today, the brightness

The sun and sky in Santa Fe are bold things, taking precedence over house, road, shrub. The light yesterday evening before the movie theater (we saw Child's Pose) demanded attention. Today, the brightness has overtaken the adobe homes, the blossoming branches, the pepper garlands hanging in the courtyards.

I'm in New Mexico with Ilene! Tomorrow, hot springs and one-lane mountain roads on our way to Arizona.

in concert

I ended up at the funniest little concert Tuesday night, a klezmer/bluegrass trio in the basement of the synagogue at 53 Charles Street in the West Village. Andy Statman played clarinet and mandolin, accompanied by a drummer and a bassist. There were fewer than ten of us in the audience, though I've heard there's usually a crowd. We were ushered through a dark corridor and into a long room lined with books, old photographs, boxes of napkins and plastic cutlery, board games and menorahs, and a mess of paintings propped up wherever they would fit. Upon arrival, Herman, the synagogue president, immediately opened the liquor cabinet, shuffling through dusty bottles of scotch and rum (so strong!) and passing them around.

Andy will be back in the basement tonight (Thursday), probably around 9 PM. Don't worry if you arrive on time and the place looks empty - on Tuesday, at five past nine, the doors were locked, and we had resigned ourselves to just having a wine picnic on the synagogue steps when Herman pulled up in his minivan, rolled down the window and yelled out that he'd let us in as soon as he found a parking spot.

Andy Statman Trio

53 Charles Street

Thursday March 13

9 PM or thereabouts

Recommended donation is $15 if you can. Go!

And thank you, Danny, for this strange and wonderful discovery.


Split Decision by Kayla Varley

american songster

Last week, I went to see this guy (up there), Dom Flemons, and his banjo at Greenwich House, a music school and community center in the West Village. He was playing with Eli "Paperboy" Reed as part of the Café au Go Go Revisited festival, which is featuring different musicians every Thursday until April 24.

I'd been wanting to see him for awhile, having discovered his old group, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, while procrastinating on a work assignment at my internship last summer. He was more than what I imagined him being, a blues man, a soul singer, a string-picker, a bone-shaker.

He'll be back in New York at the Brooklyn Folk Festival April 18, and of course I'm going. He's touring now - see him if you can.

And here's the video that brought me to him:

P.S. The Chocolate Drops will be playing at BAM April 10!

l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux

The Morgan Library and Museum has up a Little Prince exhibit until the end of April. A nice collection of Antoine de St. Exupery's sketches and illustrations are on view along with a handful of photographs, letters, and biographical anecdotes of the funny man who dreamed up one of French literature's most iconic bonhommes. Very exciting to see all of those drawings in the flesh - the lonely Rose, the Fox who wanted to be tamed, my favorite Baobab trees, and of course the boa constrictor who ate the elephant.

I went last week on a very cold day with my friend Ilene (whose Tumblr I'll fawn over another time) and my Bangladeshi countryman, Sham. It was a special visit for Sham, who doesn't read this blog, so I can tell you a few things about him. He owns the Belgian beer bar Vol de Nuit in the Village, named after another of St. Exupery's books. He also once traveled from Dhaka to Strasbourg by bicycle, a three-year journey with weeks-long stopovers in friendly lands and near-death experiences in the Afghan desert. He washed dishes and cleaned houses as he went along, and he was jailed in India for 15 days because he didn't have a visa. India alone took him nine months to cross, a vast country.

He'd hate my reducing those years to an internet-byte, but I thought you had to know.

General admission to the Morgan's exhibits (there's also one on woodcuts) is $12, a bit steep I think but worth it if you're a deep appreciator of the book, and a lot of people are.

And a tribute to the Prince's lovely Rose: 

Anaïs and Henry

"His passion runs through a chill, intellectual world like lava. It's his passion which seems important to the world today. It raises his book to the level of a natural phenomenon, like a cyclone, an earthquake. Today the world is chilled by mind and by analysis. His passion may save it, his appetite for life, his lust."

Anaïs Nin makes me want to read Henry Miller. I've only been reading women lately - Anaïs (we're on a first name basis, don't you know?), Lydia Davis, Alice Munro - and I should expand. Volume One of her diary is alive with Henry - he's living in it, and I feel I know him. I know that he didn't care to know other writers ("What would they see in me?"), that he watched acrobats dance naked in their slippers, that he slept in train stations and brothels, that he strained his eyes proofreading at a newspaper. Anaïs gave him her typewriter and bought him shoes, though her brother Joaquin, a concert pianist, didn't approve.

I'm looking forward to taking Tropic of Cancer on holiday with me next month.

photograph of Cascade Resort

there must be someone

"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.”

- Frida Kahlo

Also, I'm reading the diary of Anaïs Nin, and I'm pretty sure they would have been friends if geography had allowed.

 Rei Kawakubo

silence and noise

First off, a siren:

In college, I was a student liaison for the Yale World Fellows program. We welcomed, each academic year, some of the most talented and forward-thinking policy leaders from around the world to meet and dialogue in an effort to address pressing global issues related to political freedom, human rights, economic development, and the environment. Today, I learned that one of our Fellows, Carlos Vecchio of Venezuela, is in trouble. Carlos is currently the de facto leader of the Venezuelan opposition party, Voluntad Popular (VP), since the party leader, Leopoldo López, was taken into custody on February 18. There is an official warrant out for his arrest.

The World Fellows office is concerned for Carlos' safety. They say that he is in hiding in Venezuela with limited access to communication. They are worried that he is in danger because unlike Lòpez, he is not an internationally recognizable figure. They have asked us (citizens of the internet) to spread the word about Carlos' situation. Here are links to Amnesty's call for action and the Yale World Fellows' memo. Send them around. You can never know who you will reach.

What is the internet for, if not for this?

And secondly, a meditation I wanted to share with you. It's called "The Healing Power of Silence" (mind silence, distinguishable from political silence), and it's led by Sister Jayanti, a member of the Brahma Kumaris spiritual group. It's something I come back to when I have a prolonged period of anxiety (sometimes) or a sudden bout of devotion to self-care (less often).

Normally I don't like guided meditation (or meditation, for that matter), as the ambient sounds and gentle voices often have a paradoxically irritating effect on me. I'm also hopelessly restless, and as soon as I'm supposed to clear my mind, I want to think about which shoes would go best with my harem pants and whether I should bring my Criminal Procedure book home or leave it at school because it's heavy and I never actually read it at breakfast.

But Sister Jayanti's voice is wonderful (at least I react wonderfully to it), and when she leads me to that proverbial tranquil place, I find that I can follow her quite easily.

My mother joined the Brahma Kumaris a few years ago when she was living in Oxford. They have outposts around the world, and if you're in search of a supportive (and not at all dogmatic) spiritual community, you may want to look them up.

the healing power of silence

photograph/collage by Carlota Bird