Everything about you,
my life, is both
make-believe and real.
We are like a couple
working the night shift
in a bomb factory.
Come quietly, one says
to the other
as he takes her by the hand
and leads her
to a rooftop
overlooking the city.
At this hour, if one listens
long and hard,
one can hear a fire engine
in the distance,
but not the cries for help,
just the silence
growing deeper
at the sight of a small child
leaping out of a window
with its nightclothes on fire.
-Charles Simic
Boston’s Banditos Misteriosos is organizing a water gun battle with a Revolutionary War theme. It will take place on Saturday, August 16, and you can sign up for it on their site.
They explain:
The summer is heating up, thus, it is with pride that Banditos Misteriosos announces the Revolutionary Water Gun Fight.
Consider this event the combination of a good old fashioned water gun fight and the revolutionary battle of our forefathers.
Staying true to Boston’s historical roots, this water gun fight shall focus on two armies, marching and meeting each other for a battle in a specific location.
Specifics
———-Army Assignment:
Participants will be asked to register for event beforehand on the Banditos Misteriosos website (http://www.misteriosos.org). The registration form will be up by Monday, July 28th. The night before the event, emails will be sent out with army assignment and meet up location.
Supplies:- 1 empty water gun of your choice.
- At least 2 FILLED two-liter bottles (bring more if you desire!)
- 1 back-pack to hold water bottles.
- 1 bottle of bubbles.
- 1 either red or blue shirt (depending on army assignment).
- Any other revolutionary paraphernalia you don’t mind getting wet (hats, flutes, etc)
- As always, your fighting vigor and a bandana!
[Urban Prankster]
I carried my life, like a stone,
in a ragged pocket, but I
had a true weaving song, a sly
way with rhythm, a healing tone.
-Jay Wright, "The Healing Improvisation of Hair"
The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle Plush Toys
Ali al-Dabbagh said any timetable would depend on "conditions and the circumstances that the country would be undergoing." But he said a pullout within "three, four or five" years was possible.
"It can be 2011 or 2012," al-Dabbagh said. "We don't have a specific date in mind, but we need to agree on the principle of setting a deadline."
Now, by "comic" Kavanagh didn't necessarily mean something that makes you double over with laughter. He meant comic in the sense that tragedy is overcome, or, more accurately, he meant that in the deepest human tragedy there is a seed of supernatural joy.
I would like that kind of life, that kind of death.
Moby Dick has become a spa.
Slate is Grand Central Station.
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going
-- Padraic H. Pearse
[Wheaton Concert Choir sings]
The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked, and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.
The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth-
Somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.
And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I'm never coming back,
and yet
this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can't imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret something to perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
You said, though your own heart condemn you
I do not condemn you.
But Rob was intent on this very image. Rapt. He barely glanced at me. “You go on.”
That night—to some extent, that picture—changed his life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in Africa. The same night sent me in the opposite direction, at least for a time.
A conversation on the possible rationale for expensive religious architecture:
Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism: A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism. But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.
[via clusterflock]
