tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45449511232639492752024-03-13T19:01:24.111-07:00welcome to the museum of joyHello, friend! You've reached the archived blog of <a href="http://themuseumofjoy.org">The Museum of Joy</a>. While the Museum is still thriving, this blog is no longer updated. Why not <a href="http://themuseumofjoy.org/join.html">join our delightful spam-free mailing list</a> to stay updated?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-4295550058555262012014-06-10T17:23:00.000-07:002014-06-15T10:09:43.839-07:00harmony in the midst of dissonance<i>This past Saturday, our Artist in Residence, 18-year-old singer Jens Ibsen, unveiled his first happening for the Museum of Joy. I want to offer him & his singers my deepest thanks for their hard work, their talent, and for making this happening possible. </i><br />
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<div style="align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/97890317" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> </div>
<br />
The principle behind this piece is simple: we've been given this idea that there are places that art doesn't belong, that certain places are too loud, too ugly, too busy being <i>functional </i>for any kind of frippery like art. The determination to<i> make</i> art, even imperfectly, in a place that seems categorically unsuitable for it is a way to defy the maxim that art belongs only in a special kind of hallowed, consecrated, and basically elitist space.<br />
<br />
Classical music, in particular, suffers from this kind of <i>marble hall syndrome</i>; opera and the symphony are the finest of fine arts, the most rarefied and expensive and inaccessible, the one we never seem to see anywhere but a fancy stage in a vast, clean, traditional sort of concert hall. People think it's boring because it is handed down as <i>fancy</i>, and there's so rarely a chance to come across it suddenly and marvelously, to <i>discover</i> it in all its glory.<br />
<br />
There are a few exceptions to this, notably in the form of flashmobs in countries where the arts are better funded, like Austria's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJNp5UKRtbQ&feature=kp" target="_blank">Carmina Burana</a> - though the amount of confetti makes me feel bad for the janitors - and Spain's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBaHPND2QJg" target="_blank">Ode to Joy</a>. But the fact remains that most people don't go out of their way to see classical music, and classical music is not well-known for coming to the people. After all, classical music is something <i>refined</i>, something <i>classy</i>, something actively opposed to the noise, dirt, and stress of urban life, right? Doesn't it need to be done somewhere <i>quiet</i>? You're not supposed to do it in a noisy, dirty, ugly, dissonant place like, say, a train station.<br />
<br />
To bring something wholly beautiful in a space we consider fundamentally improper for such things seems to me to be a simple way to protest the enforced ugliness of civic space and the accompanying implication that art is for those with the time, money, and leisure to go seek it out where it's supposed to live - in galleries and museums and theaters and other places with ticket prices. (That's why I suggested to Jens that we stage it at Civic Center station, incidentally - it's the station that serves the SF opera house, and I thought the contrast would make something of a point.)<br />
<br />
But it's not just speaking up for the importance of <i>accessibility</i> that makes bringing something like this to a train platform a radical act. It's also, well, it's one thing to go into a shiny marble symphony hall built specifically to optimize the sound of a piece of music and hear a piece you knew perfectly well was going to sound amazing, and quite another thing to go into a space you generally loathe, a space that signifies boredom and grunge at best and misery at worst, and find that suddenly something extraordinary is happening there.<br />
<br />
Because the train station is, in fact, an incredible venue in which to hear this music. The sounds of the trains arriving and departing turn out to be in strange and beautiful harmony with the voices singing. The echoey concrete box of the station has a kind of resonance all its own. And it's precisely <i>because</i> it's so improbable, so inappropriate, so radically unlike the space we think this music needs to be in order to sound good that it's so moving. It's not beautiful <i>despite</i> the noise and grime; the beauty and serenity of the piece are actively amplified by it.<br />
<br />
BART stations really are unusually ugly, even for train stations (<a href="http://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Art_in_BART_April2013.pdf" target="_blank">this 2013 report on art in the BART system</a> makes that pathetically clear). Their apparent idea of art is something like the giant rope installation at Embarcadero Station - a thing you can stick in the corner and feel good about because Public Art!, then fail to maintain for forty years and <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Huge-rope-sculpture-to-be-removed-from-5539754.php" target="_blank">take it down against the artist's protests because it got dirty</a>. But they are also hostile spaces when it comes to art in other ways: try dancing on a BART car and you might end up like Nubia Bowe, the 19-year-old who was brutally beaten by police because she was <i><a href="http://postnewsgroup.com/blog/2014/04/25/girl-suspected-dancing-bart-arrested-assaulted-officer/" target="_blank">misidentified as someone dancing on a train in Oakland</a>. </i>The fact that she was innocent - and that other passengers were corroborating the fact that it wasn't her - makes it worse, absolutely. But even if she <i>hadn't</i> been innocent, if in fact she <i>had</i> been dancing, she would have been no more deserving of violence or punishment. I've seen the kids dancing on trains in Oakland. Are they loud? Sure. Are they "disruptive"? Sure. Do they ask for money? Yes. They are, however, amazing dancers, and they rarely perform for more than one or two stops. The idea that somebody would want them <i>arrested </i>for it is appalling.<br />
<br />
But it doesn't surprise me. Making art without permission is always an act of defiance, because it's a way of saying <i>this is my place</i>. And if you're not the kind of person who is seen as an arbiter of culture - if you're brown or Black, for example, or poor - then your desire to have your voice heard and your self-expression seen is a threat. And as forums for alternative expression shrink away in the white heat of the tech boom, there are fewer and fewer places to make yourself known. Galleries and community arts spaces all over the city are being evicted or priced out; the number of places you can go for art outside a museum is shrinking, not least because artists can no longer afford to live here. Access to a creative life is becoming a luxury in San Francisco, and as far as I'm concerned, that's why it's more important than ever to take art outdoors in protest.<br />
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To say that art belongs to everyone - even, or maybe especially, the hallowed fine arts like classical music - is still radical. If you're working two jobs to afford your apartment, you don't have money for a museum ticket or time to make art. If your kids go to an underfunded public school, chances are they don't get art classes. If you're worried about making ends meet, your creative life is going to get deprioritized. And as the economic gap widens, so does access to the time, leisure, and resources to spend on expressing yourself, experiencing beauty or meaning, and discovering what makes being human worthwhile in the first place.<br />
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And so bringing art into the places it's not supposed to be is desperately important. It's a way of claiming ownership, of refusing to let the soul wither despite the harshness of conditions. It's a way of saying <i>I matter, and you matter, and we can make this place matter</i>. It's a breaking of rules, both spoken and unspoken, that say <i>you can't do that here</i>. You know, a man came up to me after this performance almost in tears. "What <i>was</i> that?" he asked me. "Where did that come from? What kind of music is that? I've never heard anything like it." And maybe he hadn't. Or maybe it was just that he had never heard it <i>here</i>, in the last place he expected to hear something beautiful.<br />
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To experience delight and wonder just where it seems least likely, where it does not seem to belong, where we are farthest from it - that seems to be a fundamental human need. It's how we tell ourselves that things can be better than we had dared to hope for. It's the way we know the universe might have some gifts left to spare for us. Discovering something wonderful where you had not thought or dreamed or expected it could be - that's as good a definition of joy as any I can offer.<br />
<br />
with love,<br />
Jericha<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: arial, sans, sans-serif; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; white-space: pre-wrap;">"While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: arial, sans, sans-serif; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; white-space: pre-wrap;" />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: arial, sans, sans-serif; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; white-space: pre-wrap;">- James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"</span><br />
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<i>For more videos of this happening, including one from the 2nd performance at Embarcadero Station, visit the Museum's <a href="http://vimeo.com/themuseumofjoy" target="_blank">Vimeo page</a>!</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-61558506896370060012014-05-26T16:08:00.003-07:002014-05-26T16:14:49.988-07:00The Library of Joy: ReflectionsToday is the last day to <a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2014/05/memorial-lanterns-invitation-to.html" target="_blank" title="You can do it now. I'll wait.">send in your memories to the Memorial Lanterns project</a>! Which reminds me, I sort of, um, forgot to ever mention what happened with LAST month's happening.<br>
<br>
Which is a shame, because the Library of Joy happening was marked by a particular fortuitousness, and I'm so happy with how it turned out. Thanks again, and a million, to the <a href="http://www.awesomefoundation.org/" target="_blank">Awesome Foundation </a>for the funding that made it possible! Getting the grant from them last fall was just the first lovely thing: when the time to actually produce the work rolled around, it turned out that the day I had picked for optimal distribution of shiny eggs containing tiny books throughout San Francisco's public libraries was also the last day of National Library Week. So in addition to being seasonally appropriate (it being the weekend of both Passover and Easter, two holidays in which eggs figure rather prominently), the project - apparently of its own volition - became a special sort of love poem for the library system.<br>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Jh2APCNEGSU/U4PEohGa1GI/AAAAAAAACyA/iieOJTvzfg8/s1600/SFPL_Richmond_Library_of_Joy_6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Jh2APCNEGSU/U4PEohGa1GI/AAAAAAAACyA/iieOJTvzfg8/s1600/SFPL_Richmond_Library_of_Joy_6.jpg" height="400" width="246"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Richmond branch of the SFPL put this up on<br>
their Facebook when they discovered the eggs.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I didn't mean for this happen, but I love that it did. I mean, libraries are a kind of museum of joy in and of themselves. They're highly publicly accessible, often beautiful, and filled with the compiled memories, dreams, imaginings, and experiences of humanity. And they're that rare thing, a place where you can walk in and get whatever fragment of beauty or meaning you want -- for FREE. I spent a lot of time in libraries as a kid. They're shelters for anyone who needs time to be in a world of their own -- as many kids (and adults) do. So I'm really glad it happened this way, and it made the creation of the books an extra joy (as if I needed more reasons).<br>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2014/05/the-library-of-joy-reflections.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-7338948029771027582014-05-08T10:20:00.000-07:002014-05-18T17:45:31.425-07:00Memorial Lanterns: invitation to participate<i>UPDATE: Deadline to send in your memories EXTENDED through Sunday, May 25th!</i><br /><br />On the last day of May, paper lanterns will be appearing in trees in Golden Gate Park, one of the most beautiful public spaces in San Francisco. These lanterns are a little bit special: they'll be made from memories. Every glowing light among the leaves will be the story of a moment of joy someone shared with a loved one who has since passed on.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Maxfield_Parrish--The_Lantern-Bearers,_1908.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="The Lantern Bearers by Maxfield Parrish (1908, public domain), via Wikimedia Commons"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Maxfield_Parrish--The_Lantern-Bearers,_1908.jpg" height="400" width="297" /></a></div>
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I would like to invite you to add your words to our illuminated forest. If you have a memory of a moment you shared with a loved one that still lights you up inside, I would love to make it literally luminous by turning it into a lantern. <br />
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<b>The How</b>: Sending in your memory for lantern-ing is simple. You can write about a single memory of a moment of joy with someone you've lost, or multiple moments, or go wild with the concept and write whatever the heck feels like it matters. Use a quote from someone else if it fits your feelings better. It can be a friend, family, a partner, anyone who mattered to you, a recent loss or one from long ago. All that matters for this project is that you shared a moment with them that still glows inside you somewhere. <br />
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Send your words via email to <b>memorial@themuseumofjoy.org</b>. That's it! You can also send a picture (jpeg files only, please) and and a name and dates too if that feels important to you.<br />
<br />
(If you'd like a visual on what the lanterns will look like, they'll be something like <a href="http://wwwdesignspongecom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/lantern8.jpg" target="_blank">this</a>.)<br />
<br />
<b>The When & Where</b>:<br />
Send in your words by <b>May 20th, 2014.</b> The lanterns will be hung the evening of <b>May 31st, 2014</b> in a spot in Golden Gate Park to be disclosed closer to the actual date. Everyone who sends a memory will receive an email with the exact location. <br />
<br />
We will be attempting to take photos worthy of your memories to create a virtual version of the illuminated grove of lanterns as well for anyone who can't actually be there in person. <br />
<br />
<b>The Who:</b><br />
<i>Memorial Lanterns</i> is the May event for The Museum of Joy, a San Francisco-based arts organization that creates monthly art "happenings" to foster and celebrate joyous experience in public space. <br />
<br />
<b>The Why</b>:<br />
Because the moments of joy we share give us something to hang on to when we're in pain. Because our cities can always use a few more reminders of what makes us human. Because the people we love illuminate the dark times in our lives. Because we all need lights in the dark sometimes. <br />
<br />
Please feel free to <a href="mailto:contact@themuseumofjoy.org">get in touch</a> with any questions, and share the info with anyone you feel might like to participate. All are welcome. The more lanterns, the better.<br />
<br />
with thanks & love,<br />
Jericha<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-33917814546361023742014-03-31T08:00:00.000-07:002014-03-31T08:00:01.840-07:00April Happening: The Library of Joy<i>This post originally appeared on the March 21st edition of the <a href="http://insatiablebooksluts.com/2014/03/21/library-joy-wants-help-make-tiny-books" target="_blank">Insatiable Booksluts</a> blog</i><br>
<br>
I’d like you to do something for me. Just real quick, I mean honestly-five-seconds fast. Open up a google image search in a new tab and type in miniature books. Glance at the results. Just a brief little browse. Then come back here. I’ll wait.<br>
<br>
Okay, you’re back. Is your pulse raised? Is your heart full of longing? Do you feel covetous and greedy as a child with someone else’s shiny toys? I hope you do. Because if there’s one experience that seems to be common among readers, no matter how diverse their desires otherwise, it’s the throb of delight brought on by tiny books.<br>
<br>
TINY BOOKS! Why are they so magical, exactly? My theory is that something happens when you take an object that is powerful in its own right and you shrink it down: somehow the amount of power in it doesn’t shrink with it, and so the tiny version is not only just as potent but somehow more so, because there’s this itty bitty thing containing all the vitality and energy of something much larger. That’s a kind of magic. Think of amulets in the shape of animals or human hands or hearts or eyes, like Zuni fetishes and milagros, versus a dollhouse miniature of a table and chair: the furniture might be cute, but tables and chairs don’t mean anything by themselves, so the small version isn’t something you’d carry around with you as a good luck charm or a talisman against evil. But a tiny silver heart, or a minute stone animal, has a special aura to it that comes from the liveliness of the thing it represents – both physically and spiritually, or at least metaphysically – being packed into something you can fit in a walnut shell.)*<br>
<br>
Okay, sure, maybe, but whatever. TINY BOOKS ARE AWESOME, AMIRITE? Right. Okay, now do me another favor. Imagine you’re in your favorite bookstore. Or you’re at the library checking out a reference volume. Or you’re a kid at the laundromat picking through the faded, dog-eared romance novels on the one bedraggled take-a-book-leave-a-book shelf. You’re just browsing. Nothing’s leaping out.<br>
<br>
And then you spot it. Tucked away on the shelf is an Easter egg. A bright, shiny, brand-new Easter egg.<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://insatiablebooksluts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/800px-Washi_Egg_Japan_US_2.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/zklypFBW0Sh5YxM35FODMvQvntALaYza8DB1yrugSvOZu-oC0ec6i0JyYvRFTzvylkvU7h4MiCdYORemtlj5LCNS2k6asdFhuJDFXFUeOdDOhvQ4I4l4iXF_uMODaE__A0I1Sl7bjk7whA1xkUuVgzCFCMk"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An egg like this one! <br>
By Brianjester (Own work) [<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/" target="_blank">CC-BY-SA-3.0</a> ],<br>
via Wikimedia Commons </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You pick it up, of course. There’s definitely something in it. You open it up – and there’s a tiny book inside. The book, a little slip of paper informs you, is a volume in a series calledThe Library of Joy, and it’s the tale of someone’s singular, wild, honest, heartfelt, joyous experience. And it belongs, you lucky finder you, to you.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2014/03/april-happening-library-of-joy.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-89024246050575200682014-03-22T16:42:00.001-07:002014-03-22T16:42:38.570-07:00March Happening: Mystery Dances At 7:45 pm on March 28th, 29th, and 30th, something unexpected is going to happen in a neighborhood of San Francisco known and beloved for its many kinds of performance. Here's a little clue:<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hUByViNiXt0/Uy4dIRZZW6I/AAAAAAAACs0/lj2xCWvBwMA/s1600/1901254_681469612498_80617602_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hUByViNiXt0/Uy4dIRZZW6I/AAAAAAAACs0/lj2xCWvBwMA/s1600/1901254_681469612498_80617602_n.jpg" height="400" width="298" /></a></div>
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If you don't know where I'm standing, that's okay. This isn't the kind of performance you buy tickets to. It's something you stumble across, something you catch out of the the corner of your eye as you're leaving a theater or exiting a train...the kind of improbable event we all dream of seeing in a city and sometimes, if we're lucky, manage to glimpse. Cities are such strange and wonderful and brutal places, full of magic and suffering, and all my life I've loved the sense one gets (especially at night) that <i>anything at all </i>could happen; there's a door into a junkshop with an alchemist's kitchen in the back, a stairway up to a secret garden, a window from which spills the music of some forbidden, haunting instrument. In a city, if you look just right, you may see dancers, acrobats, or angels. This is why living in a city is worth the money and the dirt and the disenchantment: because sometimes, every so often, something senselessly beautiful <i>actually happens</i>.<br /><br />The Museum of Joy, unsurprisingly, wants to get in on this. This is what the <b>happenings</b> we do are all about: the joy of an unexpected gift that you didn't do anything special to deserve but get to have anyway because sometimes life is like that. That's what <a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2014/02/love-poems-for-strangers.html" target="_blank">Poemflowers</a> was for; that's what our April event, the <a href="http://themuseumofjoy.org/library_of_joy.html" target="_blank">Library of Joy</a>, is all about. And our March event, the Mystery Dance, is all about it too. Following in the tradition of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoC5Oyf_ss" target="_blank">West Side Story</a>, in which the street itself becomes a glorious stage, <a href="http://www.blackhoodygrrl.com/" target="_blank">our choreographer</a> has created...well, I don't want to tell you too much, but it involves some rad hats. Keep your eyes open - maybe we'll see you there...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-7149192034574329612014-03-10T09:00:00.000-07:002014-03-10T09:00:08.056-07:00May Happening: MemorialIf there's anything the Museum loves, it's fortuitousness. That's why I was so delighted when the very fabulous Hunter Franks, founder of the <a href="http://www.neighborhoodpostcardproject.com/" target="_blank">Neighborhood Postcard Project</a>, finagled me an introduction to the founder of the <a href="http://www.thehopechronicles.org/" target="_blank">Hope Chronicles</a>, an extremely cool project that asks the simple question "What do you hope for?" as a opening for compassion through conversation.<br>
<br>
If you know me at all, you know that I struggle sometimes with words like "hope" and "compassion" and yes, "joy" too, and that one of my great fears in life is winding up misquoted on someone's inspirational Facebook page in Papyrus font (or worse, Comic Sans... *shudder*) on a picture of a flower or a girl jumping on a beach. You know, the kind of thing that shows up on <a href="http://yoganonymous.com/12-habits-of-healthy-happy-people-who-dont-give-a-sht-about-your-inner-peace/" target="_blank" title="I can't even begin to tell you how much I wish I'D written this article.">Inspirational Quote Bingo cards</a>. When I talk about the Museum, one of the first things I try to express is that what I mean by "joy" isn't double-plus happiness, it's the feeling of being broken open by something inexplicably wild and vast and painfully lovely. Joy is a transcendent feeling precisely because you can't fit it inside yourself, because it's too big for you and it spills over the edges, and that's where you get that sense of being part of something bigger - because it kinda <i>breaks</i> you, you crack open with the size of it (and yeah, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ma5tF6TJpA" target="_blank">that's how the light gets in</a>, etc.) It's not necessarily a happy<i> </i>feeling, and it's not always a pretty or even a pleasant feeling; joy, as I define joy anyway, is <i>bigger than that</i>, dammit, it's overwhelming and a little frightening and glorious and revelatory and those things depend on a certain degree of unmanageability.<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F0jOc0eXrdY/UxzV84osqPI/AAAAAAAACro/t5iKObCJO58/s1600/Chapel_of_the_Chimes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F0jOc0eXrdY/UxzV84osqPI/AAAAAAAACro/t5iKObCJO58/s1600/Chapel_of_the_Chimes.jpg" height="305" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Chapel of the Chimes is, as usual, my first thought on contemplating<br>the connection between loveliness and pain: it's one of the most beautiful<br>places in this country, and it's a columbarium, a storehouse for the ashes<br>of the dead. Picture by me. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
So it was really exciting to hear Sam Lundquist, the founder of the Hope Chronicles, use the word <i>raw</i> to talk about his conversations about hope. I like the word <i>raw</i>. I like it because words like <i>raw</i> point to exactly that unprettiness, that larger-and-more-deep-down-true feeling that hasn't had its edges polished off and its meaning wrapped up in a tidy package with a picture of a dandelion or perfectly tanned model jumping in a field with a big smile on it. I like the word <i>raw</i> because it's how every experience that really, really actually in-my-bones mattered to me actually <i>felt</i>. Bigger and wilder and stranger and scarier and more beautiful and usually painful, that particular piercing, almost bittersweet sensation we get when our hearts feel too big for our bodies. That <i>hurts, </i>yo.<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2014/03/may-happening-memorial.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-54847370810375933782014-02-15T14:34:00.002-08:002014-03-31T11:43:17.265-07:00Love Poems For StrangersListen: <i>Poemflowers</i> was the single best thing I've ever spent a Valentine's Day doing. Man oh MAN it was joyous. People just light up when you give them gifts for no reason. "For ME?" they kept saying. "For ME?" Yeah, for you. Why? Because you deserve it, dammit.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mV6bXJ_AeVw/Uv_l_gTyCsI/AAAAAAAACn8/I42nLDEK0RE/s1600/jerichasenyak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mV6bXJ_AeVw/Uv_l_gTyCsI/AAAAAAAACn8/I42nLDEK0RE/s1600/jerichasenyak.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I ran into one of my very favorite poets while I was in the<br />
Bart station giving out flowers, purely by magical chance.<br />
He took this photo, which I promptly stole from his Insta-<br />
gram. Sorry, Toaster. </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div><br />
</div><div>People like to feel like the universe is handing them wonderful things through chance and synchronicity. I had one kid tell me that he'd been having a horrible morning and he'd missed three buses and now he knew why - because otherwise he would never have gotten a flower. Another man told me he was going to give the flower to a woman who meant the world to him and then said - looking a little tearful - that the world has a way of bringing you things just when you most need them and think they're least likely to appear. The lesson in all this: next year I'm doing it again, only I'm making a thousand flowers instead of a hundred.<br />
<br />
And now I'd like to give credit to the amazing poets who contributed their poems to this project, without whom this would never have been possible. And not just credit - they wrote these poems for you, after all. If you didn't get a flower yesterday, well, these poems are for you every day, in the same way that love is not one day in February but a whole bloody lifetime. A couple of poets submitted several poems, and I had to choose a few from each just to keep down the printing costs this time around, but I made sure that everyone who submitted a poem had at least one piece made into a flower. Here are all the poems that were given out yesterday, love poems for you, o stranger.<br />
<!--------
</div><br />
Bullfinch<br />
<br />
You wonder how you’ll make it through the gloom, waterlogged and sullen as a ditch, but listen: forget what everyone’s telling you about love. A bright bullfinch lit on a white stem of frozen sorrel. In his blocks of pretty colour – gouache on gouache – he was a Japanese painting, and as he shifted sideways to the heavy head of seed, dipping and pecking with his fat, black stub of beak, the stem bent under him into a bow, like a sign, of course, like some kind of damn epiphany. And now, stranger, I give him to you.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div><i>Jasmine Donahaye</i>-------><br />
<br />
<br />
To love with the intensity of air congealed<br />
And struck by the sudden silence of birds<br />
May not be wise, but how can it be helped<br />
By such a fool as falls at the speed of water?<br />
The monsoon in my breast beats for you.<br />
Please know that you are adored, dear stranger,<br />
As infinitely as rain is absorbed by the sky.<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://liarandscribe.com/2014/02/10/as-rain-is-absorbed-by-the-sky/" target="_blank">Evvie Marin</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
Dear Sir or Madam,<br />
We haven't met and yet<br />
How it makes my eyes crinkle to think<br />
Of a park bench bathed in setting light,<br />
Where we sit for a spell and tell our cares and qualms,<br />
While tracing the living maps of each others' palms.<br />
<br />
The pleasure that might bring us wayward two<br />
Echoes effortless and onward through<br />
The cores of several hundred-thousand someones,<br />
Waiting achey-patient yet to meet you.<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://liarandscribe.com/2014/02/13/tracing-the-living-maps-of-each-others-palms/" target="_blank">Evvie Marin</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
A Crossed Room</div><div><br />
I first felt your arrival<br />
because the room changed <br />
temperature, the air changed<br />
consistency: everything <br />
was warm,<br />
everything soft<br />
had a thrill run through it,<br />
hearts woke up.<br />
<br />
You were a reflection<br />
in the mirror I was looking<br />
at. We met across the room. Now<br />
you were coming<br />
closer. Any moment,<br />
your hand,<br />
my shoulder,<br />
both will become real.<br />
<br />
<i>Ryk McIntyre</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><br />
Conductor</div><div><br />
Stranger, you may not know it,<br />
but when your hands unfold this poem,<br />
my heart will beat like all the saints<br />
have gone marching in. <br />
Like a 3-year-old with an electronic toy.<br />
Like a labrador’s dream of a rabbit.<br />
With every crease your fingers pull, <br />
you prompt new words from the silent voice,<br />
you lift and release the blue curtains in my throat<br />
that flow like ghost company. Maybe I have not spoken<br />
in years. Keep unrolling this I have written for you.<br />
A tinman’s oil, you open my wires. <br />
This is a serenade for you. I cannot apologize<br />
for the strange looks people will give you <br />
as they hear this paper sing. I have asked God<br />
that, at the end of the day, She check in with me,<br />
grab a beer, and tell me how many people<br />
thanked Her today because they saw your face.</div><div><br />
</div><div><i>Annie Robertson</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Science<br />
<br />
At some point, an atom you breathed out today<br />
will enter into my body. Thank you.<br />
I like all that Gandhi, Frida Kahlo, <br />
Keira Knightley, Garcia Lorca up in you.<br />
I like all that you up in you.<br />
<br />
<i>Annie Robertson</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Love Bug<br />
<br />
You with sunshine shoulders, <br />
I like the way you breathe. <br />
Your accent is Jiminy Cricket,<br />
a boy’s best friend, so don’t lose<br />
that voice of yours. I am the kid who needs<br />
his insect. Come ride your words</div><div>in the palm of my shaded hand.<br />
I will think there’s a legend <br />
that you’re lucky or something.<br />
I will keep you uncrushed.<br />
<br />
<i>Annie Robertson</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Catching a Hot<br />
<br />
For you, I’m going to go stand in the cold.<br />
Until I get sick.<br />
And then, near enough for you to hear,<br />
I’m going to sneeze.<br />
Anything<br />
just to hear you say,<br />
“bless you.”<br />
<br />
<i>Annie Robertson</i><br />
<br />
<br />
</div><div>A Fortune<br />
<br />
You are a bellini drunk on a Sunday.<br />
You look good in every light.<br />
You are waking up in a yellow room.<br />
You are the belly of Ganesha, touched <br />
for luck, for love. Strangers cross their fingers<br />
when they pass you, hoping to catch <br />
your molecules. Stranger, my fingers<br />
are crossed, hoping you can feel<br />
bellini drunk on this senseless<br />
and lovely Friday. That you are<br />
well, and whole. <br />
<br />
<i>Annie Robertson</i><br />
<br />
<br />
There's something about the turning light<br />
that brings my heart across oceans.<br />
I am a sunset away from you, hills soaked in light rain.<br />
Our hands have not touched -<br />
I can taste your parched streets<br />
from here.<br />
<br />
Today I want my toes to curl up against yours under the sheets, today<br />
I want to ruffle your hair<br />
and smell your neck, today<br />
I want to jaywalk with you.<br />
Breathe in the bay<br />
Breathe out our lives<br />
into each other's palms.<br />
<br />
Two ships come in through the Golden Gate.<br />
Their radios are silent<br />
together they circle Alcatraz,<br />
Angel Island,<br />
they dance by the freedom of the Richmond bridge.<br />
But the hills hem them in and<br />
they leave before morning.</div><div><br />
</div><div><i>Simka Senyak</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<div>Roses are red</div><div>Violets are blue</div><div>Life doesn't suck</div><div>And neither do you</div><div><br />
</div><div><i>Jon Sivel</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><br />
<div>It is cold here on the east coast<br />
snows like sand in the wind<br />
air that chills through my long black coat<br />
but my heart holds a blooming love<br />
like the first glowing green shoots<br />
of the garlic reaching for the light<br />
that comes with the gentle coaxing of March<br />
this love blooms and grows and warms<br />
I smile with chapped lips<br />
<br />
<i>Lydia Sivel-Irons</i></div><div><br />
</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-47598986283173623032014-02-14T08:30:00.000-08:002014-02-14T08:30:01.338-08:00Poemflowers TODAY!Valentine's Day, as we have said before, is kind of a stressful holiday for something supposedly dedicated to love. To mitigate a little of the loneliness, the Museum put together Poemflowers, turning love poems written for strangers from people all over the country into paper flowers to be given out on the streets this afternoon.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Jq2eMF1kqU/Uv3CJOeW1MI/AAAAAAAACnc/pIUssVk5NMM/s1600/Poemflowers_1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Jq2eMF1kqU/Uv3CJOeW1MI/AAAAAAAACnc/pIUssVk5NMM/s1600/Poemflowers_1.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some poemflowers in progress...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6lnByARP9tY/Uv3CTwWYAUI/AAAAAAAACnk/SdMOLhLhYro/s1600/Poemflowers_2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6lnByARP9tY/Uv3CTwWYAUI/AAAAAAAACnk/SdMOLhLhYro/s1600/Poemflowers_2.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...and some finished bouquets ready to carry forth for<br />
distribution!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
We're delighted that creative folks in other cities liked the idea enough to get in on a Poemflowers event of their own. The lucky folks of Dallas, TX will be treated to these glorious creations from a Museum co-conspirator...<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-98HHq4luBa0/Uv3DHWJkJTI/AAAAAAAACns/koIRImoEy6k/s1600/Laura_Jane_Poemflowers_Mason_Pelt_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-98HHq4luBa0/Uv3DHWJkJTI/AAAAAAAACns/koIRImoEy6k/s1600/Laura_Jane_Poemflowers_Mason_Pelt_2.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">SO SPARKLY.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If you're in San Francisco and you'd like to join us in handing out poemflowers, we'll be meeting up at 5:30 at 16th Street Mission Bart (just past the turnstiles) before setting off with our bouquets. Supplies of flowers are admittedly a little limited, but we'll make sure you get to give out at least a few. We'll be posting poems throughout the day on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/themuseumofjoy" target="_blank">Museum Facebook</a> page, so if you're feeling a little bitter in the midst of all the sugary sweetness, swing by the page and read some poems written for you. Yes, you, stranger, who are more loved than you know.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-27027472310537980862014-01-30T20:50:00.000-08:002014-01-30T20:50:19.145-08:00February Happening: Poemflowers!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KV5CkLXSngQ/UusoktqyM2I/AAAAAAAACm0/4-LN8sPisi8/s1600/Blumenmanufaktur_Werkstatt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KV5CkLXSngQ/UusoktqyM2I/AAAAAAAACm0/4-LN8sPisi8/s1600/Blumenmanufaktur_Werkstatt.jpg" height="256" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Check out this fabulous image of a paper flower workshop from 1765 by <br />Robert Benard nach G. R. Lucolle. This is totally what the Museum will <br />look like while we're preparing for Poemflowers: A Happening.<br />[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Here at the Museum we regard Valentine's Day with a great deal of suspicion. Now, we do like love. Love is wonderful. But Valentine's Day is a stressful, demeaning, often dispiriting holiday for many people, and we don't like that at all.<br />
<br />
So we're going to hack your heart day. Just a little bit. <br />
<br />
Imagine that you, dear reader, are walking down the street and someone hands you a flower. And that flower turns out to be made out of a poem. A love poem. A love poem for you, the unknown passer-by. Because we all fall in love with strangers sometime. Because you deserve a love poem just for being part of the lonely and glorious and painful world we're all falling in and out of love with all the time.<br />
<br />
In the days leading up to the 14th, we're asking all the talented people we know to write love poems for strangers. We're going to take those poems and we're going to turn them into paper flowers. And we're going to hand them out by the bucketload to strangers in the street on February 14th.<br />
<br />
And we'd love it if you helped. Interested in taking part in Poemflowers: A Happening? Write a love poem to a stranger and email it to us <a href="mailto:museumofjoy@gmail.com" target="_blank">here</a> on or before February 6th and we'll print it out, fold it up, and give it away. We'll also be posting paper-flower-folding tutorials on our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/themuseumofjoy" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> in coming days, and if you want make your own flowers and get dressed up and give gifts to strangers too, wherever you happen to be, why, we'd be honored to have you join us. (Let us know if you're near our base in San Francisco and we'll make sure you can come along with us!)<br />
<br />
We don't hate Valentine's Day. We just hate how many people don't get to celebrate or feel celebrated. So we're coming out to show you some love -- yes you, the stranger, the unknown, the face in the crowd, the person we smile at on the train, the person we're too nervous to smile at on the train. So if someone hands you a flower on the 14th, take it. Keep it. Enjoy it. Because we're a little in love with you.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-31438792592012858162014-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:002014-01-29T10:37:19.070-08:00extra/ordinary: an online exhibition<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q6aErGJ0IXY/UulEMJgHx9I/AAAAAAAACmk/DfTlGciAfaA/s1600/Museum_of_Joy_extra_ordinary_banner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q6aErGJ0IXY/UulEMJgHx9I/AAAAAAAACmk/DfTlGciAfaA/s1600/Museum_of_Joy_extra_ordinary_banner.jpg" height="115" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Friends and fellow conspirators in the pursuit of wonder, I am really delighted to announce the opening of a new online exhibition here at the Museum of Joy. <b>extra/ordinary</b> is a pairing of works by photographer Laura Mason and poet Thea Henney around the theme of the fragmentary moments when something completely ordinary suddenly seems to be <i>more. </i><a href="http://themuseumofjoy.org/extra_ordinary.html" target="_blank">Please feel free to peruse it here</a>.<br />
<br />
Laura's photography was the original inspiration for the exhibition. She's in the habit of posting shots on her Facebook page that regularly startle and arrest me with their transformative framing of absolutely everyday things: a cement wall, a dead flower, a mason jar, a window, all of them caught in a moment where they seem - because of the light, the mood, a certain color? - to be suddenly alive and vivid in a way I don't expect such mundane objects to be. Her images echoed those glimpses of the same strange luminousness that I've stumbled upon in my own life, times when things that are not ordinarily beautiful act like windows onto a wilder and deeper world for no apparent reason other than <i>sometimes the universe is like that</i>.<br />
<br />
Those transcendent flickers are, for me, a huge part of the experience of joy. I think of joy as something that descends upon me from above, catching me off guard, drenching me like a sudden storm and then moving on, elsewhere, leaving me damp and surprised and still smelling the earth long after the thunder is already booming away into the west. When I asked Laura if she would be interested in putting together a selection of her works for a show on everyday moments of beauty, I was already thinking of Thea's work, because her poetry has always struck me as analogous to Laura's imagemaking in the way it captures an almost accidental glimpse of the everyday as it becomes, momentarily, extraordinary. The photos Laura chose for the exhibition all have the feeling of being captured in mid-step, as if she was on her way to something else when she noticed that the world around her was a little more beautiful than it had any right to be in such a mundane moment. Her images are all of things easily overlooked and quickly lost: a double reflection in a puddle, the shape of a curtain in the breeze. Likewise, in Thea's poems the poet appears suddenly paused by something at the very edges of her vision: she is surprised, almost puzzled, by the specific richness of feeling of the world outside her bed, the prints in the snow, the unraveling universe inside the human heart. Her lines carry the same sense of <i>discovery</i> - not of something large and glorious, but of something small and quiet, an almost private loveliness. What is enticing about these works is how tiny a thing it is that their creators are caught on, and the intricacy and depth of the minute worlds they uncover. There is a sense that they were almost never seen at all, and the very fact that they are here in front of us is due only to marvelous and poignant chance.<br /><br />It is an honor to invite you to take a walk in the world of these photos and poems.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-55105132482854562492013-12-31T20:59:00.000-08:002014-01-01T14:17:37.803-08:00Meet the Museum Team 2014!If you think this post has an overly-cutesy title, you should see the ones I tossed out. It's amazing what 2014 almost rhymes with. Dream. Scheme. Nectarine. Some of my very favorite words! All of which are instantly reduced to kitsch the second they get stuck in a New Year's blog post headline, so I figured I'd just stick to words which are already basically cheesy by nature. Like <i>team</i>.<br>
<br>
But listen! Despite the kitsch factor, I am honestly and truly excited to announce that the Museum of Joy has taken on two Artists in Residence for 2014, both of whom will be co-conspirators in the creation and curation of the Museum's new collection, <i>Suddenly... </i><br>
<i><br>
</i> <br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ecc7wRS7-hg/UsIC_j7evFI/AAAAAAAAClg/JBXsZ2HlCEc/s1600/Laurel_&_Hardy_dancing.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ecc7wRS7-hg/UsIC_j7evFI/AAAAAAAAClg/JBXsZ2HlCEc/s1600/Laurel_&_Hardy_dancing.gif"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is how I feel about the Museum's new folks.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/12/meet-museum-team-2014.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-68764145919672580472013-12-01T20:14:00.000-08:002013-12-01T20:14:48.313-08:00THANK YOU!....for making the first annual Festival of Light & Gratitude an amazing experience. Natalie and I were blown away by the hundreds of people who came to walk the labyrinth, bring offerings for the altar, light sky lanterns and menorahs, sing, chant, and help out. Some folks took truly amazing photos of the labyrinth, which we built in a triple spiral pattern, after the farolitos (all 369 of them!) had been lit:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DL196hLybvY/UpwDMS0tSwI/AAAAAAAACjc/Jn_R6ya3wD4/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_Carlos_Justiniano_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DL196hLybvY/UpwDMS0tSwI/AAAAAAAACjc/Jn_R6ya3wD4/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_Carlos_Justiniano_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://www.cjusphoto.com/" target="_blank">Carlos Justiniano</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kdYl48D4IzY/UpwDL19MENI/AAAAAAAACjY/oUgw-7rRF24/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_Carlos_Justiniano_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kdYl48D4IzY/UpwDL19MENI/AAAAAAAACjY/oUgw-7rRF24/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_Carlos_Justiniano_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://www.cjusphoto.com/" target="_blank">Carlos Justiniano</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--YDJkxlV2BE/UpwDMb0QSoI/AAAAAAAACjk/ZcdoIul5F1Q/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_Carlos_Justiniano_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--YDJkxlV2BE/UpwDMb0QSoI/AAAAAAAACjk/ZcdoIul5F1Q/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_Carlos_Justiniano_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://www.cjusphoto.com/" target="_blank">Carlos Justiniano</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BwFEhZQfsDI/UpwDqajfloI/AAAAAAAACkA/seBvJ94Ct50/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BwFEhZQfsDI/UpwDqajfloI/AAAAAAAACkA/seBvJ94Ct50/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://kylehansonmckee.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Kyle Hanson McKee</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v6Xdqjs-zS0/UpwDqCVQzeI/AAAAAAAACjw/I-2j7yPYknE/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v6Xdqjs-zS0/UpwDqCVQzeI/AAAAAAAACjw/I-2j7yPYknE/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://kylehansonmckee.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Kyle Hanson McKee</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dTnvfyB02Cw/UpwDqV8AyYI/AAAAAAAACj0/GaDok1I9UAI/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dTnvfyB02Cw/UpwDqV8AyYI/AAAAAAAACj0/GaDok1I9UAI/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://kylehansonmckee.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Kyle Hanson McKee</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZwhhoI7cwMo/UpwDr2BoyEI/AAAAAAAACkQ/leATFhSobB8/s1600/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZwhhoI7cwMo/UpwDr2BoyEI/AAAAAAAACkQ/leATFhSobB8/s320/Festival_of_Light_by_kyle_hanson_mckee_5.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://kylehansonmckee.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Kyle Hanson McKee</a>. Used with his kind permission.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You know, it's funny. I've heard people talk about having "humbling" creative experiences before, but it's always been a concept I associate more with, I don't know, mountain climbing, look-how-tiny-I-am-in-the-face-of-Nature sorts of adventures -- or, um, all the times my overblown ego has been neatly deflated by the uniquely sharp humor of the universe. But humble is exactly how I felt on Friday night. Heck, I felt almost invisible. Hundreds of people came and had what they described, to me or to their friends standing next to me or online, as a beautiful, spiritual, deeply moving experience. And me? I mostly just felt bewildered. Like, <i>wait, </i>I<i> built</i> <i>this? Me?</i><br />
<br />
The truth is that I spend actually a fair amount of time thanking the universe for the really amazingly wonderful things it gives me and praying, as best I can, that I'll be able to do something to give those things out again. To become a vessel, a channel, a threshold. I really like the idea of being able to create things that act as a conduit to meaning for others. And during the festival, that's <i>exactly</i> how I felt. In a way, it really <i>wasn't</i> like I had done it at all. It felt as if something had passed <i>through </i>me, as if Natalie and I had dreamed something into being that took on a life so completely and abundantly its own that it seems incredible to think it was ever locked away in someone's head unmanifested. <i>I got exactly what I asked for</i>. I'd say that's a pretty rare and glorious experience.<br />
<br />
And it was a bit of a spooky feeling, to be honest -- to realize that the people who had come to walk the labyrinth were feeling a deep, profound, and<i> personal </i>connection to something I had made, without any reference to me as the maker. It absolutely feels as if I had become, for the course of that evening, a channel through which a river flowed, hardly touching me at all, as if I was the path through which something passed on its way from the intangible to the real. This seems like a huge and cataclysmic honor. It was also - well, not what I expected. (<i>Be careful what you wish for</i>, the saying goes...) It was a little strange, a little bewildering, to feel it lift so lightly out of my hands into the shared sky of that night. Natalie and I kept looking at each other with a sort of delighted disbelief - neither of us seemed quite able to believe what it had become, how completely beyond us it had grown. But it was that feeling, of being almost incidental, that made me feel most strongly like it was truly successful. <i>It took on a life of its own</i>. Of course there's a strange sense of loss in there -- and yet, seeing what we created, I could not be more grateful for the chance to see it march off into the world without me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.<br />
<i><br /></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-37979490447611246282013-11-24T12:17:00.000-08:002013-11-24T12:17:14.368-08:00The Festival of Light and GratitudeThe Museum of Joy is having its very first event! Inspired by the fact that Thanksgiving and the first day of Hannukah fall on the same day for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgivukkah" target="_blank">last time in fifty thousand years</a>, we're throwing a Festival of Light and Gratitude in the form of a luminary-lit labyrinth constructed at San Francisco's Baker Beach. (The labyrinth party was actually the idea of dancer Natalie Nayun, who is co-hosting the Festival. She's a pretty luminous presence herself, as <a href="http://www.nayundance.com/" target="_blank" title="And guess who made her that stylin' video? That's right, I DID.">you can see here</a>.)<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-axb57KDTJHg/UpJZ_BVJTJI/AAAAAAAACiw/UzQqGbxiMTI/s1600/turf_labyrinth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="204" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-axb57KDTJHg/UpJZ_BVJTJI/AAAAAAAACiw/UzQqGbxiMTI/s320/turf_labyrinth.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Labyrinths are the MOST AWESOME. Here's a lovely </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">sunlit turf labyrinth in Yorkshire, England for your </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">visual delectation. Photo by Simon Garbutt<br />
Public domain via <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dalby_City_of_Troy_turf_maze.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a>.<br />
</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The Festival is absolutely open to the public and everyone's invited! It starts at sundown on Friday, November 29th at Baker Beach in San Francisco and goes until all the candles burn out -- which, this being Hannukah and all, could be a VERY LONG TIME INDEED. There's a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/549525691795316/" target="_blank">Facebook event</a>, of course, and you can RSVP and learn more there.<br />
<br />
We're super excited to be able to host this event, and we're hoping to make it a yearly tradition. Come walk the labyrinth, see the sun go down in splendid flames, and give thanks for whatever it is that keeps your light burning through the long dark.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-87554878866608698792013-10-22T11:01:00.000-07:002013-10-22T11:01:31.612-07:00A is for AwesomeHello internet. I've missed you. (Well, parts of you.) It's been a hectic couple of months full of turmoil, magic, and synchronicity, because the universe is good like that. The tornado of change has dropped me into something like Oz, except there will be no attempts to murder women for their possessions and fewer tiny people singing and dancing. (Pretty much just me, actually. But I sing and dance a <i>lot</i>, and I'm short, so you can pretend.) The biggest and most fabulous change is, quite literally, an awesome thing: I am proud and honored (and still, to be honest, frankly sort of shell-shocked) to announce that the <a href="http://awesomefoundation.org/" target="_blank">Awesome Foundation</a> has given me a grant to make artist books and scatter them all over San Francisco. Really. (If you don't know about these folks, you should; everything about them lives up to their name. There are chapters all over the world, and every month every chapter gives away a <i>grand</i> to fund a project they think is sufficiently awesome. Yes: some very, very nice, generous, and potentially insane people think that I should get a thousand dollars to make art. I am okay with this.)<br>
<div>
<br></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eNTEncLOS54/Uma3GtK93bI/AAAAAAAACeQ/xKOVp5aTEr4/s1600/Miniature_Collage_by_Jericha_Senyak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eNTEncLOS54/Uma3GtK93bI/AAAAAAAACeQ/xKOVp5aTEr4/s320/Miniature_Collage_by_Jericha_Senyak.jpg" width="320"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Miniature collage is my thing. There will be miniature<br>
collages <i>hidden in books all over San Francisco. </i><br>
Basically I make the art I want to find myself.<br>
That makes sense, right?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<br>
The project I submitted was inspired by the "Portraits of an Ingenious Gentleman" project I <a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/05/regarding-boethius-inspired-mann.html" target="_blank">stumbled across a few months ago</a>, and I was doubly delighted to have been chosen for the grant because it felt, in a way, like I was being given the chance to show my gratitude for the amazing experience of discovering that work. Now other people will be able to stumble across and discover the work that <i>I </i>leave hidden in books all over the city. If all goes well (i.e. if I do a decent bloody job) the books I make will, hopefully, inspire the same feelings of delight and wonder that I experienced when I discovered Boethius's drawings. If not, it will probably just inspire befuddlement, which is sort of like wonder after wonder has had too many drinks and starts slurring its words at the bar....<br>
<br>
</div><a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/10/a-is-for-awesome.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-51112903238184071632013-09-01T17:18:00.000-07:002013-10-22T10:11:26.598-07:00A is for Art Bar and Other AwesomenessSo my partner, the spectacularly-bearded Santa Cruz street poet <a href="http://kevindevaney.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/100-poems-i-wrote-in-april-or-true-stories-or-my-new-profession-part-3-of-3/" target="_blank">Kevin Devaney</a>, just launched the IndieGoGo campaign for his truly awesome & amazing solution to the gutting of funding for arts education. It's called the Art Bar and the basic, brilliant way it works is this: since artists are always broke and working at bars anyway, what if you opened a bar that specifically hired artists and used the money from the beer sales to help them fund outstanding arts programming and free arts education in local schools? That is, what if the beer you're out buying on Saturday night was actually paying for your kids and your community to do poetry, painting, theater, visual art, dance, design...? Sounds like a great freaking deal, right? Right. (If you want to donate the cost of one beer to making this model of sustainable funding a replicable reality, you can do so by clicking <a href="http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-art-bar-cafe/x/4596936" target="_blank">here</a>! You will get many thanks and also poems and other great perks!)<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MEmJtuOqo7w/UiPPiEmkssI/AAAAAAAACVc/9BiMMF0XF6k/s1600/William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_flight_of_Madeline_and_Porphyro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MEmJtuOqo7w/UiPPiEmkssI/AAAAAAAACVc/9BiMMF0XF6k/s400/William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_flight_of_Madeline_and_Porphyro.jpg" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Did you know there's a whole category on <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_flight_of_Madeline_and_Porphyro_during_the_drunkenness_attending_the_revelry_(The_Eve_of_St._Agnes)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> called<br>
"Drunken People in Art"? I was looking for an appropriate illustration for<br>
"Art Bar" but I just couldn't resist this. It's by William Holman Hunt and<br>
it's called "The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness<br>
attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes)" from somewhere around<br>
1847. The Art Bar will not look like this, of course, except maybe for that<br>
swell pink cape the guy is wearing. Swell pink capes are always welcome.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/09/a-is-for-art-bar-and-other-awesomeness.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-5178655207550166952013-08-14T12:03:00.000-07:002013-08-14T12:09:33.910-07:00M is For A Vision of the Future, MaybeSo last week I sorta saw my future.<br>
<br>
Well, my potential future. My future in the event that I manage to manifest the insane dream of building a magical museum. Which is, let's face it, not exactly the world's most easily-realized ambition.<br>
<br>
What happened to me between July 27th and August 3rd, however, served as a sort of week-long kick in the pants by a semi-benevolent universe. What the heck did I do? I attended a world-music-and-dance camp in the Mendocino Woodlands. It's called Lark Camp. It's another universe.<br>
<br>
In the Lark Camp universe, people play music together eighteen hours a day -- not because they have to, or because they're obsessive virtuosos, but because <i>they love it and it makes them happy.</i> It doesn't matter how good you are; whether you've just picked up an accordion or you've been playing the fiddle since the age of three, you're invited. If you don't like what one group of musicians is playing, you can walk twenty feet and find another group of people playing something else behind a stand of trees. Or by the river. Or around the fire. Or in a tent.<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rd--k2wQERI/UgvE9ubKSAI/AAAAAAAACU4/nwbxJ0cFLgQ/s1600/Creekside+nymph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rd--k2wQERI/UgvE9ubKSAI/AAAAAAAACU4/nwbxJ0cFLgQ/s400/Creekside+nymph.jpg" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You can't see them, but there are at least three different groups of<br>
musicians playing within a fifty-foot radius of this idyllic little spot.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
In the Lark Camp universe, you can dance from 8 in the morning til 4 in the morning. There's the morning waltz. There's the afternoon swing class, or Turkish Roman class, or Morris dance. There's the evening Balkan dance, or Greek dance, or salsa party. There's the midnight ceili dance, the 1am country dance. Don't know how to dance? Whatever. You'll learn.<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/08/m-is-for-vision-of-future-maybe.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-87761891777898453062013-07-08T19:31:00.001-07:002013-10-22T11:11:39.703-07:00Exhibit Inspirations: Kinesynesthesia (II)I have been tragically neglectful of this blog, which seems to be the refrain haunting the beginning of every one of my rare posts these days. This is because I am <i><a href="http://www.exploratorium.edu/" target="_blank" title="...the best science museum in the world, actually.">actually working at a museum</a></i>, a job so intellectually rich and all-encompassing that I have been essentially distracted from daydreaming about imaginary exhibits by actually learning how museums <i>work</i>. The nuts and bolts of development, membership, exhibit-making, grants cycles, visitor experience, outreach, ADA requirements...all incredibly useful things for a museum-minded gal like me, but they haven't left much space for reverie.<br>
<br>
Until recently. I've been so busy that I've had very little time for dance, which is terrible and tragic and generally doubleplusungood. And it's started getting to me. My body has its own set of interests and desires, which don't always mesh exactly with my intellect's ideas of what I'm supposed to be doing right now. If I go too long without dancing, I get restless. Physically, spiritually, emotionally. I can't sit still. I feel subtly wrong all over. I don't even like food as much, which is <i>really</i> saying something, because I <i>always</i> like food. And by dancing I don't mean dancing around my living room (I do plenty of <i>that</i>) -- I mean dedicating myself seriously to a practice that asks me to think with my body. Donna Mejia introduced me to the idea that the body is an intelligent life companion a long time ago, and I've been grateful to her ever since, because it's just <i>true</i>: the body has its own intelligence, its own ways of knowing and perceiving, its own nuanced understanding of and interaction with the world, and I spend a lot of time forgetting that because I am a very thinky person who likes words like "reification" and reads Roland Barthes for fun. But when I pay attention to my body like it's actually an intelligent being, an ally who can tell me things my rational mind can't see or grasp, I'm always, <i>always</i> glad I did.<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wFdYOAOg30k/UdtfhC-J_PI/AAAAAAAACTk/E8WWI6oH2io/s1600/Leonardo_da_Vinci-_Vitruvian_Man.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wFdYOAOg30k/UdtfhC-J_PI/AAAAAAAACTk/E8WWI6oH2io/s400/Leonardo_da_Vinci-_Vitruvian_Man.JPG" width="285"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sure, it's a cliched image. But Da Vinci created this image<br>
based on Vitruvius's ideas about the human body as<br>
the source of proportion in Classical architecture -<br>
an example of the kinds of knowing that belong to<br>
the body, if you ask me.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I think of joy as being very much in the realm of things the body understands better than the mind. For example, I'm listening to Mozart's Requiem as I write this, and I don't understand how this progression of sound waves buzzing out my tinny little speakers could possibly move me so much. It's just <i>sounds</i>. But I have ALL THE FEELINGS listening to them. Why? What's going on, as the signs at the museum say? My mind's grasp comes second to my body's in matters of music. That's what music does -- it <i>moves </i>us. We use the language of the body to describe it for a reason. The mind can understand music rationally, can contruct it and deconstruct it intellectually, and that's a noble and beautiful thing -- but it happens <i>after</i> the first thing, which is that we <i>feel </i>that movement. And I am tempted to say that it's also precisely that movement, harnessed and refined, that is really at the roots of what we call dance.<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/07/exhibit-inspirations-kinesynesthesia-ii.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-88266357174495461912013-05-19T20:14:00.001-07:002013-05-19T20:14:14.196-07:00Regarding Boethius, An Inspired Mann<br>
If you're anything like me, you've lived your whole life in private, hopeful anticipation of the moment when you at last open up a book and find a magical clue inside, or stumble on a symbol in a bathroom, or overhear a secret transmission on the radio, and find yourself suddenly caught up in some mad and glorious adventure taking place in the hidden world you've always been half-sure exists just beyond your reach in the heart of your own city...<br>
<br>
So a seriously marvelous thing happened to me the other day. I was at <a href="http://www.greenapplebooks.com/" target="_blank">Green Apple Books</a>, one of my absolute favorite bookstores on the planet (and location of one of my very earliest memories! The memory is a clear image of the racks and racks of books out front, and I know it's early because I also remember being wildly bored. I learned to read when I was three. Books have not bored me since). I picked up a volume of Borges's <i>Book of Imaginary Beings</i>. Lo and behold, tucked neatly into the front cover was a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve. This is the paper:<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lAcJncjs-0c/UZmKI6JUuvI/AAAAAAAACRQ/REH9Z0hWlFc/s1600/QuixotePage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lAcJncjs-0c/UZmKI6JUuvI/AAAAAAAACRQ/REH9Z0hWlFc/s640/QuixotePage.jpg" width="411"></a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
To find, wholly unexplained, what looks essentially like the calling card of some mystical literary gang inside a volume by Borges, that most secretive and sly of authors, is wild enough. To remember that one of Borges's most famous short stories is <i>about</i> <u>Don Quixote</u>, and to therefore find yourself immediately basking in the wonderful suspicion that layers of meaning are being revealed to you with all the intricacy and wonder of an Umberto Eco novel - well, that's even better.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/05/regarding-boethius-inspired-mann.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-15508870342828920982013-04-17T18:17:00.000-07:002013-04-17T18:17:02.254-07:00Stranger Things in Heaven & Earth<i>Here I was imagining I'd be better with this blog this year, and I allllmost managed, until a snafu with my hosting service shut my website down for almost a month. Alas. I'm sure you all missed me. </i><br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WPbG9qjUol4/UW9IkCg2ZHI/AAAAAAAACPw/VH2YQtqL0jg/s1600/Barred-owl-chick_owl_baby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="193" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WPbG9qjUol4/UW9IkCg2ZHI/AAAAAAAACPw/VH2YQtqL0jg/s320/Barred-owl-chick_owl_baby.jpg" width="320"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aw, I missed you too.<br>
Barred owl mother and chick. By William H. Majoros<br>
(Own work) [<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0" target="_blank">CC-BY-SA-3.0</a>], via <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABarred-owl-chick-58.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me last week. I don't know what to make of it. I just know that it feels as if it was important, as if I'll look back in twenty years and remember this. <br>
<br>
I was in a waiting room, and it was evening, and the gentleman next to me asked if I was an actress. Really! Out of the blue! I said no, because, well, I'm not. And then I asked why, because he hadn't asked it like a pickup line, but like he was curious about something.<br>
<br>
Oh, he said, just the way you hold yourself, you look like an actress. Or a dancer, or something.<br>
<br>
I am a dancer, I said, as it happens. <br>
<br>
Why get into a conversation with a random man in a dismal room with no one left in it but the two of us and one or the other certain to be called away soon? I don't know; because I'm a talker, maybe, because it was more pleasant to speak to a real person than read a garish magazine, because he was soft-spoken and had kind eyes. He had gray in his beard. It was a free clinic, a place it's unusual to see a man, especially a not-young man. I was curious about him, too.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/04/stranger-things-in-heaven-earth.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-46579036209115084002013-03-19T08:00:00.000-07:002013-04-17T17:39:30.680-07:00Exhibit Inspirations: A(nother) Labyrinthine LibraryLibraries and labyrinths definitely go together. It's a well-loved literary tradition, from Jorge Luis Borge's "The Library of Babel" to the library in <i>The Name of the Rose</i>. (Actually, I can't think of any others,but there must be some, right? I mean, come on.) Now, as it turns out, a genius bookshop has taken a page from Eco's book (I'm sorry, I couldn't resist) and created a fantastic art space at The Last Bookstore in LA called, yes, the Labyrinth. There's <a href="http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-last-bookstore-20130303,0,341495.story?page=1" target="_blank" title="Seriously, though, what's not to love.">a really delightful piece in the LA Times about it</a>, which simultaneously gave me hope for the future of booksellers in America and pretty much singlehandedly convinced me to go ahead and take a pilgrimage to my least favorite city ever just to see it. (Of course, LA is also the home of another of my absolute favorite labyrinthine spaces ever, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=the+museum+of+jurassic+technology&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=9tI6UcnLLYOGyAHFuIGoAQ&biw=1138&bih=477&sei=AdM6UaDIFYWNygHowYBo" target="_blank" title="You want to go to there. Trust me.">The Museum of Jurassic Technology</a>, so I should probably start trying to get funding for my coffee table book about Los Angeles Labyrinths now and kill, like, all the birds with one weighty, photo-laden, hardcover stone.)<br>
<br>
<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABibliothek_St._Florian.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" title="By Stephan Brunker at de.wikipedia Later versions were uploaded by Luestling at de.wikipedia. [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons"></a>Of course, reading about this fantastic space has got me all jazzed about the idea of <i>building my own goshdarned library labyrinth because why not</i>. I mean, if I'm going to be building a museum <i>anyway</i>. The Chapel of the Chimes, a slightly more...esoteric...take on this pairing, is one of the major inspirations for the way I envision the space, although the "books" in that particular intricate nest of stone chapels and mysterious passages are full of people's ashes. (God, the temptation to make "lost in a good book" jokes is <i>killing </i>me.) And, of course, as soon as I started thinking about writing this post, I just had to go and look at about five hundred pictures of libraries - just on Wikimedia alone, mind you, because I wanted to post all the best ones and I'm trying to be good about only using content I have permission for, so this is <i>skipping</i> all the <a href="http://thefunambulistdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/borges-desmazieres004.jpg" target="_blank" title="Like this amazing conception of Borges's Library by Erik Desmazieres.">spectacular images to be had just from simple googling</a>. Which is probably a good thing, because when it comes to the collection of labyrinthine library images on the internet, well, a girl could really lose herself browsing...oh, god help me. To avoid any more awful puns, let me simply roll out some of my favorite finds. Remember - these aren't the <i>prettiest</i> libraries. These are the ones I am least likely to ever make my way out of...<br>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABibliothek_St._Florian.jpg" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="By Stephan Brunker at de.wikipedia Later versions were uploaded by Luestling at de.wikipedia. [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons"></a><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABibliothek_St._Florian.jpg" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="By Stephan Brunker at de.wikipedia Later versions were uploaded by Luestling at de.wikipedia. [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons"></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lhnBuAIBGpk/UTrVxjPAR6I/AAAAAAAACNU/xRC6B54igV4/s1600/Bibliothek_St._Florian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lhnBuAIBGpk/UTrVxjPAR6I/AAAAAAAACNU/xRC6B54igV4/s320/Bibliothek_St._Florian.jpg" width="240"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This library looks deceptively pleasant. Ha!<br>
No, seriously, you'll never get out of there. <br>
The Bibliothek St. Florian, Austria, by<br>
Stephan Brunker at de.wikipedia. <br>
(<a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html" target="_blank">GFDL</a>) from <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABibliothek_St._Florian.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/03/exhibit-inspirations-another.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-43538148882679835772013-03-13T07:00:00.000-07:002013-03-13T07:00:00.458-07:00Exhibit Inspirations: I Wanna Hear People Say 'Can I Help You?'<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0w9STDILQws/UTozWVibWwI/AAAAAAAACNA/1TqKVFlfajQ/s1600/Franz_Von_Stuck_Sisyphus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0w9STDILQws/UTozWVibWwI/AAAAAAAACNA/1TqKVFlfajQ/s320/Franz_Von_Stuck_Sisyphus.jpg" width="228"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sisyphus</i>, Franz von Stuck, 1920.<br>
<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Art" target="_blank">Public Domain</a>. Via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Franz_Von_Stuck_-_Sisyphus.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I had a string of very bad days recently after reading too many posts on Jezebel about literal, legislative, and psychological assaults on women and their rights. Sometimes I just hit a wall. I get frantic, outraged, angry, bitter, and above all <i>heartsick</i>, pervaded by this kind of vacuumed-out sensation of weak hopelessness and exhaustion that's more than anything like a feeling that happens to me occasionally in dreams when I'm attacked by someone and I try hitting them and I <i>just physically can't do it</i>. The feeling of doors that won't lock, legs that won't run, injuries I can't inflict, safety I can't make for myself. And the worst of it, for me, is the part of that feeling that has to do with the deep and scary suspicion that the men in my life <i>don't care. </i>No, that's not quite right -- that they <i>care</i>, but distantly, or just because they care about <i>me</i>, and there's no way for me to express my boundless feeling of misery, that ground-down sensation of endless burden and Sisyphean toil, that they won't eventually tune out of because it's <i>not their problem.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
What I <i>want </i>is to see the perfectly nice, everyday guys in my life - the ones who don't post about politics or comment on threads about injustice or spend much time considering privilege but who are, nevertheless, thoughtful, decent human beings - reach out to the ladies they know and say "Hey, you know, I read about some truly f%@!&ed-up nonsense being perpetuated on your gender, and I want you to know I've got your back. What can I do?" I want to see straight people doing this for LQBTQ people. I want to see white people doing this for people of color.<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/03/exhibit-inspirations-i-wanna-hear.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-49165512644634328802013-03-07T16:26:00.000-08:002013-03-08T10:12:27.157-08:00Museum Musings: How To Make S#%! Happen<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Jeremysimon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Jeremysimon.jpg" width="200"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Totally how I picture Time, actually. <br>
By Jeremy Simon (<a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html" target="_blank">GFDL</a>) <br>
<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeremysimon.jpg" target="_blank">via Wikimedia Commons</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I would like to think you've noticed my absence, but the internet is full of clamor and I won't be hurt if you haven't. After all, <i>I've</i> hardly noticed I've been gone. Time, that vast and wheezy accordion, has been compressed, and I've skipped over the pleats and found myself inexplicably in March. (I worry about the speed with which time moves; I'm certain it was slower in my childhood. But that makes perfect sense, really, especially after watching <a href="http://www.theeaglemanstag.com/" target="_blank" title="Take the nine minutes out of your life to watch this. No, really.">this stunning stop-motion animation</a>.) I can't account for it, other than to say I've been moving, and working, and spending my rare spare minutes dancing and trying to fit my novel in around the edges. If one thing has to falter, it's my life on the internet.<br>
<br>
But this blog has been my brainstorming space for my own museum, and much though I love the hours I'm pouring into the Exploratorium (which is going to be <i>so superlatively awesome, you guys, </i>and if you're in SF this weekend you can get a taste of it at our <a href="http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/on-the-move" target="_blank" title="Glow-in-the-dark worms! Pinball! Dance! Beer garden! A giant mechanical octopus!">epically awesome and totally free roadshow-slash-street-festival</a>), it's very easy to get so caught up learning and making and working <i>here</i> that I forget to take the time to daydream. Daydreaming is a vital part of any ambitious and bizarre endeavor; if you're trying to create something that doesn't exist yet, how can you know what needs to be done without dedicating hours purely to imagining the possibilities? Fantasy and reality aren't opposites, but complements. Problems arise when you can't distinguish between the two, but creativity occurs in the space where the boundary becomes mutable. Much of what has become our daily life began in fantasy; much of what we envision and dream has its roots in what already is. They nourish each other. <br>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/03/museum-musings-how-to-make-s-happen.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-323387607170070642013-02-09T11:38:00.000-08:002013-02-09T11:38:17.530-08:00Museum Musings: A Word About My Dreams<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KL_-Xs54xHU/URajdqOGwgI/AAAAAAAACK4/mEUyEU6nsws/s1600/nesting_hummingbird.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KL_-Xs54xHU/URajdqOGwgI/AAAAAAAACK4/mEUyEU6nsws/s320/nesting_hummingbird.JPG" width="240"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A hummingbird nesting outside my boyfriend's<br>
bathroom window. The moss cup is the<br>
size of a large egg. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I had a dream last night in which a hummingbird came an perched on my shoulder. I've been thinking about hummingbirds a lot lately. One of the things I have been most sad about in leaving the Palace of Fine Arts for Pier 15 with the Exploratorium is abandoning the amazing birdlife that proliferates in the Palace lagoon - blue herons, egrets, swans, and, yes, a wonderful hummingbird I used to see almost every morning in the bushes. There is something so fantastical about the hummingbird, this tiny ball of green iridescent fluff vibrating madly though the air, a quickness and brilliance and impossibility. My old commute took me on a winding path through an elaborately landscaped garden, past a deep green duckpond, and under the arches of a truly beautiful dome of golden stone; my new commute is a straight shot through the glassy heart of San Francisco's financial district, a grim gray walk full of busy people in expensive shoes bowed under the gaze of reflective, glossy monoliths. So you can imagine my absolute delight when I discovered, my second day navigating the sour concrete shadows, that the financial district has hummingbirds as well. There's a little parklet I pass by, a bump of green and hunched trees, and almost every morning I have been astonished to see another hummingbird buzzing and darting at the edges for all the world as if it didn't know it was surrounded by skyscrapers, those largest and grandest blandishments of human indifference to natural world. (There's also a murmuration of starlings nesting there, as I discovered on my way back: a raucous cacophony of cawing birds fighting and swirling in the trees. They are loud enough to cut through every city noise. They are wonderful.)<br>
<br>
So I woke up this morning with the clear memory of a moment in a dream where a hummingbird, wise and minute and glittering, came to sit weightless on my shoulder under the drift of my hair; it was a guide of some kind, although I can't remember why, or to what. And the memory of this dream startled me, because it was a dream-moment of a kind I have so rarely that I can count every instance I remember on my fingers: a moment of gladness and joy.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/02/museum-musings-word-about-my-dreams.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-80924933767282399512013-01-25T13:36:00.000-08:002013-01-25T13:36:24.814-08:00A...is for A Year Full of GiftsYesterday was my 25th birthday. (I meant to write a post the day of, but I was busy <i>actually</i> celebrating instead of <i>blogging</i> about celebrating, so you can just <i>imagine</i> that today is my birthday.) I'm not entirely sure why, but a quarter of a century seems sort of important. Maybe it's because in my head I feel like this is the year I've got to start taking myself seriously. Not <i>too </i>seriously (we can't have that), but seriously enough that I stop making the kind of excuse for myself that starts with "But I'm still young, so..." or "But I'm still a broke quasi-artist, so..."<br>
<br>
Call it a turning point. I have some serious dreams and ambitions, and if I want to see them come out of the realm of pleasant fantasy and actually put forth roots in reality, at some point I have to stop <i>imagining</i> that I am working/what it will be like to work/that I might start working on them someday, and actually, well, <i>get started. </i>And 25 seems like a good year for that. But it's a scary thing. It's almost impossible for me to avoid falling into the trap of comparisons when it comes to creating a meaningful life for myself. How can I catch up to those friends of mine (or, hell, annoying middle school acquaintances) who are already published poets, or make $200K a year, or are famous performers with bands I'd die to get on stage with, or are getting written up in the New Yorker, or started their own wildly successful company...<br>
<br>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>...etcetera, etcetera?</b></i></div>
<br>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q5BazPRs0fs/UQLgpTlVGaI/AAAAAAAACIs/9WnyIA1rieM/s1600/temp-320-27692005.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q5BazPRs0fs/UQLgpTlVGaI/AAAAAAAACIs/9WnyIA1rieM/s1600/temp-320-27692005.gif"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"What other instruments <i>are </i>there, pray tell? Scratchy violins?<br>
Screechy piccolos? Nauseating trumpets? <i>Etcetera? Etcetera?"</i><br>
(Hi, I made you some <i>5,000 Fingers of Dr. T</i> gifs. You're welcome.) </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<a href="http://blog.themuseumofjoy.org/2013/01/ais-for-year-full-of-gifts.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4544951123263949275.post-86162374206521111542012-12-24T14:26:00.000-08:002012-12-24T14:26:44.087-08:00Imaginary Exhibits: Happy Holidays<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rjnlGH3ZKlk/UNjSrDg25yI/AAAAAAAACGw/HmqxahS_Oxo/s1600/glass_bottles_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rjnlGH3ZKlk/UNjSrDg25yI/AAAAAAAACGw/HmqxahS_Oxo/s320/glass_bottles_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
No matter what your beliefs, winter is a time of cold and darkness*. Festivals of light in times of dark are good for the soul. So too is coming together, celebrating, saying prayers and thanks, thinking of renewal and new things sprouting up from the old, and making excuses to be generous, kind, and open-hearted...<br />
<br />
<br />
May merriment pervade your darkest days and keep you warm through the cold, friends, the days of black branches and the nights of bitter ice (spiritual or physical, and quite often both). <br />
<br />
May the universe heap blessings on your heads and fill your nights with lamp-like stars and starry lamps. <br />
<br />
And yes, one day I <i>will </i>dedicate an exhibition to festivals of lights. I just need to finish this eggnog first... <br />
<br />
*Unless you live in Australia, like a large percentage of my family. But the metaphor holds. Or at least we can pretend it holds, because it's the <i>f!@&ing holidays and you should be nice to me. </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4