Season's Greetings

It's about time I updated this thing...

Here's a wintery poem to warm your hearts, from the medieval Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu:

It is the time of rain and snow 

I spend sleepless nights 

And watch the frost 

Frail as your love 

Gathers in the dawn.

Fun fact: Salvatore Sciarrino, a prominent Italian composer, wrote da gelo a gelo (frost to frost), based on a year's worth of Shikibu's poetry. Apparently, BFM in Geneva put on the opera last season, so keep your eyes peeled for a stateside production.

Props to Marco Brianza for the link. Check out his work!

Traversing the Urban Jungle

Digital wildlife take back the streets.

also check out the new and improved guard dog

BLK JKS

Straight from Cape Town, S. Africa - BLK JKS just released their first full length.  You can find the streaming version here.

I've been loving their single "Lakeside" ever since it drifted down to me from the Seattle airwaves.  The band is currently touring; check them out if you can.  Enjoy the precious remaining weeks of summer!

Tonight's prayer

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,

gimme a break before I die:

grant me wisdom, will, & wit,

purity, probity, pluck, & grit.

Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,

gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,

and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice-

these litle blessings would suffice

to beget an earthly paradise:

make the bad people good-

and the good people nice;

and before our world goes over the brink,

teach the believers how to think.

-Philip Appleman

Dickinson on a summer evening

Lightly stepped a yellow star

To its loftty place,

Loosed the Moon her silver hat

From her lustral face.

All of evening softly lit

As an astral hall-

"Father," I observed to Heaven,

"You are punctual."

------

You left me, sweet, two legacies, -

A legacy of love

A Heavenly Father would content,

Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me

The Walls are Coming Down

Wake up to Fanfarlo

A Hundred Houses

Kevin Bauman's collection of 100 abandoned Detroit homes is a sobering homage to the casualties of economic downturn. I love this quote by 2 Modern Design Talk: “His photographs of these once elegant houses are like stoic portraits of aging aristocrats struggling vainly to keep up a proud face in the face of their inevitable decline.”

While that description (which oddly reminds me of Time Regained) might not reflect the disposition of the homes' former tenants, there is an strange beauty to these forgotten structures. A few look like the monster house; others seem like they could still shelter a family - except for boards in the windows and the graffiti on the doors.

In the face of the current economic crisis, it's a reminder that hard times are nothing new. I hope Obama's next stimulus package can fix the roof over Detroit's head.