Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Happy Birthdays




Happy Belated Birthday to the poetic master of song, Leonard Cohen. (He turned 75 yesterday.) And Happy Birthday to Johnette Napolitano--the underrated lead singer of the underrated band, Concrete Blonde--covering Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows."

Monday, September 7, 2009

Patterning Portugal


Now that summer is coming to a close, I'm reviewing the summer that was, recalling it--though so much of this summer in the northeast didn't feel much like summer at all--before letting go. One of the pleasures of my summer was traveling to Portugal for the first time, and one of the many things that will stay with me from that trip is the tile patterns, particularly in Lisbon. They're rough around the edges, imperfect, exquisite, happy, unique, falling apart but holding their beauty, tinged with lost time and nostalgia, taken for granted until they're gone . . . much like the patterning of summer days. Or maybe I'm simply reading summer into them because another one is passing, bittersweetly, like travels you long to return to after they've ended.