A city that we loved together, remember?

Amy, do you remember how lovely Boston was? I didn't expect to fall in love with it so quickly. And not with Thoreau (which we knew from the beginning), but with the brick and the Freedom Trail and that hostel with the creaky bed and The Watson Twins?

And we got to follow the red line through the city like ducks in a row starting with this wonderful statue in Boston Public Gardens?

And Wagamama's! We had waited far too long to encounter its deliciousness! And it came at a perfect time. We had been wandering the city, following the Freedom Trail, and we were tired and hungry and we knew that Wagamama's would make us feel all right. 

And remember how this stonework was everywhere? And these iron workings that would seem garish in other cities, but existed so perfectly on an abandoned alleyway? I loved how everything just felt as if something really awesome and important had happened right there. 

Walden's Pond was absolutely incredible. It was so lovely to see so much green. It started to make sense why all of those early American writers couldn't write about anything but how gorgeous nature was. It made me forgive Thoreau for being such a faux naturalist. I would want to be one too if I had lived there!

And we were in Thoreau's loving arms? Cradled in his well-meaning aura of a little self-importance?

And I got to pet a cow with a person pretending to live hundreds of years ago? 

How could we not love that place. How could we not fall in love with all of it. 
 

hybrid, this one's for you:

"Using a pinhole camera made from an aluminum can, Justin was able to take super-long exposure, 160 degree angle photos over a 6 month period. The photo above was exposed from the 2007 winter solstice to the following summer solstice."



seriously? seriously? i sort of want to crawl between the panes of glassy ice and hibernate until spring.

how to make your own six month exposures and more images

because sometimes i get homesick for cities i have loved

i'm in the middle of writing a series of flash essays on cities i might have loved, which got me thinking of cities i full on, head over the heels, lustily loved. london is one of those cities. i came across jason hawkes' wonderful blog the big picture a little while ago and it is always inspiring. the following is a series of photos he took of london from a helicopter at night. and they are stunning.

what is a city you have loved and why?

seirously, wow

this is gorgeous:

directed by oren lavie (my friend megruth shared this with me. megan, by way of plugging, is a beautiful woman who does beautiful photography. she just launched her new website, so check it out--you will not be sorry!)

take it back

for the past few days i've been trying to learn some she and him songs on the ukulele. this one is so, so good:

i want paintings to be full of life (notes from a prodigal transpacifist)

about a year ago, i walked into a room in the met, never having heard of tara donavan, and left a full devotee:



tiny metal circles strung in beautiful rhythmic sequencing: so delicate, so familiar, so alive.
i've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks simply weeping with the bliss of being alive, of being surrounded by art, of being handed the indelible gift of tools with which to make art, of learning to see it in the tiniest interchanges and realizing that we are all, in our own terms, artists and creators. i spent nearly an hour yesterday feeling both exquisitely deranged and madly ecstatic while twirling a clear plastic bottle of grape vitamin water in the air, and watching the winter afternoon light creep through the slated blinds and hit the lavender molecules with resulting velvet reactions of plums and roses and sparkling greens. it was as if, for a moment, i had never known anything so beautiful - which made me wonder immediately at how to capture it, or if it even begged for capturing, or if in the act of capture that same beauty could possibly mean anything to anyone else - this exquisite beauty of photons meeting a conglomeration of molecules engaged in the delicate dance of making and breaking hydrogen bonds. it made me wonder at the point (still, after the revolution of cubism, and dadaism, and minimalism, and every other ism) of oil paint on canvas, at the point of my project proposal to install paintings in series, on squares, on canvas, hung from a wall.

of course, these are all old debates. and perhaps oil has as much its place as rust (which i'm so excited to play with this semester!) and as tiny strings of metal placed on a wall. but more importantly, perhaps every thinkable medium has its place as it redefines the art that already exists in simple organic bonds and enlarges it or glorifies it and makes us reacquaint ourselves with the pre-existing beauty of our reality. as jean dubuffet says, from notes for the well-lettered:

do not confine art, cut it off from the real world, keep it in a trap. i want paintings to be full of life - decorations, swatches of colour, signs and placards, scratches on the ground. these are its native soil.

and so tara donovan works with plastic paper cups and strips of paper and rings of metal to make us see a new dimension of paintings, both representational and brilliantly abstract, in a completely new light - new, but so familiar at the same time.

alas i cannot swim

i can't stop listening to this song:

laura marling "your only doll" (alas i cannot swim)

so completely in love

i mean, i just love him. it is that simple. plus, can we please take note of that vest?
andrew bird "some of these days"

Maurice Ravel's Piano Concert in G Major

Tonight I attended a performance of The National Symphony Orchestra and I'm pretty sure I left a better person.

The program lineup:

Dusapin's Apex
Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major (featuring pianist Yundi Li)
Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Apex is contemporary, influenced by Monet, Mallarme, and Debussy; Symphonie fantastique is 49 minutes of musical storytelling--innovatively linear, dramatic, compelling; but the real meat and bones of the whole concert was Ravel's Concerto. If I may quote from the Playbill: "The concerto's sparkling introduction first presents a taste of chinoiserie with ornate and exotic filigree. Soon, though, the American character emerges, especially with the entrance of a five-note motive characterized by its lowered third scale degree, a classic 'blue' note. The slow movement is one of Ravel's great melodic gems, first presented as an understated wordless song and then elaborated with free-flowing linear elaboration and lush orchestral harmonies. The Presto finale features breathless piano progressions with raucous commentary from the orchestra. The bright E-flat clarinet and sliding trombone provide especially saucy outbursts, while the trumpet adds a touch of mock-ceremonial fanfare, fitting the very nature of this fanciful concerto."

I include video recordings of all three movements of the concerto here because the concerto in its entirety is a delightful and enriching experience, but it is the second movement, the Adagio assai movement, that brought me to tears. Listen for the "free-flowing linear elaboration" 6 minutes and 57 seconds into the video--it lasts for almost three blissful minutes before it rolls into an extended trill to finish off the movement.

seriously. dolly = numero uno.

there are many reasons why i love dolly parton but here is one more:

this song is perfect: haunting, gorgeous, spare but so, so full.

Translated Woman

New Hero: Ruth Behar

"As I undid necklaces of words and restrung them, as I dressed up hours of rambling talk in elegant sentences and paragraphs of prose, as I snipped at the flow of talk, stopping it sometimes for dramatic emphasis long before it had really stopped, I no longer knew where I stood on the border between fiction and non-fiction." (From Translated Woman)

I'm starting this ethnographic essay and the syllabus began with that quote. Pretty perfect, considering the things I've been writing lately. Anyway, she seems like an amazing woman and I'm excited to read this book!

The Alternative

My roommate shared this quote by C.S. Lewis with me last night and I can't stop thinking about it. At first it read like a new take on a popular sentiment (better to have loved and lost...that kind of thing), and then the last sentence hit me in the gut. In a good way, I think.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

Ode to Stephen Fry

Now life on the Thai-Burma border can be a bit ominous at times, especially when working 80 hour weeks. Thankfully though, there is Stephen Fry, and particularly his new podcast. Now I was exposed to the grand thespian Fry at a young age thanks to my Texan family's love for British cinema, and my love for his witty self grows exponentially. He is more than an entertainer he is a maestro of modern society and thought. You must listen to his latest podcast on language, absolutely made my day. Listen to it here

“Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin.” Karl Kraus

be like mike (i am an advertiser's dream come true)

a few months ago i literally watched every air jordan commercial i could find. it is ridiculous but every time i see these commercials--no matter the fact that they are peddling and branding and etc., etc.--i get a little weepy. they're like everything i love about sports movies condensed into a 30-60 second clip.

Let Freedom Ring

why my love for dolly will never end

this blew my mind: feist & the constantines covering one of my favorite songs of all time: "islands in the stream"

dolly & kenny doing it oh-so-right:

rostropovich + argerich + japan = perfect storm of lovely

the two greats performing "A Talk" by japanese composer Oue Hikari:

discovery channel time warp

i just discovered this show in dc and now i am HOOKED. it's basically a show that slows down things so you can see how exactly they work. this one is rather amazing. it's a drop of water being hit by another drop of water and it is so beautiful. start at 5:10 for the big experiment:

quick note from berlin

just arrived at 8am this morning, and to curb jetlag i already hit a few SPLENDID galleries around oranienbürger straße, where i am staying at toni´s flat. so yes, already i am struck by that fabulously berlin characeristic of purposeful architectural dilapidation. victor hugo called paris a palimpsest, but i think the term is much more apt for berlin... the layers upon layers of history that has been allowed to accrue on buildings because of war destruction and communist neglect is incredible to view. the very-oh-so-american concept of renovation is absent here (at least in terms of gallery and museum spaces. and toni´s building.). case in point, this afternoon i went to C/O Berlin. holy hell, not only were the photo portraits by wowe STUNNING, but the building itself was fascinating. it was once the old central imperial post office, and where i could imagine that a new york gallery would clean off the peeling paint, rip up the semi-intact old floor tiles, or add more ventilation/light to the large staircase, berliners consciously leave it all as is. and it was gorgeously fantastic.

The High Priestess of Soul

Yesterday at dusk, during a long bike ride past rice fields, bumpy roads and more I listened to Nina Simone's "Feelin Good" and I decided, that yes, this is the right way to start the new year.
"To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music."
I couldn't find a version of Feelin Good on youtube (strange) - but here is another Nina Simone song "Ain't Got No... I Got Life"
Yeah this is how I start the new year (Amy, this can replace that violent femmes song)

be. still. my. <3.

so dc was about one billion exquisite things this week but last night was something else altogether. because last night i saw the national symphony orchestra perform prokofiev, schumann, AND beethoven. and with all the glittering gorgeousness of the chandeliers above me, nothing prepared me for the pure bliss of lynn harrell playing schumann's cello concerto in a minor (2nd movement). this is is the master rostropovich playing it:


this is a comment from the youtube page, which sounds over the top but might just be true: "If only the opening section of this slow movement could last for all eternity... humanity would surely enter a blissful state of endless music and beauty!"

Kertesz

welcome to the world of Burmese hip hop

So I've seen a lot of bad music videos come out of Burma, and honestly most of the pop music I had heard coming out wasn't my cup of musical tea. So when I heard awhile back of Burmese hip hop artists being arrested for political activity, it went into the corners of my saddened heart with others political prisoners. Then last night I was hanging out at my neighbors and one of the young guys who just came out of Burma put on a video of Burmese rappers and my mind got blown. These guys are awesome (at least to my ears) and the fact that they are also activists - well that's a whole new kind of love/adoration/crush.
I want people to send this out there because its a new vision of Burma - its not villagers huddled in the jungle, away from troops and its not monks marching in the streets -- nope this are guys who you would hang out with (or maybe want to) and also listen to.