January 7, 2007
The Feast of the Nativity in the Old Calendar. Twelfth Night, Theophany, Epiphany yesterday. The Season is ongoing. It is never too late to decide again.
When asked by a reporter something like: "What, in your opinion is the most important question facing humanity today?" Einstein thought for a bit then replied, "I think the most important question facing humanity is, 'Is the universe a friendly place?' This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.
Graphic taken from a fine photo by Daniel Coliareti
June 25, 2006
Sr. Dilys agrees. Don't miss Andy Garcia's semi-biographical movie about his family in Havana, The Lost City. Beautiful, well-made, romantic, grown-up, inspiring, and heartbreaking, like life.
Don't wait for DVD! And it may not stay long, especially in "Blue" demographic centers.
Just go.
June 24, 2006
Austin American Statesman photographs (here by Rodolfo Gonzalez)
are consistently remarkable. This one has been color-and-texture-adjusted
afterwards in the computer by the in-house digital Art-Co for licensed private use; but the perspective, composition, and eloquently evocative subject matter were there from the beginning.
So much good work Adding Value everywhere, serving everyone!
No, not Stockhausen rubbing two cats together. It's the Chapman stick, amplified, somewhere between a guitar and a zither. Here's a video of a Bach performance. And for something else different, an animated Scarlatti score.
Via Mirabilis.
Some day Chez Dilys will decamp to a smaller villa somewhere. A Chapman stick, a palm-shaded water feature, and a small beehive. That should keep us busy and contented, musical and sticky and otherwise on our toes.
March 15, 2006
Artist paints flowers and fruit slices.
Courtesy Neatorama, [Update:]a venue in which, once introduced, Sr. Dilys feels obliged to refine the details.
Trailer (click "trailer"] for beautiful, dialogue-free, Sundance-award film about Carthusians, Into Great Silence, taking as an epigraph I Kings 19:11-13.
Via Amy Wellborn
M.M. Kaye, Raj-dwelling Englishwoman who wrote, inter alia, The Far Pavilions, remembers in her autobiography the lost kingdom of places in her Indian childhood where she found pure silence, before automobiles and airplanes, before motorized appliances everywhere man lives or goes. She remembers the small pop of moonflower blossoms opening in the dark.
250 today.
Centuries of innocent pleasure.
$ Keep it alive. Contribute to your classical music station. Be the 21st-century version of a Royal Patron. $
December 6, 2005
A rousing off-line discussion has addressed the question of process and result. We have noticed that a certain kind of person refuses to enter into the process of applying himself toward what he wants without some kind of guarantee because "it'll never work anyway."
