Today is the birthday of Trappist monk, social activist and poet Thomas Merton, born January 31, 1915.
All classic shapes have vanished
From alien heavens
Where there are no fabled beasts
No friendly histories
And passion has no heraldry.
I have nothing left to translate
Into the figures of night
Or the pale geometry
Of the fire-birds.
If I once had a wagon of lights to ride in
The axle is broken
The horses are shot.
Seattle street artist No Touching Ground is busily moving through South America, posting gorgeous images and getting attention.
A few weeks ago, he put up a mural in Buenos Aires of Susana Trimarco, an activist who has been fighting for ten years to free sex slaves in Argentina.
From Wikipedia:
After [her daughter was kidnapped], Susana began to visit brothels dressed as a prostitute trying to find her daughter Marita. She received threats and was given false clues in order to mislead her search. Her investigations lead to the release of other women deprived of their liberty.
Read more about NTG's travels on his website, or check out other people checking him out on the Buenos Aires street art blog, here and here.
A great weekend of film coming up for the younger set and the adults who love them.
On Thursday night, the Children’s Film Festival opens at the Northwest Film Forum on Capitol Hill. Over the past 8 years, this has become the largest and most respected film festival on the West Coast dedicated to children and their families. Over the next week, the NWFF will screen more than 120 films from 35 countries, all geared toward young people.
The festival opens with the local premiere of Zarafa, a gorgeous film from French animators Rémi Bezançon and "Triplets of Belleville" supervising animator Jean-Christophe Lie about an escaped slave boy and the baby giraffe he befriends. Saturday morning brings a special screening of live action and animated short films proceeded by an all-you-can-eat pancake and bacon breakfast. A wonderful annual event, not to be missed.
On Sunday night, and completely unrelated to the film festival, the Seattle musical duo Miles & Karina come to the Royal Room in Columbia City with a rare live performance of their original score to the oldest existing, full-length animated film, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," made by film pioneer Lotte Reiniger. Taken from The Arabian Nights, the film tells the story of a wicked sorcerer who tricks Prince Achmed into mounting a magical flying horse and sends the rider off on a flight to his death. Miles and Karina have traveled the world with this film, and are bringing it back to Seattle for one night only. Sunday at 7:30, and open to all ages.
Antonio Frasconi always believed that art should come from a place deep within one’s self. Born in 1919 in Buenos Aires to parents who had emigrated from Italy during World War I, Frasconi grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay. He moved to New York in 1945 to study at the Art Students' League. By the 1950s he had become widely recognized as a leading graphic artist, especially in woodblock printing. Over the course of the next fifty years he illustrated and designed hundreds of books, including the poems of Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman.
His work was patient and meticulous. Before producing a woodcut titled “Sunrise — Fulton Fish Market” in 1953, he spent three months wandering Lower Manhattan’s wharves and the holds of fishing boats. He spent hour upon hour studying “just how a man lifts a box,” he said.
For many years Mr. Frasconi, a citizen of both Uruguay and the United States, taught at Purchase College of the State University of New York. He died on January 8 at the age of 93.
A poem for Martin Luther King day, by Langston Hughes
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
Chris Ware and Charles Burns are two of the brightest lights in the world of contemporary comics. Ware - whose work is marked by exquisite attention to the smallest details of sorrow - and Burns - who uses stark imagery to paint haunting pictures of everyday paranoia - both have new books out this fall. Ware's "Building Stories" is being hailed as a masterpiece by no less than the New Yorker magazine. Burns' "The Hive" is the 2nd in a 3-part nightmare homage to Tintin. The two giants of graphic literature will be at Town Hall Seattle on Monday October 22 as a joint presentation with Fantagraphics.
Tickets are just $5 over here, and the price of admission may be used toward the purchase of either book.
Israeli bike enthusiast and designer Izhar Gafni built a functioning bicycle out of cardboard, and mass production is just a few months away.
The bicycle is a surprisingly attractive, working bike that costs as little as $9 to make. “So you buy one, use it for a year and then you can buy another one, and if it breaks, you can take it back to the factory and recycle it” according to Gafni.
“Making a cardboard box is easy and it can be very strong and durable, but to make a bicycle was extremely difficult and I had to find the right way to fold the cardboard in several different directions. It took a year and a half, with lots of testing and failure until I got it right,” he said. You can see images of the crafting process right here.
Once the shape has been formed and cut, the cardboard is treated with a finish made from organic materials to make it waterproof and fireproof qualities.
He predicted that in the future, cardboard might even be used in cars and even aircraft “but that is still a way down the road.”
“We are just at the beginning and from here my vision is to see cardboard replacing metals ... countries that right now don’t have the money will be able to benefit from so many uses for this material.”
Matthew Shipp is one of the most talented jazz piano players of this era. Nearly 50, he has released a string of dazzling recordings that range from solo acoustic performances to electronic collaborations with DJ's and the Antipop Consortium. He was part of the celebrated David S. Ware Quartet for 16 years, and has also mentored younger or less-known artists by releasing their albums through his Blue Series on Thirsty Ear records and provided a home for other established artists.
Live, his music isn't so much an experience as it is an adventure. According to people who have seen him play live, he brings entire worlds when he takes the stage - delicate nuance, snatches of standards, floor-shaking cataclysm, and unexpected bits of dazzling classical technique.
Shipp comes to Seattle this Sunday with a trio, playing at the Seattle Art Museum as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival. Tickets available here. For music's sake, don't miss it.
Richard Marshall reviews Bob Dylan’s Tempest.
"Seventy one years ago, there was nothing like a Bob Dylan, so he invented one. An American boy with an appetite, no reasons, no explanations, no more involved now than anyone else, struggling to keep the sun over his head, trying to do the job he’d been given to do – which was to sing some songs – to be a poet out of that humble profession, to make that profession submit to the poet in him. He was like Eliot in his bank, Kafka in his Insurance Business, William Faulkner writing the film script of ‘The Big Sleep’ for Howard Hawks out of Chandler, or ‘To Have And Have Not’ out of Hemingway – and then one day he found electric music for each voice he’d put on up on stage, night after night – Richard Widmark, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Humphry Bogart, Brando, Dean, Monroe, Lucy Ann Polk and the thousand others. His originality is hidden in plain sight."
Bob Dylan plays Key Arena in Seattle this Saturday night, October 13. Tickets here.
In the 1950's, the hugely influential filmmaker Chris Marker, who died earlier this year, worked for the publishing house Editions du Seuil and, among other projects, he was responsible for Seuil’s series of travel books, Petite Planète.
The books bear telltale signs of both Marker's wonderful sense of design and his eye for suggestive narrative details.
In 2006 Marker collected a copy of each book that he designed for
display at an exhibition titled Having Been Described in Words. After the show, Marker decided to produce a poster depicting the covers of the Petite Planète guides from 1954-64. A rare edition of the
poster is currently for sale on the site Light Industry. Even if you're not in the market for a poster, take a moment to look at the hypnotic image created by all of these lovely books in one place.
I've been away on my annual Barcelona sojourn for the last 4 weeks, and have been dutifully ignoring the web while paying close attention to the world around me. I'll see if I can't post a few updates before heading back to Seattle and the world of work and bleach that awaits me.
Since being here, I discovered the work of Quim Monzó, a writer often billed as the "foremost Catalan writer of his generation." Not reading Catalan myself, it's hard to say if that's true. But there is no question that his short stories and novels are odd and beautiful fantasies, dealing with the contradictions involved in every aspect of modern living, the hidden intricacies of family relationships, and the unknown fates of forgotten historical figures. Extremely thought provoking and unexpected, his books are published by Open Letter Press in the U.S. Allow me to recommend Guadalajara
as a perfect place to start.
Today, June 15, is Kabir Jayanti, the birthday of the mystic poet Kabir. It’s an official holiday in the state of Himachal Pradesh in India.
Kabir was born in 1440 and brought up in a family of Musalman weavers. Stories about his upbringing abound, some claiming that he was born from a bouquet of flowers, and some that say he was born from a boil on his mother's hand. However he came into the world the child was named Kabir and was known to have all manner of mysterious powers. Upon his death in 1518, his body turned back into flowers.
Kabir is best known as a poet, and is generally celebrated as a literary, than a religious celebrity. His writings remain well known and widely taught among Sikh educated classes. The Kabir Panth ("Path of Kabir"), a religious community that recognizes him as its founder, numbers nearly 10 million people over north and central India.
Go read some Kabir poems! Why not? Or, you could always listen to Paul Auster read them to you.
Friend, Wake Up! Why Do You Go On Sleeping?
Friend, wake up! Why do you go on sleeping?
The night is over— do you want to lose the day
the same way?
Other women
who managed to get up early have
already found an elephant or a jewel...
so much was lost already while you slept...
and that was so unnecessary!
The one who loves you understood, but you did not.
You forgot to make a place in your bed next to you.
Instead you spent your life playing.
In your twenties you did not grow
because you did not know who your Lord was.
Wake up! Wake up! There's no one in your bed—
He left you during the long night.
Kabir says: The only woman awake is the woman
who has heard the flute!
I do love reading Peter Carey. The Australian fiction writer has published eleven novels and three volumes of short stories, and to a one they are all compulsively readable. Unlike so many "giant" contemporary writers whose careers begins with passion and lose inspiration as they gain renown, Carey remains a writer with an amazing ear for language and an instinctive sense of what makes human relationships so strange and fascinating. His stories are sharp, funny and ingenious, and his characters are perverse, unpredictable and very human.
Carey’s newest book is called “The Chemistry of Tears” and is billed as mystery focusing on the life of "a mysterious, visionary clockmaker." I bet it's great. He reads from and signs his new novel at Elliot Bay Book Co. on May 24. Tickets are free and available at the door.
According to history, William Faulkner originally wanted wanted to publish his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury using colored inks to signify the many different times in which action takes place. But he eventually concluded 'I don’t reckon … it’ll ever be printed that way.' Some 80 years later, the geniuses at the Folio Society have done it. Available for a limited time at just $295. More here
.
If you're looking for me tomorrow afternoon, I'll be at the Big Dig Record Show on Capitol Hill, 'cause you know I need more records. This is a well planned annual event with 20 music dealers from around the region converging on the Vermillion Gallery and Bar for a few hours. It's a well stocked one-day record store, open to all ages, with a full bar and DJ's all day. From 3-8 pm, and admission is just $3. See you there!
According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, coffee extends your life. Drink six or more cups per day, and you have a 10 percent lower risk of death if you’re a man, 15 percent lower if you’re a woman. Or so the study, based on self-reported coffee consumption, claims.
Excellent news. If this study is to be believed, I am functionally immortal. Now if you'll excuse me it's time for my 11th cup of the day.
With work and life and an incredible dose of warm sunny weather, I've been M.I.A. from this bloggie world. For all that, nothing in the recent past has been as impactful on Gurldoggie's existential condition as the death of Beastie Boy MCA. Like me, you've been reading plenty about him and his life, and probably cranking up your share of Beastie music. Portland film maker James Winters has taken his pain to the next step and crafted a loving tribute to the man and the band. Winters got with his wife, two kids, and his nephew to produce this terrific send off. What better (and cuter) way to pay tribute than to dress up kids and have them reenact Sabotage, one of the Beastie's best music videos?
This should be good - the first Seattle "Pedaler’s Fair" takes place this weekend, April 21st and 22nd, at the intersection of NW 49th street and 14th avenue North, three blocks from the Burke-Gilman Trail in Ballard. The fair is a first-ever market dedicated to bicycle related goods manufactured by independent Washington businesses. This two-day event highlights products and crafts from over twenty businesses, representing an amazing array of local projects dedicated to bikes. Sponsored by local bike heroes Swift Industries and Go Means Go, along with Central Coop Madison Market, & Seattle Bike Blog. A great chance to outfit yourself for summer, plus music, workshops, and beer. From 11am–5pm Saturday and Sunday.
by Hart Crane
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
Charlie Chaplin was born on this date, April 16, 1889
In the summer of 2007 history professor Louis Mendoza set out from Santa Cruz on a bicycle with the idea of seeing first-hand the extent of the growing Latino population in the United States. Over the course of a year he covered 8,500 miles around the entire perimeter of the country, talking to people about their experiences as immigrants or as non-Latino residents who have seen a steady increase of immigrants into their communities. When asked what his motivation was for taking a bike instead of taking a car, he said taking a bike would let him meet people in a happenstance way, and he would be forced to go inside communities he might have passed if he were inside a car.
"A bike took me off the beaten path and made me encounter people in a different way," he said.
Four years later, Mendoza has published A Journey Around Our America, offering his hard won understanding of what it means to be Latino in the United States in the twenty-first century. “I witnessed, first hand, what it was like to be considered a problem.” With a blend of first-person narratives, accounts from other writers, blog entries and excerpts from conversations he had along his ride, Mendoza presents stories of manual laborers, students, activists, and intellectuals. This book, and the journey that inspired it, represents a unique attempt to gain a broad perspective on a persistent and vital American question.
