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