wonder

over the night, the finest ice crystals fell over the forest. thin blades of grass poked up out of the white cover, and the holly wore white mittens. here the cattails at the edge of a lake lay flattened and battered, a graceful cluster of hollow brown skeletons of a year gone.



a wind continued to blow through the woods where it lifted off the sheer powder from the hollies. the ice crystals were so fine and pure, they became illuminated by the shafts of sunlight, forming a swirling golden path between the trees. you could hear the ice crystals as they crashed violently into each other, a thousand far off bells.



across the forest floor, the green winter life swelled up out of the snow. here is a runner plant whose roots are so connected that you can pull up all by one. tiny and miniature trees leftover from a world of other plants of long ago, holding on as the giants of the newer world sleep.

olympus fashion week

Although fall colors proved scarce among the tendency towards black and white, bronze made a lovely showing in many of the collections. Along with a brilliant fireball orange. In the first peice, it was lovely to see stripes done in the bronze and the grey, along with the swirl paisley print of the trenchcoat. Following we had a gorgeous green floor length to remind us of the last hard greens of summer. Two wonderfully textured black numbers show a turn towards an inviting personality for the little black number. Followed by that fireball orange where the longer sleeves are truely innovative. A little dusty yellow slip dress allows a girl to play in the past for a night. If you are meeting the winter holidays in a tropic location, a lacey little blue number should get you in the right spirit. While those looking for a dark harvest pint in an Irish bar will swoon for the next green and black skirt matched with jacket. Rounding off the end are two lovely autumn dresses, one the dark orange of the sunset and the other the dark yellow of wheat, both utterly graceful.

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.