also, because i love the pop

this is one of the catchiest songs i've heard in a long, long time

miniature tigers (from phoenix, az! woot woot trish!) "cannibal queen"

i will be calm calm calm

i love phosphorescent for many reasons (including their pretty remarkable willie nelson cover album) but this song always makes me glad


i can fly through these hallways
dressed in light though it always
it always gets cold
i can sing through my fingers
though the worth of a singer
is nothing i'm told

i am a full grown man
i will lay lay lay
in the grass
in the grass
all day

i can freeze in the place that
gets me free from this taste that
i have in my heart
we can curl in the waters
naked swirling like otters
(you know how they are)

i am a full grown man
i will be calm calm calm
in the grass
in the grass
in your arms

plus this song is a great excuse to post this video again, to warm all of our winter hearts

Toward an Impure Poetry... ya know those days you need Neruda

by Pablo Neruda

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things---all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding---willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment---moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.

when in childhood

Yesterday my friend Jess and I drove around town getting lost and more lost but we were happy winding down streets that deadended or took us to the opposite of where we needed to be. We were en route to pick up some popsicle molds from a Freecycler but things happened and we didn't get them. But we did go home and have lemonade popsicles and Jess told me the most lovely story that I wanted to share with you.

She was a little girl, maybe 6 or so. She was at a house and her aunt was somewhere in the house cleaning or something. Jess was playing but suddenly caught sight of the sunset and it was so staggeringly gorgeous that she started calling out for her aunt, who came running saying, "What is it what is it?" because when a child calls the first thing an adult thinks involves a crash, but Jess wasn't hurt, she was struck amazed with the beauty before her. She pointed and her aunt looked and saw and said, softly, "I'm so glad you called me," and she knelt down and gathered Jess in her arms and together they watched the sun set, all fire and gold, into the horizon.

I hope we all have an occassion to tell this to a person, "I'm so glad you called me"--it is one of the most beautiful things I have heard in a long, long time.

Patricia, let's go see this...

mind. blowing.

and beautiful

popsickles & puppets!

I used to listen to this song every morning back in the day and since spring has finally sprung, I wanted to share. Plus, tomorrow my friend Jessica and I are having a Popsicle-making date!

Okay, Just One More

And totally worth it.

Because Some of Us Make Our Dreams Come True

I never thought I'd post something from American Idol on here, but here it is (sorry, embedding disabled).

having a rothko moment

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

Charles Wright

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness.
And Rothko. Especially Rothko.
Separation from what heals us
beyond painting, beyond art.

Words and paint, black notes, white notes.
Music and landscape; music, landscape and sentences.
Gestures for which there is no balm, no intercession.

Two tone fields, horizon a line between abysses,
Generally white, always speechless.
Rothko could choose either one to disappear into. And did.

------

Perch'io no spero di tornar giammai, ballatetta, in Toscana,
Not as we were the first time,
not as we'll ever be again.
Such snowflakes of memory, they fall nowhere but there.

Absorbed in remembering, we cannot remember--
Exile's anthem, O stiff heart,
Thingless we came into the world and thingless we leave,

Every important act is wordless--
to slip from the right way,
To fail, still accomplishes something.
Even a good thing remembered, however, is not as good as not
remembering at all.

From "Night Music"

Each second the earth is struck hard
by four-and-a-half pounds of sunlight
Each second
Try to imagine that
No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for,
And not, as we always thought, the light.

[I have a touch of insomnia right now so sorry for the overload of posts! I'm cleaning out my mailbox and keep stumbling across the most beautiful things...this is worse than cleaning out my closet. Also, I am having trouble with the first poem--I find it beautiful in a devastating way and don't agree with much of it. But the second excerpt...now that just shook my bones.]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am in love with this

marilynne does it again

A dear friend recently sent me an email that included a spectacular Marilynne Robinson quote:

I recently read a thought provoking essay in Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam. In "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion" Robinson talks a lot about bravery. She says that society has all sorts of ways to enable physical bravely, but very few ways to help people be brave intellectually and morally and emotionally. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave, she writes. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage . . . .

I've been thinking a lot about courage lately, especially moral and emotional courage. It is something that I want in my own life because when I see it or use it in my life, I am a better person. I think that moral and emotional courage is something that rightly couples itself with integrity--which is a word that contains within it many other words: consistency, steadfastness, soundness. Courage comes from the Latin "cor," or heart--one's core, from which inner strength, steadfastness, and soundness begins and radiates. I love all of your unique examples of integrity and courage because they help me to be brave, to do things I would never expect of myself, to want to do more than I think I am able to do. So thank you, dear ones, a lot.

Gettin excited for Penang

I have to go leave the country for visa run (first time to really leave Thailand in 6 months) - so I'm heading to the diverse island of Penang Malaysia.The town of Georgetown is a UNESCO World Heritage site apparently for its amazing architecture. I'll let you know how it goes.

Feelin' Jazz Casual

that just happened.

many thanks, xarissa :)

microscopic and beautiful

a lovely combination of science and art and beauty and seriousness and sillyness.