ticking away...

...the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

An apt description of how drab life can be at times, especially when you lose sight of your objectives. Just leave it to Pink Floyd to come up with one of the best songs describing that process, with Time.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

In my not so eloquent words, we are confronted with choices early on in our lives, and the paths we choose determine who we turn into. These choices become our fate in a sense. And the only way to make sure our choices become our fate is to embrace them in one huge, fearless gulp of air that will make the gods of fate ashamed.

Strive to be better at being human, instead of trying to be something you can never be sure of. Working, talking, arguing, loving, living - just refuse to go stale!

Love and Peace

let the sunshine in...

I woke up Sunday morning to the sight of something I hadn’t seen for some time – sunlight pouring in through the window and waking me up. After seven days of constant rain this was indeed a welcomed event, even though the splitting headache of Saturday night’s debauchery was threatening to make me pass out.

words that touch the soul...

The stranger sang a theme,
From someone else's dream
The leaves began to fall
And no one spoke at all
But I can't seem to recall
When you came along
Ingenue,
I just don't know what to do



The tree-lined avenue
Begins to fade from view
Drowning past regrets
In tea and cigarettes
But I can't seem to forget
When you came along
Ingenue,
I just don't know what to do
(Life In Mono - Martin Virgo/John Barry)

what music now (fall edition)?

In these early days of autumn the following CDs keep spinning away at home and car:

1. Metric - Live It Out
   This a transitional work for a Emily Haines' band as they shift away from synthesizer-based indie-pop (Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?), to guitar-rocking indie rock. Emily Haines has also been part of another great Canadian collective, Broken Social Scene
   
   
2. Elbow - Leaders of the Free World
   Very emotional and personal work for Elbow and not as rocky as previous releases (Cast of Thousands). I can't get that feeling that Guy Garvey comes off a little like Peter Gabriel. There are some great lyrics in here such as The Stops ("I'll miss you the way you miss the sea"), The Everthere ("If I loose a sequin here and there/ More salt than pepper in my hair/ Can I rely on you/ When all the songs are through/ To be for me the everthere"), or My Very Best ("And would you tell her/ Not to talk as if I died/ Though a tiny part just did"). Beautifully poetic.
   
   
3. Keep In Time: A Live Recording. Funky music from Ninja Tunes label to keep those dreary New England days warm. Think of P-Funk and George Clinton.
   

More later (Depeche Mode, etc.)

art for art's sake...

continuing and upcoming art exhibits around the world:


Jean-Michel Basquiat showcasing the art of a brilliant but tragic contemporary American artist. The Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston have also created a unique Basquiat-related website From Street to Studio: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. On view from November 20, 2005 to February 12, 2006 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.


Cezanne in Provence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC between January 19 - May 7, 2006. This exhibit will mark the centenary of Cezanne's death. Not to be missed!

Also at the National Gallery of Art in DC, Dada, the "most comprehensive museum exhibition of Dada art ever mounted in the United States". Ends October 22, 2005.

If you are in NYC over the next 10 days, visit the Sean Kelly Gallery for Laurie Anderson's "The Waters Reglitterized", an exhibition of her latest installation, a recreation of dreams during her time on the road last year.

For those of you in Denmark of flying there between now and December 4, 2005, you can catch Matisse & a collection of exhibitions at the Statens Museum for Kunst. The exhibitions feature nine of Matisse's masterpieces created during a key period of his creativity, 1905-1918, three contemporary artists in interplay with his works, and eight international experts' take on Matisse's universe.


If you prefer a slightly warmer climate during the fall and early winter whilst in Europe, you could visit the National Museum of Contemporary Art for a look at Videographies - The early decades which includes post-formalist and post-minimalist works from the 60s through the 80s. These works of art "explore critically, contemplatively and poetically, human substance and essence within the network of its social, communicative, existential and transcultural relationships". Phew! I'm glad I didn't have to say that from memory.


Love, Peace and Understanding

if you could read my mind...

Dream 1 ("The Dream Cycle")
I wake up in the middle of the night
still clutching fading cobwebs of a dream,
a dream that should never have started,
but since it did, I wish it would stay forever.

I wake up in the middle of the night
still reeling from the sweet wine that was
this dream, still feeling drunk from such
sweet sensations, wondering whether to
chase away your countless pictures in my mind.

Am I still dreaming? I want to wake up
hoping your memory will be gone,
hoping that you'll be gone from my dreams
just like you were gone from my heart.

But I can't. The brilliance of your image
exhausts my heart, causing me pain
I long had forgotten, the sad sweetness
of a lament still echoing in my ears.

loping along at the usual pace...

Love. People in love and people out of it, people who say they've heard of it but will tell us they never think about it, people who claim to have lived through it but say never again, people who deny its existence and whose lives may or may not reflect that sentiment, people who would scale the highest summit to plant its flag, those who walk shadowy lanes in fear of it, those who probe those shadows in search of it, those who stroll hand in hand with it, those who shoot poisoned arrows at it, those who confuse love wth everything else, those who assert nearly all well-travelled roads lead to or from it, and then there is ViVa Straight, sometimes one and sometimes the other, and this is her story, the story upon which all other stories hang like clothing flung across a clothesline, the day windy, though skies are blue.

Post-modernist literature at its best!

More on this later...