What do you get when you cross classical chamber orchestra with breakcore?

Venetian Snares' Rossz Csillag Alatt Született.

Album Wikipedia.

Yoshitoshi's Warriors Trembling with Courage

Here's wishing you good luck to you as you amble along your Warrior way (and happy Monday). 

A brief gallery of woodblock prints from master Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), to inspire you. The first three from his series "Warriors Trembling with Courage:"

From his series "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon:"

More prints (and excellent descriptions of his prints featured from the "Moon" series) found here.

For your supernatural needs, the entire series titled "Thirty-six Ghosts" here.

Jesus, what was I doing with this blog anyways?

So it's been awhile, yeah? And as much as I hate meta-talk, Parallel Line's own fallow earth has been begging to me recently, and I don't really know how to scratch that itch. So to appease the gaping maw of works yet unwritten, I'm going to whittle down my own block of sepiolite in search of that delicate meerschaum pipe(dream).

I guess consistency is the key to our development, and it's not like there isn't enough substance out there to blog on.  It's still drafty in our hundred-year-old house, our family is still thriving, and that goddamn cavity in the upper left part of my mouth keeps getting bigger and more sensitive. Life keeps moving, most days un-blogged. It's what we carry with us and what we wake up to.

It's been colder outside most days, and we haven't been through our downtown procession as much as we'd like. The vagrants are still around, though more bundled, and in slightly fewer numbers. Art remains art.

But that isn't what you came here to read, is it? What did you come here to find? The seed of what you're waiting for is planted in the empty part of my chest just below my heart, where longing lives. I can feel it rising sometimes when I hear beautiful music.

Vladimir Kush

It's wonderfully rainy here in Colorado Springs. Autumn is breezing in and I keep finding pockets of color hidden in the nooks and crannies of this town. Something about the fall weather reaches deeper into your lungs and makes you want to sleep; and it's in this spirit of sleep and daydreams that I want to do a quick write-up of Vladimir Kush, a favorite surrealist painter of mine.

Kush's landscapes remind me of places I've seen countless times in my own daydreams. His treatment of clouds is what really struck me when I had the pleasure of viewing one of his pieces in one of Fort Collins' (sadly now defunct) art galleries. I found myself more willing to view it as a portal into another world than as a painting, already longing for the next time I could see it in my own daydreams.

Artist website here.

A Poem for my Deceased Dendrobium

You have died
in the manner which
all orchids come to die,
mysteriously.
The slender reed-branch
of your stem
pleated and puckered
so I watered you more;
your leaves began to flag and
yellow, so I watered you less,
and even that was not enough.
Your skeletal remains,
still longing in their pot,
remind me
in a hushed whisper
from a corner of the house
which was apparently not suitable
for your presence;
"I'll never tell."

On City Walks and Converging Perspective

You'll notice it the next time you walk through a group of skyscrapers. There's a beautiful geometry in the lumbering monoliths that mark a town's epicenter, a riot of motion and perspective to be witnessed as your own perspective subtly shifts with each step. parallel lines begin to breathe and flow and give life that resonates deep into the ground and seeps out of the cracks in the sidewalk.

It's beautiful like that. Life is beautiful like that. Despite its obtuse callousness, life has proven itself to fail at gracelessness and indignity. 

I get to witness this sight each evening as my wife and I and our little one venture into our Bohemian beat through downtown Colorado Springs. And I guess that's the aim of this blog, to unravel such gargantuan columns of concrete into what they really are, and what all things are; beauty. It's underneath your footsteps, inside the walls your fingertips brush as you pass; if you listen close enough to the waver in a mistuned guitar played by a vagrant on the street-corner, you can hear a chorus of angels, like the sound of fluttering wings and children's laughter.

I try my hardest to make each experience as meaningful and meditative as possible; I would say to look through the veneer of banality, but I find that expression lacking in that it only accepts what lies just beyond our preconceived notions. I believe in a wholistic way of beauty and living, and if everything is beautiful, why not banality?

Ask yourself, in your next intimately pedestrian moment, when parallel lines start to converge and breathe and beg to be noticed:

Why isn't your life more beautiful?