2011-12-29



"Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank, and buy a revolver."


Countess Markievicz, 19th century Irish revolutionary.

2011-12-28

Look Away


The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious presents a wonderfully idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: in each image, the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. The pictures present a catalog of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals.

And it's time, time, time that you lost... 

And it's Time     Time 
            Time



And it's Time      Time 
            Time
And it's Time Time Time



That you love

And it's 
    Time     Time      Time
 

              And it's                   
                                                                    Time

                      Time             Time           that you love.


Well, the smart money's on Harlow,
And the moon is in the street.
The shadow boys are breaking all the laws.
And you're east of East St. Louis,
And the wind is making speeches,
And the rain sounds like a round of applause.



Napoleon is weeping in the Carnival saloon,
His invisible fiance is in the mirror.
The band is going home,
It's raining hammers, it's raining nails.
Yes, it's true, there's nothing left for him down here.

Chorus:

And it's Time Time Time
And it's Time Time Time
And it's Time Time Time
That you love
And it's Time Time Time

And they all pretend they're Orphans,
And their memory's like a train.
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away.
And the things you can't remember,
Tell the things you can't forget. That
History puts a saint in every dream.

                             Well she said she'd steak around
                                    Until the bandages came off.
But these mamas boys just don't know when to quit.
And Matilda asks the sailors "are those dreams
Or are those prayers?
So just close your eyes, son
And this won't hurt a bit."

Chorus

Well, things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl.
The boys just dive right off the cars
And splash into the street.







And when she's on a roll she pulls a razor
From her boot and a thousand
Pigeons fall around her feet.

So put a candle in the window
And a kiss upon his lips,
Till the dish outside the window fills with rain
Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart           And play the fiddler off till i come back again.



 Well it's time, time, time.

             And it's Time Time Time
                                          
                              And it's Time Time Time
                                                  That


You                    Love


And it's Time Time Time

                          

                                             And it's Time 
                                                                Time                                                Time


                            That you love
 





And it's time, time, time.

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day’s pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dark blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?


2011-12-20


For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

T. S. Eliot, from “The Dry Salvages”
"You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."
- Carl Sagan

2011-12-05

Business as usual

Undaunted by a night of German air raids in which his store front was blasted, a shopkeeper opens up the morning after for "business as usual" in London.

From The Atlantic

2011-11-20

Brought down to earth.

When Doris showed up at the Mood Party wearing a balloon dress (she claimed it was uplifting), Jake quickly went after her with a pin (he said he was a stickler for details).

From hot balloon blog

Miss This

2011-10-30

Click for larger.


Feel I lead a charmed life after being spared the early snow that has buried the east coast. Treated to a light rain and upper 50 degree temps, the outside experience can be done sans coat, gloves and winter boots - for now. May all who have snow see it melt before the next winter dumpery.
Eric Rondepierre - the Moires collection

Found at Mossbone

James Rhodes - captured my soul with his playing.

2011-10-29


Excessive Cuteness Alert!




"There are suspect places
I must live in my lantern"

— T. S. Eliot, from “Love Songs” in The Waste Land and Other Poems

Karen and the Bird


I live here when the desert freezes.


My Meds



Paul Gauguin at the harmonium in Alphonse Mucha’s Studio, Paris 1893

me



A Pygmy Marmoset (Callithrix pygmaea) among of the hairs of a keeper at a primate rescue and rehabilitation center near Santiago, Chile on August 3, 2010. The Pygmy Marmoset, known as the world’s smallest monkeys and under danger of extinction, was confiscated after being found inside the clothes of a Peruvian citizen during a highway police check at the northern city of Antofagasta. (REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado)

In Praise of Daze

I once spent a lovely spring day traipsing through the woods with a dear soul friend who had saved my life by existing.

Fellow survivors look as each other and wink - they too have been to hell and back. Hells built and filled with hot hate of others dark realities the world offers on paper plates that can't hold the weight or those silent, dark hells we create for ourselves. The silent ones; the ones with the hidden crevices, the veiled river of memories, the places we go to sulk or scream but only inside for outside is gray order. NOTHING out of place.

We had met there, on the edge of the gray. That day was to take us from there to the life, the colors, feelings dug up on sandy bottoms of deep lakes and brought up for a view of the sun held in a perfect sky. We hid in the woods for weeks, at first, bonding with conifers, sleeping on their discarded foliage. Mornings were brutally bright but full of promise. Escaping to the beach one day, we saw our next refuge.

The lake had hauled great branches from distant shores and strewn them about the soft white sand in cavalier piles.  To us they were the remains of great, majestic beasts that were no more. Creeping among them, caressing their worn limbs, we could see stories of lives longer our mere craniums could conceive of. The wooden bones of once vertical wonders were our kin. And we honored their passing.

As we walked along the beach so soft and so white we had no choice but to be swept up in full daylight and being alive. A parade of green grass called to us and we ran like children.

Green.

All greens.

Every green.

On each blade of grass within this cloistered lawn was revealed the pageantry lady nature presents to those who bend low and look through lysergic eyes. Every blade was it's own shade of green. The color of life. The color of wellness. The color of my eyes. As we lay with our backs crushing the soft blades, the sun danced above us and the trees sang, each it's own voice but in harmony. Their voices soft whispers that could rend a soul sane.

The sanity was more than I could take.

On the edge of our glade, a sculpture had been erected. A crude thing. No art to it. No song. Metal jutting out of the earth at painful angles as chains hung in ordered rows. The chains had their own burdens. Burdens I happily placed my ass on and my angel and I began to swing.

The trees thrummed a new song, the sun did a jig and we swang until we grew up. But as we now walk the land among you, know that our bones are made of stories. We still pull the occasional resinous needle from our hair. We hear the trees wondrous songs play ever on. And the gray silent hell can not call us back anymore.

What my dreams have been doing with me of late.


"You, too, seeping memories, as we spin in place. An epiphyte: a love nest. Inextricable, shadow for shadow, rhyme for rhyme."
— Aaron Shurin, from “Steeped”






"Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite."
— Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

2011-10-19

"I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. "

- Kurt Vonnegut to the Paris Review



2011-10-18

TEM olfactory epithelium epithelial cells nose nasal cavity cilia

Smell receptor. Colored transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of a section through the olfactory (smell) epithelium of the nose. At center (orange) is an olfactory receptor cell body. At its top two long, modified non-motile cilia project into the liquid lining of the nasal cavity. The cilia are thought to be the sites of interaction between odoriferous substances and the receptor cells. Surrounding the receptor cell are the supporting cells with surface microvilli (finger-like). Within the cells, mitochondria (purple) & endoplasmic reticulum (flattened sacs) are seen. Magnification: x2,130 at 6x7cm size. Magnification: x7,300 at 10x8 inch size.