Paradise

L.G.

"did you know how it made me ache inside

and how deeply I understood ?

it gave me a sharp loving-pain
when you tried so hard to stop the rain

and believed so hard that you could"

Chronicles of Shai

Stealth ninja moves.

Dali

Let me describe the perfect date:

I take her out to a nice dinner. She looks amazing. Some guy tries to hit on her... now he wants to fight- so I grab him- I throw him into the jukebox! Then the other ninja’s got a knife, he comes at me, we grapple, I turn his knife on him. Blood on the dance floor. She’s scared now. I... take her home. I’m holding her in my arms. I reach in for a kiss... I hear something in the leaves, I flip her around, she gets a poison arrow right in her back. She was in on it the whole time... but I knew.

from The Bridge: The Dance

By Hart Crane

The swift red flesh, a winter king—

Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?

She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;

She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die.

And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands

With mineral wariness found out the stone

Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands?

He holds the twilight’s dim, perpetual throne,

Mythical brows we saw retiring—loth,

Disturbed and destined, into denser green.

Greeting they sped us, on the arrow’s oath:

Now lie incorrigibly what years between . .

There was a bed of leaves, and broken play

There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride—

O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May;

And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride.

I left the village for dogwood. By the canoe

Tugging below the mill-race, I could see

Your hair’s keen crescent running, and the blue

First moth of evening take wing stealthily.

What laughing chains the water wove and threw.

I learned to catch the trout’s moon whisper; I

Drifted how many hours I never knew,

But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die,—

We danced, 0 Brave, we danced beyond their farms.

In cobalt desert closures made our vows . . .

Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,

The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.

continued...http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172029

from The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge

by Hart Crane

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

—Till elevators drop us from our day ...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced

As though the sun took step of thee yet left

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—

Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;

All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn ...

Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,

Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow

Of anonymity time cannot raise:

Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!

Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,

Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City’s fiery parcel all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year ...

Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the riles’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Be Curious

"It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious."
— Stephen W. Hawking

American University Student Newspapers Vandalized Over “Rape Apology”

In a spirited diatribe entitled “Dealing With AU’s anti-sex brigade” published yesterday in the American University Eagle, AU’s resident anti-feminist thinker, Alex Knepper, argues that feminists who rally against rape are turning act of sex into a sorry ritual in which “two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other ‘Is this OK with you?.’” According to Knepper, feminists are also responsible for stamping out the “yin and yang of masculinity and femininity [that] makes sexual exploration exciting,” abolishing passion, and also somehow discouraging “inherently gendered thrills” like erotic cross-dressing. Knepper ends the column by providing a helpful reading list for his misguided peers, including works by Camille Paglia, the Marquis de Sade, and Christina Hoff Sommers.

An unidentified member of the campus community has responded with a more direct retort: They removed copies of the paper from their stands and posted a message above them reading, “NO ROOM FOR RAPE APOLOGISTS.”

Read full article here: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/03/29/american-university-student-newspapers-vandalized-over-rape-apology/#more-9478

A James Franco 30 Rock surprise

I need this in my life, everywhere.

"What if I were smiling and running into your arms...

...would you see then what I see now?"
-Jon Krakauer

Tigers with machine guns

"Because if smart women who know how smart they are intimidate men (and they do), and beautiful women who know how beautiful they are intimidate men (and they do), there is, logically, nothing more intimidating than a woman who is fully aware that she is both smart and beautiful. I mean, maybe a room full of tigers with machine guns! That could be scarier! Or, a smart and beautiful lady who makes jokes." -Tigerbeatdown.com

My mind.

"my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell
and hearing and sight keep hitting and chipping with sharp fatal
tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of chrome and ex
-ecute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming
something a little different, in fact
myself
hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings"
-e.e. cummings

That was pure wild animal craziness.

I finally watched Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox and my goodness, it was delightful.
Who knew foxes were so darn attractive? And had such glorious dance moves?

Meet me... in Montauk...

"My embarrassing admission is I really like that you're nice, right now."

photographer Chadwick Tyler

Mathsputin

So apparently, this bearded amazement of a man, recently won $1 million in prize money for solving one of the world's most complicated math problems, the one-hundred-year-old Poincaré conjecture. This equation is so complex, in fact, that after posting his proofs in 2002 it took several years for other experts to confirm he was correct. (Which, of course, he was.)

However, Dr. Grigori Perelman is too awesome to accept the money. Notoriously reclusive and living in St. Petersburg Russia with his mother and sister, Grigori has much better things to do than worry about a million dollars cash. Just ask the representative who finally managed to speak with him. Grigori's response to the interruption (notification of awarded money)...?

"You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms."

Sounds like my kind of math genius.

"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
-V. Hugo

Not a scar

Oh touch me, touch me, good woman!
That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s
a letter of recommendation, folded up tight
-Yehuda Amichai

Dancin' all over the place

Yes, this video is old, but it never ceases to make me ridiculously happy each time I watch it.

for my friend Jordan

To the Muse

by James Wright

It is all right. All they do
Is go in by dividing
One rib from another. I wouldn’t
Lie to you. It hurts
Like nothing I know. All they do
Is burn their way in with a wire.
It forks in and out a little like the tongue
Of that frightened garter snake we caught
At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny
So long ago.

I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know:

You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back to this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don’t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
Keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn’t, I can’t bear it
Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring,
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don’t blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

Lego love meets Lennon love

Sleeping with friends

Lips on lips and eyes in eyes.