“I’m not scared that I don’t have a finished script, because I can very quickly find the humor and poetry and drama in situations. It’s there all the time in life.”
~ Roy Andersson, from “Calling It as He Sees It, in Great Detail,” by Dave Kehr, New York Times Sunday Magazine (July 26, 2009)
Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda, from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Now we will all count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.
The fisherman in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.
What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.
If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could perhaps do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and everything is alive.
Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.
From Forever Young, and essay written and read by Kurt Anderson of Studio 360 (July 17, 2009):
"Waiting to get what you want is a definition of maturity. Demanding satisfaction right this instant is the definition of a seven year old. But instant satisfaction has been driving our economy and our culture for a while.
Send a message now! Get an answer now! Pick your airline seat now! Buy anything you want right now!
The web, cell phones, FedEx: they all indulge the impulsive child in every one of us.
Save? Why? For what?
Wait till I can afford it? No…Fooey!
Fuel efficient? Lame.
I don't mean to be a crank and I don't mean to condemn fun. I'm committed to rubber soles for life and I cherish The Simpsons. I'm even a convert to Twitter -- the official medium of back-of-the-class wisecracks.
Yes, the economic collapse had everything to do with credit policy and financial regulation. But I really, truly think that this forty-year-long celebration of our inner child helped lead us to the spree that we've just come off.
But with this crisis and now the rebuilding and reshaping of America we're required to do, we Boomers have maybe our last, best shot to suck it up and get serious and help straighten out the messes that we helped make. Maybe it's not too late to grow up a little.”
~ Ken McLeod, from Rules for the Road
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Norman Fischer speaking with Vince Horn on Buddhist Geeks (Episode129 -- Buddhism May Need a Plan B):
I mean that there is tremendous spike in research on meditation. Just in last three or four years. It’s exponentially increased and all the research is always showing the same thing that meditation is actually a effective, that it really works, and that it has all kind of benefits. So people seem to believe in research and scientific data, but just talk to your friends who do this practice and that’s probably enough to convince you even without the scientific data.
...It's funny, you know? I'm gone do a retreat for the army for 
[The conversation continues in Episode 130 -- Buddhism and the Evolution of Religion. Check out Norman Fischer’s article, “Why We Need a Plan B,” in the summer issue of Buddhadharma.]
Ce Soir is Montreal-based band Monogrenade's first music video. Directed by Christophe Collette, the video is entirely made in stop-motion.
See also Vidéomusique
[Thanks again JC!]
From The Story from the Static: On Writing and Painting by Audrey Niffenegger:
I have spent most of my life feeling like a woman trying to listen to the radio in a thunderstorm. I am trying to get an idea, something I can turn into a picture, or a novel, and occasionally such a thing does whiz into my brain and it's my job to pick it out from all the static of daily life and find out if it means anything.
Before I can think very hard about this idea I have to figure out if it's a word 
It takes me a long time to make things, and that's good. The more time I have, the more I can add and subtract, the better the thing will be.
My novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, began as a phrase that came to me while 
[More... ]
by Charles Bukowski
“—you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”
no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.
[Thanks JC!]
From The Week (July 24, 2009):
Trouble
by Matthew Dickman, from All-American Poem
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead roles, leaped from the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
traveling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.
KCRW Bookworm (June 25, 2009)
Economics professor Paul Zak in conversation with Krista Tippett on "The Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue," Speaking of Faith, July 9 2009:
"Economists talk of the cleansing effect of recessions. So recessions are necessary because they kind of cull out the companies that are not providing the best customer service, that are not making a profit, that are not providing some product or service that people need. And when those businesses go out of business, then those resources are redeployed to more important uses. The machines are reused; the people get different jobs. And so this keeps the economy kind of efficient. We don't want to kind of limp along and have high levels of inefficiency just because we love the name General Motors or love the name of some company if they can't kind of keep up with the herd. So competition drives that and that's an important part of maintaining efficiency.
But I think the same thing can happen in individual lives. I think as we get towards the end of every boom period, today or two years ago, the end of the 1990s and dot-com bubble, the end of the '80s and this kind of me generation, I think we do get out of whack because human beings are adaptable and we are watching what other humans are doing. We also become adaptable to this sort of yuppie, more stuff for me lifestyle.
I think, from a spiritual perspective, that recessions are also cleansing. So I think it's very important that we don't shy away from recessions and we don't try to outlaw them. I think we should say, 'Hey, there were excesses. This is how the excesses are corrected. And the excesses were both kind of on the macro level and even perhaps in my own life. Maybe I got a little over-excited about the extra bonuses I was getting and the bigger car. And now I want to sit down and reevaluate what's really important to me.' So I think there are great analogies between the micro and the macro, and we should embrace that.
Having said that, the stress issues are strong. One of the pieces of advice I like to give is: Turn off your TV. Don't listen to the pessimistic news every second of the day...
...Appropriate levels of stress are very good for human beings...There's sort of this misnomer that stress is bad. Too much stress is bad, but also too little stress is bad. So there's sort of this inverted U-curve...this sweet spot for stress that focuses your attention. So I think that when we're in that sweet spot, when we're focused, our memory's better and we're thinking clearly and we've got to figure out what to do next, that's actually very good for human beings and actually all other animals as well."
Pink and White
by Deborah Garrison, from The Second Child
Peonies are the only flower I care for
and when I saw them from the window
yesterday, tumbled and heavy along
a fence, fully exploded, nodding
at the ground, hanging their heads but not
yet spoiled, I remembered
a summer (maybe seven years
ago, or was it ten?) I wasn't sure
our love would come again,
and here I am, almost
kissing the grass like that,
bursting and rich, cracked
all over like broken cake—
makes you cry but still sweet.
[Thanks Garrison!]
“I think this idea that we meet one person and you stay with them your whole life until you die, for me, is unrealistic. I’ve loved a lot of people at many different times in my life. And the love doesn’t stop when we’re not together. And I feel as though, I’ve come to a place in my life, where the climax isn’t watching the love arrive, it’s watching the love in full. Just like our life goes in a cycle, that song has a descension which is just as beautiful as the middle. And in fact, the metaphor that I gave was the same. It was, arrive to a place in the middle where you watch everything in its radiance, you watch the beauty, it unfolds like a flower. And then, you watch it descend. And there’s just as much beauty in watching something recede into the soil as there is watching it come back because that’s full. And I feel the same way about love. So I feel no loss when love leaves because it truly never goes anywhere, and I feel no joy when it sticks around because honestly I kind of like to sleep alone now and then.”
~ Melody Gardot, in conversation with Bob Edwards (July 11, 2009)
“I'm a composer, orchestrally-trained, and the inventor of the AlloSphere. With my visual artist colleagues, we map complex mathematical algorithms that unfold in time and space, visually and sonically. Our scientist colleagues are finding new patterns in the information. And our engineering colleagues are making one of the largest dynamically varying computers in the world for this kind of data exploration. I'm going to fly you into five research projects in the AlloSphere that are going to take you from biological macroscopic data all the way down to electron spin.”
~ Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, founder of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE)
From Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin:
…I hated the second law of thermodynamics because I believed that the universe should be orderly. Over the years I have collected many articles about spontaneous order and pattern formation in nature. Susumu Ohno, a geneticist, has found classical music in slime and mouse genes. He converted the genetic code of four nucleotide bases in our DNA is not random, and when the order is played, it sounds like something by Bach or a Chopin nocturne. Patterns in flowers and leaf growth in plants develop in mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean of the Greeks.
Patterns spontaneously arise in many purely physical systems. Convection patterns in heated fluids sometimes resemble a pattern of cells. Scientists at the University of California have discovered that silver atoms deposited on a platinum surface spontaneously form ordered patterns. The temperature of the platinum determines the type of pattern, and order can be created from random motion. A small change in temperature totally changes the pattern. At one temperature triangles are formed, and at another temperature hexagons form, and further heating of the surface makes the silver atoms revert to triangles in a different orientation. Another interesting finding is that everything in the universe, ranging from amino acids and bacteria to plants and shells, has handedness. The universe is full of self-ordering systems.”
* * * * *
Genome Music Demo
from Todd Baron
More audio clips at GarageBand
“My life for the last twenty-eight years is tied up with this like it was for eighteen years being an astronaut or eight years before that being a Navy pilot. I believe in doing what you can, cause I’ll be gone in another ten or fifteen years. Your listeners need to think about this, they’re only going to be here once. Sometimes we think there’s other people around that will make up for what we don’t do. Sure they can. They can mow a lawn. They can drive a car. They can take a job and write an article or something. But they cannot do what’s in the heart of each of your listeners. And if they don’t do it, it will never be done again until time ends. Who knows when that is?”
~ Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, from “Moon Artist,” PRI’s The World, July 8, 2009.
Therefore rejoice, oh thou living one, blest in thy love-lighted homestead,
Ere the dark Lethe's sad wave wetteth thy fugitive foot.
~ Goethe, from Roman Elegies
You, The Living
(A film about the grandeur of existing)
by Roy Andersson
“Man is the fascination of man, in big things and small. Life itself bears witness to this. Art confirms it. Spectacular and dramatic events and destinies captivate us. But so does sitting at a street café and watching people wordlessly go by. As compelling as Delacroix's passionate depictions of battle scenes are the paintings by Millet or van Gogh of peasants at work, of a pair taking an afternoon nap in the shade of a haystack, or a family sitting in a kitchen eating potatoes -- pictures that are so precise, empathetic and carefully executed as to give you the feeling that there is nothing more important to relate than this.”
I Was Always Leaving
by Jean Nordhaus
I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.
It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there
the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death
did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.
“American popular culture is our eternal present, our illusion of deathlessness. We don’t really mourn the death of a pop-culture icon. We use his extinction to resurrect his life. In America, the death of an American star is really the occasion for a garrulous, obsessive, round-the-clock denial of death.”
~ From “How Constant Change Killed Michael Jackson," by Lee Siegel, The Daily Beast (July 5, 2009)
by Mary Oliver
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone --
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance --
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love --
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed --
or have you too
turned from this world --
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
From Ecce Homo (Behold Humanity) by Xavier Le Pichon:
…Our humanity is not an attribute that we have received once and forever with our conception. It is a potentiality that we have to discover within us and progressively develop or destroy through our confrontation with the different experiences of suffering that will meet us throughout our life.
Check out Jeff Scher’s blog, The Animated Life.
From “The Parade,” June 29, 2009:
The streets of the city are a non-stop parade of humanity. It’s a kind of grand, unchoreographed ballet of human locomotion. One of the great pleasures and measures of being urban is losing yourself in the crowd, with your feet and mind wandering, alone in your head but elbow to elbow with an inexhaustible supply of strangers…
We can’t help it. We are fascinated by faces and bodies alike. Every face tells a story, and the story is a mystery. The clues abound and we read them instinctively in the blink of an eye. We categorize one another as bums, businessmen, tourists, models, etc., almost unconsciously. But what fun it is to stare, and revel in the passing faces, reading wardrobe, ethnicity, posture, age. Indeed, it’s a feast with every possible variation of the species on parade. By walking in their midst we too become a part of the constantly changing people-scape and offer our own version of the mystery.
Read the whole post and watch the related video...
[Thanks Kit!]
“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
W.S. Merwin in conversation with Bill Moyers (June 26, 2009):
One of the great themes that runs through poetry, all poetry, and I think is one of the reasons for poetry, one of the sources of poetry, one of the sources of language, is the feeling of loss. The feeling of losing things. Not being able to hold, keep things. That's what grief is -- the feeling of having lost. Of having something being out of reach. Gone. Inaccessible... But I think that language itself and poetry are born the same way.
Inexpressible sound. And it's antisocial. It's destructive. It's utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. And I think that's how language emerged.
* * * * *
Youth
from Shadow of Sirius
Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I
have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me
as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let
me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I
began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already
part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
[Thanks Kit!]
~ Peggy Orenstein, from “The Overextended Family,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine (June 28, 2009)
~ Mary Gaitskill, discussing her new collection of short stories, Don’t Cry, with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm
convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought."
Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), Science and Hypothesis
by Linda Rodriquez, from Heart’s Migration
When you smile, the air grows warm and soft,
the earth is watered with gentle mists,
seeds sprout and spread leaves above the dark, damp soil,
earthworms pierce the crust and frolic across the surface
to the delight of fat, happily hunting robins,
lilies of the valley unfurl beside purple, grape-scented irises,
fat pink and maroon peonies, and gay California poppies,
damask roses hurl their rich fragrance to the wind,
the crazy-with-sheer-joy song of the Northern mockingbird
echoes above other chirps and sweet winged notes,
gardeners join the worms in the warm, rich dirt,
children gallop across yards and grab handfuls of dandelions
to present to mothers who will set them in glasses of water
in kitchen windows or on dining room tables, weeds
glorious after the dark of winter with the color of the sun
that grows and warms and heals in your smile.
[Thanks Garrison!]
From TED Talks (June 2009): “Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives.”
Philip Zimbardo knows what evil looks like. After serving as an expert witness during the Abu Ghraib trials, he wrote The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. From Nazi comic books to the tactics of used-car salesmen, he explores a wealth of sources in trying to explain the psychology of evil.
A past president of the American Psychological Association and a professor emeritus at Stanford, Zimbardo retired in 2008 from lecturing, after 50 years of teaching his legendary introductory course in psychology. In addition to his work on evil and heroism, Zimbardo recently published The Time Paradox, exploring different cultural and personal perspectives on time.
Still well-known for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo in his new research looks at the psychology of heroism. He asks, "What pushes some people to become perpetrators of evil, while others act heroically on behalf of those in need?"
Regina Spektor on trying to explain her song writing process:
“To try to go back and take it all apart, then try to put order on it, is almost not fair to it. Let’s say somebody actually knows how to fly, but people just can’t deal with that, they’re constantly looking, going, ‘But where is the button, the propeller, the jet?’ And eventually the person has to strap on the jet and say, ‘Here’s the button.’ I think that’s what happens with people having to explain their songs. The song was flying, and now I’m being pushed to make up shit about it. Sometimes it’s almost like people take it as an insult, like you’re being facetious or pretentious. Or, and this upsets me even more, people say, ‘Random’, ‘Puts together really cool sounds’. It’s not random, it’s very specific, and when I’m writing it, it feels like life and death. It would be so much more fun if people went, ‘Wow, that’s cool, he just flew.’”
[Thanks JC!]
From “Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud,” by Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times (May 16, 2009):
Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.
…I read aloud to my writing students, and when students read aloud to me I notice something odd. They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer.
It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language. This is reflected in their writing, too, at first.
[Thanks Kit!]
Sum
by David Eagleman
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.
You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it's agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
“Eternal Whimsy,” review by Alexander McCall Smith, New York Times (June 14, 2009)
“I know the human spirit. My line is, we all love each other and there’s nothing we can do about it. And any thought that opposes that, we feel as stress. And stress is a gift. It says that we’re caught in a story that may not be true for us. Time to question your mind. Stress is like an alarm clock that says, It’s time to wake the baby, the innocent one who is caught in a dream.”
~ Byron Katie, from My Mother Is…
Train de Nuit
Chanel N°5 film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Audrey Tautou and Travis Davenport
~ Björk, from Interview Magazine (June/July 2009). Voltaic, a two-CD, two-DVD box set of live recordings from Medúlla and Volta, will be available June 23 from Nonesuch.
Teaching is a kind of
learning, much like loving,
mutual goings-on,
both doing each to each;
mutual forbearance;
life itself, you might say.
~ George Johnston, from Farewell to Teaching
Regina Spektor’s CD Far is due out next week (6/23).
[Stream it. Explore it.]
God can be funny
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious
From The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance by Polly Young-Eisendrath:
The special self is the creation of idealization. Exceptional, extraordinary, perfect: these are not the descriptions of any real human being, a person with weaknesses as well as strengths. If we have heard repeatedly how talented, beautiful, smart, or promising we are, we may grow up with an intolerance for weakness and difficulty in others, and a greater intolerance for imperfections in ourselves. Within such a self-esteem trap, we are unable to connect with others or embrace ourselves in the messy ambivalence of love.
"Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained, hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired."
The Great Poem
by Lawrence Raab, from The History of Forgetting
Think of Keats and his odes.
But we shouldn't have to be dying,
What I'm writing now is not
the great poem. After a few lines
I could tell. It may not even be
a particularly good poem, although
it's too early to decide about that.
Keep going, I say. See what happens.
But trying hard is one of the problems.
since it shows in the lines as a strain
or struggle that reminds the reader
too much of the writer, whereas
most readers want to listen alone.
The great poem, I think, will arrive
when I no longer care. Perhaps
I'll have abandoned art altogether,
and I won't even want to write
the poem down. But then I'll remember
what I once would have given
for this moment, and I'll go back
to my desk. And I'll write the poem
as though I were another person,
someone I will never be again.
Daron Larson
Freelance Contemplative
