Blog

Media, poetry, articles, art, videos and random nuggets that tickle me.

Scenes From Life

'The Ballad of Holland Island House is a short animation made with an innovative clay-painting technique in which a thin layer of oil-based clay comes to vibrant life frame by frame. Animator Lynn Tomlinson tells the true story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay.'

The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking

Interesting short piece From The New Yorker:

As the journalist Oliver Burkeman noted in “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,” “Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

According to a great deal of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding. In one experiment, the social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked eighty-three German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job.” Two years later, they approached the same students and asked about their post-college job experiences. Those who harbored positive fantasies put in fewer job applications, received fewer job offers, and ultimately earned lower salaries. The same was true in other contexts, too. Students who fantasized were less likely to ask their romantic crushes on a date and more likely to struggle academically. Hip-surgery patients also recovered more slowly when they dwelled on positive fantasies of walking without pain...

It Is With My Whole Life...

Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illuminate you.
The mind is but a visitor:
it thinks us out of our world.

Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
and make of yourself an offering.

I don't want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.

When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.

-Rilke, From the Book of Hours, 1.51

My Favorite Albums and Movies of 2014

Music

5. Sun Kil Moon - Benji

This album feels like a room with a fireplace when it's raining outside. It is fantastically sparse and quiet, but warm and full in its nakedness. The guitar sounds carve a perfect space and the richness of Mark Kozelek's language fills that space with a feeling that doesn't need to be anything other that what it is. Benji is an entirely human experience.

 

4. Caribou - Our Love

Dan Snaith keeps getting better and better. Without conceding the intellectual instrumentation and shifts in mood that he's developed over the years, this album is simultaneously accessible and interesting. It oscillates between being hooky and haunting without ever loosing the aesthetic that makes it sounds exactly like Caribou, even if it's a wholly new iteration of that moniker.

 

3. Hundred Waters - Moon Rang Like a Bell

This one snuck up on me. It took a several listens but, without me even noticing, Moon Rang Like a Bell built a substantial momentum inside of me. I think more than any other record this year, Hundred Water's new effort runs a strong cohesion from start to finish. The production is seamless, the vocals are mesmerizing and the content found within both is somehow extremely comforting.

 

2. Spoon - They Want My Soul

On the other hand, Spoon's 2014 album grabbed me from the first listen. These guys have it down. They are both students and artists and, unlike many other acts, have no trouble separating the study from the creation. In these songs, their rock-and-roll is perfect pop music not because it follows a formula but because it transcends the formula by taking an immense ownership of it–it's so simple, it's so full of depth and... it's soo Spoon.

 

1. Syvan Esso - Sylvan Esso

Start to finish emotive, beautiful and celebratory. Nick Sanborn's production is ridiculously well rounded, it doesn't try too hard and the sonic palette leaves the perfect scaffolding for Amelia Meath's upfrontness. There is a perfect blend of the obvious and the unexpected here. It is playful but not overly so, it is dark but completely awake. I love everything about how these guys sound.

 

Honorable Mention - Sage Francis - Copper Gone, Aphex Twin - Syro, Ben Howard - I Forgot Where We Were, Azealia Banks - Broke With Expensive Taste, Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes.

Last Year’s List

Movies

5. Interstellar

I accidentally read a review of this flick before I saw it and because of its mood, delayed seeing it for several weeks, probably in fear that my love of Matthew McConaughey and Christopher Nolan would be disappointed. But on a rainy Sunday I went with some friends and left completely intoxicated, movie-drunk, one of the best states of mind. I loved this film not for its technical prowess or scientific chops, both of which it flexed with great proficiency, but for the reminder of how completely infinite this world is. It took me one dimension higher, one of the greatest gifts we can get from any piece of art.

 

4. Boyhood

Ever since I watched Waking Life five-dozen times many years ago, Richard Linklater has had my unreserved respect as a filmmaker. Like his old animated film from 2001 writhed itself deeply into my brain, this year Boyhood took a strong trajectory to my insides, but this time foregoing the head, it flew directly to my heart. Besides the obviously visionary and game-changing twelve-year production that made it a instant classic, this movie got me because of its realness. Where Waking Life was a long discussion of everything esoteric, Boyhood is a celebration of everything mundane. It struck home and made me feel more at ease in my own struggle to grow up without having to figure it all out.

3. Under The Skin

I'm honestly surprised that this movie didn't get more love this year. Completely absorbing, visually breathtaking and artistically entrancing, I forgot about reality in the theater with Scarlett J. Where she stole the show in Her last year with only a voice, she shined as star in the complete opposite way here. In an almost silent fashion, her work in Under the Skin is transporting. As an extraterrestrial grappling with the nature of humanity, to me her journey in Jonathan Glazer's epic is symbolic of the journey into empathy. But far beyond the challenging story which left nothing neatly organized, this movie was quite simple in its shockingly beautiful visual landscape. A feat that renders it worth seeing more than once.

2. Birdman

I think one of the most important roles that stories serve in our lives is that of the mirror. A good tale places an undistorted reflection directly in front of us. Acted with such a shocking fluency, Michael Keaton's character in Birdman is a distillation of the most human desire–to be seen in the world. As we join him on the ride of creative risk and expressive purpose, we glimpse an intimate view of the burning fire inside the world of art. How do we balance our heart's need to create with the fear of how that effort is received? A ancient question that is not simply chewed in Birdman, but swallowed. Not only is Alejandro Iñárritu brilliant here as a writer, but as a director he solidifies himself a modern master. The cinematography is the best of the year, if not the decade.

 

1. Jodorowsky's Dune

I left this movie with a well of inspiration that is still pumping. Seeing the genius of Alejandro Jodorowsky from behind the scenes as he detailed the journey of his failed efforts to make the epic science fiction novel Dune into a movie, we see the function of creativity standing on its own million legs. Frank Pavich's documentary shows that in fact the prize is always in the process, that if we dedicate ourselves to what we love and what moves us, we will always be loved and moved in return. Jodorowsky's endeavor here is in many ways emblematic of our most primal journey to make something out of nothing and, as we dive deeply into one of many of the microcosms of that process, we see that in fact inspiration is the most important resource we have. We recognize that if we live off each other's passions, when we thrive through the enjoyment of each other's excitement, we are completely and totally ALIVE.

Honorable Mention - We Are The Best!, Finding Vivian Maier, Gone Girl, Nightcrawler, Grand Budapest Hotel, Love is Strange.

Two Necessary Scathing Articles on Modern Yoga

There's nowhere more enriching to be than on the slippery slope. I hope we don't fall off.

1. "Create, trademark, and brand your own style of yoga. Who cares about lineage anymore anyway? Combine yoga with a martial art and circus act. For example, Kung Fu, Yoga, and Mime. Then throw in some Tantra for the sex, Buddhism for spirituality, and some obscure Vedic practices (nevermind the contradiction of it all – no one will notice) and not only can you be your own guru – you can be everyone else’s too!" READ.

2. "I recently had the dubious pleasure of interacting with certain members of the Yoga community, which only served to drive home the point that the ancient wisdom tradition had been appropriated, annexed and colonized, much like the cultural appropriation of Native American, Asian, African and other indigenous traditions by vendors of low-brow pop culture. Moreover, it had been totally stripped of any connection with the culture which gave it birth, Hinduism, and now only had the most tenuous links with the esoteric science it claimed to represent." READ.

Chogyam Trungpa on Depression

Alongside the difficulties of life is a visceral propulsion into the center of one's self. The friction of disappointment can thaw out the opening to the invaluable place within where we can sometimes catch a glimmer of truth: it's perfectly beautiful to not know. In times of confusion and sadness I often return to this gem from Chogyam Trungpa:

"Well, try to relate to the texture of the energy in the depression situation. Depression is not just a blank, it has all kinds of intelligent things happening within it. I mean, basically depression is extraordinarily interesting and a highly intelligent state of being. That is why you are depressed. Depression is an unsatisfied state of mind in which you feel that you have no outlet. So work with the dissatisfaction of that depression. Whatever is in it is extraordinarily powerful. It has all kinds of answers in it, but the answers are hidden. So, in fact I think depression is one of the most powerful of all energies. It is extraordinarily awake energy, although you might feel sleepy.

But, at the same time, you are experiencing tremendous texture, the texture of how the stagnation of samsara works, which is fantastic. You feel the texture of something. That entertainment didn’t work. This entertainment didn’t work. Referring back to the past didn’t work; projecting into the future didn’t work. Everything is made out of texture, so you could experience depression in a very intelligent way. You could relate with it completely, fully. And once you begin to relate with it as texture of some kind, as a real and solid situation which contains tremendous texture, tremendous smell, then depression becomes a beautiful walkway. We can’t discuss it really. We have to actually get into heavy depression and then feel about that."