cast your gaze into the moonlit clearly

 it is a beautiful, hazy & prophetic friday night in september.

and this is one of my favorite songs ever.



happy weekend.

bangarang!!

my neighbor came to the door to give me some errant mail.
i just realized i was wearing warpaint during our interchange.

it's been a long hard day of fighting the man. i fall asleep to the sound of sirens and have long twisty dreams about being unjustly arrested by swarms of policemen. as my faithful comrade in chaos cousin tony would say, fuck the five-oh.

it's the first day of fall and i am joyous and unruly! i win!

equinox: balance in nature

Time drops in decay,

Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
What one in the rout
Of the fire-born moods
Has fallen away?

-william butler yeats

america the beautiful: david lynch's interview project

in the glorious folkloric tradition of this american life and storycorps, david lynch's interview project is a treasure trove of characters encountered during a 20,000 mile road trip across the united states. a new 2-3 minute episode is posted every three days, chronicling the marvelous stories and amazing soul-moving resilience of people. oh america. someday, someday-- i will have my own wonderful version of this project. mark my words.

my favorite interviews are #10 jim carter, #24 mrs. dennis, #26 john d. montgomery, #28 jefferson orwell opal, and#32 joseph l. king. but every single one is pretty epic.

InterviewProject.com

r.e.m. adventures: grandma's fire

a few weeks ago, i had a dream i was in a little white cottage on the top of a hill overlooking an endless expanse of sprawling green fields. i was inside with my father and his brothers, and grandma craig was there-- but she was younger than i'd ever seen her and fearsomely hot. there was a handsome wooden cabinet against the wall from which grandma was pulling out a series of beautiful antique firearms. one by one, she'd select a a different gun, take reckless aim, and fire it through the closed window in a glass-shattering explosion of sound. we all watched with nervous reverence as she sampled each and every gun. that's when i remembered that i was married to bill cosby and we had two daughters together who were outside playing, right in the line of grandma's fire! so i ran out of the house to find my daughters, squirming on my stomach over the grass, dodging bullets left and right. it was a warzone, but i finally spotted the girls and pulled them to safety. i remember telling them how lucky they were to have bill cosby as a father. then i woke up.

enjoy happiness

i went to the canfield fair and these are my favorite things that i saw:

=

THIS STEAM ENGINE IS ALL SET UP
FOR TURNING A ROTISSARY.
THE LIGHTS ON IT GIVE YOU A BONFIRE
WARM GLOWING FEELING.

IT CAN RUN ON STEAM OR AIR.

"MANFRED", DOB 6/10/03
Yes, Manny is a Riding Steer, he is tame and is a
puppy dog. I can ride him & do occasionally, at
special events.

happy birthday ernest hemingway

"I know now that there is no one thing that is true. It's all true."

-Ernest Hemingway, who was born 110 years ago today.

post-grad career plans

i wish i could be the ghostbusters' secretary.

bailout blues & comic relief

here is a small excerpt from

CORPORATE FOLKTALES: HOW BERNANKE TACKLED THE DEPRESSION, AS RECORDED 150 YEARS FROM NOW BY POST-APOCALYPTIC HOBO FOLKLORISTS

by grant munroe

-----
"The Scourge of Markets sat glumly, sipping coffee from a nuclear cooling tower just outside of Lansing, Michigan. He was listening to the wails of the unemployed, which to him sounded as pleasing and melancholy as any Coldplay album. Knowing the strength of his enemy was too great to confront on the level field of battle, Bernanke, being a wise and crafty man, disguised himself.

Hey there, greeted Bernanke.

Oh, hey, said Depression with disinterest. He started absently clipping his toenails with the hinged trunk of an unsold 2009 Chevy Impala."
-----

read the whole thing at mcsweeney's.

"closing time" by veronica diaferia

here is the trailer to veronica diaferia's beautiful/funny/heartwrenching documentary "CLOSING TIME: Storia di un Negozia," which chronicles the final month of one of new york city's oldest, realest stores. when you have 30 minutes, you can watch the whole thing HERE at folkstreams.net.

it will break your heart.

hideout

colleen: aw, i'm going to miss your attic.
me: i know, me too.
colleen: it's so anne frank it's ridiculous.

cowabunga, dude

i love when i rewatch movies from my childhood and they fulfill all of my hopes and expectations. afterwards, i went straight back to north campus video to get TMNT 2: THE SECRET OF THE OOZE. yeahhhhh. that's right. turtle power.

talking to myself

---

"I once sat in on a hearing voices class where people were encouraged to articulate their inner dialogues, talk back, and negotiate with them. A pretty twenty-something girl had thought her co-op was compelling her to buy things she had no use for, so she couldn’t walk within 100 meters of the entrance. A Nigerian man’s voices were personified by a six-foot blond transsexual and an angry midget who would constantly argue in his head. And one old lady believed her husband worked for the Secret Service, and that they had kidnapped her and planted a chip in her brain, which made her act out their will. They all agreed the best coping mechanism was using a mobile phone. They held it to their ear when they had the urge to talk to their voices so people didn’t think they were insane."

click here for the full post from VICE

---

i use the cell phone trick all the time.

living wonder

"Each of us is aware of far more than we can ever express. Yet those who can persuade themselves to be guided thus in their pursuit of the totality of truth, find themselves rewarded not so much by a surrender of any significant part of the essential mystery, as by its transformation into something accessible as living wonder."

--Laurens van der Post

from wit of the staircase <3

The Music of the Spheres & 100 Hours of Observation

I am blogging live from the back corner of my astrobiology class lecture hall, where my professor was just explaining the ancient geocentric concept of the universe, in which Earth was fixed at the center while the other heavenly bodies moved around it in constant rotation.

Pythagorus, who lived in the days of the geocentric system, suggested that if people sat outside in total silence and listened carefully, they would be able to hear the sound of the sun, moon, and stars rotating around the Earth on their crystalline spheres. If you were in the "right state of mind," as my professor put it, you could listen to this "music of the spheres."

He also informed us that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and to celebrate, thousands of people around the world will watch the sky for 100 hours between April 2nd and April 5th.

80 observatories around the world will provide live webcasts of the observation event, which will bring astronomy to the masses.

la boheme

Roger Viollet, Portrait d'une bohémienne, circa 1940

stalled in their skins: lester bangs on astral weeks

in the spring, i always reattach myself to van morrison's astral weeks, one of the most important albums of my life soundtrack. it has been following me around for days now.

this is what lester bangs said about the album in a 1979 article:

"What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. "

lester bangs on astral weeks

rick steves: make something!

famed backdoor travel guru & american dreamer rick steves discusses travel, economy, and global perspectives in a recent salon.com interview. this is one of many morsels of his snappy, inspiring clarity & poignant worldly wisdom:

---
"A headline today said, "Americans lose 18 percent of their wealth." Well, no, it wasn't real wealth, it was a bubble. You're down 18 percent? You're not. It shouldn't have been up there in the first place. So get over it. Shut up. Go to work, produce stuff that has value. I really think the days are gone, I hope, when people can rearrange the furniture and get rich on it. You got to produce something."
---

full interview: salon.com

genius and how we ruin it: elizabeth gilbert on creativity

elizabeth gilbert, the writer who found sudden, wild, international success with her travel/soul-searching memoir eat, pray, love, talks about western conceptions of creativity, how they came about, and why they are dangerous. gilbert proposes a return to an ancient understanding of art and genius in this inspiring twenty minutes, which has moved me to motion in the past & just woke me up again amid the delirium of finals week.

support your local indian food

ferdinand and i have this tendency to develop co-dependent relationships with the proprietors of mostly-empty indian restaurants, and yesterday we added one to our list. we ordered some food & the owner invited us back to the kitchen for a VIP sneak peek of his tandoor, the old-school clay oven crucial to open-fire indian cuisine. he made some naan in the blink of an eye & gave it to us on the house. it was amazingly delicious.

face the music

and songs are like cues or keys, and when seasons begin, music bears layers of years and anxious nostalgia. i hear a song from some other spring, and it transports me with this wincing shock of memory, sharp and sudden and bittersweet. one year ago we sat on the roof in windy sun, drinking gas station wine with ice cubes from coffee mugs. i woke up early every morning to lie in the grass under the epic white trees on the oval, paging through dubliners and mrs.dalloway with a hand over my heart. and two years ago, somehow, was spring in dijon, walking the streets in this ecstacy of warmth and green, and everything suddenly alive. we spread blankets on the grass and sat in our worldly circles, planning and chainsmoking, sundizzy and deliriously content. songs appear like apparitions when i comb backwards through catalogues of marches and aprils, but i never make conclusions anymore. we cannot have a final say, we can never access time that is gone. we can connect dots and tell it all like one long story, but with distance and time and meandering retrospect, the past crystallizes until it is contained in one single song, and then somehow every flicker of some long-gone season comes spilling out to wash over us in the spots where we stand.

patsy cline & prophecies of doom

"But in 1962, while recording “Sweet Dreams,” Cline cried at the microphone. Perhaps her emotion reflected a sense of impending doom. Cline began giving personal items away and wrote her last will and testament. She also asked close friends to care for her children if anything happened to her.

On March 3, 1963, she gave a brilliant performance at a benefit concert in Kansas City, Kansas. Afterward, Cline’s close friend, Dottie West, pleaded with her to ride home with her and her husband Bill. Anxious to see her children, Cline told West, “Don’t worry about me, Hoss ( a name she used for close friends). When it’s my time to go, it’s my time.”

After calling her mother, Cline boarded a Piper Comanche for Nashville flown by her manager Randy Hughes. “Cowboy” Copas and “Hawkshaw” Hawkins joined them. They stopped in Dyersburg, Tennessee to refuel and the airport manager suggested they spend the night because of high winds and inclement weather ahead. Hughes replied, “I’ve already come this far. We’ll be there before you know it.”

Hughes and his passengers left Dyersburg at 6:07 p.m. and crashed, according to Cline’s wristwatch, at 6:20 p.m. just outside Camden, Tennessee. Nobody survived.

At just 30, they laid Patsy Cline to rest in Sheandoah Memorial Park in Winchester."

musicouch.com

r.e.m. time traveling: the hartford circus fire

i am occasionally haunted by ghostly victims of the 1944 hartford circus fire. sometimes they wander into my dreams at night. according to international circus code, when the band plays "stars & stripes forever" during a performace, it signals distress to the circus personnel.

"In 1950, a Circleville, Ohio man named Robert D. Segee claimed he was responsible for setting the Hartford Circus Fire. He said he had a nightmare in which an Indian riding on a "flaming horse" told him to set fires. He further claimed that after this nightmare his mind went blank, and that he did not come out of this state until the circus fire had already been set."

seed magazine.com: collecting dying languages

'The Linguists' is a new PBS documentary chronicling the adventures of two ambitious researchers who traveled to the most remote pockets of the world to collect audio recordings of seriously endangered languages.

"In a particularly powerful moment in the documentary, Harrison and Anderson use a laptop to show elderly Chulym speakers video footage of themselves speaking that they've edited together via iMovie software. While sitting around the computer as if it were a campfire, the Chulym speakers express a sense of delight at seeing and hearing their recorded voices for the first time. "To see themselves represented in a high-tech way," says Anderson in the film, says to them that "maybe our language isn't so backward; maybe I have a knowledge that really is special."

full story @ seedmagazine.com
'The Linguists' official website

no future in anything

"Charlie there is no future in anything. I hope you agree. That is why I liked it at a war. Every day and every night there is a strong possibility that you will get killed and not have to write. I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease into a vice. Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession. An obsession is terrible. Hope you haven't gotten any. That's the only one I've got left."

-Ernest Hemingway to his publisher, 1940

not spring yet

and maybe we are like trees growing up, stretching into the sky. but we grow both ways, up and down, high and low. we grow in reverse, with our roots reaching deeper and deeper into the ground, anchoring us in so many pieces of past until what's beneath us is so heavy and intricately interwoven that it's a struggle to move up. and then you start to feel like a warrior, because in the end, it's every man for himself. because maybe the stretch into the sky has to be a ruthless venture. because maybe when formulas and strategies fail and the ground is pulling us down, our only chance is to plow ahead towards some illusory bliss with all our bets on the table.

woody on time

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."
-Woody Allen

ghost bikes

"The practice of erecting ghost bikes to honor the cycling dead began in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003. Patrick Van Der Tuin, a local cyclist who runs a shop that caters to low-income riders, saw a bicyclist struck and killed. He painted a bike white and erected it on the spot with a sign reading "Cyclist Struck Here". When he saw how the bike caused drivers in the area to be more cautious he and a group of friends put up 15 more ghost bikes around the city. Since then ghost bikes have spread to 75 cities across four continents.

"There is something about it that resonates with people from so many different cultures," says Leah Todd, a volunteer at the Street Memorial Project, which builds and installs ghost bikes around New York. "Whether or not you knew the person there is an immediate resonance, a feeling among riders that it could have been you, a shared sense of helplessness on the streets."'

full story at obit-mag.com

beyond reductionism: stuart kauffman on salon.com

"I've fallen in love with the idea that consciousness has something to do with being poised forever between the quantum world of possibilities, where nothing actual happens, and the transformation of that -- whether it's the collapse of the wave function or decoherence, where something actual happens in the world.

If this is related to consciousness, it provides an intellectual framework in which we can understand the mind acting on matter. Quantum mechanics is astonishing because it's not causal. It just happens. Maybe the mind is acausal. Maybe the mind is non-algorithmic. I don't want you to take this very seriously. It's just Stu Kauffman getting old and thinking weird things. But it may be true. And even if my arguments are right, it still doesn't tell us what consciousness is. I don't have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind. "

Full Interview on Salon.com