screw so instructive for the many of us who, having taken a hit or two by the time we were 30 or 40 or 50 or so, wonder not so much how we can get back up and keep going — there’s something innate in the human survival instinct that allows us to do that — but how we can rise like a phoenix from the ash and set this world ablaze.

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