Police suspect giraffe in circus breakout

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Fifteen camels, two zebras and several llamas and pot-bellied pigs escaped from a circus visiting Amsterdam early Monday, police said.

"We suspect that a giraffe kicked open a pen," Dutch police said in a statement, adding that the animals did not get far before they were rounded up and returned to the circus.

A Press Release from PRKA

This is an excerpt from an amazing George Saunders piece in Slate magazine. If you haven't read it in its entirety, I strongly recommend it. It's a manifesto for a fictional organization called "People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction." The part I wanted to share with you all because it reminds me of you all (for which I thank you one million times over):

"A word about our membership. Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize. We stand under awnings during urban thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by. In moments of crisis, we pat one another awkwardly on the back, mumbling shy truisms. Rushing to an appointment, remembering a friend who passed away, our eyes well with tears and we think: Well, my God, he could be a pain, but still I'm lucky to have known him.

This is PRKA. To those who would oppose us, I would simply say: We are many. We are worldwide. We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail."

a manifesto of sorts.

With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces. Everyone who reproduces that which drives him to creation with directness and authenticity belongs to us. -ernst ludwig kirchner 1880-1934

perfection can be lovely

Carrie Marill's A Dream World Glimmers In The Background Of The Soul

say yes!

this single paragraph by dave eggers has become my edict for life over the past few months. i love it so much and wanted to share it with you.

"What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips's new album is ravishing and I've listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who's up and who's down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f--kload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."

so here's to saying YES! to things that scare us--to risks in life, love, art, and everything.

Reading's Timely Comeback

Today over gchat, Hybrid (Marc) sent me a delightful link which sent me sprawling into the past: http://www.readatwork.com/. [When the page pops up and you click on the icon to the right, a fake screen will pop up. Click on the files, select a story/poem and pretend to be dutifully preparing to do a powerpoint! It's that easy!]

If you were anything like me as a child (and I happen to know that several of you were), you were not only hyperactive but you also would read anything you could get your filthy, little hands on. Cereal boxes, teen romances, boy survival tales, anything. I seemed to be reading all the time, or at least when I wasn't supposed to, and the most tempting of all times was when I was supposed to be sleeping. I don't know why the allure of nighttime made reading so dangerous and exciting, but I do know that I went to great lengths to do it.

My favorite tactic was this: lie down in bed while holding my opened book against the back of my abnormally wide teddy bear. That way, when my parents came in I could just clutch the panda to my chest and pretend I was sleeping. Brilliant. I don't know how I explained the light to them. But man, I had them good because they never caught on. Or maybe they didn't have the heart to force a little girl to stop reading, not like the soul-less monsters that we call "bosses" these days.

So if your fingers don't quite move at a quick enough speed to minimize your online reading, consider this a modern day panda.

Lightning Bugs

I'd never met a firefly in person, but people told me I would run into them when I moved out East. I was excited for this first encounter, but eventually I forgot all about it (I'm gonna blame it on the government).

A few weeks ago, walking down New Jersey Avenue after getting off the metro, this little light flashed in front of me for a moment and then faded to brick, like a match igniting and then extinguishing. I waited, and a few moments later the yellow spark flashed again. Again and again the light when on and off. Entranced, I nearly followed the lightning bugger right into the street. I survived our introduction when the firefly united with the front grill of a BWM, and its light abruptly when out.

I wish fireflies made their homes in these frosted glass jars covered by polaroid emulsion transfers (Created by Max*Power).

Where I'm eating tomorrow....

I got into Mississippi tonight and already my love for the south has reignited. I watched the slow pace of the River tonight (yes River with a capital R) and who wouldn't want to eat pies and biscuits inside a giant black woman's skirt? While it may not be the most politically correct thing ever, it does bring me joy.

More on the South later, but here is a quote from on of Mississippi's finest - Eudora Welty
"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass."

La Vida

Almost my entire mission I had a Picasso painting from the blue period hung up above my desk. It was a page from a calendar. I had once told mario how much Picasso's blue period really moved me and one day in a manila envelope the small square painting arrived with a folded crease down the middle, he had cut it from the October 1998 page. I don't know that some of my companions quite understood or approved of Picasso's acrobatic clowns peering down a little sadly at us next to our calendar of baptisms and picture of the temple, but there is something so real and human and just beautiful about those people. Spiritually doesn't have to be limited to church. The painting has continued to follow me and I put it up above every desk i come to live by.

Yesterday i went to the U of U's new exhibition, 'the impressionists to surrealism', it was so exhilarating to see the work of artists who were very much revolutionists and activists for change in their own right. I saw the above Picasso piece, so beautiful. I've cried a few times in museums, usually trying to play it off casually as an itch in my eye. Once when I saw a Giacommeti, once when i saw another Picasso in the Met, once at a Bill Viola exhibition in the Guggenheim, the Andy Goldsworthy on the roof of the Jewish History Museum, at Zack Taylor's Mormon ex-convicts show, so many times at Gallery 110 when I saw people coming together, and yesterday can now be added to the list. Although yesterday i got a little teary-eyed for two reasons...perhaps three. One, this blue period piece above, Picasso made it after a dear friend committed suicide because of the rejection of his lover, it is thought to symbolize the different stages of life, or two types of love (mother and child, lovers). (The actual painting is much richer in color and not so blue, it is also about 10 ft. tall and there is a little bit cropped from the image i put here).

While I was walking through Rodin's sculptures I noticed a guard watching me. (I was in my blue blue dress, for some reason that sticks in my head). The guard was older, with white hair and a soft grandfatherly, yet childish face, maybe those are synonymous anyway. He had hearing aids, not just the getting old kind, but I could tell he was at least partially deaf when he signaled me to come over and began to speak to me, (which was also strange because there were a lot of people in the museum and i don't know why he chose me). He said, 'did you see the van gogh's yet?', I said 'yes'. He told me that he'd stood guard for 12 hours in the room with the van gogh's and every time he looked at them he saw something different. He seemed to be so enthused and appreciative of the paintings. We talked for a few minutes and he asked me what I do. I said I wasn't quite sure, but that I love art and love to paint. With a wink as I left he said, 'maybe in 100 years you will be on these walls.' I'm not so sure about that, but as I rounded the corner and left him standing and watching in his navy blue museum guard suit, I was touched by to reach out to one another and to realize that art can be a catalyst for that connection.

The third reason I was particularly moved in those moments between the Gaugin's, Picasso's, Matisse's and a Modigliani was perhaps more introspective than the other two, I've been having a particularly hard time the past couple weeks reconciling change, decision, endings and beginnings, to be entirely vague. As I walked through the paintings I listened on my black guide recorder about the artists, their lives and context of paintings. I realized that centuries ago these people also felt heartache and joy and loss and contentment. They painted about God and children, and lovers and death and unsurety. Being in the middle of those paintings for a few minutes felt like being among ancestors who cared and were speaking to me from centuries ago. i don't mean to be melodramatic, although it's perhaps one of my unavoidable qualities. i just mean to say that art is important, experience and spiritually are important, knowledge and connection are key. I just mean to say that standing in front of that giant picasso yesterday in my blue dress and braided hair meant a whole lot.

at war by anuradha vijayakrishnan

Dip your head, she warns me, when you walk
and let the fireflies pass. The spark in their eyes
could be real fire; you could burn, your hair
could crackle and char. The smell
will be terrible and nothing will wash
it off, not even my tears or the best
soap we could buy in these parts.

She is full of warnings today, singing them
out because that way we will remember them
better. And her tunes buzz like brave
mosquitoes when we don't listen.

When we stumble the sand tastes of salt, the salt
of a sea now far receded. A sea brimming
with white waves and blue fish imagined
with perfect wings.
We are walking on uneven ground, pebbles
rolling angrily out of our way.
But we walk like giants
here, swinging our arms, shouldering the skies lightly.

And she goes off-key-humming how
red hibiscus when alone is dangerous, how
it kills with the purple poison given it by the gods
we think we worship.

She is full of warnings today
and we bend to let them pass, because we are ones
that wish no land and nobody any harm.

[i can't get enough of the phrase: 'we walk like giants.']

Per the author's request, this poem was published in Bare Root Review, Issue 4, Spring 2007. And besides wanting to cite my sources, what the author wants, the author gets.

Birthday Song

[Just a little snippet about the birthday picnic--alex, the lemonade part is EFY--thanks for the idea :)]

On the banks of the Potomac with touch football kids rowdying the grass, sheets of humid air hang from the clouds. Fireflies, all tenacious biolumen, rise from the ground and flash semaphores. We huddle around Adam who pulls a white ball from the bocce bag and arcs it away from the picnic blanket. The pallino smalls against the pale summer sky, nosedives, then lands with an unassuming thunk. Too-tall grass hides it from view and we make exaggerated shows of strong arming each bowl into line. When all six are thrown, we swarm like kids at a soccer game. The measuring tape spools out of its compact—white vinyl and black ticking mediates disputed distance. The pallino goes flying again. Kids shout and the lemonade sun sinks deeper and deeper into the firefly-flecked earth.

Circle not Square

I took these in Atlanta & in SLC when I went to visit Lia. 1) You can't help but squint, 2) Rock sugar candy, 3) A readily available sky

Completely Smitten...

By Ophelia Chong! From her Slips of Paper series. (Caspar David Friedrich + gorgeous paper scraps = heaven)

Bienvenida!

Welcome to our dear friends Ashley Mae & Marc! We are excited as egrets to see what treasures they rustle up!

tree shadows

something about green and trees and growing and summery breezes makes me feel like sailing about in a white linen dress. i was on a little hike the other day, and the trees were so lush and full that the light was streaming down in various tints of green. the wind kept shifting the light patterns on the ground so that the green tints were very nearly twinkling -
i took about a million photos, suddenly obsessed with capturing the patterns, and wondered if i might find a way to pick up the shadows and put them into my pocket for safe keeping.

"Summer"

I still can't explain what about Cy Twombly's Four Seasons makes me weak in the knees. It looks a mess--scribbles and thrown paint. But maybe it is his raw abandon that I admire. Anyway, this is his Summer. It makes me want to dive inside to see what else there is to be found. Or lemonade in the evening with water balloons sailing over my head.

a garden of wishes

i spent the past few days in gyeoungju, a lovely city on the southern coast of korea. while wandering about a beautiful buddhist monastery there, i came across a hundred tiny piles of stones, each symbolizing prayers and wishes - an entire garden of tangible hopes.

one more delight

(I just couldn't resist) These are ridiculously evocative birds by Anna Paola Civardi

It's amazing what a little ink will do...

I am absolutely revelling in Yellena James' beautiful pen and inks:

"Allure"

*You can buy prints at her Etsy store for about $20!

"Sources of the Delaware"

I love these first few lines of Dean Young's poem maybe too much:

I love you he said but saying it took twenty years
so it was like listening to mountains grow.
I love you she says fifty times into a balloon
then releases the balloon into a room
whose volume she calculated to fit
the breath it would take to read
the complete works of Charlotte Brontë aloud.

Got Room for 1 More?

Something I really admire about my roommate Luke is his fearlessness. Some people might say that Luke really needs to censor himself more, or maybe if he felt awkward it would help him - but no - he doesn't and just goes ahead with amazing projects. I remember thinking once about John Kovalenko and how people flock to him, because in many ways he expresses feelings and emotions which many of us are afraid to express. We watch opera and think 'gosh how overly dramatic' - but are drawn to it none the less, why? Because sometimes our insides are bursting with an aria - but we censor it.

Censorship of self, can be good - but I give you an amazing example of Luke's fearlessness. Luke, yes, is gay, and there was a boy that he loved - however said boy already had a committed lover. Not letting this deter him, Luke figured, why not polyandry? And hence the powerpoint - yes the powerpoint of seduction .

Got Room for 1 More

the beauty of impermanance...

"when i make a work i often take it to the very edge of its collapse. and that's a very beautiful balance" - andy goldsworthy


to me this beauty has everything to do with the risk rooted in every creative impulse. this clip moves me so much. i think we have all thought similar things but watching him so quiet, thorough, and connected building this lovely portal-nest, makes me remember why my heart beats everyday.




(thelms--this docu will always make me happy, not for obvious reasons, but because that is where we first hung out)

impermanence as an eternalizing element

i had a friend tell me once that the only art he really believes in is the kind you can't capture, the kind that happens and flickers and then moves forward. the oscillation of people through a subway car. a glimpse of sky through a tangled web of electric wires. the tint of your bedroom wall at sunset.

it makes me wonder a little about the importance of permanence in art, or whether the word permanent plays any link in art beyond the memory we have of it. it reminds me of the way tourists in a famous museum will go about excitedly from painting to painting, photographing every image they feel touched by (or have been told they should feel touched by). who looks at those pictures once they're taken? what does the image even mean once it's been isolated onto a 4x6 inch reprint?

while wandering about a contemporary korean art exhibit the other day, i came across a wall covered in mylar and black packaging tape by the burgeoning artist heeseop yoon:



i immediately cringed with sadness at the thought that all of the meticulous detailing would go to waste at the installation of the next exhibit, but just as suddenly wondered if its impermanence wasn't one of the greater factors in its magnificence. was it the actual piece that made it great? or the reaction it gauged in its audience? what was the eternalizing element?

on my way home, i walked through a puddle of origami papers that had fallen into a large swirling heap in the subway terminal. as i looked back, the wisps of color fluttering gently up here, congregating slowly down there in the breeze of passing footsteps filled me with a sudden and forceful -
oh!

without any sort of disrespect or disregard for the treasures of art that we keep in museums and study in books and pass about in our homes and in our hearts - if art acts as a metaphor for life, surely we can say: life is art.

A little goodness from South Africa

Fall of 2006 was spent listening to this band from South Africa called Freshlyground - a multiracial group of people working to help heal the nation through music.

I just finished watching for the 40th time "Amandla: Revolution in 4 Part Harmony" about the music in the anti-apartheid movement. In one part Abdullah Ibrahim, this jazz composer says something along the lines of "these were not just liberation songs, songs to liberate us from the white man, but songs to help liberate ourselves"

Potbelly isn't exactly a political song, but i think the music video does say a lot (and is visually so enjoyable)

BIENVENUE!

A big, hearty welcome/hello to A&O, another newly minted Transpacificist! We wait, breathlessly, to see more of the wonderful gems he will find.

"His Hand An Encyclopedia"

I saw this at Tate Modern a few years ago. That phrase, "His Hand An Encyclopedia," is one that I think about a lot. And I love that image and I want to think that about my own hands--how they can be an archive of the small histories my life has learned. I also love that he uses poetry to depict his body. It is something I want to try very, very soon.


Sir Roland Penrose, "Portrait" 1939

Small Things With Wings

I try not to watch this clip too much because sometimes it makes me dizzy but there are times when i just have to. It is beyond wonderful. Just a little scrap of beauty. The fluttering wings captured so perfectly and iconically on his equally fluttery film. The other night I saw my first Virginian firefly. It darted through the little thicket of pines that line our walk then disappeared.


"Mothlight" - Stan Brakhage

Indifference

This is a prose poem by Stephen Dunn that I love. Especially since I feel indifferent a lot--it is kind of a wake up call every time I read it.

"Indifference"

There's evidence of life in hatefulness, which is why indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. Between lovers, what's worse than a shrug? Or you look in the mirror, and not even an old friend stares back, or anybody you'd be inclined to improve.
Otherwise, indifference may be what you can't help feeling toward someone who can't help inspiring it. It can be as natural as a yawn, not necessarily a failing or a falling away. Justified or not, indifference is never anything to be proud of; there's not a situation it has ever made better. For those regulars of indifference, to whom so little matters, some synapse between brain and society has snapped, some link between hearts and other hearts. They are beyond hurt, these masters of distance, they don't permit themselves the sweetness of the tragic world.

oh yes! oh prompt!

A few years ago a dear friend told me about an exercise her poetry class did. I loved the idea so much then that I wrote a poem about the bellies of whales and army boys dressed in green dying of nostalgia (what is now known as a form of homesickness was, in the late 1800s, a textbook disease). I'm curious to see what things look like six years later so if you get a minute, consider the following prompt. The teacher gave each student a title and asked them to write an accompanying poem. This is what my friend got:

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

It's one of those titles I wish I had written. Anyway, please post whatever might come of this little exercise (excepting Raymond Carver's original story...), and/or post other titles for us to play with!

sometimes you just need a welsh poet

There are plenty of old black man hanging out on the streets in my neighborhood and they usually give the best compliments, everything from "you are lookin beautiful today" to "and I thought they said real women don't wear plaid, but girl you are looking great". It's such a shocking contrast to the icky 20 something year old guys who will either give you creepy looks or not even notice you.

Men opening up doors for me, who cares really - but there is sometimes the earning for gentlemen to make a stern come back into society. Summer sales boys, law students, bleh - I'm done with that - give me someone with a soul.

If he was 60 years younger and he was still alive I would date Leslie Norris. I'll never forget the day he came and spoke in my WWI lit class and talked about hanging out with Dylan Thomas, his dad in the war, reading some poems, and I loved how his eyes got big when he said the words "the old mole".

Sometimes you just need a welsh poet - so here are some files to listen to of him reading some poems in his soothing voice.

Borders
A Sea in the Desert
A Visitation from a Welshmen

to amy (an artist deserving of the name)

so i stumbled upon this treading-on-cheesy rodin quote on a gallery wall a few weeks ago, and scribbled it down just in case i felt the right moment might elevate it for me:

"to any artist, deserving of the name, all in nature is beautiful because his eyes, fearless by accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth."

today was one of those insipidly hot, humid all over your body days. i was practicing some bach on the violin when all of the sudden my screechy chords were meshing with the peels of thunder - and i looked out to see all of the heat melt happily into a cascading waterfall of summer storm. and i thought of you. beautiful.

for patricia (with love)

after about two hundred attempts at trying to come up with some sort of image for a project, i looked out our kitchen window tonight and saw:



so this one's for you and me.

An addition to the tangled conversation

Jeremy Blake did the gorgeous art for this video. I love how many variations on the original theme he manages--how they are each unique but are also layers, which shades and deepens the original itself so that Beck's face is/becomes/dissolves into clouds, stars, eclipses, interfacing circles, etc. And the music--! The combination is absolutely lovely.

Things that make my heart go - - -

Bare, white library shelves underground: Memorial to the May 10, 1933 book burning in Berlin's bebelplatz where Nazi youth groups destroyed 20,000 books


Spray paint inscription on the Berlin Wall: "TO: ASTRID MAYBE SOMEDAY WE WILL BE TOGETHER"

It's been almost two years since I went to Berlin but these two images have made themselves at home in my head. I remember how it felt to stumble across the glass pane, to peer down and down at the stark shelves, to see my reflection beaming back up to me so that my face became a book on the shelf. Or when I walked with my fingers trailing across the wall until they reached a fissure large enough to clasp two hands through, and how everything zoomed outwards and inwards when I read (like millions of other tourists have before me--and yet) the inscription. There needs to be poems, paintings, songs, everythings about these two images. I want there to be all of that because there is too much distance between my hand clicking the camera shutter shut and that gorgeous, tragic fissure, too much distance between the me two years later from the me standing in Bebelplatz with my heart spasming in my ribcage..there is just way too much of so much, which makes thinking about these things important, and wanting to take the abstract mess of the past and turn it into something personal: to create.

let's get tangled

i've been a little bit obsessed with the idea of repetition lately - like the chords of a cat power song, or the way the buildings of an apartment line up like a bach fugue, or the way shadows fall off of a line of people at midday. i love the idea of taking those repeated images, and then overlapping them into a sort of collaged tangle, until the image or concept becomes the composite, impossibile to separate into its individual pieces.

observe arturo herrera's success below:



note: when combined with belle & sebastian's electric renaissance, this idea sort of morphs into a state better known as overstimulation.

this was going to be about bartleby's soul (then it turned out to be about mine)

Yes, I Was Productive at Work.

Don't you wish that the forrest animals kept track of YOUR birthday?