and the world spins madly on...

lveo and peace in 2010!

handmade nation

there's a screening in providence on january 15

It is better to give.

We made a nativity in our attic
because we thought the pics would look cool.
here they are...

i still see a lot of life in you*

The Copenhagen Climate Summit didn't work out...
and I then had this crazy dream*

Moments

I didn't create this but I thought you all would like to see it. It was made by the New York public radio (WNYC) team that does my favorite podcast: RADIOLAB

perusal

define pining. the very mention

of a place. a month you'd

so long looked forward to's

gone by. you're singing

in the shower without

the shower without

the singing. actually

you're just walking

down the street. how far

into recollection do you peruse

to summon a past

evening to make it

linger to hold

you over

rachel is there with the black umbrella

cat's cradle

"there is love enough in the world for everybody, if people will just look. i am proof of that." - kurt vonnegut, jr.

11-12-09

There's no doubt about it. I'm in a bit of a rut. I'll spare you the details because as someone smarter than I am recently pointed out, if you walk down street and get drenched then you're a fool to think it's only raining above your own head. Anyway, I wrote this a year ago and the nostalgia is still somewhat comforting.

11/23/08
I'm on a train somewhere in the Czech Republic. My mind often has trouble keeping up with the passage of space/time. I close my eyes and I wake up on the floor of my Aunt Wilodene's Indiana house. It's humid and I can hear crickets.
I wake up in Chengdu and rush down 5 flights of stairs to class. Dragonflies as big as your fist buzz by my ear.
I wake up on the hardwood floor of a hostel in Kangding, my body is covered with couch pillows and I'm shivering.
I'm dozing off in the back of a truck parked outside of Bethany's house in Keiser, Oregon.
Close my eyes and I'm straining to read Visions of Duluoz by moonlight on someone's couch in Salt Lake City.
I wake up to the smell of something perpetually burning and I'm in the study room at Emerald Cove.
Squeeze my eyes shut and I'm watching the sunset on a rooftop in Sevilla although the night is just as warm as if the sun were high in the sky.
I'm in San Diego and it's 5AM and time to get up and go to work.
I'm in Belfast but I just want to sleep.
I'm in Dun Flodigarry and the sunrise is too alluring to do so against a backdrop of the Quirangs jutting from the Northern Sea.
I'm in Oxford and it's snowing outside my 3rd story window. I turn the space heater towards me, roll over, and go back to sleep.

The train lurches to a halt and I gotta make my connection.

calls from home

from the good folks at Thousand Kites,
via Paula D:

Dear Friends,

We are asking you to take a minute to call in a message to the 2.3 million people who are behind bars this holiday season.

It's easy. Call our toll-free line at 877-518-0606 anytime from now until December 7th.

An answering machine will record your message. Your call will broadcast on over 200 radio stations across the country. Don't worry if you mess up because we will edit the calls.

This is the 10th year for "Calls From Home," a program that connects family members to their loved ones in prison and educates the public about the criminal justice system. Hundreds of family members, former prisoners, staff, and citizens call in songs, poems, and messages of hope.

For more information, visit www.callsfromhome.org

i like this drawing

Peter Doig, Camp Forestia 1996. Pastel on paper, 7 7/8 x 9 1/2" (20 x 24.1 cm)

Mindfulness

December Named "National Awareness Month"

"This December we're asking that all Americans stop whatever it is they're doing, and take a moment to open their eyes for once — just once — in their lives. It'll make all the difference in the world." — The Onion

Buy Nothing Day!

Gonna lay down my heavy load, down by the riverside,
down by the riverside,
down by the riverside. (repeat)
and i ain't gonna study war no more...

i ain't gonna study that war no more,
i ain't gonna study that war no more,
i ain't gonna study war no more.

(e's take)

Gratitude – is not the mention
Of a Tenderness,
But its still appreciation
Out of Plumb of Speech.

When the Sea return no Answer
By the Line and Lead
Proves it there’s no Sea, or rather
A remoter Bed?

Emily Dickinson

bulgaria, summer

bird

I will now resist employing every superlative in my entire diction to recommend watching this.

BIRD film from Andrew Zuckerman Studio on Vimeo.

let me tell you about my boat...

more....

leafy

thanks christoph niemann !

grocery lists i found on the floor,

Put Your Backpack On Your Shoulder, Be A Good Little Soldier!

more...

when you're online

yours
among the names

at last

from grey it goes
and brightens

when you're online well
heart of mine well let's

just say
it heightens

my cursor may
go wander

toward touching
what is you

to open us
a window here

to pass each other
notes
through

now meet me
in the sleepless

darling type away
the evening

type along our white
and mutely
scene as though

to walk along
the novel snow

and whisper
in the fog

where what you wanted to happen, would happen

He's not quite done. But he's started, at least. (Hey, that's like all of us.)



In other news: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...

Polaroid is BACK!

POLAROID TO RE-LAUNCH INSTANT CAMERAS!

you're so pretty the way you are*

more...

we wanted to go to istanbul,

The Ocean Always Wins, My Love.

more...

We Are All Connected

"I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people in the street and say, 'Have you heard this!?'" - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

More at Symphony of Science

Daily Poetics

I just stumbled upon this... I don't know what it is. But just reading the post titles is a beautiful experience.

Daily Poetics

Transit

Watch it fullscreen if you can.

i've been feeling very maternal

i get my fix on here : spain dad

on circumnavigation

round the world! there is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure were all the time before us.

`melville

Won't you go with me into the forest? i'll take you with me, you sing the chorus, and we'll go all the way!*

It's about the pie!

more....

Held together by threads

serbia, june

appearance here

everywhere
when the light is right

during the late
gathering of grays

attracts
my several senses

cold
causes my favorite
kind of breathing

everywhere
town's taken something
of a liking to fall

trees
leaf through latest
harvest fashion

everywhere light
diminishes more soonly

all the rooms
are heated

`peter

Wake Up, Dead Man! It's wake up time! Time to open up your eyes, and rise, and SHINE*

more...

and sometimes, coming back

They Shall Be Robots!

As a child, I colored things.
As an adult, I make things to color.
This is a wonderful balance, I think.

Here's to the one day a year
you get to say "yes, I can be"
to everything!

there will be snacks*

more...

postcards from italy

a thorough roast

I guess this is how our generation's coming across.

also: this.

craigslist illustrations

craiglist's 'missed connections' ads, illustrated.




(kottke's find)

karma police*

more...

The "A" Word

"This fit like clothes made out of wasps."

- Modest Mouse

I dreamed I was younger. I walked hand-in-hand with my first love, into the holy playground of our adolescence. We held each other on a bench, laughing and whispering, while our friends played on swings and jungle gyms they had long outgrown. Slowly, I became aware of a long EEG, stretched out and plastered on the walls around us. It was a map of my brain waves. And typed beneath the treacherous spikes was the diagnosis: a single, ineffable and hateful word, like the mark of Cain or Hester's letter. I had become known. My friends, the playground — my love — they abandoned me.

And suddenly, the world was more frightening, and more beautiful, than it ever was before.

the colours have run

"Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?"

Virginia Woolf
"Street Haunting"

,

the simple life.

more...

what's happening peter

( an absurd answer to a four-year-old girl who sometimes greets me with that question )


what's happening's a galloping
among the tameless nows

somehows will house the possiblies
when definitelies browse

reality's the stuff we draw
from lazy grazing cows

and should be's just that naggerfly
an animal allows

but could be's been the evertease
when definitelies browse

what's happening's a galloping
among the tameless nows

the living theater

theater like this does not exist anymore. It needs to. this is just a tidbit a preview at that. but please watch and be inspired.

if you knew my story word for word, knew all of my history, would you go along with someone like me?

more...

greetings from america street

little april sea song

call for submissions

from our friend Matthew Spencer,
on behalf of The Prescott Family:

--
Hey Traveling Neighborhood folks,
I'm working on putting together the 3rd issue of The Family Press and I wanted to see if any of you would like to contribute. If you don't know The Family Press I suggest you check out Issue 1 and Issue 2. The theme for this issue is Sex. If you feel that you have something you'd like to contribute (all mediums welcome, for web only), send it to zine@prescottfamily.org.
--

deadline September 20, 2009
more on The Prescott Family at http://prescottfamily.org

leaf let (autumn instructions)

follow a sleep fall
low with a dive fall
slow without leap fall
faintly alive fall
yellows and sweeps and
survives into heaps fall
follows wee deaths and
regards them as sleeps
when it falls for the wind
knowing nothing’s for keeps


ptr grg knt

Love is bigger than You, bigger than Words, it's bigger than US*

"We are bigger than the end,
and we can just let the world wash over US
without being washed away."

--Johanna Kunin

more...

it's been a while

and i have been run dry this past summer with the hum of not one but two swamp coolers and far too much heat for a little closet...the only cool being facts and numbers under my eyes when what i really wanted, nay, NEEDED was fuzzy words i could cozy up with and that would tickle joy write out of my mouth. yes, write.

thank you for being here. for running even though i had to let go. for inspiring me to double-dutch jump right back in your spinning lines.

<3

little february train

Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Dancers...it doesn't matter, just clean it up!

more...

changes

fifty things that are being killed by the internet.

favorites:

3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There's no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will "album albums" like Radiohead's Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?
13) Memory
When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the "mere" storage and retrieval of knowledge. What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.
14) Dead time
When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or rereading a favourite book? The internet's draw on our attention is relentless and increasingly difficult to resist.
29) The mystery of foreign languages
Sites like Babelfish offer instant, good-enough translations of dozens of languages – but kill their beauty and rhythm.
30) Geographical knowledge
With GPS systems spreading from cars to smartphones, knowing the way from A to B is a less prized skill. Just ask the London taxi drivers who spent years learning The Knowledge but are now undercut by minicabs.
31) Privacy
We may attack governments for the spread of surveillance culture, but users of social media websites make more information about themselves available than Big Brother could ever hoped to obtain by covert means.
35) Concentration
What with tabbing between Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Google News, it's a wonder anyone gets their work done. A disturbing trend captured by the wonderful XKCD webcomic.
37) Personal reinvention
How can you forge a new identity at university when your Facebook is plastered with photos of the "old" you?
42) The nervous thrill of the reunion
You've spent the past five years tracking their weight-gain on Facebook, so meeting up with your first love doesn't pack the emotional punch it once did.

when favoritest song came along

it feels

like this tonight this the possibly my favorite
little thing of a tune in my ears

and how it feels when
it feels

well of course maybe
maybe it's that these things he's
singing
have something to do
with growing up maybe

that's why I like it and how
it feels when
it feels



ptr grg knt

this is the sound of your life*

more...