"small as a wish in a well"

"When the world is sick, can't no one be well
But I dreamt we was all, beautiful and strong."

"God give us love in the time that we have..."

That's Icelandic for "Puddle Jumpers"

One of my favorite songs of late is Sigur Ros' Hoppipola. Ridiculous song. It turns out the video makes it even better - the concept is old people behaving like out of line adolescents. So great. I knew the old folks had it in them.

It reminds me of when my grandmother and I used to go outside after it had rained and jump in puddles together. I may or may not have been only wearing a diaper.

"OG ÉG FÆ BLÓÐNASIR (Hoppípolla)
En ég stend alltaf upp (Hoppípolla)
Við sjáumst tvö
Í sjálfum mér
OG ÉG FÆ BLÓÐNASIR
Og ég stend alltaf upp
Við sjáumst tvö
Hoppípolla (til endaloka)

or english if you prefer...

And I get nosebleeds (jump into puddles)
But I always get back up (jump into puddles)
We see each other
In myself
And I get nosebleeds (jump into puddles)
But I always get back up (jump into puddles)
We see each other
Jump into puddles

The Geffen site also has a video for Glosoli, which is also very tastefully done. You Icelandics put me to creative shame.

Comfort in the Sound

Death Cab's lastest video, for Marching Bands of Manhattan is out. And it's worth a look.

"And it is true what you said
That I live like a hermit in my own head
But when the sun shines again
I'll pull the curtains and blinds to let the light in."

crime scene evidence

In case you missed it this past week, Ryan Adams was on Austin City Limits. I don't say that so that I can launch into some thoughts about how great what you missed was and how you should forever carry with you a deep regret for missing the event. I just wanted you to know that if you missed Ryan Adams on ACL last week, you can download video of the performance here:

Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: Games
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: Cold Roses
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: Hard Way To Fall
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: Call Me on Your Way Back Home
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: Now That You're Gone
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: Let It Ride
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals :: A Kiss Before I Go

All clips care of An Aquarium Drunkard, which is firmly entrenched in my pantheon of great lyric inspired blog names. (I realize the narrow scope of such a pantheon.)

It was a subdued, slightly haunting, set from Adams and company. The highlights for me were Hard Way To Fall, Call Me On Your Way Back Home, and Now That You're Gone. The video quality on these isn't perfect, but the sound is excellent. I think they would look and sound great on a video iPod, which means that this post is pretty much just for Ian, and for Paul when he gets around to getting his new white baby.

SIDENOTE: Does anyone find it ironic that the word blog is not in blogger's spell check list? That's the purest irony I've experienced all day.

Atlas Shrugged

So AT&T recently merged with SBC, creating at&t and an updated globe logo, a little ball that I cannot, despite my best efforts, get away from. The other day I saw billboards in both Spanish and English, while driving alongside a bus advertisement, and hearing talk of their new motto your world delivered on the radio. Not to mention the magazine, television, and web ads that have been slowly grating on me over the past few weeks. They must be spending a hundred million dollars making us all aware of absolutely nothing. This new at&t means little to me, and I have no idea what it means that they're delivering my world to me. I thought I was already living in my world, I wasn't aware that I was awaiting its delivery.


I appreciate the heads up on the new identity and all, but if I have to see that three-dimensional blue and white striped thing or hear the corresponding tagline five more times I just might go insane. The new at&t is close to going down in my bad blood book right after John Mayer and Napoleon Dynamite. I wish they would just pin me down, give me a tattoo of their impressionistic rendering of the earth, and move on to delivering someone else's world.

Is anyone else having a hard time with this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Elsewhere: Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Dyin' [Be A Design Group]

never underestimate a russian novelist

I've been pretty into the fact that our nation seems to be regaining a social conscience; that there seems to have been a significant uptick in our concern about the impoverished both within our own country – and probably more heavily – concern about those in the third world. This is especially true with people within the church and with people in my age group, the generation following Gen X, whatever we're called.

This makes me hopeful about our world and it's often sorry state. I'm a supporter of the One Campaign - I sport the t-shirt from time to time and send pre-written letters to my congressman. I gave my family a flock of ducks for Christmas, a cleverly disguised contribution to the good people at Heifer International. I find these, and other endeavors that Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates put their seal of approval on, to be worthy causes.

Not to discount any of these efforts in the least, but I've been wondering these past few months if we're really solving any problems. Sure these aid movements are demanding of their beneficiaries responsibility and a return on investment like never before, they're geared towards creating self-sufficiency and sustainability, but are they fixing problems or are they only mitigating symptoms? Are these efforts mere bandaids on flesh wounds?

The real question was crystallized for me during a conference call I was listening in on yesterday: is poverty just a physical problem or is it also a spiritual one? Is our world's pain and stark poverty just in need of a redistribution of the wealth? My guess is that such a solution is only a temporary one. The capitalism the west is proselytizing is, at its core, a system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is a system in which man reigns supreme, the richest men the ones who rule, who get more stuff.

Granted, free trade is important, and a worthy fight. But will this goal, fully realized, solve porverty or just distribute it more evenly around the globe? Will these pursuits not just make the poor harder to find and easier to ignore? The ultimate question is one of who is ultimately in charge. As long as mankind views mankind as the highest power there will continue to be discord, poverty, and bitter pain.

I admit these thoughts to be but partially informed and spontaneous, open to criticism. I also admit them to be heavily influenced by a speech I read this morning, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's speech to the graduating class of Harvard University in 1978. It's ridiculous how much foresight Solzhenitsyn had. He pretty much nails the progression our world has gone through over the past half-century. I hope his words won't be lost on us, they're worth careful consideration:

A World Split Apart
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Excercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978.

Also: Flag Waving SUV by Penny Carothers [Burnside Writers Collective]

1,036 words

My photo prof passed this quote on. I thought I'd share:

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."

-Willa Cather

another little hole

Interesting read today in the New York Times.

Michiko Kakutani's article comes in the wake of James Frey's admission that his Oprah Book Club worthy memoir "A Million Little Pieces" includes a healthy helping of fiction, to make it more exciting and memo(i)rable. Kakutani takes an interesting look at our culture and the continually blurring lines between fact and fiction.

An excerpt:

"James Frey's admission last week that he made up details of his life in his best-selling book "A Million Little Pieces" - after the Smoking Gun Web site stated that he "wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states' " - created a furor about the decision by the book's publishers, Doubleday, to sell the volume as a memoir instead of a novel.

It is not, however, just a case about truth-in-labeling or the misrepresentations of one author: after all, there have been plenty of charges about phony or inflated memoirs in the past, most notably about Lillian Hellman's 1973 book "Pentimento." It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth. Indeed, Mr. Frey's contention that having 5 percent or so of his book in dispute was "comfortably within the realm of what's appropriate for a memoir" and the troubling insistence of his publishers and his cheerleader Oprah Winfrey that it really didn't matter if he'd taken liberties with the facts of his story underscore the waning importance people these days attach to objectivity and veracity.

We live in a relativistic culture where television "reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the "reality-based community," can assert that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Phrases like "virtual reality" and "creative nonfiction" have become part of our language. Hype and hyperbole are an accepted part of marketing and public relations. And reinvention and repositioning are regarded as useful career moves in the worlds of entertainment and politics..."

Continue reading Bending The Truth In A Million Different Ways [NY Times]

dallas