consuming spirits

CONSUMING SPIRITS (trailer) by Chris Sullivan from chris sullivan animation on Vimeo.

You have never seen anything like it.

Film critic AO Scott in the New York Times on Chris Sullivan's animated feature Consuming Spirits.

arch(itect)

auditorium, a photo by jovivebo on Flickr.

I am not attracted by the angles or the hard and inflexible straight lines created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve, the curve which I find in the mountains of my country, in the flow of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, in the body of a woman.

The architect Oscar Niemeyer to the Spanish newspaper ABC. Niemeyer died last week a few days shy of his 105th birthday.

batem-bia

Des Moines, Iowa
State Capitol Building

a passionate and gentle voice

Whatever contact I have with hope

Is clear to me on certain mornings

When a voice slips

Into my mind like a shy

Suggestion of love

That nothing will deny.

It is a passionate and gentle voice

Authentic as a patch of sunlight 

On a floor inside a window

And it has always spoken the same words:

'I live in the stripped branch,

Dying flowers on the kitchen table,

Pools of water after a storm

Uncomprehending as children

Strayed from their parents in a crowded town.

You understand I do not exhort.

My state is one of waiting

For you, for the most part,

And I am helpless till you observe me

With your electric blood

And your eyes

Redeemed from the tedium by the desire

To know

Why something begins to stir

In utter stillness like a memory

That will not let you sleep at night

But takes possession of you

And absorbs you into itself.

So I await that morning

When you emerge

From the tired night as from a mist

Into a decision of sunlight

Where I exist.'

~ Brendan Kennelly

all the books I have convinced myself I will read during the course of my brief trip to London

It's not true, of course. If I'm lucky I'll complete one. But the sad truth is: in the age before e-books I would have actually packed them all.