SUI GENERIS

we think that things are fixed, that we receive the phenomena of the world and that we're not a part of creating that which we behold, but we are definitely a part of creating that which we behold

As untanklike as you can be

A photo of a passage with a plane ticket from Calafate to Buenos Aires as my bookmark. I finished American Pastoral last night on the way home and I still can’t get this page (I think 37? regardless, early on) out of my brain. 

I remember standing in line on Nov 7, Election Day, waiting to vote and listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast where he’s interviewing Cal Fussman and they talk about Muhammad Ali as a hero for an entire generation and Fussman asks, “What kind of heroes do [the kids] have? Do they have a Muhammad Ali?" 

Regardless of your opinions on his economic, social, or foreign policy, Barack (and Michelle) as a president, or simply an individual, is a hero. Thank you Ta-Nehisi Coates for so beautifully capturing the empathy and strength of our President. In a world full of the best and the worst, what Obama has shown and stood for will continue to inspire me and hopefully, generations to come.

Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter. Do not take away the rose, the lance flower that you pluck, the water that suddenly bursts forth in joy, the sudden wave of silver born in you. My struggle is harsh and I come back with eyes tired at times from having seen the unchanging earth, but when your laughter enters it rises to the sky seeking me and it opens for me all the doors of life. My love, in the darkest hour your laughter opens, and if suddenly you see my blood staining the stones of the street, laugh, because your laughter will be for my hands like a fresh sword. Next to the sea in the autumn, your laughter must raise its foamy cascade, and in the spring, love, I want your laughter like the flower I was waiting for, the blue flower, the rose of my echoing country. Laugh at the night, at the day, at the moon, laugh at the twisted streets of the island, laugh at this clumsy boy who loves you, but when I open my eyes and close them, when my steps go, when my steps return, deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter for I would die.

- Neruda

How Great is Loving Someone

I Need a Forest Fire 

Just mashed this YouTube video of the Fort McMurray fire from May 3rd with new James Blake & Bon Iver, eerily timed but what beautiful drops of fire

The Chair Affair

Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012)

I visited the newly opened Broad this weekend, which in itself was such a treat, but I was especially taken aback by this piece on the first floor by Ragnar Kjartansson -

9 panels of his musician-friends (Sigur Ros band members included), recorded simultaneously in rooms all around the same house in Hudson Valley. Speakers by each panel, with the audio of each room, so you can move closer to the cellist, or the accordionist, or the piano/guitarist, or the guitarist, or Ragnar in his bathtub. (But really, he was in the bathtub for nearly an hour, wasn’t the water cold by the end?)

The combination of the simultaneity and the emotion in the music and the backdrop of the beautiful - I think Hyperallergic sums it all up well: They are alone, each isolated in one room of the house (except those on the porch), yet intimately connected via technology, via their common endeavor—the performance.

For more:

“A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.”

Max Lamb’s Marmoreal