Happy birthday, Mahatma.
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“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.”
(attr. Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1869-1948)
“And this independence is gained, not by means of strife, not by the destruction of existing forms,of life, but only by a change in the interpretation of life. This independence results first from the Christian recognizing the [...]
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My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post). But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.
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Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:
In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence [...]
I normally don’t listen to NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion… Garrison Keillor is an amazing storyteller and has one of the best voices ever, but the folksy aesthetic usually isn’t my cup of tea. I caught the first bit of last Saturday’s show though, and he said something at the beginning that really resonated with [...]
This past Monday was the 50th anniversary of the first recording sessions for Miles Davis’s masterpiece Kind of Blue.
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There is a Japanese art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a special parchment, with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or [...]
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“She’s Love, she loves and yet she is not loved.”
[Wm. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis]
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Ten years ago, the Magnetic Fields (a project by Stephin Merritt; the band is apparently named for Les Champs Magnetiqués, a Surrealist novel published in 1920) released 69 Love Songs, a three-part genre- (and gender-) bending collection of songs that are by [...]
“How different are the prudent and formidable words of the obsessive. He delights in his discourse, touches it up, polishes it. He is the man of one single utterance, and of one unique image. He’ll serve it to you over and over, prepared or presented differently. Don’t be offended. He [...]
“Everything can be as interesting as every other thing. My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. ”
-John Updike (1932-2009), interview with Life magazine, 1966
If you like Updike, here’s the interview from which the above sentiment (one oft-quoted [...]
“Poem for South African Women” by June Jordan (1980)
Excerpt from We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, by Alice Walker (2006)
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Barack Obama, February 2008)
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The Unicorn Tapestries
Capturing the Unicorn: How Two Mathemeticians Came to the Aid of the Met
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When the Depression hit I was taken out of private school and put into public school. So I had a new set of friends to bring home to have a look at whatever my father was. These were the [...]