Happy Valentine's Day

the "heart bandits" strike again!

Treasure Hunting at the Local Library

Like I need more books. I should be donating them books, not buying them. Still, I couldn't resist and even left work early to go to the latest Portland Public Library book sale, held a few times a year in the auditorium. I tend not to go right at the opening because in past years the line used to go out the door and the frenzy when everyone stormed into the library was overwhelming. The book dealers would be flipping through the books, tossing the good ones in boxes, like they were trying to pick fruit with a tornado bearing down on them.

The powers that be have made the sale earlier in the day and by the time I got there there was still a sense of delirium in the air, but the first rush was already in the checkout line.

I used to come home from these sales with a mountain of books, including hardcover treasures I planned to cut up for collages. Although I did make some collages out of them, I've tried to cut back on this compulsion, especially after the time I moved apartments and found myself dragging along these big heavy cardboard boxes of old magazines and collage books. I've also gotten pretty selective about what I buy. The library does a good job at labeling the sections, i.e. Fiction, Biography, Poetry/Literature, Social Issues, Art, etc. Sometimes books get mixed up, though so you might find an unusual poetry book you want in, say, the health section. It all makes for great treasure hunting.

For $13.50 I garnered the treasures pictured here, along with two CDs: Rain Forests, Oceans, and Other Themes by John Fahey (recorded in Portland, Oregon, our sister city) and Mirrorball, a live CD by Sarah McLachlan. John Fahey is a legendary master of the wooden guitar and Sarah's songs send me into an emotional vortex in a good way.

Kitsch (The World of Bad Taste) by Gillo Dorfles, with contributions and essays by a variety of art critics and provocateurs, is pretty amazing, as you can tell by the cover (top image). Out of print, published in 1968, I found a reference to a collectible version of the book on Amazon that says the First Edition, published by Bell Publishing Company, is worth around $100. Amazing. Unfortunately, mine is a second edition, which is worth about $10 in the used book market. Other hardcover reprints are available for as little as $3 on the Internet. It was the first book I picked it up, floating around on the art table. It didn't look that excited (except for that irresistable gaudy cover), until you looked inside and saw the variety of commentary and reproductions in the book, which is really a critical compedieum of history, art criticism and social commentary. Amazing illustrations include a series of postcards, each representing an episode of Napoleon's life, which when put together form a complete figure of Napoleon; a souvenir from Venice featuring a plastic version of Jesus' crucifixion on colored seashells; a still from the film about van Gogh Lust for Life; a photo of lacquered tree trunk photographs; a photo of a swastika coffee cup; and so much more. Another reader blogged about it here in more detail.


sleep (bedtime reading) by Robert Peacock (folk art collector, author and curator) and Roger Gorman (designer) is a handsomely printed and designed hardcover book that features an odd assortment of work by such photographers as William Wegman, Nan Goldin, Sandy Skoglund and Duane Michals and an even odder assortment of writing by Laurie Anderson, Fran Lebowitz, Richard Hell, Lou Reed, Paul Auster and John Updike among others. It has a very urban, New York feel to it.

Nude in Tub, Stories of Quillifarkeag, Maine by G.K. Wuori is a great book by an Illinois writer I suspect for obvious reasons has spent some time in Maine. I had read these stories before in a hardcover version (from the library) and was very impressed. I had considered buying the hardcover version new, but don't spend a lot of money on new books. Years later, here it was. I couldn't resist. These quirky stories are divided into sections called "Land," "Love," "Law," "Learning," "Loss" and "Life." They are funny but savage. One story, called simply "Family" opens:

"It was an educated crew -- that family -- that went wild outside of Quilli, the man starting out as a professor at the tiny state university in town, his wife and four kids wanting to live out somewhere, way out, an old way in a new time.
'This is Maine,' they said, and listed it all: heavy coats, woodstoves, lakes and rivers frozen by Christmas, moose, wolves, even eagles. The wife said, 'I'm going to relearn French.' The children went Pow! Pow! Pow!"






This little book, Come Climb My Hill by Winston O. Abbott, with illustrations by Leon Tebbetts, is a gem. It's a small out of print hardcover, published in 1947 by Falmouth Publishing House, a small book press run by Tebbetts, who used to run a legendery tiny used bookstore in Hallowell, Maine. That bookstore was crammed to the rafters and had many small cul de sacs. Leon was there well into his 80s and I remember meeting him. This book is hardcover, with the original jacket and charming color drawings, printed on creamy yellow pages that were handcut. It's worth about $20 on the antiquarian market.

"To me there is something deeply inspiring about a tree, a tree with its branches flung heavenward twoard the fathomless blue of the sky and its groping roots anchored security in the good earth beneath. I suppose that a tree could not be said to have a personality, and yet trees are possessed of as great a variety of characteristics as people. And though I am an admirer of hemlock and maple, elm and pine, I look with especial favor upon the oak. For the oak is to me a symbol of rugged strength and enduring courage and tenacity of purpose."

The Soul's Book of Answers by Carol Bolt (author of The Book of Answers, Love's Book of Answers, and The Literary Book of Answers) is a very silly book, though a clever idea. Using "bibliomancy," the idea is to ask a question, riffle the pages of the book and find an answer. At least it won't break, like those silly "eight ball" oracles of the 70s. I got a first edition, which makes it worth $16 (it's original price) in theory (by a bookseller on Amazon), though I can't imagine why anyone would pay that much. I got it for an "office present" for one of my co-workers birthdays. The soft fuzzy blue covering is a bonus.

Here, let's test it. I asked it, "Will I find success as a writer?" The answer? "This dewlike life [will] fade away; avoid involvement in superfluous things." Hmmm. That's interesting. Why the brackets? is a more burning question.



Advanced Cinematherapy (The Girl's Guide to Finding Happiness One Movie At a Time) by Nancy Peke and Beverly West (authors of Cinematherapy: The Girl's Guide to Movies For Every Mood, Meditations for Med Who Do Nothing (and Would Like to Do Even Less) and How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time on Five Dollars a Day) is another fun bit of silliness that originally retailed for $13.95. Another office gift. It's actually pretty good, with chapters like "I'm Not Waving, I'm Drowning: Rescue Fantasy Movies" and " 'Oh Her? She's My Sister': Trust Issues Movies." It's fun to read the descriptions, the sprinkling of quotations, actor profiles (Gabriel Byrne's "Top Drool Pics" are listed in The Handy Hunk Chart). There's fluff like "Women We Wish We Could Go for a Beer With" (Christina Ricci, Jean Harlow, Parker Posey. . . ) and "Freudian Slipups" (On Casablanca: "Until we women rewrite our internal scripts for romance, we guess Hollywood will just keep stoking the fire of our dysfunction.") Quasi-feminist, but mostly a great gimmick (hmmmm, there seems to be money in these gimmicky books), it has some recipes too!

Last but not least, I got a copy of the book Art & Fear, Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland, two working artists. This was recommended to me once upon a time by an art teacher, I got it from a library, and I have long wanted a copy of my own. It's a short practical treatise that undercuts the damning voices of self-sabotage, such as "I'm not an artist -- I'm a phony" and "Other people are better than I am." It's a book for visual artists, per se, but the basic advice can be applied to pretty much any creative endeavor.

"Artmaking involves skills that can be learned. The conventional wisdom here is that while 'craft' can be taught, 'art' remains a magical gift bestowed only by the gods. Not so. In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive. . . "

More Robins!

The robins were back last week. They don't seem to mind the cold. A colleague at work said these subspecies of robin do indeed from Canada and go north when it gets warmer. Reverse migration.

The Canadian Robins

A few weeks ago, in mid January, I saw the biggest robin I had ever seen. Here he was in this urban neighborhood in the middle of the snow and cold. Am I going crazy? I thought. That was a robin, right?

On Monday there were over 30 of them flying around the trees, eating berries. I couldn't believe they were robins, but I looked on the Web and couldn't find any other birds that looked remotely like them. Then a co-worker described the same sighting out in a more rural area.

Turns out they are Canadian robins who come here in February. They're larger than the regular robins. Robins roost in groups of hundreds at night. I did not know that. They are migratory songbirds of the thrush family, known typically as Turdus migratorius, with several subspecies. There are a number of legends about the robin. One is that a robin fanned the embers in the barn where Christ was born, in order to keep Mary and the baby warm, scorching his feathers a red color in the process. Another, told by Charles Dickens, tells the tale of how Dame Nature told the robin about the fires of hell. The robin was so moved he put a drop of water in his beak and flew there to try to extinguish the flames. His feathers were scorched in the process. Robins are often associated with charity and it is considered bad luck to kill them. The Welsh call them "Breast-burnt" or "Bron-rhuddyn."

The Native American Chippeways have a legend that a powerful hunter urged his son to fast as long as possible during the son's coming of age fast. The son became a robin, but told his father not to mourn the transformation, that he would be happier as a robin than a man and would be a friend to humans and live around their dwellings.

Lately temperatures have plunged back into the Arctic zone. At 5 p.m. today it was fourteen degrees with a stiff wind that made it feel more like five. Four below is the predicted low. More cold tomorrow and then it's supposed to warm up into the tropical 40s on the weekend. Then it's going to get cold again. The robins are pretty. I hope they survive.


There's some better pictures on another blog here.

Blood Tea and Red String

My friend Lunden lent me this DVD, which is a handmade stop-animation movie that took the director, Christiane Cegavske, thirteen years to make. It is a wondrous adult fairy tale with a hauntingly sweet soundtrack. There are no voices, but the creatures in it make noises that are better than speech in this context. It is full of charming tableaus and scenes, with a riveting plot during which the Aristocratic White Mice steal a doll made by the Rustic Creatures Who Live Under the Oak. Three of the four Rustic Creatures set out to find the doll, getting lost in a labyrinth where they come to a garden, eat hallucinagenic fruit and are waylaid by large body-snatching leaf pods. They are rescued by the King Frog, who cooks them dinner and feeds them berries. There is also a Spiderwoman who captures a Bird Woman that the doll gives birth to and scenes of the Aristocratic White Mice drinking their blood tea and dancing with their skull-crow companion.

The link to Christiane's website above contains some of her paintings and illustrations as well as her costume designs. There's a preview on You Tube you can watch here that shows the unique flavor of this incredible work.

She also has a My Space page, which is worth checking out, just to see her friends. . .

Okbari

Photo courtesy of Northeast Indie and Okbari.

Last night I had the immense pleasure of attending a concert by Okbari Middle Eastern Ensemble, which presented an evening of Turkish Fasil music. A longtime duo, last night they unveiled their latest line-up of a new ensemble, which features Amos Libby on ud and vocals, Eric LaPerna on percussion, Carl Dimow on flutes and Mike Gallant on violin.

It was a frigid cold night, but not windy, so I didn't mind walking to the yoga studio where the concert was being held. I met my friend Amy there and we sat on a long wooden bench in the back row. It was a packed house in an intimate setting, a studio that contained remnants from the Shoestring Puppet Theater next door, such as two giant female puppet masks and a row of puppets on a high wall that were like a second, mysterious audience.

The music, with its complex, meditative rhythms, made me want to dance, and the musicians, all virtuosos in their fields, played one long set, unbroken by any intermissions, which made for a unified tranced experience.

Some of the songs were poignant, such as Unutturmaz Seni Hic Bir Sey by Ekrem Guyer: "Nothing can make me forget you, even if I am forgotten. My soul is a cloudy Autumn without you, you are everything, I am speechless."

And even the happy, celebratory melodies have a touch of ancient melancholy, which stirs the heart and leads one's thoughts into a deep mosque of the soul. The last part of the program featured dancer Katy McCann, who presented fluid and betwitching gyrations in an exotic costume, enhanced by a gauzy scarf and finger cymbals.

The middle eastern oud (Turkish ud) is an ancient fretless instrument that usually has eleven strings. To me it evokes images of gypsies, deserts and generations of people dancing in cities, around fires and in cafes. Walking home, the churned snow underneath my feet was reminiscent of thick sand.

Okbari has another website here.

Un coeur en hiver

Winter in Maine requires forbearance. It is beautiful, but often cold, gray and windy and it lasts well into March and even April. The forecast says we'll be back in the sub-zero temperatures by the end of this weekend. These photos of State Street were taken last weekend after a big storm dropped over seven inches.




Even Longfellow was enshrouded.




It's not the best time of year for bicycling.

Without books, music and movies, I for one would go mad. I moved to a new apartment in December, which was traumatic, but it's nice to be in a cozy warm apartment that does not leak or have a bar downstairs. Plus I have a nice view:



Haven't been doing too much artwork, but I've been reading and working on a big writing project. One thing I'm reading is a set of four books called "The Aegypt Cycle" by John Crowley. There are four books in the cycle: The Solitudes, Love and Sleep (I'm halfway through this one), Demonomania and Endless Things. I got the first volume for a couple of dollars at The Portland Public Library book cart and ordered the second from a local bookstore, determined to read the entire quartet. The books are dense and intriguing. They center around an historian named Pierce, with a narrative that shifts back and forth in time. Pierce Moffett lives in New York but has moved to the country, where an author named Fellowes Kraft lived. Excerpts from Kraft's novels about Shakespeare, the Shakespearean doctor John Dee, and a visionary Italian monk/astrologer named Giordano Bruno are woven throughout the books, which are also about magic, lost worlds and the ways in which childhood becomes translated into the adult world. I'm not usually obsessive enough to read four dense volumes by one writer, but I got hooked by passages like this:

"He told her how, in Kraft's scheme, between the old world of things as they used to be, and the new world of things as they would be instead, there has always fallen a sort of passage time, a chaos of unformed possibility in which all sorts of manifestations could be witnessed. Then safe old theurgies and charms have suddenly turned on their practitioners and destroyed them; then huge celestial beings have been formed, born out of the assembling of smaller ones, who became the larger ones' parts and organs; then great Aegypt has been revealed again, and her children have recognized one another, by signs no one before understand."

And there's plenty of colorful narrative to hold all this together.

Speaking of the Portland Public Library, it's the greatest. Just today I picked up a free New Yorker from last fall on the free shelf outside the inner doors, a copy of The Prestige, a DVD I heard was very good that I ordered from another library branch, and a mystery novel. I don't usually read those, but am doing research and some of them aren't too bad. Perfect for winter. All that bounty for free.

Another thing that helps with the forbearance of winter are animal friends.


Rickey is sixteen.


Lord Byron is an astonishing twenty years old!

Happy New Year

Paper Mache sun by Nance Parker.

Paintings & Poetry

Ekphrasis refers to an artistic device whereby one form of art is used to describe another. These poems were inspired by the abstract paintings of Francine Schrock. Their titles match her titles. More of her work can be found at www.francineschrock.com


Abstract Poems by Annie Seikonia
Inspired by the Abstract Paintings of Francine Schrock




blossom

yellow peach-red
furnace fire
in the essence of flower,
beach dawning
metal twisting
in the floating foreground
of a candling night



mud & jewel

craggy prints
amongst primrose pine –
dark palette of a
sapphire dirge



inkleined

rusty echoes of
the room behind the periwinkle
room sing,
strings quiver up from
a covert place behind
traces of skin,
knicks and wrinkles
of ghostly gloved hands

hierarchy

lemon and orange duet
in a tropical patio
coerced by green

beguiling knife edges smooth
shadows of days
ladders of stars

hearkening the red magic



more inkleined

neon indigo peacock Parish blue
and sky breath blue
remembering the scenic precision
of pastel balustrades
and ochre walls:
ceilings and beaches
now buried in flowers
saturated by violet tones
smothered in late sea
singing the frameless square




crimson

the boards of the red palace
ghost building, a nocturnal capture,
glinting now in the daylight of the café,
quietly absorbing the gossip and runes,
the ladders and mines, in their
violet looms



breeze

an Arctic geometry
sings through the shattering
windows of sleet.
the whisper of the ancient blue plain
beneath the scree
escapes even here, now,
from the painting

The Annual Shoestring Puppet Theatre Halloween Parade

Although it's already November, memories of Halloween are still resonant. Every year the Shoestring Puppet Theater hosts a Halloween Parade featuring drums and horns and puppets of various sizes. There's even a stiltwalker. People line the streets of the West End to see the little carnival go by and it's always great fun. This year was a gorgeous balmy evening with the usual consort of incredible costumes (including a zebra woman and an elaborately dressed Viking). I foisted a huge crow puppet with wings that flapped up and down as we walked along the leaf-strewn darkened streets. I forget from year to year how heavy and unwieldy the puppets can be, especially by the time the parade snakes from Pine Street to Emery Street to Taylor Street to Tyng Street and eventually up Brackett Street back to the puppet theatre. But we still had energy to do a wild puppet dance to the beat of accelerating drums in the parking lot at the end of the parade. Exhilarating, celebratory and great community fun, it's one of the highlights of the fall season.

Two Expansive Movies

One great film I saw recently was Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008), a lyrical documentary about French high wire walker Phillipe Petit, who stunned the world at age 24 with his death-defying walk between the World Trade Center Towers on August 7, 1974. A death-defying film as well, this absorbing movie is unforgettable. Between the back story of the complex plan that went into the stunt, the counter story of Petit's relationship with his girlfriend, Annie, and, most of all, the vertiginous and miraculous images of the walk, this film has instantly become one of my all time favorites. He crossed the wire eight times and even lay down on it. The story is inspiring; it proves that even the craziest dreams are attainable and may indeed result in works of great genius. Though it would seem self-destructive, Petit insists his walks are not reckless ventures and are planned in great detail, a result of years of training. Rather than being depressing (due to extensive footage of The Towers) the film remains light and buoyant, and by not mentioning the Towers destruction or Petit's reaction to that event, becomes a graceful and appropriate memorial.

Petit, who is almost sixty years old now, has survived his many walks on the high wire (including 500 arrests, mostly for street juggling). He lives outside Woodstock, New York, where he has been working on a hand-built performance barn for roughly 15 years, using 18th century tools. He is also the author of the autobiography, To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers.


Perhaps it's not surprising that Petit is a friend of Werner Herzog's, which brings me to great film number two: Encounters At The End of the World (2008) by the master himself. The tag line "Off the Map, Things Get Strange," is not suprising to those of us familiar with Herzog's films, which tend to veer off into strange territories (both literally and figuratively). This one is set at the Arctic's McMurdo Research Station, where Herzong interviews everyone from volcanists to plumbers (finding a fair number of offbeat personalities along the way). Herzog's usual pessimism about the world doesn't for a second ruin the supernatural, otherworldly footage of this outpost, which is tempered by his considerate, accented narration and sense of humor. A feast for the eyes and for the brain, this latest foray into unusual territory, Herzog-style, is a mind-expanding journey to the center of nowhere and everywhere.

I am a huge Herzog fan. Born in Munich, shortly before World War II, he shared a house with his friend and nemesis Klaus Kinski (their love-hate relationship is documented in the great movie, My Best Fiend) when he was only 13 and even then was confident he would become a film director. Herzog has worked in a Mexican rodeo and welded steel to finance his movies. His quality of tenacious obsessiveness is evident throughout his best movies, especially Fitzcarraldo, a film that created its own story during the making of that story and featured a lunatic playing a lunatic. (During Fitzcarraldo, he moved a 320-ton steamship over a mountain without using special effects -- see Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the film). Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is another scenic journey into madness, with Klaus Kinski revelling in an outrageous role he may or may not have been acting. My least favorite film (and there are plenty I haven't even seen) was the satiric comedy Incident at Loch Ness, which I found just plain silly, but rather than veering off into art house obscurity, his vision has flowered, resulting in the picturesque The White Diamond, the quirky Grizzly Man (probably his most "mainstream" entree) and now a plumed trip to the innermost workings of the cosmos itself -- expect a royal Mayan ancestor and neutrinos, among other wonders.

In August 2008, Esquire Magazine interviewed Petit and Herzog together ("Werner Herzog Walks the Rope"), which is good for a laugh.

Common Ground Fair 2008

Common Ground Fair, held by The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardiner Association in mid-September, is an annual extravaganza of animals, food, crafts, demos, music and more. Heralded as a celebration of rural living, it features hundreds of vendors and events that range from sheepdog demos to lectures on composting, with everything in between, including "Burma -- A Time for Change," "Raising Goats 101," "International Folk Dance & Baltic Women's Choir," "Cigar Box Guitars" and "Monolithic Heated Slab Foundations." It's huge, it's three days and it's all stunning.

This year, gorgeous weather graced the fair. The only huge drawback was the traffic, which gets worse every year. We got a late start on Saturday and, after a stop for breakfast and to drop our dog off with my sister, arrived at the 3.5-mile road that leads to the fair around 1 p.m. It was a slow crawl along that road -- an hour journey from the intersection to the fair parking lot, which was so crowded we wound up squeezing into a space at the bottom of the south lot, virtually in the campground area. A pleasant stroll through a demo forest led to the fair. The vendors shut down around 6 p.m. so our plan was to leave by 5:30 p.m. to beat the crowd. Of course we dawdled on the way out and reached our car at 6:00 p.m. From there we sat for a solid hour, engine off, waiting for the cars to inch up the hill and out onto the road, about a quarter mile away. At last we began to make creeping progress. In all we wound up spending about an hour and forty-five minutes in the parking lot, because cars in the rapidly emptying parking lots kept cutting into our lane from the rows, which prevented the cars trapped in the bottom parking lot from moving at all. Eventually passengers walked up to cars in the cross rows and stood in front of them to keep them from cutting in, in order to let the trapped cars move out. Some of the drivers were none too friendly or pleased, which didn't exactly make for common ground. The drivers that got stuck included volunteers and a woman with a young baby.

Sadly, a drive that should have taken roughly three hours round-trip took six hours round-trip, with only four hours spent at the fair. Not sure what the solution is -- enforced carpooling? There was a satellite lot you could bike in from, but we had a small car with no bike rack. Just too many people wanting to partake in a great Maine event. Nonetheless, we got to eat some great food, watch sheepdogs in action, visit lots of beautiful animals, hear some amazing music and spend an afternoon in a halcyon gathering with colorful people.

More pictures can be viewed on Flickr.

The Shimmering City

Here's some samples of the work I've been doing for my latest project, a book of Portland haiku with illustrations. I started it as part of an excellent class I took recently on illustrating picture books for children and adults.

under the
full August moon
slicing carrots

reflections dance
in the world
below this world

blossoming branch --
exotic monasteries
cling to fragile life

the city’s sparkling
white jewelry disappears
in spring rain

invisible crows
speak from within the
Fairy Tale Kingdom

Icarus

Update! I called Sparks Arks, where the seagull went for rehabilitation and David Sparks told me he was fine and going to be released soon!

Photo Credit:US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Free Photo Accessed Through Gimp.Savvy

Last week I was involved in an intense seagull rescue. On my way back to work with a cup of coffee, walking downtown, I noticed people staring at something. That something turned out to be a juvenile (you can tell by the gray feathers) seagull that had something caught in its beak and was attempting to fly but going in half circles in the middle of traffic in a busy downtown area. I went into the street, stopped traffic (which resulted in much honking of horns and general road rage) and after several futile attempts (more honking of horns) managed to herd the creature towards the curb. Once there it cowered and I yelled, "Does anyone have a blanket?" A kind woman had a blanket in her car and brought it over. I wrapped the seagull in the blanket as a crowd gathered.

Officer Dan, a bicycle cop, arrived. He dialed up animal control only to find out the person didn't come on duty until noon. Meanwhile the person parked right by the seagull had to leave. I hoisted the seagull up onto the sidewalk. The bird was relatively calm and not struggling very much. A pair of pliers and some wire cutters were procured and I held the seagull and held its beak while a brave man attempted to pull a three-pronged fishing lure hook out of its mouth. It was quite a process and very difficult but he finally did it. After that I got him to bend back the hooks and then someone else used the wire cutters to cut the entire hook structure off, so the bird wouldn't get hooked again. Unfortunately the large fish-shaped lure had a lower hook that was stuck in his side. After some probing we agreed it was best to wait for animal control at that point. It wasn't stuck in deep nor was it bleeding, but it was really stuck. Although the seagull had thrashed a bit during the hook removal from its beak, overall it was amazingly subdued. One bystander thought it had been hit by a car, but when I was herding it I noticed both wings were out and looked functional and it didn't seem to have any major problems other than the hooks.

After we removed the hook, it's bill began to bleed a bit and another bystander said it would choke on its blood and die, but the bleeding didn't seem heavy. I asked if anyone could find a box and someone found a nice large box with flaps, so I lowered the seagull-in-a-blanket into the box and moved him near some storefronts away from the street. Eventually everyone wandered off except for an art student and I. We kept vigil while we waiting for Animal Control. The beak stopped bleeding and the seagull seemed alert and responsive and fairly calm. A couple of times he started to move around and then we talked to him and held the flaps in place. Most of the time, though, he just sat in the box without us having to hold him in there and after awhile he settled down into it like it was a nest. Beth, the student, and I sang songs to him and talked to him. We named him "Icarus." It was very hot and I figured he was thirsty and hungry but didn't dare give him anything to eat or drink in case it wasn't the right thing to do. Finally, after an hour, the Animal Control woman arrived and put him in her van. She was going to drive him to a wildlife rehabilitation center in the country, run by a couple who rehabilitate animals and provide educational workshops to local schools. She told me they had a whole pen full of one-winged seagulls. This one seemed like it had a better chance.

Usually I agree it is best to let nature take its course, particularly with regard to baby wild animals, which will usually die without constant expert care, or may be waiting for their mother to retrieve them. In this case, though, it seemed possible to save its life and spontaneous action led to its (hopeful) survival. Of course, many people will scoff at the idea of saving a seagull or a pigeon, but even these creatures have brains and nerves and living, beating hearts. These cases can often pose ethical dilemmas. If it had indeed been hit by a car the best thing to do probably would have been to just let it get run over by another car, putting a swift end to its misery. Even so, if it had died after we rescued it, at least it would have died more naturally, in a warm place without a fishing lure stuck in its beak.

In any case, hopefully Icarus will survive and be able to fly the ocean skies once again.

One thing I couldn't figure out was how it wound up downtown in the street with a fishing lure in its mouth. A friend of mine and I came up with the theory that it probably had the hook stuck in its beak and was flying away from the waterfront, when, near the downtown area, the second hook became stuck in its side, making it impossible for the bird to navigate or fly.

One lucky bird. One very long coffee break.

Photo Credit:US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Free Photo Accessed Through Gimp.Savvy

Lammas Celestial Poetry Evening

[Photo credit: www.freedigitalphotos.net]

Thanks to my dear friend, Lunden, I attended the Lammas Celestial Poetry Evening at Southworth Planetarium last night. It was cosmic, to say the least. Sitting in reclining chairs in the celestial dark, illuminated by a facsimile of the night sky overhead, as well as occasional shots of the sun, moon and various astronomical events, we were treated to readings of poetry by Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Nanao Sakaki, Rabidranath Tagore and a number of local poets, by a number of local poets. There was even a song, sung in a plaintive lunary voice with accompaniment on a resonant parlor guitar.

The evening was divided into "Canto I: Earth and Sky," "Canto II, Moon and Worlds," "Canto III: Stars and Space" and "Canto IV: Cosmos." During the intermission we were treated to granola, cookies and delicious bread and butter, compliments of Big Sky Bakery. The evening wrapped up with a stunning performance/poem entitled "Micro-Macrocosm," that encouraged the listeners to follow a meditation paralleling the microcosms of the body with the macrocosms of the skies. COSMIC!

According to Wikipedia, "Lammas is a neopagan holiday, being a cross-quarter holiday between the Summer Solstice (Litha) and Fall Equinox (Mabon). It is opposite Candlemas or Imbolc, in early February. Lammas takes place with the Sun near the midpoint of Leo." "Loaf-mass" Day is also a celebration of the first wheat harvest of the year in olden times, back when we all had wheat harvests to celebrate. Apparently (also according to my friend, Wikipedia), "neopaganism" is any one of a variety of religious movements influenced by pre-Christian "pagan" religions. I think, at this moment in history, that being a neopagan, or at least celebrating a neopagan holiday, is not a bad thing by any means.

During the intermission my friend and I got to explore other cool things at the planetarium, including a holographic "ghost" whose head will turn to follow your movements, a portrait of the Mrs. Southworth who inspired the planetarium in memory of her husband (she looks like she's wearing a copper hat ), a machine that will give you a measurement of your weight on other planets and a bunch of cool old maps.

Remember: "lunatic," or "lunatik" in Middle English or "lunatique" in Old French, comes from the Latin lūnāticus, meaning moonstruck.