Sign of the Times

Sign of the Times
Originally uploaded by 2 b danny.

LIVING WITH WAR

NEIL YOUNG'S 'LIVING WITH WAR' SHOWS HE DOESN'T LIKE IT
The New York Times

By JON PARELES

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.

Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

TV in Japan: Real Life Bear Ranch Dancers

TV in Japan: Real Life Bear Ranch Dancers

Dooga dooga: Grandpa Fitz

So well said by Jim that there is nothing to add.




For a wonderful look at JRF's legacy:
http://www.ironwoodglobe.com/0427fitz.htm

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H'mong School Kids

H'mong School Kids
Originally uploaded by fotobot.

United Children of the World

Check out this wonderful blog - images of children from all over the world. Beauty.

Really - who doesn't love Brian Jungen...this Emily Carr graduate who is all the rage now...when I saw these images of his sculpture made out of nike parts after spending a week looking at Northwest Native totem poles and masks, I just wanted to holler - YES.

New Public as a news source is interesting - check out what they are doing with their site - well worth spending some time there.

“Justice is Beautiful: Expanding the Paradigm of the Artists Book”

From an essay by Kurt Allerslev...

“What happens in a book when you're not reading it? A closed book is a treasure trove of wild possibility. The insides of a book when it sits closed on the shelf is not like the light in the refrigerator when you close the door -- you know that light goes out every time. It's designed to do that. Even if you don't see the light go out, you know it has.

The bookmaker, however, creates something that is meant to endure. The insides -- text and/or images -- stay lit up forever. But perhaps they wonder if you have gone out. The inside of the book doesn't know about the continuance of our existence when it's closed. What do we become to the closed book? What does the pollution, the cat, the car alarms and moldy ham sandwiches matter to a closed book? In closing, they are protected from that chaos that seeks to diminish and extinguish the beauty within.

I don't believe that the insides of books have a secret life that takes off when closed, the way we have a secret life when we close our eyes and dream. We are able to escape our everyday reality, exchange it for fleeting moments of other. The book, however is also not statically waiting for us to indulge it, but it grows and matures. The pages yellow, the text grows more meaningful and wise, or more dated and doddering. Every second, it changes as the world around it changes it's context. It is fed by every pair of eyes that fall on it, and it pays homage to the creators by providing a passage to a secret life that can be accessed by us as if dreaming.

You can't open the same book twice. Perhaps you can't even open the same book once. Like a river, it's changing as you open it. As the pages turn. And it changes as it sits on the shelf. A library full of books is a whirlpool of persistent change. We want text to solidify language, but language is too fluid. We are too fluid.”

Touching Base

Home this morning after almost a month of travel - and not done yet...flying back out to Seattle in a week. This time with family to visit the Redwoods in northern CA.

I am sneaking up on the final months of this sabbatical year - and full of gratitude to have had the time to travel, research, reconnect and reflect. Most of all the reflection has been a powerful gift - and one that I realize more and more I have to have in order to really do anything else well. We have pretty much written it out of our daily lives - and I believe it numbs us to all kinds of evils. Speaking of reflection....

The Cloister Walk a favorite book - recounting (amoung other things) the time that writer Kathleen Norris spent at St. John's Abbey. She writes,

"Monastic people seek to weave ceremony through every mundane part of life: how one eats, how one dresses, how one treats tools, or enters a church are not left to whim. Ceremony is so large a part of what Benedictines do that it becomes second nature to many of them. The monastic life has this in common with the artistic one: both are attempts to pay close attention to objects, events, and natural phenomena that otherwise would get chewed up in the daily grind."

Earlier this year I spent some time in northern Minnesota at St. John's Abbey. I was there to talk to the folks at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library about the St. John's Bible. This is the first bible that has been commissioned in the monastic tradition in 500 years. Those talks were extremely fruitful. Seven facsimile pages of the bible (stunning in their own right) will be coming to Milwaukee in January of 2007 as part of the exhibit that I am pulling (and this is exactly the right word some days!!) together this year.

More about this in the coming months - "Sacred Texts/Contemporary Forms: Spiritual Traditions in the Digital Age"

Yesterday I was able to stop by and introduce myself to Robin Kinney at the Bay View Book Arts Gallery. How wonderful to see this little jewel of a gallery within blocks of where I live and work. The work she is showing is worth stopping by to look at. I hope to have some images here soon as well.

George

George
Originally uploaded by lesliefedorchuk.

Talking with George on the first of April.

"Heaven is a state of MINE, not yours..."

"Hey, you gota black window up your nose....APPLE FOOLS!!!!!"

I love this guy.