fiery furnace

out last night into the bitter cold i went, to see a few bands play at a music club i had never been to before. such a big adventure for me, since i hate going places alone. especially places to which i have never been. still, there are new year's resolutions to meet and true love will not be found on a computer screen. this is the 9:30 club. i went dressed in my green knit sweater dress and my old green corduroy pattern trenchie, and a chunky cream shell bracelet. talked for a bit with a girl in line who is taking pics for a local music blog. inside i chose an nice oatmeal stout and watched this band from the bar, the opening act: holy fuck.

up the stairs in the club are a series of rafter balconies where there is some area to sit. in order to monitor the crowd, and watch for illegal drug sales, the club employees have stands up here that are like life guard towers at the beach, though done in black wood, where they take turns scanning the crowd. fiery furnace: this indie rock band came on for the second set, and their lead female singer had an interesting furry voice and good rhythm. i spoke with her for a second during the third act, when she was meeting people in the crowd. she was accompanied by her 12 year old son, with whom she had an obvious good and deep relationship. how amazing it must be to have a rocker mom.

here is the title act, the welsh alternative rock band: super furry animals. the lead singer is quite the showman, much in the way of bare nakked ladies from canada. at one point he had a bunch of leek, and at the start of each line of his song, bit off a chunk and tossed the rest to a fan in the audience. one of their best songs was about the loyalty of a golden retriever. they really knew how to earn the adoration of the audience, finding ways for the fans to participate in the music by sound effects and special crowd "waves." as they went into the encore though, i suddenly thought it wise to scoot. and lucky me. by a bare few minutes i caught the last of the public metro trains back to my stop. such a good starry night.

no country for old men

so rare in these days of extreme profit gouging to find a film that refuses to be a movie. and yet this offering succeeded, giving a vast and event-less landscapes combined with chilling classic western violence. there are no spirits, no gods, no karma, no underlying principles that compel people towards their end(s) beyond their thinking or unthinking choices. and yet it is a moral play.

death exists without pity or appeal, and yet at heart remains capricious. a nagging moral conscious is no more likely to guide you to the right action pride or humility. community eases isolation and invites in evil. age does not give wisdom.

you do need to see this. so often you wish the world to be one way or another, you begin to see people as more good or evil than perhaps they are, more wise or more foolish, and rarely human. you imagine you see the whole life of a person in a chance encounter in a line at the grocery store. but there is clarity in a country stripped of myths, even if it is a place not for old men.

clarendon

in pools of light, the city gives you only rough contours. lines of brick and spirals of wire are the signs that guide you. the skeletons of factories and lines of cars by parking meters rear up out of the darkness, like an endless crowd of set and hostile faces. then among them you see pairs, hand in hand, lovers on their way from one place of light to another. her long brown hair bounces and you see his breath as he speaks. her long bright scarf and the flash of his watch. her and him. you reach across the darkness and take his hand. you fall into that pool too deep either for the darkness or for the light.

ice storm

snow.. a most remarkable occurance. first in large fat flakes, as large as candies and sounding like cat's paws on the trees and grass. swiftly though, the line of the storm came north and the snow transformed into frozen rain, cat's running on claws over everything. and then the cold, the real cold entered into every tree and clearing and body. the birds have taken to the wind with their chattering protest, fleeing the early darkness.

secret garden

My mother teaches elementary school, and every year her class reads "The Secret Garden." She left her copy on the table at her house a few days when I was visiting recently, and since I had never read the book as a child, I picked it up and wandered through it. Strange and gorgeous little gem, and sometimes difficult. The characters sometimes think about each other in ways we no longer do, of course. No one expects to have any masters or servants. Still, we all expect to figure out how we belong to each other. At the end, it's a beautiful message: that by creating beauty you will belong to the world and live forever.

to be read

a friend introduced me to this little challenge, where the meat of it is to select a list of 12 books that you had always been meaning to get around to reading, and then to commit to reading them over the next year. the books must be older than 6 months and you can't have already read them. the point is to get to some of those classics that make us all more rounded as people.

and my list, without further ado:

1984, by George Orwell
Journey to the End of Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Hunger, by Knut Hamsun
The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
Independent People, by Halldor Laxness
Blindness, by Jose Saramago
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

the road won the 2007 pulitzer prize and i've read several of his other books, including all the pretty horses. of course i've read other books by hemingway, but the other authors are all new to me.

the friend who introduced me to the reading list challenge asked me yesterday if i thought current efforts to increase reading could be successful. for instance, are there any long term effects of the harry potter mania? will children who didn't usually read then go on to read other books. while i think that there will be some additional exposure to other children's books, i think it might be a few generations before such sparked interest bleeds over into classical literature or into historical nonfiction, genres needed to see a positive change in human society. for all the effort of oprah's book club, for instance, her marginal readership remains far more interested in forms of romance literature that advance a self-destructive society.

before the new year had even begun, i had finished 1984. this book alone should be read in high school, and not for instance wuthering heights. it's depiction of torture and the easy by which the human spirit may be controlled and destroyed is a warning needed for any democracy. now i have moved on to don quixote, whose depiction of self-induced delusions is extremely poignant. you can't help but think of the degree to which we all seek to be don quixote in order to mitigate the dullness of obscurity of our own lives.

bone horse

wandered through one of the smithsonian museums last weekend. drawn there by a landscape exhibit, but i also wandered through some modern paintings, some abstract exhibits and some folk art. in the abstract galleries, i met this fierce beastie....

new year's resolutions

last summer i spent a few wonderful days in the countryside in england, so exotic and so recognizable. i promised myself then that i would cease to believe all of the reasons to give up art, or to marginalize it, that i had soaked up over all of these years spent finding a way to survive. so very small are the things that i have managed to do since in order to achieve that, things done for that goal rather than having come from doing other things. here are some photos to remind me of that promise.

these photos were taken at avesbury, england. the tree above is really red in the middle of june. within a few hours, the rain was falling out of these clouds. but while the sun and wind held them off, they were a gorgeous backdrop for the stone circle in the field. what i felt was not a spiritual feeling, standing among them, but a warm human feeling. an expansion of the heart to simply respect the sincerity and hope that bound people together enough to bring a marvel into their world.

Honey at the Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.

-Mary Oliver