In appreciation of a New Year's Eve blue moon...

...and anticipation of a stellar 2010...

...we'll enjoy traditional Hoppin' Johns + Bloody Marys + collards + corn bread (with bacon) (and Irish butter) with a houseful of friends.

Once in a blue moon it all goes away. The clouds clear.... [You can make up the rest for yourself and just hum; it's a good song]

—Randy Prentice

From the Miami Herald, my old hometown newspaper...

Posted on Thursday, 12.31.09

NEW YEAR'S EVE

Rare blue moon will illuminate skies on New Year's Eve

BY SUSANNAH BRYAN

Sun Sentinel

When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, remember to do one thing: Look up. A full moon will be shining down from its highest point, illuminating the landscape.
``It will be so clear it will take your breath away,'' said Jack Horkheimer, host of the PBS show Star Gazer. ``It will be super bright and super high for us.''
It will be the second full moon of the month -- a phenomenon known as a ``blue moon.'' A full moon on New Year's Eve last occurred on Dec. 31, 1990; it won't happen again until 2028.
Horkheimer, 71, held a ``Howl at the Full Moon'' party 19 years ago for families with kids in his Miami neighborhood.
``They came in their bath robes and pajamas,'' he said.
``It was the most fun New Year's Eve I ever had in my life. Those children are now adults, and they still remember it.''
Horkheimer encourages families to ring in 2010 in similar fashion.

Those who do can send photos or videos toStarGazerHowlIn@gmail.com. Twelve winners will receive a new telescope. 

 I remember Jack Horkheimer from Miami Space Transit Planetarium. Whoa.

Best wishes for a Brand New Year, y'all!

How it tasted | Santa Rosa Beach c. 1957

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself
in the sunset.
- Crowfoot, 1890


And what is sweetest in the mid-1950s? The same ... plus a long drive with pillows in the back of a two-tone station wagon, Dramamine knocking us silly, relentless winter sun, reflections in the water, skinny legs, treasures from the sea, bathing suits all one color, sisters with hair blunt cut at home, mother drinking in the saline days, pimento cheese sandwiches, Dad's prescience with the movin' picture camera.

The Conch Shell in the Room

I forgot to post this grainy photo. Coconut Grove c. 1969. It was a very good year.

Fewer than 70°

And the sheets are flannel. Everyone is pulling on sweaters at the beach.

People are eating filet mignon in lieu of shrimp...

....and reading.

The Cinnamon Peeler

...by Michael Ondaatje. You really might want to read it.

We all have a renewed and substantial hunger.


You could eat 15 bean soup. Acorn squash + olive oil + butter + garlic + salt/pepper. Cranberry scones. Feisty Rooibos chai from Pekoe Sip House (order by phone). Walnut halves in a cast iron skillet + butter + kosher salt. Cauliflower gratin. Roasted beet salad. Risotto with winter squash. Roasted asparagus + parmigiano reggiano with scrambled eggs. Pan seared scallops. Sweet potatoes + sour cream + caramelized onions. Rustic fruit tarts. Toasted marshmallows. The ultimate: David Eyre's Pancake. Look at the photos. You'll need to make this. And then you'll need to make it again.

Into the night

Welcome to the neighborhood. It was an old ragtop flying through this October night.

Vroom.

.

.

.

I've missed you! | Intersections

 

Click, scroll down, look on the right and listen (Listen for free) to :30 clips of The Beatles: Rock Band remastered. What a wonderful thing to have been born at the perfect intersection of the ultimate rock band and Bob Dylan.

Feed your head. — Jefferson Airplane

Time is the longest distance between two places. — Tennessee Williams 

May you stay forever young. —Robert Zimmerman

Meet Colette | The Blue Lantern

Friday, Oct. 18, 1963

Books: Regarde

THE BLUE LANTERN by Colette. 161 pages. Farrar, Straus. $3.95.

The last word uttered by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette on her deathbed in Paris in 1954 was "regarde." To her, it meant to look, feel, wonder, accept, live. For all her 81 years she obeyed that injunction with an immense, daylight sense of reality and a pagan delight in the sensuous experiences that delivered the world to her mind and to the blue note paper on which she recorded it. The Blue Lantern, written between 1946 and 1948 and now translated into English for the first time, is Colette's last major work—a moving but unsentimental record of how it was with a poet of the senses whose senses were failing...

So many eggs to crack

.



.

Sweltering on the Florida Panhandle....

Photo: Fred Sawyer

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.

—John Berger

Bowl, hairline fracture

I photographed the gardenia for a week as it swam and shrunk and migrated to the far side of the bowl. And then I saw the crack that said I now had only 3 usable, intact iterations of this favorite white vessel. I must have an odd number of everything now. Stemware, silver, linen napkins become gossamer... It's that we keep what we love as it matures and eventually comes undone. We're all bruised and fractured and cracked. It's how we stay interesting.

When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the

damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe

that when something's suffered damage and has a history it

becomes more beautiful.

— Barbara Bloom

On my dentist's advice, I once had a porcelain crown replaced with gold. My dentist told me the gold crown was softer and would last longer. It did. Bend. Don't break.



This flower, not better. Just earlier. Younger. Lying over the crack.

If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Too serious?


In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner.
If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's
on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak
with an accent.
— Roman Polanski

True.

-30-

Lace

Origami Bird Takes Flight

Go, little bird!

The simplified form of Bernoulli's equation can be summarized in the following memorable word equation:

static pressure + dynamic pressure = total pressure

Basically, to get a good Cuban cigar—swim or fly. Visit Hemingway's Finca Vigia just outside Havana / Habana. Quickly.

I love a cow

I especially love a cow in Polaroid.
Or 3.5 cows in Polaroid.

May the canny souls trying to obtain the stuff necessary to make the film, succeed.
May the canny souls trying to obtain the stuff necessary to make the film succeed. (Ambiguous, huh?)
May the canny souls trying to obtain the stuff necessary to make the film succeed in doing so.

I'm thinking it's a...

....crash.

Blue Monkey's Maiden Flight | Rare Daytime Post

The Blue Monkey did indeed fly among Honorable Mentions at Digital Graffiti 2009 / Alys Beach last Saturday. And, hey, the Finalists and Winners were truly spectacular. Congratulations!


An aside: I realize now that Blue Monkey is actually turquoise, but Turquoise Monkey's Maiden Flight lands on the ear with a bit of a thud.

What's in a name, huh?

r e p o s t : Digital Graffiti 2008 + 2009

.
Digital Graffiti 2008 —

Imagine you're at Alys Beach on the Gulf of Mexico with the waves slapping on the sand. Imagine it's your photography on that wall.

Whoa.


Digital Graffiti 2009 —

Think: multiple color-saturated beachside drive-ins on foot + VJ Shantell Martin + drinks + architecture

Saturday, June 6
8:30-midnight
Alys Beach, Florida

Look for my short, very short animation 'Blue Monkey's Maiden Flight' in the courtyard.

Hey, it's fun & frolic! Be there.




Photos: Fred Sawyer

7 AM

Ephemera

High school
when it meant something : dress code, effort, mandatory second language,
necessary work-arounds and tricks
essentially innocent though not at all so
not so at all

when
born old

Luck

I caught a reflection.
Actually I caught a slew of reflections.
The orchid caught my eye.

Kiss 'em goodbye for a bit

Say farewell to the briny-sweet Apalachicola Bay oyster for a few months. Sublimate with boards of Gorgonzola dolce + honey + prosciutto + melon until fall. Make lunch of tomato + mozzarella + basil caprese with olive oil and baguette. Halve avocados, splash on the hot sauce, sprinkle with diced Vidalia onion and salt. An avocado is its own bowl. Get trays and pop out ice cubes of ruby pomegranate juice. Buy a seltzer water bottle and spritz fruity syrups. Eat after sundown. Drink a lot of sangria. Drink a lot.

It's hot out there. Even now, it's hot.



PS Most bottled waters are somebody else's tap water so get a filter for your kitchen sink. Plastic bottles are forever. Save a dinosaur.

More pearls and a longtime delusion

Beware the urge to check your pleasant word in the dictionary. The familiar one you believe you know so clearly that you'd never researched it. But you don't know. Not really.

All my life—forever, until today—I've believed the surface of a pearl was formed of the magical.creamy.delicious French nacre. But no. Nacre is mother of pearl and lines the lovely shells we used as ashtrays on screened porches circled with windchimes. Fine, but nacre is not a pearl and no one smokes any longer, so I plant succulents in the shells. Briefly. They advance quickly from shallow shells to celadon pots. There's another word I won't look up. Celadon. And shagreen. Onion skin. Penultimate.

I prefer innocence. Illusion. Delusion. I prefer nacre as the surface of my pearls. Or glow.

I checked a thesaurus. There is no synonym listed for 'moonlight.'

Spring arrives in music + impossible greens

"Suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is" —Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons





Music for this springtime:

• Van Morrison — Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl
• Madeleine Peyroux — Bare Bones
• Jolie Holland — the living and the dead
• Neko Case — Middle Cyclone
• Avett Brothers — Mignonette
• Heartless Bastards — The Mountain
• David Byrne & Brian Eno — Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
• Lucinda Williams + Shelby Lynne — YouTube, Still I Long for Your Kiss
  
• + a bottle of wine
  

People, places, thinkin' | Independent Lens

Lions and tigers and bears ... who cares? PBS does. A PBS hour or two of who is caring about something. Irresistible.

Frog went a-courtin'...

...and he did ride, uh-huh.


I feel silly, oh, so silly.

Wallflowers | long-term potentiation | Memories

I was concerned about sentimentality and photos of roses — or more truthfully, my grandmother and the Windsor Rose nail polish that she wore always and forever. But everyone has a grandmother and a memory or two, the persistence of which is unlikely by any measure, but there it is like Windsor Rose. And the incessant smoking, occasionally with a cigarette holder or possibly cherry tobacco tamped into a carved wood gargoylesque ladie's pipe with semi-precious stone eyes or shrimp cocktail with Saltines or wearing heels and sporting pearl earrings while watering the lawn with an impossibly ugly green hose.... This is the grandmother who taught me to pack her pipe and smoke it. She gave me that pipe by the time I was 10. I lost it or gave it to a friend.

Today I read a NYTimes blog regarding memory. There are currenlty 186 readers' comments posted, but if you sort for Editors' Selections, you might read a dozen or so and then be not quite able to turn off the thought process.

So I quit even thinking the blurry shots might be sentimental.

Petrichor and Merriam-Webster and me

I'm puzzled.

There is a definition for 'petrichor' here and a singular place for it in A.Word.A.Day but no definition at Merriam-Webster online except obliquely as the root (second) 'ichor' 2 : an ethereal fluid taking the place of blood in the veins of the ancient Greek gods.

Possibly it has to work its way into Oxford English Dictionary to be deemed a part of our lexicon. I venture it's in OED. Does anyone subscribe?

Ichor but no petrichor.

You know petrichor like you know rain, earth, air. Don't you?

Another poem...

...begs reading. You might need to maximize its format [larger/smaller] for optimal viewing. You'll know it when you see it.

More pearls and Albert Einstein

This may be the end of the pearls for now. This manipulation, when I am in that sleepy-but-still-pondering place, reminds me of Einstein in his elevator being hauled through time/space — which makes me think of the poem that sent me off into the back alleys of the internets to read about the man in his less lofty moments.

More pearls [with lyrics & interruption]

After a while / you just can't help but smile
As you watch things go around / mmm mmm (lost to time)

Once in a blue moon / it all goes away
The clouds clear / I can see my way

—rp/ch Coconut Grove, c. 1971

...and a Florida-only fly-thing-lette walks into my shot. Just lucky, I guess.

Flying Fish

Forest for the trees...

It's never occurred to me to leave home to make art. —Sally Mann