Posted on: October 31, 2008
I didn’t make it to all the way to the Falls. Was within half a mile or so before time ran out. Someone turned out the lights on the great painting in the sky.
I still found some green and blue peace and more. I found a vision and learned how certain cameras can not handle what comes out of that great painting in the sky. One has to prepare for such things and I didn’t. Next time.
How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! — Emily Dickinson, letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper, 1880
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. — John Muir, 1913.
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Posted on: October 28, 2008
The Flight of the Red Balloon
Just watched Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s wonderful film, The Flight of the Red Balloon. Set in a glowing, shadowy, geometric and abstract Paris, it stars Juliette Binoche as Suzanne, and Simon Iteanu as her son Simon. Simon’s nanny, a young film student from China, is played by Song Fang. I’m not sure who plays the red flotation device.
The film is a homage to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic, The Red Balloon, but doubles and echoes and adds new layers. The nanny shoots film footage in Paris, incorporating her new charge, Simon, and his hovering red friend and we see both the internal and the external. We watch the film within the film and think about what that hovering balloon may be pointing to. The freedom, the joy, the…
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Posted on: October 27, 2008
Vienna Teng. Photo from her Myspace collection.
One of my favorite recent discoveries is the music of Vienna Teng. I love the name. She chose it. It fits. A Taiwanese-American singer/songwriter from California, Vienna has a gorgeous, angelic voice that exudes intelligent sweetness, but is never saccharine.
She has called her music “Chamber Folk”, which rings true. Influenced by Classical, Jazz, Folk and Pop, Vienna Teng sings on the edge of discovery. She flies higher, but doesn’t overreach. When she is not singing, just talking, she sounds more than down to earth. She seems relaxed about her place on the surface of this planet. But music lifts her off that surface again and again and again.
From her myspace page:
Influences: My parents’ record collection: Simon
…
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Posted on: October 23, 2008
Yongzheng Emperor and Deer. China. 1723 – 1735
Want to point to the new poetry below by
Aleksandar Novakovich and a return visit by
Desi Di Nardo. Strong poets from the Balkans and Canada, respectively. Please comment on their works and let them know your impressions.
* * * * *
Now, for that digression. Albeit brief. I recently heard an interesting fact on the radio. Deer like the grass on the side of the road because it is more loaded with certain kinds of nutrients they need. It’s loaded with that nutrition primarily because we mow the grass along side our roads continuously. Deer are attracted to that grass, and can’t really judge the speed of cars on the highway. Hence the accidents. In addition, the months of October and November is their…
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Posted on: October 21, 2008
United Nations building, Geneva
I have been saddened lately by a strong sense of national disharmony. By a screaming, aggressive, desperate atonality. By a discordant barrage of sharps and flats that not only hurt the ear, but the soul. In fact, I think it has never been this bad before, though I do acknowledge that the shrill bombs of hatred and hostility have been with us always. They just seem louder now.
Right now, it feels like it’s never been worse, though undoubtedly in the past it has. Either way, I ponder and am depressed by reality, the waste, the senselessness. The sheer ugliness of the decibels.
Disunity and disharmony is a wrench in the gears of the metropolis and the countryside. Not because we should all be the same — far…
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Posted on: October 18, 2008
Emily Dickinson. 1846. Photo by William C. North
[Guest blogger Tony Jones]
Religiophobia
Blindered by heat-flashes
of banality; the sacred barnyard
tells us nothing except it has
no room for us without our becoming
at once greater and smaller.
This is what it means to have
the mind of Christ; to become as a child
with the heart-space of a 1000 goslings,
arrow-tipped with lightning.
One of the reasons it’s hard to write good religious or spiritual verse — and I am well aware that the terms spiritual and religious are not synonyms — is that the “truths” of religion/spirituality are so public — known by millions and millions — of people that to even utter them in their publicly known form is to start…
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