April 1st on September 30

Two quotes from the April 1st Project and several journal pages.

"Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." - Charles Dickens

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow

Isabelle Allende: Tales of Passion

Truer than truth...

What The Night Knows

Last night, I listened to a podcast of KCRW’s Bookworm. The featured author was Eduardo Galeano, and the discussion centered on his book “Mirrors.”

I was dizzy with excitement from the moment he began to speak. What a tremendous discovery! Amazingly, I had never been aware of Galeano or his books and find it odd considering how widely I have read some of his Latin contemporaries and those to whom he has been compared. Anyway, it’s a great find, and I look forward to reading his oeuvre.

His words were poetry, and they effortlessly floated on his accent. You can enjoy the podcast here, and I encourage you to do so.

Of the many things he said, two things jumped out and caused me to grab the first pen and begin to scribble.

“Perhaps the night knows more about us than the day time.”

In a few words, this compact sentence, Galeano puts forth the mystery of dreams and what happens when we’re asleep. I could almost hear him smile. I could almost hear the question mark at the end. It was beautiful.

Later in the broadcast as he talked about history and storytelling, and he talked about learning by listening in the cafes. He said that he realized, “Past could be lived as present. Facing the boundaries of time was the beautiful task of the storyteller.”

Without knowing Eduardo Galeano, I imagine that he’s a man that has lived fully, lived knowingly. It seems that he doesn’t believe in boundaries or limitations, and it is this conviction that translates humanity into a melody of words.

Here are a few more links to Eduardo Galeano. Enjoy…

Paradoxes and Misnomers

Wiki: Eduardo Galeano

Washington Post article and conversation

NPR Interview and Article

Democracy Now Interview

Mythology and Imagination

Last night I finished reading two texts. As it happens, I usually have several books and magazines going at one time. Occasionally they intersect in a surprising way. It happened last night.

I was finishing A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. It’s the first in Canongate’s Myth Series. I was also finishing Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare, a play that had been turned into a film with Will Smith and Stockard Channing that I had never seen.

The two works intersected at mythology and imagination. Karen Armstrong’s book is a scholarly look at mythology through the ages. She traces its evolution, links it to history, religion, and scientific thought. She posits that social and cultural shifts transformed mythology, used it where necessary, and discarded it where it wasn’t useful. She argues, or puts forward, that mythology is a necessity.

John Guare’s play, dense with so many emotional tangles, pivots on imagination. A line: “The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world…I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world.”

I believe in the power of mythology. I love the stories, plain and simple, because they make sense. They make sense of things we take for granted, and they give cause to things we can’t wrap our heads around. It used to be that we (the collective ‘we’) would tell stories to explain the complex or the simple – why spiders spin webs, the origin of the constellations, why a turtle has a shell, why there are seasons, and so on. We don’t do that anymore. Why not?

Have we lost our imaginations? After all, it is the imagination that created mythology. It is imagination that helps us rationalize the world around us. It is imagination that fuels us to create something new out of something that seems ordinary. It is in the imagination’s pages, stamped with experience, that we travel.

I’m not saying creativity is dead. It’s not. Far from it. But we share a common dialogue about creativity. We no longer do so with mythology and, perhaps only occasionally with imagination.

Armstrong writes, “It has been said that history is a process of annihilation, since each new development requires the destruction of what has gone before…whenever they enter a new era of history, people change their ideas of both humanity and divinity.”

We have done that. And perhaps that’s why we moved away from mythology. Armstrong thinks this is the reason. She also says, “A myth, it will be recalled, is an event that – in some sense – happened once, but which also happens all the time.”

Myths are a way to work through our fears, justify our hopes, explain the nature of evil, and celebrate the power of goodness. We need mythology. Don’t you agree?

The April 1st Project: September '09

Here's a September update for the April 1st Project, including some pictures of the journal at the end.

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing." - Nietzsche

"The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn." - John Lubbock

A headline from the July 25th issue of The Economist (yes, I have a stack or two of magazines to go through) -- "Waking from its sleep: A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab World; it will be complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out."

Design, typography, graphics, and more:
I Love Typography
typenuts
grain edit
Poster Cabaret
The Deck
Flick Out
Web Urbanist
Deco Journal
Cool Boom
Cult Case

From A Short History of Myth: "Mythology was therefore designed to help us to cope with the problematic human predicament. It helped people to find their place in the world and their true orientation."

From the Office of Management & Budget: $9 Trillion -- Projected federal budget deficit over the next 10 years, $2 trillion more than forecast in February.

Oulipo - a loose group of mainly French-speaking writers and mathematicians.

KQED: The Writers Block
Slate's Audio Book Club
The Writing Show

WSJ Headline on September 12: "Man vs God"

Book to read: The Elegance of the Hedghog by Muriel Barbery. Thanks for the tip Teresa!

Question: What is the truth of this situation? From Peaks and Valleys by Spencer Johnson.

Last.fm
Lala
Thru You

A list of plays to read that came from the inside back cover of 'Night Mother by Marsha Norman (a powerful play):
Three Tall Women by Edward Albee
Broken Glass by Arthur Miller
Suburbia by Eric Bogosian
All in the Timing by David Ives
Hello Again by Michael John LaChiusa
Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver
Lonely Planet by Steven Dietz
The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks
The Fourth Wall by A.R. Gurney
Julie Johnson by Wendy Hammond
Four Dogs and a Bone by John Patrick Shanley
Desdemona, A Play About A Handkerchief by Paula Vogel
The Lights by Howard Korder
The Triumph of Love by James Magruder
Later Life by A.R. Gurney
The Loman Family Picnic by Donald Margulies
A Perfect Ganesh by Terrence McNally
Spain by Romulus Linney
The African Company Presents Richard III by Carlyle Brown
Imaginary Life by Peter Parnell
Mixed Emotions by Richard Baer
The Swan by Elizabeth Egloff

Not Just A Blip On The Radar

Music.

Webster defines it as follows:

             Main Entry: mu·sic

             Pronunciation: \ˈmyü-zik\

             Function: noun

             Usage: often attributive

             Etymology: Middle English musik, from Anglo-French musike, from Latin musica, from Greek mousikē any art presided over by the Muses, especially music, from feminine of mousikos of the Muses, from Mousa Muse

             Date: 13th century

1 a : the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity b : vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
2 a : an agreeable sound : euphony music to my ears> b : musical quality music of verse>
3 : a musical accompaniment music>
4 : the score of a musical composition set down on paper
5 : a distinctive type or category of music music for everybody — Eric Salzman>

But that doesn’t explain what it is. I began to think about this (not music, I think about it all of the time) after I discovered Blip.fm.

Almost giddy, I signed up as Mixin’ Maria – that’s the DJ name I selected. Check out all of my selections here or look at the end of this post for the first 18 of them.

So back to the definition.

As I carefully made my selections, I was asked if I wanted to add a few words about each song – you blip songs, blip as in a verb to indicate that you’re posting / playing / suggesting a song. So as I set out to spin a few tracks, I had to verbalize what I liked about a song, the singer, and such. While there are songs that I love because of the story they tell, most of the time I like a song because it speaks to me. It moves me. I feel exalted in some way (yes, that is the proper word to use). That’s what music is to me. It’s a connection on some level of which I am totally unaware. It has the capacity to make me feel like few things do. It provides the same joy as love. Crazy perhaps, but true. It opens my heart and I gush.

But that’s selective. There are thousands of bands and songs and compositions that I don’t like. Some are horrible, and I can’t change the channel fast enough. There’s no love there. None lost either. So Webster’s definition as “an agreeable sound” has truth to it, but it’s not accurate. I’m not talking about something that’s “agreeable.” I’m talking about something that makes you want to turn the volume up loud enough to shake the windows, dance in the living room, and use your lung capacity in a way that you can’t in a typical setting. And what’s this about “the science or art of ordering…” -- ? I doubt seriously that Madonna employs scientific methods to create her gyrating tunes. I would guess that it has to do with passion.

All great art is the result of an experience and results in an expression of that experience. That’s not scientific.

So what is music?

Life, Death, and Paying It Forward

I went to a funeral last week. Not someone I knew well, but someone who had casually been in my life for over 15 years.

The rabbi who presided over his services said many kind things. He beautifully eulogized his friend, for they were close friends, creating images not only of the man who had been ‘severed from us,’ but also of the emotions that we were experiencing now (and those we experience whenever someone is taken from us). I was moved by the tenderness of his words, and my heart cried when the rabbi choked up talking about our friend. The rabbi said that we should look at our friend’s death and learn from it how to live our lives.

What a glorious message.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since. And I’ve been thinking about the people that I’ve lost. But more importantly I’ve been thinking about the people who are in my life today, living and breathing, and a phone call away.

My friend who just died was authentic. That’s what I would say the lesson of his life was. He was exactly what you saw and experienced. He said what he had to say, he loved life and showed it, he was passionate about his opinions, and he loved people. He was himself. It never occurred to me to wonder who he was. I just knew.

There are many people in my life that I don’t have to wonder about, and for that I am blessed. They are good friends, important threads in the fabric of who I am. I am not waiting for a future date to learn from their lives. My life is rich, and I’d like to think that I’m a better person, because I try to live by the truths that they share.

I have a friend that I don’t’ see often enough, but when I do, I am reminded that having fun, being spontaneous, and laughing a lot are essential. I have several friends committed to helping people and serving the community. They are shining examples of how to make a difference. Another friend reminds me that you can have effortless grace even when you might feel a bit frazzled, and yet another amazes me with her self-honesty. I could go on and on.

I miss my friend who recently passed and am sorry that I didn’t tell him what it was about his life that I admired. But it’s not too late to thank so many and let them know that I’m trying to pay it forward. I better get busy.

The Killing Moon

The lyrics to, perhaps, my favorite Echo and the Bunnymen song. Sorry for the loss of their keyboard player, Jake Drake Brockman.

The Killing Moon

Under blue moon I saw you

So soon you'll take me

Up in your arms

Too late to beg you or cancel it

Though I know it must be the killing time

Unwillingly mine

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

In starlit nights I saw you

So cruelly you kissed me

Your lips a magic world

Your sky all hung with jewels

The killing moon

Will come too soon

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

Under blue moon I saw you

So soon you'll take me

Up in your arms

Too late to beg you or cancel it

Though I know it must be the killing time

Unwillingly mine

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

You give yourself to him

La la la la la...

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

La la la la la...

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

La la la la la...

All Who Wander Are Not Lost

This is my favorite expression. Or perhaps it’s my motto. Either way, it’s something that I believe to be true. Some of my greatest discoveries have come from being aimless or from deviating from the road. It’s how I have accumulated a breadth of professional experience. And it’s how I saw the Petrified Forest in Arizona – I saw the sign and decided to head there. Why not?

It’s this question that gives meandering validity. Why not? How many times do we not ‘just go for it’ or ‘give it a whirl?’ And how many times have we regretted it? There have been numerous times in which I didn’t have the courage to answer the question. Typically on ‘big’ things – the really scary life stuff. But the truth is that I’m rich with experience because I have taken to the road, literally and figurative, and I don’t regret it.

Recently when my brother-in-law Jim was visiting, we went to Hugo’s. Being the hot food aficionado that he is, Jim wanted authentic and spicy, and they served it up. The fried grasshoppers intrigued him – well, all of us actually – and he ordered them. Why not? I had a bite. They were crunchy and spicy and not something I would order again, but I tried them.

There’s a lot to the expression “I gave it a shot,” and I think it’s one of those indisputable moments when you realize that although you didn’t ‘make it’ – whatever that means to the situation – you succeeded because you ‘went there.’ I keep a Lululemon ad on my bulletin board in my office. Of the many inspiring reminders, it says, “do one thing a day that scares you.”

When we’re young, we’re taught not to get lost, to stay on the straight path, and ‘go directly there and back.’ It’s great advice for a kid. But there comes a time when we have to shed the fear of getting lost and go down the path that branches away from the one we take to get to our destination. Perhaps the way to get over the fear is to remember that ‘all who wander are not lost.’