dear amanda and julianne,

last year i sent out e-mails every now and then with bits of classical music. and marc would send me an e-mail with a piece of art. and amy would send out a poem. and then this blog was born.
i'm still sending out clips of music, but i don't have your e-mail addresses and soundbits can't be given out on the blogosphere - could you pass them to me? (and anyone else who might want inclusion.)

much love.

the power of white.

we watched a documentary on robert ryman in my painting class the other day. suddenly, everything i've been painting has been turning out... white.

Renewal

"It is the function of art to renew our perception.
What we are familiar with we cease to see.
The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

--Anais Nin

Tarek Eltayeb

Even though there were so many things to talk about from today (Pancake Parades, the Broadcast, a quinoa-filled potluck), I wanted to tell you about Tarek Eltayeb because his soul was gentle and he smiled large and sincerely and leaned forward, eager and interested in conversation. he told me about his wife, her love of music, how he recently bought her a piano so she could make music live in their home. and he told me about his poems, his paintings, and these are a few i want to share with you because they are lovely, lovely, lovely:

First Kisses

From a distance, I stopped and gazed at them
In the garden:
A girl and a boy
She was kissing him
And each time she kissed him he’d wipe his mouth
After the final kiss, she took his hand
He laughed
And this time he kissed her
While their hands were intertwined
My heart sung
A cry of joy just about
Escaped from me; it nearly ruined
A resplendent ritual

Vienna; May 21st, 2001
(translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu Zeid;
from “Takhlisat (In Clear)”. Irhab al-ayn al-bayda. Poetry, Merit Publishing House, Cairo 2002)

after my heartbreak

word for word.

The Museum would like...

I saw the Richard Misrach exhibition at the National Gallery of Art the day before they took it down. Misrach (b. 1949) does these ginourmous chromogenic prints of people on the beach and in the water from the top floors of a Hawaiian hotel he was staying in.

I caught myself searching through all the lounging people for...myself, scrutinizing each face to see if it was me. Completely bizarre really, checking someone else's image of the world to see if you're represented, searching for reassurance that you have a place, that you were able to eke out your own patch of beach.Well apparently this up close soul searching made the museum nervous, because a 16 year-old museum employee interrupted me to say, "Sir, The Museum would like to remind its patrons to stand at least one foot away from the photographs."

What if we hadn't left the Garden?

Every day for about a week now I've been going over Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" - a triptych depicting 3 scenes: the Joining of Adam and Eve, A Garden of the World, and the third is a scene from Hell. I like scrolling through the painting and absorbing all his vivid imagery - a bird swallowing humans while sitting on his thrown, people making love in clams, etc.
I've been concentrating a lot on the center panel, and I guess my interpretation is what would the world be like if the Fall had never happened, if we had never left the garden...

Make sure that you click on the image so you can see it in its large self

If I May,

I'd like to recommend a friend's blog to everyone who reads this because she, like many of you dear people, is one of those who seeks good and beautiful things and finds them and then goes out and creates more good and beautiful things whenever and wherever she can.

Madame Tutli Putli

Existenial stop-animation short film. Need I say more:

Part 1:


Part 2:

i wish i could embed this, but

one of the students i taught english to over the summer was a successful jazz pianist and music composer. this is one of her music videos and oh, it makes me miss korea so much.

an adult dollhouse, of sorts

alex showed me these photos while describing an architectural exhibit he viewed in the hayward gallery in london.
"haven't we all wanted, at some time, to smash things up, wreck the house, punch the walls and send the furniture flying?", or so says the review, which describes it perfectly.

phenomenal.

Eugene de Salignac

my dear friend megruth shared this with me and it is awesome:

Brooklyn Bridge, showing painters on suspenders, October 7, 1914

if you want beauty

then fall is the answer. and so is this, camille utterback's wonderful, lovely, thoughtful, lyrical text rain. (watch the quicktime documentation.) letters fall on your body and your body tells the letters how to make a word, a phrase, a line of poetry.

Love is a Battlefield: Zaw Moe Kyaw's story

I must tell you all this story, because the words and images from it haven't been able to leave me, and maybe also in the spirit of Lia, to share something of my own.

In modern times there are no fairy godmothers, but sometimes there are wise former guerilla soldiers. I went to his apartment so we could finish a video project we've been working on about a young monk, one of the leaders of the Saffron Revolution last fall. "I told the soldiers that we were praying with love for peace for everyone, including you. But he said he didn't understand and that we must leave or else he would shoot."

Zaw Moe Kyaw made me some Burmese food before getting to work and we talked in broken Thai, Burmese, and English phrases - "kun chuap aa hann thai mai ka?" so that we would not forget these languages. He pulled out some old photos he found while moving, of him when he lived in the jungle. "These are my comrades" and he points to them, "yes he died later after being arrested in Thailand, and he died of malaria." He moves slowly as he turns the photos. Throughout the night he would pick them up and stare at each a long time, at him with long hair, at the photos of funerals, for that was the only time they really took photos.

He is sad I'm leaving for Thailand and wants to come to. He is done sitting in an office, done going into a tunnel then coming out then going into the hole of the RFA office, then coming out to only go into a hole again. He describes to me his dream life if Burma was free. "I want to have a lot of land, with some, how do you call them "orchards", is that right? And have some wildlife, maybe some of those deer about the size of horses, I saw them in the jungle often. (I tell him he needs a pet elephant). Lots of land where I can be a cowboy, and I'll wear the hat you got me in Texas. I also will be an MP for my town, and maybe start a college where people can go to school, you should come teach there."

Awhile later we spoke of love. I do that quasi-joking voice and I say, haha, how moving to Thailand will be good and will help me to progress, then I sigh as only an adolescent with a broken heart can sigh. He says "You must move on Thelma, life is like water. You are young, enjoy life!" And then he tells me his story, and I must tell you this, because hearing it has changed me.

He loved a girl in his hometown in Burma. "I would get excited just being near her." And then the revolution of '88 happened and by '91 the military regime was hunting him down, so he had to flee to the jungle. The night before him and his comrades were to leave he asked them to wait for him in Rangoon because he had to go to his town to say goodbye to her. She was young then, only 17. "This better be important what you have to say to me" she says "I have my big exams tomorrow." He tells her he is leaving but "please wait for me." The only things he takes with him are his ID card and her photo.

"For 10 years Thelma, I didn't have a girlfriend, I only thought of her. I would be hiking through mountain sides and be thinking of her. I would be out at night checking for enemy soldiers, marching through the dark forest and pretending to have conversations with her in my head." No contact with her ever.

After awhile he left life in the jungle and went to work with Burmese exile groups in Thailand, had his eyes opened and knew that it was time to move on. Got an American girlfriend, a British, a Thai one and eventually started working with his current girlfriend in the office of Burma's socialist political party, DPNS.

Four years ago he moved to the States and starting working for Radio Free Asia, which secretly broadcasts news inside Burma. Through this she, yes she, hears his voice and writes him a letter telling him that she has never married, that she waited for him. "But I had changed, life had changed. I told some friends in my town to take care of her, but what was I to do now?"

How could I speak after hearing this? I silently returned to fixing the subtitles, with pain changing U Gawsita's statement of 'I live in Maggin monastery" to "I lived in Maggin monastery."

"Thelma, in Burmese, the word for 'marriage' roughly means 'house arrest"

"No, you are joking."

"No, I am serious. Listen to me, you are young. Flexibility and freedom are amazing things, embrace it!" Then he laid on the floor, with his hands behind his head and I'm fairly certain he was dreaming of getting away from office life, or perhaps fighting again, or maybe just about his orchards.

A guerilla leader, named Moetheezun who now lives in Queens, NY, once put a sign in the camps in the jungle "Revolution is school." Zaw Moe Kyaw never was able to finish college, but he tells me this, and I'm sure that the monk that was on the screen in front of me knows this to, "love is when you want the happiness of another, even if it goes against our own desires."

small, quiet perfection

Reading James Agee's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" is one of those small, quiet perfections that both startles and overwhelms me with its lyricism, its gentleness, its ability to love the things around it. It is a short essay, about being a boy in Knoxville. About summer evenings when the whole neighborhood comes out, when streetlights flicker on, when fathers roll up their sleeves and water the lawns in chorus, when families lie in the grass staring at the stars and feeling the warmth of dear bodies all around. I hope you get a chance to read the whole essay but here are the last two paragraphs, which are both a remembrance and a prayer (which are, so often, one and the same):

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Cause to Celebrate

Joey Franklin, Patrick Madden, and Brian Doyle in the same issue. Thank you, Brevity!

for thelma:

i am being brave and dusting off and posting one of my intaglio prints. i made this one last april in a moment of desperation against neuroscience and physiology and the general effects of a rather tumultuous semester, and i entitled it "apoptosis" (which means cell death).

It Acts Like Love

It acts like love-music-
it reaches toward the face, touches it, and tries to let you know
His promise: that all will be okay.

It acts like love - music and,
tells the feet, "you do not have to be so burdened."

My body is covered with wounds
this world made,

but I still longed to kiss Him, even when God said,

"Could you also kiss the hand that caused
each scar,

for you will not find me until
you do."

It does that - music - helps us
to forgive.

----- Rabia

a hopeful autobiography

one of my painting assignments for the weekend was to create a list of images that i feel defines my motivations as an artist.

after much, much deliberation:

elizabeth peyton
richard diebenkorn
clyfford still
cy twombly
mark rothko
monique prieto
amedeo modigliani
willem de kooning
edward hopper

about [the fragility] of memory

this is so, so wonderful. [click "in the white darkness" to begin. when you're at the screen with the pulsing dots, try clicking a bunch of them at once and watch what happens. it's amazing how much a program approximates how memory works...]

the artists on the work [reiner strasser & m.d. coverley]"
"ii — in the white darkness: about [the fragility] of memory" is an interactive piece about memory. The work was created by Reiner Strasser in collaboration with M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink) over a period of 9 months in 2003/04. It assimilates and reflects the experience with patients fallen ill with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's diseases, showing the fragility and fluidity of memory from a subjective point of view. "It was not the erasure that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no longer can identify." (M.D. Coverley) From the pulsing dots of the background-interface different events can be started, played, and combined. In this process the experience of remembering and loss of memory can be re-created in the appearance and disappearance of words, pictures, animations, and sounds. Memories (readable with a general metaphorical meaning) are unveiled and veiled in transition at the same time, arranged by or using your own memory.

after narwhal's post, and the potential of space

snowy landscape by cuno amiet.

(forgive the low quality - it's such a pity, this painting is incredible in person: absolutely massive taking up a whole wall in the musee d'orsay. i'm in love with it.)

the infinite potential of spaces

I have thought about this excerpt for nearly three years now. It is so beautiful and, for me, true.

Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me... And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

-Nicole Krauss, from The History of Love


So after blowing my students' minds (probably for the worse) with our discussion about deconstruction and the complete unreliability and instability of language, that bit above came to mind. And it made me think about the infinite potential that spaces/gaps/absences allow--they allow room to grow. Emptiness demands to be filled and we must create/invent things to feel at home in the spaces left by absence, loss, etc. Krauss argues that people (interpersonal relationships) can do this. Foer argues this, too, but he also argues that language--a new kind of language, one without the baggage of our current language (thanks Patricia), is necessary. So he creates new punctuation systems (see the brilliant "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease"). He imagines new fully functional typefaces--he wants to see active readers engaging with and (if necessary) creating an active language--language that embodies the life it is trying to describe. Though it may be a futile act (we can't ever describe what we want) there is a strange beauty in trying in the face of futility (i.e. Sisyphus). It is why art matters, why books, and poems and everything that humans create (including other humans) matters. And why teaching students difficult texts matters. A whole lot.

for some reason i nearly cried

when reading this.

something again touches me about the beauty and simplicity of enjoying being with children and family and those you love. to simply enjoy the company of others fully in the moment without distraction. to find ecstatic joy in the most banal events of daily life. (so maybe swimming in the red sea isn't banal, but you understand what i mean).

the rest of this ny times photo-essay is stunning, i loved each picture and passage - they say so much about life and what worldwide we are all striving towards. towards connection and meaning and fulfillment and some understanding that there actually is more out there, outside of our consciousness, vision, and perspective. to feel even the most momentary of relation to an other. to incorporate that other into the self, and to no longer feel an isolation of experience. like buber said, to say THOU, to truly say and mean that expression of relation, to escape the it-world, where others are mere objects or means to be used, but instead to say thou in actual equanimity of relation.

"all actual life is encounter."

John Denver and the Muppets

If there was anything that summarizes my family and my upbringing it would be John Denver and the Muppets. Both are loved wildly by everyone in my family and together there's nothing better. I road my old blue bike this morning to work and listened to John Denver, and for a moment I felt like I was back out camping with my family.

There are many folk singers I love, but John Denver will always have my heart, probably mostly because of nostalgia. It's the only music that everyone in my family, all 12 of us can agree on, and since Amy spoke of her ache for the sea, I'll say that almost nothing makes me miss the West more than John Denver. Can I please sit with him and the Muppets singing around a campfire?

spoken word crush: rafael casal

i was trying to figure out a way to make john donne's "death be not proud" and dylan thomas' "do not go gentle" come alive in a new way for my students so i wanted to tie it to spoken word. i found this rafael casal piece over the summer and it knocked my socks off. it is so hauntingly beautiful, such power in his words and his expressions. it is mesmerizing. (he drops a gloriously perfect f bomb, just fyi).

WCW & The Sea

I've been missing the ocean lately and this is why:

I miss November at the beach, when it is still except for waves and birds, when everywhere you look is just sand for miles, a bit of thin sun. I took this picture almost five years ago at my favorite spot on my favorite beach in California. It is the spot that, even years later, still feels like home. Everyone needs a few of those spots, I think.

I have also been on a bit of a William Carlos Williams kick and he has a small section about the ocean that fits perfectly:
(from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower)

But the sea
which no one tends

is also a garden

when the sun strikes it

 and the waves

are wakened.

I have seen it

and so have you

when it puts all flowers

to shame. 

environmental art (pictures are better than words)

robert smithson's spiral jetty. great salt lake, utah.


sentiero dell'arte, valle verzasca, ticino, switzerland. (the artwork in the last picture is really subtle. i.e. brilliant.)

all the things i know

i came across a robert barry piece the other day (entitled two pieces) that involves a handmade book with a single idea per page, outlined in perfect minimalist form.

i wish i could bring that to you, but instead:

i really love this woman

i've heard rumors that she takes in stray friends who have suddenly turned violently ill after vomiting on the metro... one of her many talents.

No regrets.

I don't care about the ridicule. I don't care that there are people who won't understand. I have a crush on James Taylor and I don't care who knows it!

It starts at about at the minute mark.



I have been listening to this song on repeat for the past couple days, and to me, this song represents that little intake of breath before you do something hard. It includes the realization and the determination that the next thing you have to do will be more-than-difficult. And probably worth it.

Do you remember the first time you saw this painting?

Crush: E.B. White

How could I not love a man who feels this way about writing: "As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost." - The Ring of Time

and who knows the holiness of a summer morning: "I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral." - Once More to the Lake

and who is wise enough to write this: "I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands--she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip. Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists--just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts." - A Report in Spring

???

when bobby met johnny

"meeting [johnny cash] was the biggest thrill of a lifetime" -bob dylan

i love reading about heroes when they were young, when they were still finding their own, and still getting starry eyed about their own heroes. i love the end of this video when johnny is tutoring bobby. and bobby, to quote joan didion: "Was anyone ever so young?"


and then, of course, there is this. a clean cut bobby with a mainstream country voice. but man, just seeing those two sitting side by side strumming the guitar like two buddies on a porch...


[this is 3 songs from that johnny cash show episode--delightful]

"Am I Right!?"

yes, otis redding, forever yes. good grief, otis redding! i cannot explain how much i love this man. or this song.


and of course we can never--will never--forget this beautifully spastic and emotive dance scene:

enough said.

Gossamer Threads

I asked a dear friend to share his top 5 images of love. He concluded with The Noiseless Spider by Whitman. My usual oppositions to Whitman faded as I realized the beauty of this poem and what it means to send my threads out.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

And then my friend talked about the connection of joy and pain and shrugs when a gift is given. He says, "Pain is an inevitable part of the process, even when the anchor holds and we form that delicate gossamer connection. There's a relationship between love and loss and pain that I don't entirely understand, but I suspect that we all experience it, perhaps more often than we generally care to admit."

It makes me think of gossamer threads flung out at people I meet in an instant. It feels like such a delicate connection at the time. And later I realize how strong and important they were. Not really ephemeral at all. But pillars of concrete, even if they were built and destroyed in a moment. Like the strings in Calvino's city of Ersilla, telling the story of mankind through connecting hearts that have touched through hands on cheeks and blushing eyes meeting across rooms.

"instead of a preface"

"in the terrible years of the yezhov terror i spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in leningrad. one day somebody in the crowd identified me. standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

‘can you describe this?’
and i said: ‘i can.’
then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

- leningrad, 1 april 1957"

russian poet anna akhmatova famously wrote this at the start of her "requiem," a poem which then begins with the line "such grief might make the mountains stoop." this poem, recounting the trials of russia through the second world war, is tragic-beautiful-stunning-overwhelming-all-encompassing-transcendent-invigorating-consuming poetry at its best. it aligns with what pasternak said of his own epic dr. zhivago: "i made the world weep at the beauty of my country."

what is so critical and important about poetry like this is that it expresses that despite all, and defiant in the face of pain, we still cry: we are human, and we are worth something more than this. i wouldn't pretend to say i have understood suffering as those akhmatova or pasternak describe, but isn't it incredible to think that these artists did in all degrees suffer, and yet their art prevails?

one of james' characters in portrait of a lady says "i'm afraid there are times in life when even beethoven has nothing to say to us." i hope that is never true. i don't want to believe adorno's reprimand that "there can be no lyric poetry after auschwitz." surely mankind rallies again. surely pain is not the deepest thing. and surely poets like akhmatova can describe what has been, as requested by this anonymous russian woman in line to survive in dismal leningrad.

The Beauty of People

That there is someone who dances to Iron & Wine's song "Sleeping Diagonally" makes the world a much more beautiful place.

"The Journey"

Originally I was planning on writing an ode to Emma Thompson. Yesterday I watched "Sense and Sensibility" for the millionth time and once again fell in love with Emma Thompson's wit, grace, and phenomenal screenplay. On Youtube I stumbled upon this video (as shown below). I had never heard about this project before, but a shiver of gratitude and heartbreak went through me as I learned about it. Utilizing art for not just awareness raising, but viable political efforts is one of the top things I am passionate about in my life. I really don't know if there's anything that I hate more in this world than sex trafficking and the massive scale it exists on, this industry that makes billions of dollars a year from the slavery of women's bodies.

Seven rusty cargo containers became a demand for change. Led by Emma Thompson and the Helen Bamber foundation, several artists created an exhibit which told the story of Elena, a young woman from Lithuania, trafficked to the UK and sold as a prostitute, forced to service around 30 men a day. The installation went to several cities around the world and was even in Vienna to coincide with the first-ever global forum on human trafficking, The Vienna Forum to Fight Human Trafficking earlier this year.

I have my definite qualms and distaste in my mouth usually about celebrity activism (mostly because I quake of the disgenuine nature of it all) - but this is a brilliant use of it, because Emma Thompson is essentially using her status to guide people to listen to the story of the actual person and she demonstrated greatly (from what I have read) her intense moral passion to end one of the most revolting social ills.

Quotes from an interview with Emma Thompson:
"I wanted to find a way that I could engage people that wasn't simple story-telling, but there was a kind of story-telling that came halfway towards you and asked you to fill in the gaps."

"No, I don't think the average person knows and no one wants to know about suffering, they have got enough going on in their lives. You have to find ways to engage people without having to say, 'I'm really going to depress you now.' Nobody wants to be depressed by another story about what's going on the world. What they want is to be offered an opportunity to do something useful. There isn't a single person I've met who doesn't want that opportunity and that's what we've got to work on. "

"Those who have suffered a great deal have much to teach us. They are mentors and they can teach us about what's in the darkness. The ethics of the 21st century will depend on us recognising that darkness. We need to understand why human beings torture others, because we all have that inside ourselves."

flowers growing out of wolf ears

there is something so singularly haunting and beautiful about that image. my friend sarah sent me this poem and i love it immensely, if for that single image.

The Wolf God
Ann Carson

Like a painting we will be erased, no one can remain.
I saw my life as a wolf loping along the road
And I questioned the women of that place.

Some regard the wolf as immortal, they said.
Now you know this only happened in one case and that
Wolves die regularly of various causes—

Bears kill them, tigers hunt them,
They get epilepsy,
They get a salmon bone crosswise in their throat,

They run themselves to death no one knows why—
But perhaps you never heard
Of their ear trouble.

They have very good ears,
Can hear a cloud pass overhead.
And sometimes it happens

That a windblown seed will bury itself in the aural canal
Displacing equilibrium.
They go mad trying to stand upright,

Nothing to link with.
Die of anger.
Only one we know learned to go along with it.

He took small steps at first.
Using the updrafts.
They call him Huizkol,

That means
Looks Good in Spring.
Things are as hard as you make them.

"The Lady"

That's what Charles de Gaulle called her. Under her father's instruction, she memorized the Qur'an before the age of twelve, when she disguised herself as a boy so she could perform with other musicians of her age in public. During her early career, the poet Ahmad Rami gave her the gift of words in the form of lyrics for 137 songs and countless conversations about French and Arabic literature and theory. She was known to repeat one line of lyrics over and over again at her concerts, each time emphasizing a different lyric or emotion until the crowd rose with shouts of euphoria. She could sing every Arabic scale in a wider range than anyone in the world. Ever. Her voice was so powerful that she had to stand at least a meter away from her microphone or else she would break it, her vocal chords able to produce thousands of vibrations per second. With passion she sang of love and loss. People all over the world--but especially throughout the Middle East--were mesmerized by her, from poets to presidents. In an area of the world where people could agree on so little, Umm Kulthum was one thing they agreed on unanimously. When she died, over four million people mourned at her funeral, Jews and Arabs alike, forming one of the largest public gatherings in history.

El Atlal pt 1

El Atlal pt 2

The Orchard... I weep

The Orchard performed at Opening Night for the 2008 Vail International Dance Festival.
Choreographed by Damian Woetzel.
Piano: Philip Glass
Cello: Wendy Sutter
Dancers: Carla Korbes, Pacific Northwest Ballet and Tyler Angle, New York City Ballet.
(p.s. the video is soft, I had to turn up the volume on my computer)

Television Crush: The Wonder Years

Wasn't everyone's? Trish and I have been watching Wonder Years episodes together and it is wonderful. This, in particular, is a scene that moves me in the entirety of such a young boy's earnestness. And love. For the one and only Winnie Cooper:

L’Age Mûr : Camille Claudel

I realized that there were few expressions of our female crushes, maybe because the awe is different, instead of just devotion there is sometimes more connection and self reflection with women. So I present Camille Claudel (in a fashion similar to Brian Doyle's proclamation on William Blake), but Camille who tragically most people in the world only know as Rodin's mistress. Is she my crush or my alter ego?

Perhaps it is because of her defiant gaze and upswept tossled hair that stood against art critics, lovers, and family who were baffled at the idea of a female sculptor. Because she was Rodin's equal and even her best work happened after their relationship ended. Because the famous art critic Octave Mirbeau wrote she was "A revolt against nature: a woman genius". Because of the insufferability of living in a time when it was a revolt for a woman to be a genius. But maybe Camille Claudel haunts me because of the honest arms outstretched to her former lover leaving her for a harpie. Because when she first released "L'Age Mur" or "The Age of Maturity" Rodin was horrified because the fingers of the man and the implorer touched and furiously demanded the separation of them. Because in the her work she achieved a level of expression that had rarely appeared in sculpture before and does not have to hide behind appealing model poses. Because for 30 years her family kept her in a mental institution even though the hospital said she didn't need to be there. Because it has been said she was unstable, and yet she still had an old wise soul beneath her as can be seen in her work "The Prayer". "Because in women courage is often mistaken for insanity." Because Camille Claudel haunts me as the internalized pain of insulted and abandoned passion. Because her stare is one of necessity.

the beauty and glory and sadness of the world in a single chord progression

it feels appropriate for me to mention at some point in time my continuous crush (or perhaps one-sided love affair) of many years with sergei rachmaninoff. i was a sophomore in highschool the first time i listened to his music - really listened, put my heart in and let it fill gaps and listened. i was working on a stack of chemistry homework, trying my hand at stoichiometry, when suddenly elements and notes combined in the tragically beautiful melodic lines of his third piano concerto. it was the first time i cried while listening to music. it was the first time i wanted to reach out and touch the composer and thank him for having exhisted.

it was rachmaninoff that took me through my freshman year at byu, when a kind classmate lent me a cd called RACHMANINOFF PLAYS RACHMANINOFF (titled, appropriately, in caps on my itunes playlist). it was rachmaninoff on cello that i listened to, weeping, on a meadow in the alps a year later, while the snow breezing from off the peaks caught the sunlight and radiated it in rainbows all around me. it was rachmaninoff that made me alive, that pulled me out, that made me weightless and wonder, like mary oliver,

"oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?"

i wish i could trumpet him across the planet to the few his presence has not yet graced, and proclaim that his is the power to capture the beauty and glory and sadness of the world in a single chord progression.

meanwhile, i'll just sound off on this lovely blog that he is my composer crush of the hour, year, and (quite possibly) eternity.



(excuse the home video taping - this is his sonata for cello and piano in g minor, op. 19 - andante played by an israeli cellist)

first off

i'm in love with the danish poet.

i expect (and hope) that many have seen this delight before (i know dearest thelma has), but it's worth another viewing.

it is especially on my mind and deserves my first post because just two days ago i finally finished the novel kristen lavransdatter mentioned in the short film, which i have grown up hearing was the best novel ever written by my incredibly intelligent mother, who reads it again every few years. the novel was gorgeous and sweeping, i have rarely (if ever) read something which so completely and subtly captures what it means to be human with all its imperfections. you can feel the presence of the characters, you know them and can recognize them as actual human beings, not shallow caricatures or stock stereotypes. from a female point of view, the novel doesn't skip over domestic and daily realities, like what it is like to feel a newborn baby's head pressed against your neck. i love how much of such seeming "banality" of daily living is embedded in the novel, since fiction often likes to aggrandize itself by overlooking or idealizing the very stuff that makes up the majority of our experiences as humans.

it is rare for me to sit down and read fiction, unless it has a heavy dose of ideas embedded within (hello, kundera) - but i was transfixed by sigrid undset's prose. on my edition in the back one critic states "undset's trilogy embodies more of life, seen understandingly and seriously, than any other novel since the brothers karamazov." i've rarely agreed with a critic more.

and of course i'm also transfixed by this charming film, who wouldn't fall in love with kasper?