i am a visitor here, i am not permanent

My good friend Sean passed away two weeks ago.

I got the news - via facebook message - while I was helping two of my friends practice for their first dance at their wedding the following day. I cried after they left and tried hard not to think about it. And except for it creeping up on me when I least expected it a few times in the last week, I've done a pretty good job not thinking about it. Which meant that I had not prepared myself for his memorial service today as well as I might have liked.

What was so nice about the service was how much emphasis was placed on Seany's music, and how much he loved it and loved sharing it. The gigs and gigs of music I have saved on my hard drive are due, almost entirely, to him. We didn't have exactly the same taste, but had much in common; he was responsible for a huge amount of my development as a music listener, and he grew to know my taste better than anyone. He would nearly pounce on me as soon as he'd found a new album he thought I'd love, and he was always right.

Sean was always, always a good friend. He was always ready to listen whenever anyone needed it. He was a genuinely open and caring guy.

We'd drifted apart the last few years - both busy with our jobs, I think, and not spending as much time chatting online (as we did all through college). I'd been meaning to text him for at least two weeks before he died, and was just too distracted to follow through. We'd planned to hang out when I was on spring break, and he was dead before that happened.

At least he went while he was with friends. At least it was just as simple as falling asleep listening to Coldplay, one of his very favorite bands.

I went back through emails we'd exchanged, and found a paper he'd written for a music course and sent me back in 2006: a list of his favorite albums of the moment - some of which are still my favorite albums, and ones I most associate with him, because he shared them with me - and an accompanying short analysis and his favorite bits. I thought, in the spirit of his musical generosity, that I'd share his list with you; especially if there are ones you are unfamiliar with, I'd strongly recommend you listen and lose yourself in some music for awhile.

I love you lots, Seany. I miss you terribly, and I'm so sad we didn't hang out more the last few years.

things I like, vol. 44

The Acrobat Sublime.

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Much better than a grandfather clock.

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Prospective Immigrants Please Note

by Adrienne Rich

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.

It is only a door.

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Scarves (and other things) with crowdsourced designs. Found one today at Nordstrom's Rack; may not be able to take it off.

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A bedroom like a cocoon, which is what I want. Minus the hydrangeas. I hate hydrangeas.

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Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

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A beautiful catch - the mirrored poses, the contrast between them - perfect.

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Long live Wonder Woman.

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I feel like I really ought to go live in France to really master the French Paradox diet, but in the meantime, I'm using it as my excuse to keep drinking a lot of red wine.

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Like looking through a window.

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From here.

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A beautiful article on how they make Hermès silk scarves. That's a hand-rolled hem, above.

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The adorable magnet the shopkeeper at Red Elephant Imports gave J this morning. They had a really nice variety of items - lots of them from Latin America - but had pillows with Beatles portraits on them, too. It's a good place for Christmas presents, as we start approaching that season.

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I'd always loved "Walk on the Wild Side," but I didn't really start to discover Lou Reed until after he died (the same way I discovered Vonnegut, incidentally). His wife's tribute in Rolling Stone is both heart-wrenching and beautiful:

I guess there are lots of ways to get married. Some people marry someone they hardly know – which can work out, too. When you marry your best friend of many years, there should be another name for it. But the thing that surprised me about getting married was the way it altered time. And also the way it added a tenderness that was somehow completely new. To paraphrase the great Willie Nelson: "Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that's what makes the jukebox spin." Lou's jukebox spun for love and many other things, too – beauty, pain, history, courage, mystery.

There's been a lot of death in the world, lately.

things I like this week, vol 42.2

I lied about posting again the day after the last one.

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Sell music on itunes at ReverbNation.com

Apparently I have a thing for trip hop. This is on regular rotation on our blues nights and it's been in my head for weeks.

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There was a long time where if you asked me to name my "type" of man I couldn't give you any specifics beyond tall. I've narrowed it down quite a bit since then, but this post reaffirms my love of beards.

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Clever.

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I love almost everything this woman wears.

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In case you haven't seen it (though you probably have). Colin and I have been quoting it at each other at least twice a day since we watched it.

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A found bookmark.

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A coworker bought a bunch of these scalp massagers as graduation gifts for our seniors. She had extras, so I got one too. It is awesome.

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I don't like Beyonce, but her hair looks like fire in this picture.

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There is a special place in my heart for stained glass.

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Yes, please.

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This too.

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Every once in awhile you could see the wind doing this to the peaks in Flag.

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Maybe I need to just make a post entitled "Steve McCurry is awesome."

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A really beautiful post on Aldeburg, Suffolk.

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He "document[s] the exact time, angle, latitude and longitude of each exposure and then track[s] the rotation of the earth to locations with clear night skies such as the Mojave, Sahara, and Atacama deserts."

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And, because I feel like ending with a poem:

Suicide's Note

The calm
cool face of the river
asked me for a kiss. 

- Langston Hughes

things I like this week, vol. 41

From the selby's Nina Pohl shoot, which was lovely and mid-century modern - though I preferred the flowers. 

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Einstein's desk, which I saw two pictures of in a week, one accompanied by this quote: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" And even though I spent two and a half days cleaning up my office over spring break, at least I felt somewhat validated about it having been very much like Albert's in the first place. 

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Bookshelves in the bathroom . . . 

 . . . bookshelves in the kitchen . . .

. . . bookshelves in the bedroom. These make me conclude that we need more bookshelves in our apartment, preferably built-ins. Hardwood floors wouldn't hurt, either.

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Neil Gaiman did a collaboration with BlackBerry called A Calendar of Tales. He twitter-sourced ideas by asking questions about each month ("What would you burn in November, if you could?"), picking a tweet that inspired him ("My medical records, but only if that would make it all go away.") and then wrote a story for each month. And then they posted all the stories, and asked people to create art based on those stories, and they're going to pick an art piece for each month and turn the whole damn thing into a calendar. 

The stories are quite good, and the art that people submitted is incredible. You can see/read/watch the whole thing here. What it all has to do with BlackBerry I don't know, but it's beautiful despite that.

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Dimitry Tsykalov, whose works make me think of these lines from Eliot's Wasteland:

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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This is from a photoshoot done with disposable cameras, by two models who are dating, as an ad for Gucci Guilty Black. I am fascinated by the contrast of the apparent intimacy of the photos and the obviously advertorial nature of the whole enterprise. 

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This house is downtown, just behind the Stillwell house, and is quite gorgeous. And for sale for an absurd $1.5mil, because apparently it was the home to some Senator I've never heard of.

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Morocco is quickly climbing the list of "places I need to visit soon."

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'Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from Ulysses

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The irony of Courtney Love discussing makeup amuses me. She seems surprisingly coherent. 

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It was in my head for a week or two before I actually listened to the lyrics and fell in love with itfor that reason, too.

things I love this week, vol. 40

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart.

- from "Love is a Parallax," Sylvia Plath. 

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A man feeding swans in the snow.

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It came up on one of my tango Pandora stations. The Google translation of the lyrics is as beautiful as the melody.

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Made of shards of glass.

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A fascinating NYTimes article about Linsday Lohan and a micro-budget film shot last summer.

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"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." 

- To Kill a Mockingbird

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Sublime.

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[I want

to eat that
light.] Every
thing that grows
does.

- from “Honeysuckle,” Lyn Lifshin.

things I like this week, vol. 39

I have it on good authority that this performance is entirely improv - that these dancers never choreograph a performance (unlike most professional dancers).

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It's the entire text of The Great Gastby on a 20x30 poster.

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My friend Bree, photographed for an article on the local brewery Borderlands. Her fiance is the brewer. Their beer (and I don't like beer) is awesome.

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Angelina Jolie in an interview for Vanity Fair in 2010, talking about her kids becoming teenagers:

“I had some great advice: ‘You’ll know they’re teenagers when they close the door.’ And when they start closing the door, don’t talk to them, listen. Because there’s nothing you could say. You’re not going to be able to tell them you know better. You’re not going to be able to correct them. . . . You have to raise them right before that. Then you need to listen for a good five years, just keep your mouth closed. Just be their friend—don’t try to always tell them they’re wrong.”

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 I would like to spend my entire summer like this - swimsuit, nailpolish, turban, everything. From a blogpost about American designer Claire McCardell.

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There's part of me that read this article and the accompanying NPR interview and wanted to become a street musician.

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Although pianos are hard to transport and I could never be as fast-fingered as this guy.

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Casey Legler, who is a woman working entirely as a male model. So awesome.

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Simple and elegant roses from a Slim Paley post . . .

 

. . . which inspired me to get these the following morning . . . 

 

. . . which looked about the way Sauvignon Republic's 2012 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc tasted, which is to say, like grapefruit and sunrise. I highly recommend it with your next brunch - it's $8 at Trader Joe's. 

vonnegut on the blues

 . . . Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today - jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop and on and on - is derived from the blues. 

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country - an atrocity from which we can never fully recover - the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves. 

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.

- Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country

songs to reunite to

things I like this week, vol. 32

First, the poems:

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door . . . 

. . . 

For each age is a dream that is dying
or one that is coming to birth.

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The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
[XVI]

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And then the pictures for which I can give no good source link, since they are off friends' facebook pages:

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The bit of light on her inner thigh is what makes the photo.

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They were camped out in my friend's parents' backyard.

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I'm not generally one to repost these ecards, but this one speaks to a pet peeve I've had for years.

I have the same pet peeve when it comes to people who get "to thine ownself be true" as a tattoo.

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And now, the photos I can source:

Steve McCurry, again.

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Bookshelf Porn, so aptly named.

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Edvard Munch.

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And now, the videos:

Five ways to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. (The shoe is my favorite.)

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Watch what she does on her toes. Insane.

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And, finally, a token, a quote, a list, and a note.

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