When the door is shut in your face, you are in a unique position to reflect on other opportunities you may not have previously seen or considered.
Not all opened doors lead to betterment – even broom closets have doors.
Looking In On The Outside
a Reblog from Photography in Oman. I absolutely love this beautiful video by Mike Olbinski. FYI – a must-watch in full screen.
via Now this is, weather. (just a little diversion) — Photography in Oman
Syria’s Blood Soaked Walls
Probably like most people, the desperate situation in Syria that has been going on for several years sickens me. I am so disgusted with the politicians playing with innocent peoples lives. But is there hope?
I love this song and video by Maher Zain. It’s filled with powerful images and allegory. Enjoy. Will love prevail through you and me?
* if you purchase this song from iTunes – all proceeds go to Syrian humanitarian relief work. Help The Syrian People: http://humanappeal.org.uk
Do you masticate?
Or, do you just eat?
Mastication is one of those words that I absolutely L-O-V-E. What is it? Well if you don’t know mastication is the act of chewing food, gum, or whatever you decide to put in your mouth (be careful now). To me “eat” just seems so common and bland like something one does out of habit. It is what you do at McDonalds. But “mastication” is filled with glamour. It’s how your mouth romances the food you put into it. It’s the tease and tickle of the taste buds on your tongue it releases flavors and smells of great food for a multi-sensory sensation. It’s what you do when enjoying fine dining.
Of course you still gotta be really careful what you eat. If you eat lots of leafy greens and vegetables you won’t have to suffer this next song.
“I feel alright….yeaaahhh” LOL 🙂
Little did I know in 2012 – when I took this photo of some graffiti on a wall – how relevant it would be only 5 years later in T-rumpworld – where borders are being shuttered and talk of walls being built. East Vs. West and North Vs. South. The McCarthy era has returned with a vengeance – where suspicion breeds fear and hatred.
I look forward to when walls come down and borders are opened – it will happen eventually no matter how hard you fight it – history has ALWAYS proven that walls come down… so why bother to build? Couldn’t better things be done with the money?
…or, how to start your day serious and end with a smile…. 😉 Have a GREAT weekend everyone.
David Sylvian & Robert Fripp – GOD’S MONKEY
Pixies – MONKEY GONE TO HEAVEN
Lancelot Link & The Evolution Revolution – EVOLUTION REVOLUTION
Field For Swallows Play
Where have all the swallows gone?
wings clipped
caged spirits
songs silenced
ghosts of freedom
murmurations
of grace and dignity
gone gone gone
hiding in dark shelters
feathers tremble
hearts quiver
waiting for the noisy,
angry hunter to leave
fire burns the fields
arrogance tears down shelters
bringer of death
the enslaver comes with a mocking grin
noisily waving a flag
One of my favorite abstract artists is Cy Twombly – especially his “scratch” or “scribble” works, like the “Blackboard Series” with the notions of automatic writing, action, movement, simplicity, emotion and passion and how these all work together as a joyous expression of life and identity.
Where I found this artwork: Last Summer I decided to visit the Cleveland Zoo. I was hoping to get some nice pictures of animals but just like me trying to photograph people – my camera just said “no” to animals (mostly because the animals looked bored, unhappy or sickly – so JUST SAY NO to ZOOS! There has to be a better way to learn about exotic animals). Okay so enough about my newly developed political viewpoint toward zoos.
Now, onto the main topic of this post. I did find a couple of other cool things on the zoo grounds. One thing was this blackboard outside the Ape Exhibit where visitors (animal or human) could take a piece of chalk and write, draw or mark up what ever they felt like.
ODE 2 CY TWOMBLY 1
ODE 2 CY TWOMBLY 2
I like both presentations of this work and even if they are the exact image the processing completely changes it and I think they are very complimentary side by side and in the spirit of Cy Twombly’s work – which is why I titled them “ODE TO CY TWOMBLY”. I hope you enjoy.
For the music part of this post I decided to include one of my new finds that I dearly enjoy. The composer is Canadian born Mark Templeton. He composes experimental/abstract/noise/glitchy/ambient music. I hope you like this selection, “Pattern For A Pillow” which is from his 2007 recording STANDING ON A HUMMINGBIRD.
For more on Mark Templeton you can check out his website at http://www.fieldsawake.com
There is always a price to pay. It doesn’t matter when you pay – whether you pay admission or pay upon exit. You’re gonna spend spend spend ’til the money’s all gone and you’re way down in the hole.
When I was young I learned how to fly.
Now that I’m old I’m learning how to land.
It isn’t always easy.
I get frustrated.
Sometimes I crash and burn.
I still need practice.
Landing The Hard Way
God Is An Astronaut – Fragile
I sometimes wonder if we are not under some mass delusion that good health is normal.
All around us, the world is in decay. In fact the human body is in decay the moment it is born. It only lasts as long as it does through maintenance – proper eating, hygiene, exercise etc. But ultimately it will become diseased and die. Disease is lives up to its name because it can be so damned uncomfortable but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it – that’s just the nature of the beast. Disease is the norm. Bacteria and virus live with us 24 hrs a day, 7 days of the week and 365 days of the year. There is not a single second that we go without. Even after you shower there are still bacteria on your skin. It is impossible to be “clean”. Yet we delude ourselves constantly.
Pox Populi
There is also mental and emotional states of decay. We just now give them fancy clinical names that give us the delusion that we can control and eliminate them. But any controls are only temporary. In the end they always come back and the mind itself dies.
Maybe that’s what spooked the horses. We just need to “deal with it”.
Zoviet*France – Something Spooked The Horses
The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
Looking outward, beginning within
Proofs through the night
Found in the hidden shadows of planetary life
Here/Now
probing
Ascending
We look to where the proof is directed
Not from where it is rooted
Down deep
within the dirt
Let the revelation begin
Let it end where it began
Here/Now
The search for extra-terrestrial life completed
THE PARADOX OF URBAN LOGIC
Mortal. It’s what we are. Even our super heroes with their super powers are mortal. All things get old and die. But we have somehow deluded ourselves into denying our mortality by thinking if we make the right plans, if we eat right and exercise our mortality will not be of an issue. But we are lying to ourselves.
Infants are unaware of their mortality.
The young ignore it.
Adults deny it.
Mature adults fight it.
Seniors can’t escape it.
In fact all our marketing and advertisements seem to promote products that help us deny, fight or escape our mortality by finding ways of promoting youth and not growing old. But these are lies.
Getting old doesn’t suck.
I use those words specifically because I hear a different version of them ALL the time. I’m really tired of hearing “Getting old sucks” from people complaining about their ailments or expressed as a sort of sympathy for my when I talk about my ailments. For example, I have arthritis which has caused complications with bursitis and also sciatica and I also have atrial fibrillation. These conditions come and go by degrees. And while I have these pains that have caused me to resort to using a cane to help get around and have limited my mobility I do not complain. I’m just happy to be alive. Pain reminds me of my mortality and the older I get the more aware I am of the end that is destined to come – an end that I will welcome but will not rush toward.
It seems at times that we have finally become such a youth-based culture that aging and all it’s related issues have become completely intolerable as if mortality was something to be cured of, or fixed. And medical science and technology have done nothing to diminish that idea. Yet for every disease that is cured a new one is discovered. It is inevitable and will continue to be so because we are mortal and there is NO CURE for mortality.
I once wrote the following 2 ideas (in previous blog posts):
1. We begin to die the moment we are born.
2. We spend our whole lives learning how to die.
We must come to terms with our mortality in loving acceptance. Failure to do so will only result in the unnecessary illness of self-delusion.
At times it seems that we are just one step away from the Euthanasia portrayed in the science-fiction film – LOGAN’S RUN (1976) where life must end at the age of 30. And maybe that is the only solution to our mortality. Blind delusion that leads us to an end that is sooner than what was destined.
Sure, I’m getting old and I am accruing illnesses that accompany my status and state of being. I can’t change it. I can’t turn back the clock. I accept that I have changed. In fact at times I look back to when I was in my 20’s and think, “who was that person?” and ruminate that I’m not sure I would like to meet that person if I bumped into them today. My values have changed. Getting old doesn’t suck – it’s just different. I can still experience good things – even if it means just sitting by my window enjoying a quiet moment watching the sun rise. I can still contribute to the world around me (whether others pay attention or not). Life is beauty and pain. We cannot escape pain and mortality. We should welcome it regardless of what may come – at any age.
For the second review in this (hopefully) ongoing series. I’d like to draw your attention to a relatively new recording by Icelandic composer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, titled Orphée. Jóhannsson has composed for numerous films including the recent ARRIVAL and upcoming BLADE RUNNER 2024 as well as many solo studio recordings….. But of all his work so far the one that really stands out as a pinnacle in his oeuvre is this “solo” recording exploring the myth of Orphée/Orpheus.
The second track on the album:
This recording for Deutsche Grammophon records can, at first listen, be compared to Samuel Barber’s ADAGIO – but that is only in mood and temperament. When listening to this masterwork by Jóhannsson I find so many rich and wonderful feelings and ideas. I can feel like I’m wandering through a darkened hallway, arms outstretched, moving slow and gently feeling my way around the space. With continued listening I also feel a sense of gravity a tension that a very large bird may feel as it starts out in flight and slowly lifts itself from the earth. And in its flight feels the constant pull of the earth again even in it’s supposed freedom of soaring on the winds. Maybe it’s the speed at which the musical themes evolve throughout this 47 minute composition.
When thinking about this music, and the ideas, of Orpheus in the underworld wanting to bring back his love. I also begin to muse on the “warning” he is given to not look back and trust that his love Eurydice is behind him. And when he does look back – she is lost to him forever. This notion of not looking back is also found in the Bible story (Genesis 19) of Lot and his family as they flee Sodom and Gomorrah who were also warned to not look back. When Lot’s wife looks back she is turned into a pillar of salt. I further begin to wonder, what is this problem with looking back? It seems to be something we as humans do all the time. It is the cornerstone of memory. We don’t have memories of the future, do we? Or maybe we just haven’t learned to access those future memories. And looking back isn’t really all that bad. In the case of Orpheus the underworld can be compared to underground that where things are rooted – for plants literally. Underground is the foundation upon which we build our buildings and other man-made structures. It is not only a place for the dead. It seems that one could make the argument that Orpheus was looking back to his roots and very foundation for his wife – the gods had tricked him. In the case of lot with his wife turning to a pillar of salt. Salt is beneficial and necessary in all our diets it is also a preservative. So maybe her looking back actually made it possible for the rest of her family to be saved/preserved. These two examples may relate to the sense of gravity that I hear and feel in this music under the earth there is no escape from gravity and a pillar of rock/salt is so completely connected to the rest of the rock it cannot escape.
We all look back at some point in our lives. It is not a weakness. It is only human nature and inevitable. Orpheus, like Lot’s wife HAD to look back. And that may be the tension I hear and feel in the music – the desire to only look forward while feeling the pull to look back that is ultimately irresistible. So maybe the problem isn’t the looking back; as the warnings imply (and many bible scholars will try to teach), maybe these myths simply teach us of the cost. There is a cost and consequence to everything. It’s not a matter of good or bad but simply an understanding of exchange. And that thought is freeing and non-condemning like a bird in flight.
The final and only genuinely vocal track on the album:
These are the many things that drifted through my listening of this excellent album. All that being said, this music simply stops me in my tracks and forces me to listen, think, dream. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
TRACK LIST
1. Flight From The City
2. A Song For Europa
3. The Drowned World
4. A Deal With Chaos
5. A Pile Of Dust
6. A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder
7. Fragment I
8. By The Roes, And By The Hinds Of The Field
9. The Radiant City
10. Fragment II
11. The Burning Mountain
12. De Luce Et Umbra
13. Good Morning, Midnight
14. Good Night, Day
15. Orphic Hymn
Follow the link for more info:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
~ T.S. Eliot
WASTELAND #1
In the age of ubiquitous and addictive click-bait. Technopoly rules. Online, you are a drop of water in a sea of alternatives. You are invisible.
“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself
in precisely the way Aldous Huxley
outlined in BRAVE NEW WORLD,
he argued in his 1993 book on the topic.
‘It does not make them illegal.
It does not make them immoral.
It does not even make them unpopular.
It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.’ “
– Neil Postman
Like A Drop In The Ocean
I just came across a note I had written to myself that read “Stop taking what you call “life” so seriously!!!” I find that I need these reminders to bring me back to what’s real.
The bottom is a place where we can start to separate reality, from our man-made dramas that only exist in our head. When we start to see clearly, we begin to laugh instead of lament. We can enjoy this short journey of life, instead of asking “Why?” or” What do I do now?” or “Is there even a point?” The questions fade, as we no longer need answers because we are only engaged in what “is”.
~ Matt Pryor
Again, natural light. I like the suitcase on the bench. after the aquarium closed this place was used for a time by the Cleveland police department to train police dogs. No doubt sniffing out cocaine hidden in suitcases was on the training agenda. The file cabinets on the left were filled with police files.
~ David Korten
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
To Donald T-rump: Here’s a news flash, 90% of everything that comes out of your mouth is lies, falsifications and therefore FAKE NEWS – who are you to deny and ban select media outlets from press functions just because you don’t like what they have to say and therefore claim they are purveyors of “fake news”? It’s a sad case of the “pot calling the kettle black”(as we say here in Ohio).
Sure I ain’t no big fan of the news media but that doesn’t mean their reporting is fake. Fake is different from bias. But apparently a world leader like President of a country isn’t required to have the intelligence to know the difference.
You want “fake news”? See video below for a song the Donald T-rump wrote the lyrics for.
Okay now that IS fake news (with all due respect to Henry Rollins) But it does feel that it is culturally relevant to our “President” T-rump.
“We may ask, ‘What is wisdom?’ It is our life itself.
We not only have that wisdom, we are constantly using it.
When we are cold, we put on more clothing.
When hungry, we eat. When sad, we cry.
Being happy, we laugh. That’s wisdom.
The seasons change, the stars shine in the sky, it’s all wisdom.
Regardless of whether we realize it or not,
we are always in the middle of the Way.
We are nothing but the Way itself.”~ Taizan Maezumi
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;
remember that what you now have
was once among the things you only hoped for.”~ Epicurus
“And those who were seen dancing
were thought to be insane
by those who could not hear the music.”
~ Nietzsche
“How many people
have forgotten how to dance
on
the
long
march
to
WAR?“
~ mobius faith
This is the first in what I hope will be a new series of short posts about albums that I feel are unmatched within an artists catalog/repertoire. Albums that stand out from the dross and drivel of the popular environment in which they first saw the light of day. Albums that stand apart from the mainstream of their respective musical genre’s.
For this first post I will focus on an album that has never grown tiresome over repeated listens – GOLDFRAPP’s FELT MOUNTAIN. This first full length album by Alison Goldfrapp [and band] whips up dreamy confections that are so rich and fluid the listener can wander thru spaced-out sci-fi fantasy and into steamy jacuzzi-like relaxing melodies without even trying. The music will take you there. One of things that makes this stand out from all her other work is that there seems to be some tension between the musical settings of techno/electronica and jazzy art-song stylings with some experimental flourishes. Unlike Goldfrapp’s later albums the techno beats are more in the background and provide an energetic backdrop that keeps the proceedings moving like liquid flowing down hill. There are also fantastical sounds that would not seem out-of-place on an Esquivel album and Alison’s vocals, with her airy delicate delivery of lyric sweetness, are some-what reminiscent of Astrud Gilberto (of “Girl From Ipanema” fame) or a wispy Shirley Bassey.
Taken in context – there is not a bad track on the FELT MOUNTAIN album and the whole album deserves to be listened to in a single sitting. So take the time, grab your favorite relaxing beverage, sit down, relax and let it take you away.
Enjoy these two singles:
LOVELY HEAD
“In order for light to shine so brightly,
darkness must be present.”~ Francis Bacon
I’m a real fan of film analysis. Films are more than just escapist entertainment and in many ways are the modern mythologies of our time. So analyzing these films seems a necessary informative way to gain new understanding of our own cultural mythology.
This video is probably one of the best analysis I have ever seen. If you haven’t seen the film yet that’s okay – this will be a good primer that will enhance your viewing experience.
Enjoy this video criticism for the film CHILDREN OF MEN [2006] – Dir. Alfonso Cuaron.
and here’s the trailer
... on being and becoming ... 