because life rarely gets better

(OMG OMG OMG why are germans so funny?!?!)

We are star stuff

Last Tuesday at 7am I sat down at gate 23 in Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and began reading Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl for the first time. Three hours later I finished and wondered how the heck I hadn't heard about this book before.

Because my heart swelled when Leo asked Archie, "Was she really here? Who was she? Was she real?" and Archie responded,

"Real? Oh, yes. As real as we get. Don't ever doubt that. That's the good news." He pointed the pipe stem at me. "And well named. Stargirl. Though I think she had simpler things in mind. Star people are rare. You'll be lucky to meet another."
"Star people?" I said. "You're losing me here."
He chuckled. "That's okay. I lose myself. It's just my oddball way of accounting for someone I don't really understand any more than you do."
"So where do stars come in?"
He pointed the pipe stem. "The perfect question. In the beginning, that's where they come in. They supplied the ingredients that became us, the primordial elements. We are star stuff, yes?
"...And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a little more in touch with the stuff we're made of."

i kind of wish i was jenny boully

epilogue

instead of begloom, when real happiness, with real bliss, when I point to a sunset and say something about awe. I know the forest creatures are in hiding from some great, unknown terror, a creature which is, in actuality, a mere shadow. I too go into hiding at the suggestion of darkness. (Do you know what happens before arriving here?) The strangeness of animals that know only light and dark, sleeping and waking. The hand that cuts you free from the cloth is not necessarily the hand that sews you back in. I too have a scissors aimed at the sky; I too will slice open the belly of a great heaving.



[she's amazing! her wikipedia entry]

prodigal sketchist

I think it's an amazing thing to be brought out to sea on someone else's ship for a short while. Maybe we feel nervous, maybe it seems that they are captaining all wrong, that the anchor should be placed sooner, that the waves are getting too big, but then we look up and see that we've been taken to a beautiful place, entirely new, we've never seen the sea like this before. We look back and see that we are a long way from shore, with only the hope of trust that our friend will get us back safely. And most likely they will, though perhaps not in the way we would have done it, but they have been doing things this way, maybe all their lives, it is their essence. You love that essence, embrace it, don't seek to mold it into your own, even if you do know a more efficient way home. You do this because next week you will invite them out on your ship, and they may feel just the same way you once did, but you will both be the better for the experience. The sea, with all it's monotony, may be a new place because of the way you saw your friend look upon it.

happy christmas, dearests

i have been listening to this song on loop all month long. i think you'll see why:

i love you all and hope that you are safe and happy wherever you are!
(priscilla ahn "silent night")

from snowy iowa

(because you asked me to, dear thelms)

Funktional Art: Lighting up Thailand

I first met Tor Larp (also known as Hern) three years ago when I stumbled into his little shop off Nimmenhennen road in Chiang Mai. I found him again today randomly, and once again enjoyed a long talk with him about art, life and more. He really believes in "Funktional Art", so there are lamps that are part of paintings, art work imbedded in the most amazing journals, and so fourth. Recently his home which he designed all himself, was featured in a home design magazine in Thailand - and it seems the most creative space I've ever seen. I'm posting a few pictures, but see more here. He is also turning his gallery into an art space for people and a good community spot. My new goal in life is to be best friends with him.

find my way back home

priscilla ahn = hero

the build up

this is maybe my favorite kings of convenience song and i kind of like that this is just feist.

Appreciation for Wild Birds and the Wild West.

My friend Caleb introduced me to the PRI RadioWest podcast and I love listening to it because I feel that it helps keep me connected with the West, the Rockies, and the Utah community. While in Thailand I interact with a lot of foreigners from many places, and though many Thais see everyone in the U.S. as the same, I have found that I fervently proclaim my status of being a Westerner - not a West Coaster - but a Westerner. Texas and Utah, two foregrounds of rugged expedition, yes this is my background. Two states that I often took for granted growing up.

So I listen to these podcasts and one of the recent ones was about the birds of the Great Salt Lake and artist Rosalie Winard whose photographs of America's wild birds she hopes will speak about how each bird is part of a community and how these communities are being threatened.

My brother Carl has spent a great deal of his life caring about wetlands and also the birds in them, a beautiful part of our surroudings often taken for granted. I remember when he went with my Dad to Aransas Pass in Texas, one of the few places in the world endangered whooping cranes make their home.

They are beautiful, no?

sometimes you just need a little cheese

and mr. mraz always helps :)

"if it kills me"

enter cheese (and don't try to suppress that sigh!):
Well all I really wanna do is love you
A kind much closer than friends use
But I still can’t say it after all we’ve been through
And all I really want from you is to feel me
As the feeling inside keeps building
And I will find a way to you if it kills me
If it kills me

If I should be so bold
I’d ask you to hold my heart in your hand
Tell you from the start how I’ve longed to be your man
But I never said a word
I guess I’m gonna miss my chance again

the snowman

this was one of my favorite movies as a kid--flying with a snowman? perfect. and the music is gorgeous.

self portrait

a few of my mother's pieces from grad school. i have had a million different reactions to this, and i feel like i should share it.




(all the work is in ceramic. the face is from a plaster molded dead mask - thus the self-portrait.)

determining aesthetic value

i've been thinking a lot lately on what it means to make art, on whether living for bread (see thelma's post below) or living for roses is more important, or if they somehow mean the same thing. thelma sent out an e-mail the other day that included this quote from li-young lee, and it made me wonder if what i was doing up in my studio alone that night was really as important as bread, if throwing paint and watching it drip could have enough value to merit its appreciation. i don't know, but maybe i really am just a small part of the one great mind - the universal mind - and maybe i am just reaching out to all of you and hoping that really, truly, there is so much import in this.

"The highest thing we can do is practice art. There is only one mind, and so whatever we do in that mind - when we create more beauty there, more opening, more understanding, more light, when we shed more light in our own mind - affects the great mind. So you're creating value when you write a poem. And I mean material value! They've proven that on the physical scale, that when a butterfly flies across Tienanmen Square, it affects the weather in Florida. In minute and inevitable ways, everything is connected. In the invisible realm - which has more reality than the visible realm because the visible is dying and without materiality - when somebody writes a poem, when they open themselves up to the universe mind and the universe mind is suddenly present in the visible world, the poet isn't the only one that gets the benefits. Universe mind comes down and that whole mind is a little more pure, a little more habitable. That's why were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." I never understood that until recently. We keep the world from falling apart, and they don't even know this! Not priests. Not ministers. Not rabbis. If we stop writing poems, you'll see this world go into such darkness. They won't even know what hit them."

on a related tangent, or at least related to me, i've also been thinking about what it is that makes art important, or how it is that we can create something that won't just wilt, but last, and in lasting, both sustain us and change us. i came across an essay by henry geldzahler called determining aesthetic values -

The work of art must continue to reveal new messages and images on subsequent viewings, and not exhaust itself in what I call the Big Bang, revealing everything to you the first time you see it and then having a lessened impact each time subsequent. The narrative, or the story, is how a picture reveals itself to you through time. The story is in you. It’s an internal story and only you can judge it.

i suppose that in one way this is the key - that just like the bread, which gives us little molecules of nutrient that enter our cells and fuse with our body and become our new core, what we read and hear and see enters into us and becomes us, so that we are living a billion different lives all at once - lives that are really all one life, the one universe mind.

something both beautiful and sad.

Robert Pinsky, on this poem: "those bees, an image of sweetness and of death, of housecleaning and of art, of getting on with it and remembering."

A Story About the Body, by Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of herstudio-was full of dead bees.

How my little stone teacher's heart grew six sizes:

6. had students write one-line biographies about themselves. cried all the way to my car reading them because they are kind, loyal, trustwrothy, and overall decent people.

The man who was curious, helpful, and respectful.
The man who loved to cook for his family.
The man who cared for others.
The man who was loyal and loved his friends and family.
The man who was thoughtful, compassionate, and loved his family.
The man who treated everyone with respect and dignity.
The man who loved animals.
The woman who loved everything about life.
The woman who loved love, family, friends, art, respect, and trust.
The woman who painted for herself.
The woman who smiled at strangers.
The woman who loved dreaming.

the thing that stuck me the most was how kind and generous they were to themselves. i think that is a very hard thing to do but when it does happen, it displays a sort of larger trust in humanity and the ability of people to be kind and good. what is your one line biography?

Bread and Roses

In 1912 in Lawrence Massachusetts there was one of the greatest labor actions in American history. It started in one mill then spread to others, fueled mostly by young ethnically diverse immigrant women. One of the great fables of this strike is that they held signs that said "we want bread, but we want roses to."

The slogan originated in a poem by James Oppenheim, published in Dec 1911 in American Magazine, which attributed he to "the women in the West"

BREAD AND ROSES

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

We come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for - but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
Nor more the drudge and idler - ten that toil where one reposes,
But sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

beautiful song shared by a beautiful woman

The First Snowflake from The Boy Least Likely To on Vimeo.
(from rachel's amazing blog!)

do you want to see the most beautiful art in the world?

i actually cried when analiesa showed these to me. slime molds. deep inside the world, around plants and in the greenest of crevices, these small fungi spring up and breathe life and beauty into the most microscopic of things. i want to shrink down and crawl among them and breathe in their colorful pixie dust, and find a way to bind myself to the world.

Five Pennies for your thoughts

In the same vein as Thelma's post, here's a clip from The Five Pennies, a movie that I have loved ever since a few of my dear friends introduced it to me a few years ago. I tell ya, you can't watch this clip of Danny Kaye and Louis Armstrong singing Pennies Saints and not be delighted:



And, while I'm at it, here's another clip I love from the same movie. Forgive a moment of sentimentality, but when I hear songs like this, I can't wait to sing them to my own kids one day. Here's Lullaby in Ragtime:

instead of studying

or writing my 20 page paper, or organizing stuff for hack-a-class, or doing anything that matters in real time, i am reading brian doyle. because after spending the last month in my class making my students read things that are hard and tragic and reflect only the worst and most ugly parts about being a human (that torture, war, bitterness, hate, and anger happen daily), i wanted to find something that could soothe all the ragged nerves, all the ruptures that may have pocked their personal definitions of what being human means. so i've assigned dave eggers' rather wonderful "when they learned to yelp." but that is not enough. so i think we'll spend most of the day talking about the human connections that can come from tragedies. in that vein, we will read out loud brian doyle's perfect "leap"(the one that ends "Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that"). we will read "kaddish" (aramaic for "holy"--used especially during mourning rituals in judaism, ends with a supplication for peace), which is a list of one-line biographies of all the people who died in 9/11 and i will make them write one-line biographes of themselves and of someone dear to them.

and instead of stressing about the work that is not done that needs to be done and the snow that is falling fast outside, i will read "a prayer for pete" because it is lovely and good. it ends like this:

Do I really think that my prayers will save Pete, or cut his pain, or dilute his fear as he sees the darkness descending? Do I really think my prayers will make hs wife's agony any less, or reduce the confused sadness of his little boy?

No.

But I mutter prayers anyway, form them in the cave of my mouth and speak them awkwardly into the gray wind, watch as they are instantly shattered and splintered and whipped through the old oak trees and sent headlong into the dark river below, where they seem lost and vanished, empty gestures in a cold land.

Did they have any weight as they flew?

I don't know.

But I believe with all my heart that they mattered because I was moved to make them. I believe that the mysterious sudden impulse to pray is the prayer, and that the words we use for prayer are only envelopes in which to mail pain and joy, and that arguging about where prayers go, and who sorts the mail, and what unimaginable senses hear us is foolish.

It's the urge that matters--the sudden Save us that rises against the horror, the silent Thank you for joy.The children are safe, and we sit stunned and grateful by the side of the road; the children are murdered, every boy and girl in the whole village, and we sit stunned and desperate, and bow our heads, and whisper for their souls and our sins.

So a prayer for my friend Pete, in the gathering darkness, and a prayer for us all, that we be brave enough to pray, for it is an act of love, and love is why we are here.

Unlike Me by Kate Havnevik

Just try to not love this song. Just try.

To help people through cold nights of finals prep

Just follow what Judy tells us - Forget your troubles, come on get happy...

here's to non-ant living.

tombell graciously shared this brilliant photo gallery with me. click on the "touching strangers" album, which is exactly what it sounds like: richard renaldi went around and asked strangers to touch each other, and photographed them after. here is one example, but do check out all of them.


it reminds me of that wonderful scene in "waking life," when wiley bumps into that woman who dreams about that insane soap opera... he says the customary "excuse me" after bumping into her, and she responds:

"Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?' "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be ant, you know?"

Bridging the Gaps

Recently I've been having many discussion with youth from Burma about the hierarchical structure and problems of Burmese culture that keep youth from really taking charge of this movement.

My friend Emily came back with me to Mae Sot and we walked through the streets singing many old singer/songwriter songs - Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and especially Cat Stevens.

iLife

i am sort of obsessed about the phenomenon of a Mac-induced iLife (though not always, there's probably something with Google there too)--which i take to basically mean that so many of us tied to our macs or iPods, iTunes, blogs, etc. that it has become an integral part of identifying ourselves to others and ourselves. but i just found out about lifeloggers. and it blew my mind. it is both horrifying and intriguing on many levels:

Lifeloggers (also known as lifebloggers or lifegloggers) typically wear computers in order to capture their entire lives, or large portions of their lives. In this context, the first person to do lifelogging, i.e., to capture continuous physiological data together with live first-person video from a wearable camera, was Steve Mann whose experiments with wearable computing and streaming video in the early 1980s led to Wearable Wireless Webcam. Starting in 1994, Mann continuously transmitted his everyday life 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and his site grew in popularity to become Cool Site of the Day in 2005[1]. Using a wearable camera and wearable display, he invited others to both see what he was looking at, over the Web, as well as send him live feeds or messages in real time[2]. In 1998 Mann started a community of lifeloggers which has grown to more than 20,000 members.

here is steve mann's wearable computer:


and then--oh. em. gee.--Sousveillance, as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity,[1] typically by way of small portable or wearable recording devices that often stream continuous live video to the Internet.

check this out, wearable wireless webcam:

what in the world is going on!?

Old Russia in Color

Seeing the post about the 1930s in color reminded me of the works of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

He was quite the scientists and gis own original research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures. Around 1907 Prokudin-Gorskii envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advancements that had been made in color photography to systematically document the Russian Empire. And bless Library of Congress for finding out ways to print them in color.

I think when I see these color photographs it helps erase my stigma of the "past" - they are no longer figures, but human beings.

beautiful animation

The Fable of Annabelle Lee (boats, storms at sea, whales, and maybe some true love)

Story and Art by Evan B. Harris

1930s-40s in color

wow

vermont fair

from library of congress

so delicious.

gary komarin's zone of continuity. sometimes you see something and you want to run inside of it, embed within it, lick the colors from the bottom right corner. if you did, your tongue would drip with sugar like a caramelized pear and the nerves in your fingertips would reel with the delicious shock waves. life would suddenly become more than okay - wondrous, fantastic, deserving of every exclamation point.




"Komarin holds no apparent hierarchies. The first mark is as important, and as unimportant as the last. Each new element added either remains on top or eventually gets partially buried into the cumulative richness of the surface. The complexities of shape, line, field, surface are sustained miraculously from painting to painting by a remarkably consistent integrated working method that embraces a perpetually shifting focus and validates every nuance of the process, but favors none."

from Steven Alexander's essays on art.

author crush: nam le

I have been thinking a lot about reading--or my lack of reading, which is not entirely true since I read quite a bit--I suppose maybe my lack of reading things that grip me, that make me want to stand up and shout, "This is what it's all about!" But there is one short story that I read a few months ago that moved me entirely: Nam Le's "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice." The title comes from Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which goes like this:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Now, I am not entirely in love with Faulkner but there are moments when I am. Like now. Sometimes it is fully worth it to feel a bit heroic about poetry and literature.

*Hear Le talk about his book here (start at 29:00). He has a great Australian accent, so that doesn't hurt at all :)

"on the verge of tears"

by marta v (from .v's blog)

man on wire

i saw this documentary a few weeks ago and it made my heart soar:

oh puppets and puppets

so after seeing ashmae & davey's puppets and watching lia giving the puppet with the glittery purple mouth and crazy hair the time of her life shouting out of our car window, i found the following weepies video on a very smart and lovely poet's blog:

and i am so in love